Party competition and electoral reforms: why do governments initiate a reform?

Abstract

Most accounts of electoral reforms focus on successfully implemented reforms to explain how electoral context shapes the incentives of political parties, paying scant attention to the cases where governments fail to implement their preferred system. This article takes a step back in the electoral reform process and examines when and why governing parties initiate electoral reforms. In doing so, it focuses on how the electoral context can affect the electoral bases of the incumbents and their main competitor. This novel account expects that governments initiate electoral reforms depending on whether small or new parties draw votes from their own vote base or from that of their main competitor. Using an original dataset of electoral reform attempts from 32 parliamentary democracies between 1945 and 2015, this article shows that ruling parties are more likely to initiate a restrictive reform when small parties draw votes from their electoral base, but a permissive one when small parties draw more votes from their main competitor.

Keywords:

• Electoral systems
• electoral reform attempts
• party system fragmentation
• parliamentary democracies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and two anonymous referees for comments and suggestions that helped substantially to improve the manuscript. I am grateful to Margarita Estevez-Abe, Seth Jolly, and Matt Cleary for their insightful comments. I also thank Emre Ekinci, Jack Santucci (the discussant) and the participants at MPSA 2019 and APSA 2020 for their feedback. Lastly, I thank Scott Mainwaring for providing the electoral volatility dataset.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See also; Freedom House, Nations in Transit 2014 - Slovenia, 3 November 2014, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5465ea2124.html (accessed 15 March 2023).

2 Incumbent party is the political party currently holding office in government. I use the terms incumbent party, governing party, and party in power interchangeably to convey the same meaning throughout the article.

3 See also Blais (2008) which examines electoral reforms from the First Past the Post System; Grofman (1999) and Bowler and Grofman (2000) which focus on the Single Non-Transferable Vote and the Single Transferable Vote respectively to explain their origins and effects.

4 Some options such as increasing the district magnitude in plurality systems are obsolete and not used in any consolidated democracies. Others, such as decreasing the assembly size, are difficult because the parties need to convince the backbenchers to give up the seat in their district. Finally, while boundary delimitation can produce partisan, and in particular, incumbent advantage, it does not necessarily affect the proportionality of the system.

5 A similar assumption is also used by Bawn (1993).

6 The argument does not assume that there are two strong parties, either of which forms a government in each election. It allows for the possibility that the main parties in government and an election can differ depending on the election results, and that the main parties in government and an election can have an imbalance in terms of electoral power.

7 For the list of countries see online appendix Table 1 and for the number of legislative terms each type of reform is attempted in the countries see Figure 1 in the online appendix.

8 See also Nunez et al. (2017), Bielasiak and Hulsey (2013), Remmer (2008).

9 See online appendix Table 2 for the coding procedures and sources for the dependent variable.

10 Two electoral reform attempts were not included in the dataset as the direction of change was not clear: i) German reform (2005) which replaced Hare quota with the Sainte Laguë; ii) Romanian reform (2008) which introduced single member candidacies yet distributed party seats as in the previous system (Marian and King 2010; Renwick 2011).

11 The main parties are not included in the calculation of competition in each bloc with the aim to derive a fragmentation score sensitive to the small parties.

12 I thank the reviewers for their suggestion to include the satisfaction with the electoral system in the analyses.

13 See online appendix Table 3 for the definition and data sources for each control variable discussed here.

14 The number of previous reform attempts is included in all regression models in this article but not reported in the tables for space considerations. In each model this variable is close to zero and statistically not significant. For similar approaches used in multinomial regressions to deal with the time dependency problem, see Bielasiak and Hulsey (2013); Nunez and Jacobs (2016); Nunez et al. (2017); Remmer (2008).

15 Note that relative risk ratios are exponentials of multinomial logit coefficients, and they indicate the risk of a permissive (or restrictive) reform attempt in comparison to no reform attempt by a unit increase in the independent variable.

16 Note that when the relative risk ratio is below 1, the outcome is more likely to be in the baseline group (Long and Freese 2014).

17 I also estimated each specification in Table 3 using the presence of judicial review as an additional control variable. The qualitative nature of the results did not change. Because the coefficient on judicial review was not significant in any of the estimated models, I do not report those results.

18 See the results in online appendix Table 4. I also consider the possibility that the relationship between fragmentation in a government’s ideological cluster and the electoral reforms might differ depending on the satisfaction of the incumbent with the electoral system. In Models 1 and 3, I test this interactive effect. The results show that the effect of fragmentation in a government’s ideological cluster on permissive and restrictive reform does not depend on its satisfaction with the existing system.

19 The effect of fragmentation in the governing party’s ideological cluster is also robust to the inclusion of fragmentation in the opposition’s ideological cluster variable (models not shown here).

20 Figure not shown for space considerations.

21 The electoral reform, though, benefited the leftist coalition the most in the 2000 election only because they were able to form a pre-election coalition.

22 The permissive reform makes the electoral system more proportional but only for the parties that pass the infamous 10 percent national threshold.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Esra Issever-Ekinci

Esra Issever-Ekinci is a postdoctoral researcher at Koç University. Her research specialises on electoral systems, electoral reforms, political parties, representation, and gender and politics. Her previous work has been published in Politics and Gender. [[email protected]]