Replication Data for: ‘Electoral Systems and Geographic Representation’

The files included reproduce the analysis in the main text and supplementary materials of the paper ‘Electoral Systems and Geographic Representation’. Abstract: Who gets represented in legislatures, and how does this depend on electoral institutions? Others have asked this question from the perspective of gender, race, and class; we focus on space, asking whether MPs disproportionately come from some places rather than others and how this depends on electoral rules. Using data on over 13,000 legislators in 62 democracies, we develop a new measure of the extent to which the spatial distribution of MP birthplaces matches the spatial distribution of the citizens they represent. Contrary to received wisdom, we find that single-member district systems do not have more geographically representative parliaments than multi-member district systems, while mixed-member systems perform significantly better than both. We attribute the higher spatial representativeness of mixed-member systems to contamination effects in their single-member tier, and we present evidence for this explanation from within-country analysis of elections from Italy, the UK and Germany.