Customer Reviews

Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

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I'm a Freshman at a German university. I had to read most chapters of this book for a class project. First of all I have to state that this book has a really sophisticated language and is quite hard to read for Undergraduate students. I think that Mr. Cox did an excellent work with this book. The excellence starts already with the very logical structure of this book: Parts, Chapters, Sub-chapters and one more sub-division of each sub-chapter. In the first three chapters, Mr. Cox gives us a very detailed insight on electoral systems and the different schools of thoughts about the linkage between electoral systems and party systems. I could easily state that someone who is totally "illiterate" about elections would not have any difficulties reading the book, since every single aspect is being represented in the first three chapters. Then Cox moves on the much more exciting discussions: The game-theoretic stage of strategic voting. Once more in this part of the book, his very structured division is remarkable. In each of the chapters, he does not only talk about the electoral backgrounds only, he also emphasizes the importance of microeconomics (an individual's maximization of utility). Since the reader is also someone eager to maximize its own utility, the themes proposed by Cox about strategic voting in the local level make all sense perfectly. Finally Cox has included some chapters about the Macroeconomic level of elections. Themes about the general effects of electoral systems on the whole political system (for example national party system, the composition of the parliament, government policies and coalitions) are discussed in great depth. After having read his detailed chapters about the local "economics" of voting, it was very exciting for me to also learn something about the macro effects of electoral systems. I want to make some remarks about the chapter construction as well. In every single chapter, Cox has written a sort of introduction briefly stating what he is going to examine in that chapter. Then at the end, he summarizes the key themes of that specific chapter. Even at the end of each part of the book, he does not fail to include a Conclusion as well. His empirical studies and examples that he cites to prove his themes are - to my opinion - unique in the literature that I have studied so far. I would encourage everyone interested with that topic of the linkage of electoral systems and party systems to read and study this book. However I want to conclude my review by reemphasizing that this book includes numerous theoretical themes which may be hard to understand for English as a second language Undergraduates or even for native Undergraduate students. But it is an enjoyable challenge!

It has been an unsettled debate for years among the political scientist whether we should name the discipline as `Political Science' or simply Politics or Government. Having read 150 pages of Gary Cox's Making Votes Count, which is praised on the back cover for being "original", and not encountering with any non-intuitive argument in it, I thought maybe it is time for us to reconsider the connection between politics and science. Of course, everyone has its own understanding and definition of science; yet I guess we can define science in a conventional way as "any endeavor that produces relevant information for us to understand the reality." Now, what original and non-intuitive arguments/findings does Cox produce in Making Votes Count?

Unfortunately, current political science studies, in particular the quantitative branch of it, deals more with "confirming the obvious" than with revealing what is not obvious to naked eye. I have not been able to understand the value of studies that start and end with theories like "states fight more with their neighbors than with their non-neighbors" or "international organizations increases the likelihood of peaceful settlement of disputes". As homo sapiens, do we not have enough common sense or intuition to know these `facts' without the help of the so-called `political scientists'? In the same vein, do we have enough justification to say that the mere `quantification' of a commonsensical truth can be considered a scientific improvement? Coming back to Making Votes Count, does it have any achievement beyond summarizing the basics of electoral politics and quantifying the commonsensical convictions on voting behavior?

The main argument of Cox is that "electoral institutions determine how votes translate into seats," (p. 8) in general and "strategic voting imposes an upper bound on the effective number of competitors," (p. 148) in particular. Appreciating all the flavors that Cox adds to these arguments with his quantitative analyses, I still think that these are `facts' that are quite obvious to any homo sapiens, or at least to all homo politicus. That every voter votes so as to maximize its expected utility is a postulate and needs no further confirmation. And strategic voting is a necessary instrument for any rational human being to make his vote count.

The book does not lack complete originality, though. Cox refines two of Duverger's theories. He first demonstrates the conditionality of the Duverger's Law and argues that Duverger's Law, which states that simple-majority single-ballot system favors the two-party system, "really pertains a quite specific system and is not very robust to small changes in that system," (p. 96). He then claims that Duverger's Hypothesis, which implied that there were typically no reason for voters to vote strategically in dual-ballot systems, is simply wrong: "in top-two majority runoff elections with three or more candidates, voters always face incentives to vote strategically," (p. 137). However, with no intention of denigrating Duverger's achievements, I do not think that we need that much models and numbers to understand the shortcomings of his theories.

Making Votes Count might be a nice introductory book for a class like Electoral Politics 101. Yet I do not think that it is original, innovative, or provocative enough to be an assigned reading in a graduate-level course.