The project is to discuss the micro-foundations of how electoral institutions impact political representation. The micro-foundations are built upon the citizens' decisions on how to express their policy preferences in elections. The beginning of political representation is political participation, the decision of voting or not. Moreover, since not all people decide to vote, the accuracy of the citizens' preferences expressed through voter turnout is essential in political representation. Furthermore, the authorization of the citizens' preferences is related to the selection of political agents who have the power to speak for the people's will in the government. These three topics are the main themes of this project.The central finding of this project is that various types of electoral systems (i.e., proportional representation (PR henceforth) and single majoritarian (SMD henceforth) systems have their own advantages and disadvantages on three components of political representation. I first show that the micro-foundations of why PR systems are associated with higher turnout than SMD systems are built upon the calculus of voting and spatial theory. Individual evaluations of the B term in the calculus of voting are affected by spatial party competition framed by electoral institutions. Then I ask the question of how electoral institutions affect the degree of political representation through the perspective of comparing the distribution of voter preferences versus that of all electorate. Different types of electorate according to their relative locations in the distribution of voter preferences have various incentives to voting. Finally, I argue that electoral systems create the convergent and non-convergent electoral incentives with substantial impacts on the position-taking strategy of political parties through mechanisms of the electoral formula, and the district magnitude. The pattern of party positioning is also modified by the type of government (i.e., majority and coalition) and voter turnout rates depending on electoral systems. These two aspects cause lower policy dependence under SMD and higher policy dependence under PR.
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