Making Electoral Democracy Work at the 2012 EPOP conference

The Making Electoral Democracy Work project will be represented at the conference Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP), which will be held at the University of Oxford, from the 7th to the 9th September.  Three papers related to the project will be presented. The first one is entitled “Party Mobilization and Electoral Systems” and has been written by Ignacio Lago, Sandra Bermúdez, Marc Guinjoan, Kelly Rowe and Pablo Simón. It investigates how the type of party strategies vary across Spanish electoral systems. The second paper is entitled “The impact of Voting Rules in the 2012 French Presidential Elections” and has been written by Jean-François Laslier, Karine van der Straeten and André Blais. It assesses the influence of electoral rules on vote choice and election outcomes using a quasi-experiment conducted during the 2012 French presidential election. Finally, a paper entitled “Choice, Information and Complexity: Voting Behaviour in Swiss Elections”, written by Laura Stephenson, Marian Bohl, Ekrem Karakoc, André Blais and Hanspeter Kriesi, will be presented. It examines who among voters takes advantage of the opportunity to cast a customized ballot in the Swiss open ballot PR system.