Who stands in the way of women? Open vs. closed lists and candidate gender in Estonia

The literature on women's descriptive representation has looked at the debate on open and closed lists as a choice between electoral systems. This article instead focuses on whether voters or the parties are biased against female candidates. Using data from six Estonian elections, the article finds that voters are not consistently biased against female candidates and open lists do not necessarily decrease women's representation. However, unknown and non-incumbent female candidates fare significantly worse than similar men. The analysis also shows that parties do not place women in electable positions on closed lists, and closed lists do not improve women's representation

The Tailor of Marrakech: Western Electoral Systems Advice to Emerging Democracies

The article explores the challenges of providing Western electoral system advice to emerg-ing democracies, drawing on experiences of Estonia and Poland in the format of a historical recollection of attempted electoral reforms and electoral engineering. It proposes a tentative five-phase sequence of attitudes toward foreign advice: initial acceptance of pre-existing rules, recognition of the need for reforms, attempts to reinvent electoral systems, eager adoption of foreign advice, and eventual reliance on local expertise with selective use of external input. Using Estonia as a case study, Taagepera details his role in introducing electoral system op-tions during the transition from Soviet rule, highlighting the shift from external influence to local politicking. Kaminski contrasts this with Poland, where the absence of expert electoral advice during the 1989 Round Table negotiations inadvertently facilitated Solidarity’s victory, underscoring the impact of electoral ignorance. The article assesses the validity of Western advice, focusing on proportionality, government stability, and party constellations, and ad-vocates for simple, stable electoral rules in emerging democracies. They conclude that while a science of electoral systems is developing, its applicability to unstable democracies remains limited, and feedback from these contexts offers modest insights into established electoral theories, such as Duverger’s law. The article explores the challenges of providing Western electoral system advice to emerg-ing democracies, drawing on experiences of Estonia and Poland in the format of a historical recollection of attempted electoral reforms and electoral engineering. It proposes a tentative five-phase sequence of attitudes toward foreign advice: initial acceptance of pre-existing rules, recognition of the need for reforms, attempts to reinvent electoral systems, eager adoption of foreign advice, and eventual reliance on local expertise with selective use of external input. Using Estonia as a case study, Taagepera details his role in introducing electoral system op-tions during the transition from Soviet rule, highlighting the shift from external influence to local politicking. Kaminski contrasts this with Poland, where the absence of expert electoral advice during the 1989 Round Table negotiations inadvertently facilitated Solidarity’s victory, underscoring the impact of electoral ignorance. The article assesses the validity of Western advice, focusing on proportionality, government stability, and party constellations, and ad-vocates for simple, stable electoral rules in emerging democracies. They conclude that while a science of electoral systems is developing, its applicability to unstable democracies remains limited, and feedback from these contexts offers modest insights into established electoral theories, such as Duverger’s law

Photoelectroluminescence of Single Crystals of Manganese‐Activated Zinc Sulfide

Photoelectroluminescence, which involves the control of electroluminescence by electromagnetic radiation, is reported for single crystals of manganese-activated zinc sulfide. Both plane-parallel and point-contact electrode structures were used. The latter resulted in greater homogeneity of luminescent emission with the applied voltage mainly across the spreading resistance regions. The field distribution was probed. The observations are explained with essentially the same basic theory as was earlier used to explain observations on vapor-deposited films. However, from the analysis of the data on single crystals we deduce that carrier multiplication is occurring in the cathode region and to a lesser extent in the anode region, and also obtain values for the local fields for acceleration of carriers and for collision excitation. © 1966 The American Institute of Physics