Explaining Reforms of Assembly Sizes: Reassessing the Cube Root Law Relationship Between Population and Assembly Size

One of the consequences of the current economic crisis and the ensuing austerity measures is that many people question the number of politicians. Governments in Austria, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal have considered reducing the size of their assembly. Has the state of the economy historically affect actual reforms of the assembly size? We distinguish between three explanations: (1) the dominant technocratic approach which holds that assembly sizes vary with (the cube root of) population sizes (Taagepera & Shugart, 1989), (2) a rational choice inspired explanation focusing on the effective number of parties (Colomer, 2005) and (3) the economic explanation stressing economic factors (Jacobs, 2013). In this paper we test which of these three explanations explains assembly size best using regression and event history analysis for the period 1950-2010.