We have examined the electoral laws that are in place in the countries of the world with respect to nine different domains. What is most striking when we look at them in some detail is the amazing variety of rules that prevail in the world. It is very rare that a given rule would prevail even in a mere majority of countries. Differences clearly trump similarities.
There a few exceptions and these are interesting in themselves. The most dominant pattern is the voting age. There is a nearly consensus (86%) that voting age should be 18. This is a paradoxical consensus, as there seems to be no obvious reason why people should have the right to vote at 18 rather than at 15 or 20 or 25. Why almost all countries have converged towards the same rule, while they have not in most other matters, is a mystery which hopefully will be solved in the future.
There are other exceptions. Compulsory voting at the national level does not occur frequently. Few (17%) countries impose education or literacy conditions for candidates and the great majority allows independent candidates as well as public and private funding. Vote counting usually takes place at the local polling stations and vote recount is possible under some conditions.
Still, in the great majority of cases there is just no dominant pattern. We have looked at the nature and source of these variations. We have first determined if there are geographical patterns. The verdict is pretty clear. In most domains, regional variations are quite substantial. This observation raises further questions, about the reasons for these regional variations. We have not been able to address this question in this exploratory study but we hope that future research will delve more systematically into the sources of these regional variations. We suspect that this reflects the impact of networks and culture but more detailed analyses are required to test our intuition and to untangle the relative importance of these two factors.
We have also checked whether the various electoral rules seem to be correlated to the level of economic development, the degree of democracy, and colonial heritage. In the great majority of cases we have shown evidence that colonial heritage matters. Our findings confirm those obtained by Massicote, Blais and Yoshinaka (“Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies” 2004) whose study was confined to electoral democracies. But again much more work needs to be done to specify how the influence of the mother country concretely operates, which former colonies are most and least likely to follow the “example” and why.
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