Intra-party Sources of Electoral Reform in the “PR Wave”

• In Event: Electoral Systems, Parties, and Representation

Abstract

Existing research focuses on partisan calculations of prospective seat gains and losses to account for the widespread adoption or proportional representation (PR) systems around the turn of the 20th century. In contrast, we argue that these reforms were primarily adopted at this critical juncture with the aim of enforcing party discipline through list systems. List-PR appealed in fact both to the leadership of the emerging mass parties, who saw them as means to capitalize on their organizational advantages, as well as to establishment elites, who saw in list systems an opportunity to turn the inchoate factions of 19th century politics into the disciplined programmatic parties needed for the age of mass suffrage. In contrast, when non-list, candidate-centered systems (like the limited or single-transferable vote) were considered as an alternative to single-member districts, reform attempts failed. In turn, the “menu” of reform options was endogenous to the preference of electoral reform advocates vis-à-vis the power of parties. Where parties had come to control politics before suffrage expansion, reformists promoted electoral reform as a way to weaken parties (and failed); where reformists could point to weak programmatism and parliamentary indiscipline as problems for democracy, they pushed for party-list systems as means to strengthen parties (and succeeded). Using process-tracing, we test this “party building” account of electoral reform on four historical case studies: Austria, Belgium, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Authors

• Leonardo Carella, University of Oxford

• Klaudia Wegschaider, Yale University, University of Vienna