National and District Competition in East Asia: a Multilevel Comparison of Mixed Legislative Systems

While the global trend has been towards more proportional electoral systems, Asian governments have chosen increasingly majoritarian designs. In addition, while mixed systems including single member districts (SMDs) and seats delegated by proportional representation (PR) have proliferated globally, five Asian countries have enacted strikingly similar mixed majoritarian systems. This study attempts to embed the East Asian cases (Taiwan, Japan, and Korea) within a broader framework rather than presume the uniqueness of these cases. Instead of focusing solely on institutional effects, I suggest that these reforms should be viewed as interacting with party and contextual factors to alter the competitive arena, which in turn shapes party and voter behavior. In this analysis, I combine qualitative and quantitative methodologies within a multilevel framework. To determine the effects of institutional reform on party competition and party system formation, I collected constituency level election results these three countries as well as other mixed systems, 88 elections in 25 countries total. Next I employ Nagayama triangles using constituency data f to determine whether reforms are leading to two-party competition and compare regions over time. Finally I will conduct statistical regressions at the national and constituency level for all mixed systems to determine whether these East Asian mixed systems show fundamentally different patterns of competition at either level.