Electoral Rules, Programmatic Competition, and Redistribution: Evidence From Interwar France

This study leverages the adoption and subsequent abandonment of proportional representation in interwar France to examine how electoral systems shape politicians’ incentives to engage in programmatic redistribution. Using novel data on the legislative initiatives and manifesto commitments of members of France’s Chamber of Deputies, we compare politicians against themselves under different electoral rules. We find that politicians devote more effort to programmatic redistribution under France’s single-member majoritarian system than under the open-list proportional rule, both in parliament and while campaigning. Our results contradict canonical work by economists on the distributive effects of electoral rules, but are consistent with work by political scientists that emphasizes the tendency of electoral competition under open-list PR to devolve into personalism at the expense of programmatic policy. Our findings point to the distributive significance of institutional variation among PR countries and highlight the shortcomings of stylized contrasts between PR and single-member systems.