Size Matters! Partisan and General Interests in Parties' Strategies for Electoral Institutions in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Electoral institutions are unique objects for the study of parties' strategies. Their very nature indeed allows to disentangle partisan and general interests in the shaping of parties' preferences theoretically, and to assess their relative importance in various contexts empirically. In this perspective, this paper first builds formal models of parties' utilities accounting for both partisan and general interests in the support to electoral institutions. Second, the parameters of these models are derived empirically using an original dataset of parties' positions in electoral reforms debates in advanced industrial democracies since 1945. Finally, various hypotheses about the modifying effect of the type of party and political system on these parameters are tested with the same data. In particular, it is shown that the size of the party modifies the relative importance its leaders put on general and partisan interests when they decide to adopt a position in electoral reforms debates. Small parties, as they have less to loose in terms of political resources, tend to give a greater place to general interest in the shaping of their strategies for electoral institutions.