Electoral Reform and Trade-Offs in Representation Michael Becher∗ Irene Men´endez Gonz´alezy January 26, 2019z Conditionally accepted at the American Political Science Review Abstract We examine the effect of electoral institutions on two important features of rep- resentation that are often studied separately: policy responsiveness and the quality of legislators. Theoretically, we show that while a proportional electoral system is better than a majoritarian one at representing popular preferences in some contexts, this advantage can come at the price of undermining the selection of good politicians. To empirically assess the relevance of this trade-off, we analyze an unusually con- trolled electoral reform in Switzerland early in the twentieth century. To account for endogeneity, we exploit variation in the intensive margin of the reform, which intro- duced proportional representation, based on administrative constraints and data on voter preferences. A difference-in-difference analysis finds that higher reform intensity increases the policy congruence between legislators and the electorate and reduces leg- islative effort. Contemporary evidence from the European Parliament supports this conclusion. ∗Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and University Toulouse 1 Capitole. Email:
[email protected] yUniversity of Mannheim. Email:
[email protected] zReplication files for this article will be available upon publication from the Harvard Dataverse. For help- ful comments on previous versions we are especially grateful to Lucy Barnes,