Electoral Reform Attempts in Parliamentary Democracies

Why do governments want to change the electoral institutions? To answer this question, I examine when and why governments initiate electoral system changes. The existing literature has paid imbalanced attention to successful reforms even though there are many cases where electoral reforms initiated by governments failed in the process. Unfortunately, these failed reform attempts, also involving a government act to change the electoral system, are largely neglected, which creates a methodological bias. In this paper, I study both successful and failed electoral reform attempts that change the proportionality of electoral systems in parliamentary democracies. Categorizing them into permissive and restrictive types in terms of their openness to small parties, I discuss different scenarios of reform attempts from governing parties’ perspective. To explain when and why governing parties initiate either electoral reforms, I develop a novel account that centers on the competition between the largest two parties in elections which are the main contenders. I specifically argue that the ruling party initiates an electoral reform depending on whether small or new parties draw votes from its vote base or from that of its main competitor in the election. I test the hypotheses by using an original dataset of cross-national electoral reform attempts in parliamentary democracies between 1975 and 2015. The findings of the study support the main hypotheses that ruling parties initiate a restrictive electoral reform when small parties draw votes from its vote base, but a permissive one when small parties draw votes from its main competitor in the election.