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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.

Mexico has a long experience with highly majoritarian variants of mixed‐member systems, but has recently been made more proportional in a process of democratization. Electoral reform has developed along two major axes: the degree of proportionality, and the composition of the electoral authority, with the parties often trading openness on one axis for closure on the other. Sometimes trade‐offs in reform negotiations followed a third dimension—the registration requirements for new parties. This chapter first describes the evolution of the Mexican electoral formulae from 1963 to today, explaining the rationale of each phase of reform either as a majority party decision or as a trade‐off between government and opposition; the phases described are the plurality party deputy system (1963–1976), the mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) minority representation system (1979–1985), the governability clause of the 1988 law, the governability clause with ‘moving escalator’ of the 1991 law, and the abandonment of the governability clause in the 1994 law. The last part of the chapter focuses on the last round of electoral reforms (the 1997 law), in which the mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) system reintroduced in 1994 (after the earlier brief interludes of systems that combined MMM with mixed‐member proportional (MMP) arrangements under the 1988 and 1991 laws), was further reformed to result in a more proportional allocation of seats, with the dominant principle depending on the vote distribution.

In the field of electoral systems, Britain has long held out as a bastion of stability, as the country seen as least likely to undergo fundamental electoral reform, but this picture was rudely shattered in the late spring of 1997, with the election of a new Labour government. The central argument of this chapter is that the current debate over British electoral reform should be viewed as part of a wider process of the coming of age of British politics. A review of the historical debate reveals a series of failed initiatives to reform the electoral system, suggesting that the matter has never been entirely put to rest, and that there has always been the prospect of its re‐emergence. The current episode, dating from the election of the new government in 1997, provides reason to expect that electoral reform may really happen this time, and indeed already has happened in a number of British electoral arenas (European Parliament; London mayor; Northern Ireland, Scottish, Welsh and London Assemblies). The chapter is arranged as follows: the first section summarizes the historical record from 1860 to 1970, and provides evidence of a political elite willing at least to countenance the idea of experimenting with change, even if not yet prepared to embrace it; the second section explores possible explanations for why the issue re‐emerged in the 1990s and describes the reforms implemented in that period (up to 2000); this is followed by an outline of the deliberations and proposals of the Independent Commission on the Voting System for the British House of Commons (the Jenkins Commission), which was established by the new Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, in December 1997, whose report was published in October 1998 and suggested ‘alternative vote plus (AV+)’ as the new electoral system; the concluding section discusses the current prospects for electoral reform in the UK.

This chapter, on the causes of electoral reform in Japan, reviews the movement from an extreme electoral (hyper‐personalistic) system in which candidates of the same party competed against one another in three‐ to five‐seat districts (in a single non‐transferable vote system, SNTV) to a mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) system that eliminated intraparty competition. It is argued that short‐term act‐contingent motivations played a necessary role in passing political reform, and that by January 1994, when the reform bills finally passed into law, no politician could publicly oppose political reform, even though some felt freer to grumble about it. The main sections of the chapter are: The Pathologies of SNTV: Who Hated What?; A Brief History of Failed Electoral Reform Efforts—1956 to 1991; The Fall and Rise of the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party): Electoral Reform in 1993–4; Analysis: The Causes of Electoral Reform.

Recent electoral reform in Venezuela, including the adoption of a mixed‐member proportional (MMP) system, has occurred in the context of crisis. Recounts the history leading from the situation of an extreme electoral system with a very dominant party leadership (a hyper‐centralized system) to the adoption of the MMP system in 1993—in which it was hoped that legislators would be more accountable to voters in the newly created single‐seat geographic constituencies; the system adopted is described as the result of compromise. The first section describes the electoral system and how it has evolved, emphasizing issues of ‘electoral efficiency’. The next section analyzes the reform process and the role/motivations of various actors in the move to an MMP system. With these historical data in hand, the chapter concludes by putting the system for electing congress in the context of wider systemic, institutional issues.

In 1994, Bolivia undertook a major constitutional and electoral reform, in which a closed‐list proportional representation (PR) system for the Lower House of the Congress was replaced by a mixed‐member proportional (MMP) system. Article 60 of the reformed constitution establishes that 68 deputies out of a constitutionally fixed number of 130 will be chosen by plurality rule in single‐seat districts, while the remaining 62 will be chosen by party‐list voting according to proportional representation in nine regional multi‐seat districts. This new electoral system establishes seats linkage between the two tiers such that the overall allocation of seats is determined proportionally according to list votes at the level of each multi‐seat district. In analyzing the underlying causes of the electoral reform in 1994, Mayorga first deals with the widely perceived fundamental problems and flaws of the traditional PR system and, second, addresses the main causes leading to the adoption of an MMP system, focusing on the context in which the politics of electoral reform was carried out.

This examines why Hungary adopted a mixed‐member (MM) electoral system by analyzing the bargaining process that produced it. The discussion of Hungary's negotiated transition to democracy from communism in 1989 shows that the country's MM system emerged as the result of a patchwork grafting of different components rather than a systematically conceived and coherently designed grand plan to meet broad societal needs. The coalition of opposition parties and the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party that negotiated the electoral law in National Roundtable talks attempted to design a system that would both maximize the seat shares of their individual parties and allocate those seats to top‐party elites. They pursued these objectives, however, under a thickening veil of ex ante uncertainty about ex post electoral outcomes, and indeed, the thickening of the veil during the Roundtable talks caused the ruling Socialists to hedge their bets on the global features of the system, combining different sets of rules in order to allocate seats in multiple ways. The chapter proceeds as follows: the first section provides some necessary historical background, discussing previous electoral systems in Hungary's fleeting periods of democratic rule and under communism, as well as the struggles over the reform of the law leading up to the National Trilateral (Roundtable) talks that produced the system in use today; the second section briefly describes the electoral system resulting from the electoral law of 1989, identifying the significant elements of the law and disaggregating the institution into its individual components; the third section discusses the background to the National Roundtable talks, and the fourth turns to the negotiated design of the 1989 law in order to explain the origin of the significant components of the Hungarian electoral system; the last section summarizes the discussion.

The introduction of a mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) electoral system in Russia came in the midst of a violent struggle between President Boris Yeltsin and a communist and nationalist opposition, after which Yeltsin was left to construct a new electoral system and a new constitutional order unopposed. Explains the development and maintenance of the MMM system in Russia as a compromise between competing intraparty and interparty goals, first within the small circle drafting the executive decree in 1993, and then between competing institutions in the struggle over the electoral law in 1995. The designers of the presidential decree that implemented the system saw a mixed‐member system as being able to promote the formation of national parties while maintaining regional representation, and despite the preponderance of power that Yeltsin held throughout this process, the system was not crafted exclusively for the interests of a particular party or ideological camp. It is argued that the system that eventually emerged was a product of competing goals, uncertainty over future electoral outcomes, and compromise between competing institutions. The chapter proceeds as follows: the first section briefly examines the historical background of elections in Russia and provides an overview of the MMM system adopted in 1993; the second describes the process surrounding Yeltsin's executive decree establishing the electoral system for the 1993 election; the third looks at the adoption of the electoral law in 1995; the final section draws some conclusions.

Outlines the aim of the book, and briefly describes the contents of each chapter. The book seeks to evaluate (1) why so many countries with such diverse political histories have chosen to adopt mixed‐member electoral systems, and (2) what the consequences have been of implementing such a system. Part I sets the stage for the 10 country chapters presented in Part II, which presents 10 stories of why the countries concerned adopted a mixed‐member system. Part II then covers the same countries but investigates the consequences of adopting a mixed‐member system, and Part IV looks at the prospects for further reform in two further countries (Britain and Canada), and provides a conclusion, which summarizes what has been learned from the country chapters.

Describes how the German mixed‐member electoral system arose, and shows how it developed both from interest‐based bargaining and from more widely shared concerns about political stability. Some of the features that are most characteristic of the current German arrangements—including giving citizens two ballots and the legal threshold set at 5% of the national vote—were absent in West Germany's first electoral law. These points were incorporated into the German law as the result of partisan struggles, contests whose outcomes were shaped by the shifting contours of West Germany's evolving party system. In other words, although the circumstances of total regime collapse and temporary occupation created rare opportunities to develop a political consensus for principled experimentation with new institutional designs, the German ‘model’ was as much an ad hoc creation as it was the product of theoretically inspired engineering. The different sections of the chapter are: Electoral Systems in the Federal Republic of Germany; The Origins of Germany's Mixed‐Member System; The 1949 Law—and the 1953 and 1956 laws; The German Electoral System Since 1956; and Conclusion: Accidentally Inventing a Model?

An analysis of the factors and the processes that led to the adoption of a mixed‐member electoral system in Israel. The first section analyzes the characteristics of the Israeli pre‐reform extreme electoral (hyper‐representative) system according to the two dimensions (intraparty and interparty) suggested by Shugart in Ch. 2; it also presents a brief discussion of reform initiatives, intended to provide solutions to some of the electoral system pathologies, and explains their failure. The second section discusses the developments in the intraparty dimension—the parties’ tendencies from the 1970s on to adopt more and more inclusive selectorates for candidate selection (this was reform outside the constitutional and legislative framework). The final section discusses the developments in the interparty dimension—patching a majoritarian feature onto a proportional system; this is an analysis of the politics of reform—the factors and the processes that led to the adoption of direct election of the prime minister, and includes five elements: long‐term developments that served as background factors; events that served as catalysts during the struggle for and against reform; a description of the political actors who took part in this struggle; the characteristics of the mixed system that make it more fit for promotion and its use by the reformers to overcome the primary advantage of the institutional status quo; and, lastly, the four stages of the reform process. An appendix lists major events and dates.

Explores the replacement in Italy of an extremely proportional (hyper‐representative) system by a relatively majoritarian variant of a mixed‐member electoral system. On April 18, 1993, the Italian electorate overwhelmingly approved a referendum that altered the electoral system for the national Senate. Unlike the 1993 referendum altering the electoral system in New Zealand (discussed in the previous chapter), which came at the end of a lengthy process including an extensive study and report by a Royal Commission, and which gave final popular approval to put the new electoral regime into effect, the Italian referendum was the catalyst that finally initiated change after long, but apparently futile, debate. Rather than ratifying the selection of one system that had been deliberately chosen over others, the Italian referendum imposed, at least for the moment, the only reform possible, given that Italian referendums can only abrogate existing laws, but cannot impose new ones. The different sections of the chapter are: Background to the Referendum of 1993; Immediate Impact of the Referendum; Ends and Means—to electoral reform; Drafting the New Electoral System in the Chamber; Drafting the New Electoral System in the Senate; The New Electoral System; and Expectations and Predictions.

Henry Pelling enjoyed the deep respect of his professional colleagues, primarily in Britain and the anglophone world and also notably in Japan. His oeuvre secured him a reputation as the foremost empirical labour historian of his generation. Between 1954 and 1963 he published no fewer than nine substantial books, despite his complaints at the way that Oxford teaching duties ate into his time as a writing scholar. Having made himself the unrivalled authority on the history of the labour movement, Pelling had branched out in the 1960s into the new field of electoral history.

This chapter places the Obama field campaign in historical context. Unlike previous campaigns, the Obama field model did not rely on the party infrastructure, outside vendors, or a last-minute get-out-the-vote blitz. Instead, in 2008, OFA cobbled together an electoral-organizing strategy that revived elements of traditional shoe-leather politics, even as it built on cutting-edge mobilization research and technology that had emerged in the modern era. The context within which these innovations emerged reflected three important historical shifts, which this chapter chronicles: the dissolution of the traditional party system in the twentieth century; the rise of new, paid, and mass media; and resurgent interest in face-to-face, targeted communication in the early 2000s. These forces converged in the 2004 election, albeit in different ways in the Democratic and Republican camps. In 2008, key players on the Obama team studied lessons from both sides, tested different approaches, and then sought to sharpen them.

Abstract: This chapter begins the historical analysis of American elections across four political periods: the government expansion period (1920–1944), the post-war period (1946–1972), the government reassessment period (1974–1990), and the Internet technology period (1992–2012). In the first period, the Great Depression and the advent of radio notably reduce nonvoting. When the economy stabilizes and most people have radios in their homes, nonvoting increases. The chapter also explores the effect of women’s suffrage on nonvoting and finds that women did not enter the electorate in large numbers in the first elections for which they were eligible to vote. However, by the 1940s, their nonvoting rates are much lower than men’s in presidential elections, although not in midterm elections.