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Explores several of the factors that significantly affected the transition of New Zealand's political system from a pluralitarian (extreme majoritarian) system famous for its tranquil efficacy to an MMP (mixed‐member proportional) system renowned for its vengeful reformism. These factors include: (1) dealignment; (2) minor party under‐representation; (3) the under‐representation of minority groups in an era of increasing multiculturalism; (4) radical, unpopular economic reform by successive Labour and National party governments; and (5) the parliamentary ‘other side’ of the calculus—the provision of both a Royal Commission, which highlighted representational failings of the Westminster system while legitimating MMP specifically as an alternative electoral system, and indicative and binding referendums, which gave New Zealand's voters the final say in determining the fate of the country's electoral system. The extent to which these issues were important in vote choices of electors in the 1993 referendum is also considered. A last section considers the overall explanations for New Zealand's turn to MMP, and the chapter includes a table that shows a timeline of electoral change in New Zealand since 1985 (the period immediately preceding the reform of 1993) and an appendix giving a sketch of the MMP system in New Zealand.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of main purpose of this book, which is to describe and explain the electoral changes in Western Europe in the second half of the 20th century. It then discusses political change in Europe, modernization and political change, declining voter turnout, and party choice. An overview of the chapters in this volume is presented.

When choosing an electoral system, the main tradeoff is between decisiveness of government and representation of minority views. With simple electoral systems, their average effect can be predicted. With complex electoral systems, the ability to predict their actual workings is lost. Refraining from changing electoral laws frequently allows an understanding to develop of how the electoral system works.

Political events and democratization have created emerging questions for the analysis of comparative politics. This provides opportunities to test the role of political culture, voting preferences, and the link between political norms and behaviour prior to stable democracies in equilibrium, on which formerly research has focused. Major advances in comparative political behaviour reflect the individualization of electoral behaviour in value change and modernization, and the contribution of political culture due to patterns of democratization.

Political reforms which impact on the electoral process can have long-standing and unintended consequences on the characteristics of political leadership, on the gatekeepers of that leadership, and on the homogeneity of leadership under a democratic electoral model. The peculiarities of a legislative system, particularly in the way that it is structured, can unquestionably slow down the processes that democratic electoral change typically engenders, by determining the type of leaders selected and who does the selecting. Democratic change, measured by numerous background variables of the leading politicians, can be extraordinarily radical in scope. Institutions play an important role in the backgrounds of political leadership, particularly in their credentials and their recruitment. In spite of these important influences produced by perceptions of a politician's career experiences and accomplishments, non-institutional relationships based on familial linkages are extensive in Mexico, potentially exerting greater influence on their selection than those experiences or credentials which are publicly visible and concrete. Democracy is enhancing an increase in politicians' experiences and credentials typically associated with a democratic process, including negotiating and bargaining skills; yet democracy also has increased party militancy significantly and consequently the level of partisanship has expanded, not only among governors, but among politicians holding important national positions, including members of congress.

This theoretical chapter presents the existing contributions in order to enable understanding of the determinants of democratic reforms, but also the processes leading to reform in established democracies. It focuses, first, on the sets of incentives and obstacles to change of the institutions: political crisis, political instability, and the state of the pre-existing institutional system. On the other hand, the research in this field has confirmed the existence of several barriers to change, the importance of taking the roles of complexity and uncertainty into account, and how the type of reform and the type of process leading to reform (or non-reform) are intrinsically linked. Second, this chapter shows that authors often fall into traps, of which there are several, and these mainly derive from the absence of cross-national and multidimensional data on institutional change: that reforms are rare, mainly self-interested, and tend to happen as isolated events.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key themes of the book. It analyses David Cameron’s strategy for rebuilding Conservative electoral appeal and the evolution of his modernisation strategy from his election as leader in 2005 to the Conservative victory in the general election of 2015. It explores the difficulties associated with modernising a political party, notably disunity over its future direction. It sets Cameron’s efforts to renew the Conservative Party against profound changes in British politics, especially declining support for the two major parties and the growing strategic influence of smaller parties such as UKIP. Finally the chapter introduces the different perspectives of the various authors and highlights their contribution to the analysis.

This chapter presents the first dedicated study of party attachment in Ireland in the wake of the economic crisis. Previous research shows that party identification has historically been an important factor in Irish voting behaviour, though – much like in other democracies – it began to decline from the 1980s onwards. This chapter examines how party attachment has evolved in recent elections. The core question it seeks to answer is whether the electoral turbulence in 2011 and 2016 was simply a symptom of a fundamentally dealigned electorate, or whether we are witnessing a realignment in Irish politics. In other words, has the number of floating voters increased in the wake of the crisis, or have people begun to form new party attachments that are likely to shape elections in the future? The analysis shows that while party attachments were ruptured in 2011 (most notably so in the case of Fianna Fáil), in 2016, by contrast, partisanship increased, and there were some interesting trends among young voters in particular, with many of them beginning to form new allegiances.

Analysing six waves of parliamentary surveys in Sweden, this chapter discusses the variation in the extent to which MPs have a reason to vote against their party based on policy preferences alone, and how this varies over time. The chapter argues that while preference homogeneity within parties consistently across time explains a substantial share of unity in Sweden, the parliamentary parties are not ideologically homogeneous enough to explain the voting unity observed, confirming the findings of the previous chapter. Analysing the drivers of attitudes to party unity, and confirming the findings of the previous chapter, the chapter finds that the most credible explanation of the very high levels of unity in the Riksdag is that MPs voluntarily choose to vote the party line due to the long-term benefits of doing so. The chapter then analyses around 200 answers to an open-ended survey question, confirming the findings from the quantitative analysis.

Studies that explain class voting have often focused on ‘bottom-up” social factors, but paid little attention to ‘top-down’ political factors. In this chapter, we argue that party positions on left-right ideology affect the strength of class voting. We test this thesis by estimating the impact of Left-Right party positions on the class-vote association through a Two-Step Hierarchical analysis of pooled data from Australia, the United States and 13 countries in Western-Europe (1960-2005) supplemented with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Although there is a general trend for class voting to decline over time, partially accounted for by the impact of education, we find that most variation in class voting does not take the form of a linear decline. The ideological positions of left-wing parties alone do not have any effect, but the polarization of parties along the left-right dimension is associated with substantially higher levels of class voting.

This chapter investigates whether changes in religious and class voting in the Netherlands can be interpreted by social and political factors. From the social perspective we focus on compositional changes, education, changes in the class structure, and religious integration. From the political perspective we examine the impact of merging political parties and changes in party positions. Employing Election Surveys (1971–2006) and Manifesto-data, reveals that the rise of the class of social-cultural specialists is important for understanding changes in the class–vote relationship. Although party positions are relevant they do little to explain the decline in class-based voting. Weakening religious integration largely explains the decline of political boundaries between non-religious voters and Catholics and Calvinists. After taking party positions into account the effect of the CDA-merger no longer reduced religious based voting, suggesting that the merger resulted in a revised ideological choice set facing voters. Furthermore, religious voting increases when traditional moral issues in manifestos are emphasized.

The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was the dominant party in Northern Ireland from the 1920s until the end of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century has been much more of a struggle. The UUP was punished, not rewarded, by many in the Protestant Unionist British community for conceding too much to Irish nationalists in the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Those concerned about the deal defected to the more militant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The story of the UUP during the peace process and in the decades since the 1998 Agreement is examined in subsequent chapters. The volume draws upon the first-ever dataset on UUP members constructed by the authors to examine who belongs to the UUP, explore what they think of their party and others, and assess their views on the political changes which have seen their party come under pressure.