Electoral System Choice and Personalistic Parties in New Democracies

In this dissertation, I examine the reasons for differences in electoral institutions and party development in new democracies. I investigate why political leaders sometimes choose candidate-centered electoral rules during democratization, which tend to foster personalistic parties, undermining party discipline and loyalty. I argue that voter demands for local and individual benefits, or pork and patronage, and party access to government resources for such benefits are likely to lead politicians, whose primary goal is winning the first election following democratization, to choose more candidate-centered electoral rules.;Empirical tests of the arguments consist of two parts. First, I conduct cross-national quantitative studies of 97 new democracies since 1950 to show the general applicability of the theories. I find that (1) the poorer the average voter, the more likely a candidate-centered electoral institution will be adopted, and that (2) where incumbent governing parties are more influential in selecting new rules, candidate-centered, single-member district electoral systems are more likely to be selected.;I then use case studies of the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Korea to untangle the complex dynamics of institutional choice at the time of their transitions to democracy. The choice of a candidate-centered electoral institution (single-member district plurality with an open ballot) in the Philippines is a straightforward example of electoral system choice in which the incumbent is dominant in selecting a new electoral rule. The Indonesian case of selecting a party-centered institution (closed-list proportional representation), as a comparison, illustrates an institutional choice upon which the incumbent has limited influence, because negotiations with opposition parties are necessary, despite the similar preferences of voters. Finally, the South Korean case shows what happens when the institutional choice is endogenous to the party system. When major opposition parties were divided and were negotiating over a merger, the ruling majority party opted for a single-member district system that helped keep the opposition divided. The case studies suggest that party access to state resources, the context they face (including division of the opposition), and who has the ability to choose or bargain over the institutions affect the final institutional outcome.