ABSTRACT
This comparative study of political party systems in Asia has dealt primarily with the number of political parties counted in terms of vote shares (or the electoral party system), as opposed to the number of political parties in terms of seat shares (or the legislative party system). In particular, it has made a clear distinction between voters’ preferences and their votes and focused on the process of converting voters’ preferences into votes. This process is very different from that of vote-seat conversion. It is, of course, affected to some extent by institutional designers’ intentions so that some electoral systems exert more influence on transforming voters’ preferences into votes. This is why some scholars refer to a single-member district system as a strong system in comparison with a proportional representation system. However, unlike the issue of vote-seat disproportionality, we cannot attribute everything to electoral systems when it comes to the issue of translating preferences into votes. This is simply due to the fact that voters do not act exactly as institutional designers want them to. Institutional designers might have wanted to change voters’ behavior by introducing a particular set of electoral rules. If they succeed in designing a coherent set of electoral rules, their experiment will turn out successful, but, even in this case, their expectations tend to be met only partially. This is because voters are influenced by factors other than electoral rules.
