The causes and consequences of electoral reforms have been analysed in several case studies (e.g., Bawn 1993; Benoit and Schiemann 2001; Hazan and Rahat 2000; Kaminski 2002; Katz 1996; Moraski 2007; Nagel 2004; Reed and Thies 2001; Renwick et al. 2009; Shugart et al.
2007; Pachón and Shugart 2010), and in comparative research on various countries, including contemporary (e.g., Best 2012; Bielasiak 2006; Birch et al. 2002; García Díez 2001; Harfst 2013;
Ishiyama 1997; Remmer 2008; Renwick 2010) and earlier democracies (Boix 1999; Cusack et al.
29 An unpopular party is, according to Fey, a party that does not obtain a considerable vote share rather than a party that lacks citizens’ popularity.
20 2007; Rokkan 2009 [1970]). However, their determinants and effects have never been systematically analyzed. For this reason, in this thesis I intend to formulate a body of theoretically driven and empirically rigorous comparative work on the causes and consequences of this phenomenon by bringing together several theoretical frameworks and employing various empirical strategies. Moreover, I plan to widen the scope of study from a single reform or small set of reforms to a wider group of episodes of this kind of institutional changes. This provides more leverage for my statistical analysis, and gives the opportunity for broader generalizations.
In this dissertation, I examine more than 100 electoral reforms in 60 democratic countries from four continents (Europe, America, Asia and Oceania) between 1945 and 2010. More specifically, I study modifications in the rules that shape electoral outcomes at the national level.
It is obvious that electoral reforms can happen at all levels of government at which elections take place. However, I prefer to avoid studying electoral reforms at the international, the regional or the local level because this research attempts to obtain results as comparable as possible.
Consequently, I only study them at the national level. After all, some authors argue that changes in voting systems at other electoral levels than the national should be categorized as minor (Bowler and Donovan 2008; Dalton and Gray 2003). Moreover, there is still a second reason to focus on electoral reforms at this tier of government. If we take seriously the “second-order”
elections theory (Reif and Schmitt 2006 [1980]), national elections are the most important ones.
In fact, they are perceived to be so by both voters and parties (candidates), in spite of the processes of supranational integration and territorial devolution that have taken place all over the world in recent times. Therefore, the cases selected for this study concern the electoral system at the national level.30
Finally, an explanation needs to be given concerning the countries that elect more than one office at the national level. With regard to presidential and semi-presidential systems, I prefer to stick to legislative elections in order to maximize comparability across countries.31 With regard to bicameralism in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies, I choose to focus on
30 For a study of the adoption of the mixed-member proportional systems in Scotland, Wales and for the London Assembly, see Dunleavy and Margetts (2001).
31 For a study of the adoption or the change of the electoral formula in presidential elections in Latin America, see Negretto (2006).
21 the rules employed to elect the chamber of parliament to which the national government is mainly responsible. This solution also avoids giving more weight to countries with presidential or bicameral systems. Problems, however, begin to arise as soon as we start to think about countries where cabinets have to win confidence votes in both chambers in order to stay in office (like in Italy). In such cases (not that many, to be frank), I take into account the rules employed to elect the chamber that is traditionally considered the lower house.32 And the same solution applies to those presidential countries that are bicameral.
I take into consideration as many political contexts as reasonably feasible in order to circumvent small-N problems related to scarcity of statistical power, and avoid large-N problems associated with lack of comparability. In particular, three criteria regarding case selection are applied. First of all, I only look at countries and periods in which free and fair elections take place, as I said earlier. This criterion rules out many electoral systems around the world. A second criterion that guides case selection is the availability and reliability of comparable data on electoral laws and party system features across all the countries under study. For this reason, the case selection is limited to post-World War II democracies and third-wave democracies from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Table 1.1 displays the list of countries and time periods comprised. Notwithstanding the incomplete nature of this catalogue, the aim is to draw valid inferences on the origins and consequences of electoral reforms in all contemporary democracies. Finally, I examine presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary regimes. After all, in spite of their distinct institutional setup, the basic logic of bargaining should be similar there (Strøm et al. 2008). Thus, I think it is a worthwhile attempt to formulate decision theories that cover all three types of systems (Amorim Neto 2006).
With regard to the data and methods employed, various research strategies are here combined to answer the central questions of this study. In brief, the empirical part of my dissertation tries to maximize the evidence supporting my theory.33 However, this involves several tasks.
32 For example, because the president of the Senate stands in the role of Head of State when the president of the Republic needs to be replaced, the Senate is traditionally considered the upper house in Italy.
33 It was my first intention to use a so-called mixed method and combine a cross-country large-N part with some evidence from in-depth case-studies. I think this nested research had a synergistic value (Lieberman 2005), and
22 Table 1.1. Countries and time periods analysed
Countries Time Periods Countries Time Periods
Albania 1992-2010 Italy 1946-2010
Czech Republic 1996-2010 Peru 1980-1989; 2001-2010
Denmark 1945-2010 Poland 1991-2010 additional tests of hypotheses generated from small-N studies. On the other hand, case-study analyses could be used to assess the plausibility of observed statistical relationships between variables and to generate theoretical insights from outliers. In the same vein, James Fearon and David Laitin (2008: 773) believe that case studies can be quite useful for ascertaining and assessing the causal mechanisms that give rise to the empirical regularities discovered in large-N analyses. So, combining these two approaches would have allowed me to overcome the usual pitfalls that each type of method presents. However, Alexander George and Andrew Bennett (2005) identify several weaknesses recurrent limitations of case-study methods such as the problem of case selection, the trade-off between parsimony and richness, and the related tension between achieving high internal validity of particular cases versus making generalizations that apply to broad populations. For these reasons, and because of time and space constraints, I finally decided to take in-depth studies out of the research and confine a preliminary skecth of the cases in Appendix 4 to this thesis.
23
Germany 1949-2010 Switzerland 1947-2010
Greece 1974-2010 Ukraine 1994-2010
Guatemala 1990-2010 United Kingdom 1945-2010
Honduras 1985-2010 United States 1946-2010
Hungary 1990-2010 Uruguay 1989-2010
Iceland 1946-2010 Venezuela 1963-2010
Ireland 1948-2010
Israel 1949-2010
First of all, the electoral systems of all the countries and for each year under study have to be identified and classified as either “reform” or “no reform” and coded as to reform type (see below) on the basis of the criteria stated earlier. In order to do that, I examine all the electoral laws available in the languages that I read (i.e., Spanish, English, Italian, French and Portuguese), and cross-validate the results with an extensive review of secondary sources.
Having collected the data, I perform quantitative analyses using the appropriate statistical tools.
In the first part of the dissertation, I use the aforementioned two typologies of electoral reform as dependent variables in order to explain the variation in the likelihood of occurrence of each category of institutional change. More specifically, the estimation of several dynamic models on the basis of two-self built datasets allows me to find out why electoral system change takes place in some cases, and not in other highly similar ones.
The two typologies of electoral reform are the main independent variables in the first two chapters of the third part of this research (i.e., Chapters 6 and 7), which aim at exploring the consequences of this type of institutional change at the macro-level. In a set of comparative analyses based on several cross-sectional times series models, I assess the consequences of changes in the rules of the game for disproportionality and party system nationalization. In the chapter concerning the effect of the position adopted by each party during electoral reform processes (i.e., Chapter 8), their performance in the immediately following legislative election at the national level serves as dependent variable. This last potential impact is measured by implementing the corresponding hierarchical lineal models, and after having updated a dataset on parties’ preferences about electoral reform that Damien Bol has kindly shared with me. This innovative data source has been built on the basis of an expert survey conducted regarding 30
24 different national processes of electoral reform. Finally, Appendix 6 to this thesis employs individual-level data from several New Zealand Election Studies. The availability of data limits the analysis of the consequences of electoral reforms at the individual level to only this country.
In this appendix, a combination of various econometric techniques specially designed to deal with endogeneity problems are employed.