When Electoral Reform Fails: The Stability of Proportional Representation in Post-Communist Democracies

Nikolenyi, Csaba

doi:10.1080/01402382.2011.555986

Cited by 28 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…The potential victims of this mechanism are easily identifiable, and are almost certainly the legislators from small parties. Along this line, we also find historical elements supporting the diffusion of a high electoral threshold in the reforms of the early 2000s in Belgium (Pilet ), and in the reforms of the 1990s in Slovakia, Slovenia (Nikolenyi ) and the Czech Republic (Kopecky ).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 59%

The international diffusion of electoral systems: The spread of mechanisms tempering proportional representation across Europe

Bol

Pilet

Riera

2015

European J Political Res

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There is an assumption in much of the electoral engineering literature that domestic episodes of electoral system choice occur in a vacuum, isolated from international influences. Yet this assumption remains largely untested, despite the comparative focus of much of that literature. This article focuses on part of this gap by considering two electoral mechanisms that seek to limit party system fragmentation under proportional representation – low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds – and shows that the mechanisms have spread across many European countries during the post‐1945 period. Analyses reveal that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of peer countries have made similar choices within the last two or three years. This effect is robust to various model specifications and to the inclusion of multiple controls. The article also offers some qualitative evidence from case studies and parliamentary debates.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 59%

The international diffusion of electoral systems: The spread of mechanisms tempering proportional representation across Europe

Bol

Pilet

Riera

2015

European J Political Res

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“…In accordance with the above mentioned scientific literature this approach is "intuitive, testable, and transparent" (Hallerberg 2011: 39) and has already proved itself to be valuable at conducting the empirical studies, devoted to explanation of political stability and instability causes (Hallerberg 2011;Ganghof 2015). The veto player approach has been applied at studying the electoral reform policy in Ukraine (Herron 2004), in the United Kingdom (Blau 2008), in Slovenia, in the Czech Republic, in Romania (Nikolenyi 2011) and in Belgium (Hooghe, Deschouwer 2011). This model was also used for the analysis of the party reform in Russia in 2001 (Herron 2004) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs reform under the President Dmitriy Medvedev within the period from 2009 to 2011 (Taylor 2014).…”

Section: Literature Review and Theoretical Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Executive Branch and Major Electoral Reforms in Russia

Turchenko

Shevchuk

2015

SSRN Journal

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One more attempt to change the Russian electoral system initiated by the president in 1994-1995 failed. This article considers the cases of major electoral reforms in Russia through the veto player theory. It demonstrates that the reforms were successfully implemented in cases when the executive branch, striving for maximum control over the legislative process, was interested in such implementation and there were no other veto players, who were able to block passage of the law.

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“…For example, the rational choice perspective provided important first steps in explaining the causes of electoral change, but once we get into the more complex issue of how the reform process unfolds, these parsimonious approaches quickly become unglued. We need theories that include a wider set of actors and broaden our perspective to encompass those reforms that passed, along with those that did not (Baldini 2011;Hooghe and Deschouwer 2011;Nikolenyi 2011).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the new democracies, electoral system changes take place in very different contexts, and an important question is whether the theories emanating from the study of established democracies explain electoral reform in these cases as well (Nikolenyi 2011). More generally, the question is whether and how determinants of electoral reform vary based on a country's democratic status -whether it is a country undergoing a transition to democracy, a new or fragile democracy, or a non-democracy (Renwick 2011).…”

Section: Expanded Thementioning

confidence: 99%