Early work in the field of electoral reform mostly focused on the few cases of major electoral reform. Recent research in the field has moved beyond these major reforms and recognized that electoral reform comes in many forms and sizes (see Katz, 2005, Pilet, 2007; Celis, Krook and Meier, 2011; Jacobs and Leyenaar, 2011; Leyenaar and Hazan, 2011). One consequence of this reconceptualization of electoral reform is that it can now be studied as a normal phenomenon (instead of an ‘accident’, cf. Blais and Shugart, 2008). This means patterns in electoral reform can be found. The proposed paper will focus on patterns in the occurrence of different types of electoral reform. Electoral reform, in the broader sense, comes in many different combinations. Indeed, in practice, political elites often discuss and implement reform packages that tie together different electoral reforms (e.g. some increasing the impact of citizens, while other elements actually decrease the impact of citizens). The question that this paper seeks to answer is why specific reforms occur together. I will propose an onion model whereby different electoral reforms are situated in different ‘layers’. The inner layers are important to politicians. The outer are not. Depending on the type of reform process (elite-majority imposition or elite-mass interaction, cf. Renwick, 2010), politicians either reason inside-out or outside-in. This theoretical argument will also be illustrated by examples from Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. It will be shown that the model can explain such diverse reforms as the abolition of computer voting in the Netherlands, the lowering of the voting age in Austria and the introduction of an electoral threshold of 5% in Belgium. Based on the examples in the empirical part of the study, I will then reconstruct which reforms are found in which layers.
