Malapportionment in Mongolian elections: Does institutional structure matter?

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines malapportionment in Mongolia from the introduction of a unicameral parliament in 1992 to the parliamentary elections in 2016. We especially address the question whether the level of malapportionment was significantly influenced by various types of electoral systems at both national and district levels. Due to its frequent electoral engineering, Mongolia can serve as a very useful case for testing the relationship between levels of malapportionment and different types of electoral systems. The results show that almost irrespective of the type of electoral system applied, the level of malapportionment grew constantly at both national and district levels until the election of 2016, when the growth ended. The importance of this finding lies in the fact that while most existing cross-national analyses of malapportionment presented rather contrary arguments, the Mongolian case demonstrates that plurality systems, or single-member district systems, are not unambiguous factor distorting fair apportionment.

Keywords

• Mongolia
• parliamentary elections
• malapportionment
• delimitation
• electoral reform