Why voting systems change: Electoral reform in western industrialized countries

This dissertation examines why voting systems have (or have not) changed in western industrialized countries over the past century. Though sharing broadly similar processes of economic and political development from the mid-to-late nineteenth century on, western countries diverged in their choice of voting systems, with most of Europe shifting to proportional voting around World War I, while Anglo-American countries stuck with relative majority or majority voting rules. Past work, both quantitative and ideographic, attributed this result to the effects of culture, or political diversity, or differing patterns of democratization. Using a comparative historical method, and by attending to the historical sequence of events in each case, this study reviews all national efforts for voting system reform in the west over the last century and finds little support for traditional explanations. Instead, this dissertation argues that the strategic position of left parties has been the key factor in all cases.

Utilizing Miliband's concept of 'capitalist democracy,' the dissertation demonstrates how voting systems became contested as a by-product of struggles to gain and define democratic government, and by extension give shape to both economic and social policy through the state. The study explores the question of voting system reform across four broad historical periods: the nineteenth century, the period around World War I, the Cold War, and the 1990s. The findings of the case studies suggest that class has defined the process of voting system reform over different historical periods primarily because of the tensions inherent in first establishing and then maintaining the specifically capitalist form of democracy that emerged in western countries. This tension was fuelled by the rise of left political parties throughout the west in the late nineteenth century and their decline a century later. Left parties championed democracy as a means of turning the state toward the economic and social concerns of the working class, and their distinctive form of organization allowed them to mobilize mass levels of support. Throughout the twentieth century the left's expansive 'democratic imaginary' inspired mass support and strong opposition from bourgeois forces and traditional political elites against a backdrop of national and international struggles over the state regulation of capitalism. Voting system reforms emerged again and again as one means of responding to the strategic position of the left and effecting a 'condensation of class forces' in the institutions of the state.