The Political Science of Proportionality and Comparative Party Finance

Votes are the basic metric of democracy, but they have not featured prominently in the study of political finance. This article presents a new statistic to measure whether distributions favour large or small parties. Empirically, I study 219 parties in thirty-five countries. I find (1) that electoral systems are much more majoritarian than political finance regimes and (2) that majoritarian electoral systems compensate for their bias with public funding systems that favour smaller parties.