DISPROPORTIONALITY IN PROPORTIONAL ELECTION MODELS – A LOOK AT THE EXPERIENCE OF THE COUNTRIES OF THE FORMER SFRY

Abstract

Electoral systems play a central role in many modern democracies. Their influence on politics and vice versa is a justified concern of the disciplines that exist in political science. One such influence that is intensively studied in the science of elections and electoral systems is the influence of electoral rules on the (dis)proportionality of voter representation in legislative bodies. Disproportionality is nothing but a kind of bias in the distribution of seats in favor of (or against) the larger parties. Disproportionality, in other words, is a deviation from some desired perfect proportionality. Even those electoral systems that can be qualified as satisfactorily or solidly proportional have a certain built-in disproportionality. Electoral disproportionality is one of the most important resulting forms of the electoral process. Hence, this paper aims to examine disproportionality in proportional electoral models in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. For this purpose, the paper is structured as follows: first, a theoretical overview of disproportionality, which exists in the science of elections and electoral systems, will be given; then an overview of the indices used in the science of measuring disproportionality will be approached; so that afterwards to approach a comparative analysis of the degree of disproportionality that exists in the countries of the former SFRY in their proportional electoral models. It should be emphasized that there is no consensus on how to measure the distortions caused by the transfer of votes in seats, and many efforts have been made to measure such deviation. Disproportionality indices are generally used for this purpose, and there is extensive literature on the subject. However, the index of relative disproportionality (least squares index LSq) proposed by Michael Gallagher (1991) somehow comes to the fore, and it will be used for our comparative analysis.