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The job description for legislators in western democracies includes constituency-focused activities such as casework and district visits. Unfortunately we have a limited theoretical and empirical understanding of the factors affecting legislators' constituency-oriented activities, in large part because most studies focus on single nations; even studies that are comparative do not span a variety of electoral systems. In this article we examine the constituency focus of MPs in six chambers that do provide such variance: the Australian House and Senate, Canadian House, Irish Dáil, New Zealand House, and the British House of Commons. We find that electoral considerations and incentives provided by different electoral systems, as well as other factors, affect the priority that MPs place on constituency service.

Immigration has fundamentally altered the ethnic and religious makeup of most advanced democracies, but substantial variation is observed in the political representation of immigrant-origin minority groups across countries and cities. Though existing research has highlighted the role of electoral institutions in explaining minority representation, it is often difficult to isolate their effects across contexts. Focusing on Muslims in England and employing a new data set containing over 42,000 candidate-level observations, this article explains Muslim candidate election and selection. To do this, the author makes use of a rule change whereby a subset of localities switched from the use of multimember elections to the use of single-member elections. She finds that these electoral rules have no significant effect on the share of Muslims that gets elected but that they do influence the selection process: in a given election, Muslims are half as likely to be selected when only one seat is up for election as compared with when three seats are in play. Yet parties balance the slate across consecutive single-member elections, leading to similar results across systems. Further, the more undesirable the seat, the more likely it is to have a Muslim on the ticket, but this effect holds only in single-member elections, and it reverses as Muslims gain electoral leverage. Overall electoral leverage proves crucial: the effect of institutions and the potential for institution-based discrimination are conditional on the size and concentration of the local Muslim population and the votes it can deliver at both the election and the selection stages.

This study demonstrates that district magnitude (the number of officials elected from an electoral district) affects the behavioral choices and policymaking contributions of legislators. We theorize that legislators elected from districts of larger magnitudes focus much of their efforts on relatively low-cost, high-visibility activities that allow for easy credit claiming, while their colleagues from lower magnitude districts focus more on relatively high-cost, low-visibility work required to move policy proposals through the legislative process. We test our hypotheses using data recording the legislative activities of members of the Maryland House of Delegates, which elects its member from districts of different magnitudes. The results, which are mostly supportive, have implications for the impact of institutional structures on representation and policymaking.

Many studies have shown that incumbent candidates have an electoral advantage over nonincumbents under single-member-district systems, but less is known about whether incumbents enjoy the same electoral bonus under other electoral rules. This article focuses on multimember-district systems that allow intraparty competition and contends that incumbents may have little advantage or even a disadvantage over nonincumbents of the same party under these systems, although the incentives to cultivate a personal vote—one of the main sources of incumbency advantage—are greater in these systems. I demonstrate my argument using electoral data from Japan during 1958–93 when the country used the single nontransferable vote system. Having applied an estimation of incumbency advantage immune to endogeneity bias due to strategic retirement, I find supportive evidence to my argument. The results suggest that there is an important variation in incumbency advantage across electoral systems.

We analyze a model of legislative particularism to understand how the provision of constituency service responds to variations in institutional and electoral environments. We show that increased partisan balance in the electorate, single-member districts, and independent executives all increase incentives for legislators to provide constituency service. The results of the model are consistent with existing comparative-institutional empirical observations. Moreover, the model addresses over time trends in the United States that are not explained by existing models and yields novel hypotheses that are amenable to empirical evaluation.

In this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. Multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats within the same district. This allows us to identify both the direct office-holder benefits and the incumbent quality advantage over nonincumbent candidates from the same party. We find that the overall incumbency advantage is of similar magnitude as that found in previous studies. We attribute approximately half of this advantage to incumbents' quality advantage over open-seat candidates and the remainder to direct office-holder benefits. However, we also find some evidence that direct office-holder benefits are larger in competitive districts than in safe districts and in states with relatively large legislative budgets per capita.

This article seeks to contribute to recent debates on the link between political settlements and state building. It proposes a theoretical framework that centres on the alternative concept of 'elite bargain' and suggests that inclusive elite bargains can be expected to facilitate both peace and economic development. Yet a detailed case study of elite bargains in Zambia shows that all good things do not always go together. While inclusive elite bargains have indeed helped to avoid civil war, they have often constrained economic development-a dilemma of unproductive peace.

The death of President Levy Mwanawasa in August 2008 plunged Zambian politics into a state of flux. This article argues that the way the main parties responded to the challenge of the resulting presidential by-election has three lessons to teach the emerging literature on political parties. First, Rupiah Banda's rise to power within the MMD demonstrates the extent to which intra-party machinations can leave a party saddled with an unpopular leader, and hence illustrates the great significance of succession struggles within dominant-party systems. Second, the main parties' continual repositioning of their electoral platforms reveals that not all African elections take place in an ideological vacuum, and shows that the platforms parties adopt can only be fully understood in the context of the wider party system and the way in which parties interact over time. Finally, the ability of controversial opposition leader Michael Sata to mobilize a diverse support base - by employing a 'populist' message in urban areas at the same time as receiving the support of his ethno-regional community in rural areas - lays bare the complexity of party strategies and the limits of the 'ethnic census' model of party support. Taken together, these findings suggest that the tendency to divorce the study of elections from the study of how parties function and interact impoverishes our understanding of African politics.

Zambia's 2006 election was won by incumbent President Levy Mwanawasa and his Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). However, it is argued here that the most important outcome of the campaign was the successful articulation of a new populist politics by Michael Sata's Patriotic Front (PF), which won a significant majority in urban areas. Sata's attacks on foreign investors (particularly from China) for their abuse of the workforce and their supposedly corrupt relationship with the MMD resonated with urban Zambians, already angered by the negative impact of economic liberalization. PF's campaign injected popular social demands into what had become a moribund political debate. The MMD government is now adopting PF policies in an attempt to restore its own urban support base. The article describes the campaign and its outcomes, contrasting the political discourse of the MMD and PF and analysing the differences in voting behaviour between rural and urban Zambians. It argues that recent relief of 92 percent of Zambia's international debt, along with the renewed profitability of the copper mining industry, have created conditions for the re-emergence of a nationalist-developmental political framework.

In this article, I demonstrate that multimember districts form a basis for collaboration between two legislators. In order to maximize the limited incumbency advantages they possess, legislators from multimember districts form coalitions in an effort to generate greater credit-claiming opportunities and policy benefits for their district. In order to test this conception, I utilize a natural experiment and an opportunity to observe institutional change in North Carolina's elimination of multimember districts during the 2000–2002 redistricting cycle. Coupled with cross-sectional analysis of several states that use both single-member and multimember districts, empirical evidence strongly corroborates my conception of multimember districts as a basis for collaboration between representatives.