Electoral Studies 24 (2005) 6584 www.elsevier.

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Strategic fools: electoral rule choice under extreme uncertainty

Josephine T. Andrews , Robert W. Jackman
Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA

Abstract We compare patterns of electoral rule choice in two periods, that following the First World War in Western Europe and that following the end of the Cold War in Central and Eastern Europe. Heretofore, scholars have studied these two instances of electoral rule choice separately and have come to quite dierent conclusions about the implications of strategic behavior of the relevant actors. In the case of early 20th Century Western Europe, Rokkan and later Boix cast the choice of electoral rules as a result of coordinated strategic behavior by established parties in reaction to increasing support for new parties of the left. In contrast, recent analyses of the postCold War period in Central and Eastern Europe suggest that while all political actors acted strategically, an extreme lack of information prevented them from making choices that served their self-interest in the long run. Indeed, many party leaders supported electoral rules that later eliminated them from politics. We argue that uncertainty was a major factor in both periods of electoral rule design, so that political elites often made serious miscalculations of the eect of particular electoral rules on their own future success. A reanalysis of the Boix data suggests that eorts to explain the choice of electoral rules as a coordinated response by established parties to electoral threat must be viewed with skepticism, since uncertainty made success or failure almost impossible to predict. Instead, any strategic behavior was short-term at best, reecting the largest partys most recent experience in the preceding election. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Electoral rule; Strategic behavior; Boix data

Corresponding author. Tel.: C1-530-754-8108. E-mail addresses: jtandrews@ucdavis.edu (J.T. Andrews), rwjackman@ucdavis.edu (R.W. Jackman).

0261-3794/$ - see front matter 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2004.03.002

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1. Introduction The recent wave of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe has refocused attention on the choice of electoral institutions. The emerging view takes this choice to be the product of strategic decisions by key political actors operating under uncertainty (Przeworski, 1991; Lijphart, 1992; Geddes, 1996; Shvetsova, 2003). In contrast, research on the electoral reforms that occurred in Western Europe surrounding the First World War has cast the choice of electoral institutions as the predictable product of strategic calculations of established parties given the vote received by rising socialist forces (for the classic statement, see Rokkan, 1970, and for a recent statement, see Boix, 1999). Among other things, this predictability implies that strategic calculations underlying electoral choices in the early 20th Century involved little uncertainty about the political consequences of alternative institutional arrangements. Our purpose is to show that the choice of electoral systems in the two periods was governed by the same logic, one in which strategic actors sought to maximize their legislative presence under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Given this fact, the safest choice typically involved some form of proportional representation. Further, political actors have had mixed success at best in choosing electoral rules that subsequently optimized their electoral performance. In many cases, particular parties appear (at least in retrospect) to have been strategically foolish, in the sense that the rules they approved ended up eliminating them from politics.

2. The issues Like institutional change more generally, electoral reform is a rare event, since those in a position to initiate reform themselves assumed power under existing institutional arrangements (see, e.g. Cox, 1997, p. 18). For political actors to engage in reform of the procedures by which they won in the rst place, they must come to believe either that existing arrangements will adversely aect their future prospects for winning, or that they face considerable uncertainty, or both. This, in turn, is most likely when winners face a profound shift in the composition of the electorate and/or the political arena more broadly arising from major political transformations. Just as events in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 20th Century constituted a major transformation, so too did the events surrounding the First World War in much of Western Europe. Such transformations are by denition extraordinary, and uncertainty becomes endemic for all actors.

3. Studies of the recent period Studies of the adoption of electoral rules in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe emphasize the ways that uncertainty undermines the eectiveness of the strategic behavior of all parties (see, e.g. Remington and Smith, 1996; Moraski and

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Loewenberg, 1999; Moser, 2001; Kaminski, 2002; Shvetsova, 2003). All actors, whether favoring the status quo or not, support electoral rules that they believe will optimize their legislative presence (see, e.g. Benoit, 2004). However, miscalculations are frequent, if not the norm, given informational shortcomings. Typically, in the recently formed democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, new electoral rules were rst negotiated in round table settings that included political parties present during the time of transition (Geddes, 1996; Elster et al., 1998). Newly elected legislatures often further amended, or changed outright, these initial choices. In analyzing the strategic interests and preferences of parties at either the round table negotiations or in legislative decision-making, scholars have stressed the discrepancies between anticipated and realized consequences of particular rules. Among other things, the post-communist transitions involved substantial volatility in partisan electoral support as well as in the number and ideological characteristics of political parties. Further, opinion polls revealed dramatic and frequent shifts in public support for political parties, and key political actors had limited historical electoral experience on which to base their calculations. All these factors increased the odds of strategic mistakes, and the evidence systematically shows that . postcommunist institution-makers adopted the rules that they themselves would have wanted to change almost immediately (Shvetsova, 2003, p. 201). Analyses of the choice of electoral rules in post-communist countries underscore the ways in which the quality of strategic decisions hinges on the information available to the key actors at the time (Shvetsova, 2003, pp. 193194). In Kaminskis words, There are two reasons that may explain a disastrous outcome for a rational player or a stunning success for a fool. First, the model used by a player may be inadequate for the empirical decision problem.. Second, when uncertainty is involved, a surprising move of Nature may turn a smart decision into a bad outcome or a stupid decision into a glorious victory (2002, p. 334). Consider the eect of uncertainty over three essential kinds of information needed to predict the potential eect of electoral rules on electoral outcomes. These are: (1) the number of parties that will compete in future elections; (2) the preferences of voters over these parties; and (3) the eect of the electoral rules themselves, especially institutional details such as the district magnitude or electoral threshold. Observe the interdependencies among these three types of information. For example, unless actors know the number of parties that will compete in future elections, they cannot gauge voter preferences. Similarly, absent information about voter preferences, they cannot calculate the eect that the electoral rules will have on electoral results, even if they are knowledgeable about the eect of a particular set of rules on election outcomes. Thus, uncertainty over any of these three particular types of information leads to more generalized uncertainty over the relationship between electoral rules and electoral outcomes. The interdependencies between these three types of information mean that actors face considerable uncertainty even if they are quite well-informed on two of the three counts (as is more likely in contemporary well-established democracies). For example, a change in electoral rules may lead to the entry of new parties or the demise of old ones. That is, the choice of rules inuences the number of parties, which in turn changes voter preferences and electoral results. In addition, while polling results may

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be accurate on a certain day given a certain set of parties, if the set of parties changes, so too do voter preferences. Finally, beyond a general understanding of the dierent eects of proportional representation (PR) versus single-member district plurality (SMDP), even experts understanding of the eect of complex electoral rules on electoral outcomes is quite limited, and the politicians designing post-communist electoral systems were simply not aware of the important eects of features such as the electoral threshold and district magnitude (Remington and Smith, 1996, pp. 1259 1261; Shvetsova, 2003, pp. 203206). Thus, given the conditional impact of each separate source of uncertainty along with the general limitations of expert understanding of the impact of electoral rules, uncertainty always plagues the choice of electoral rules. It follows that there can be no simple linear relationship between electoral rule choice and electoral performance. This is not to imply that political actors do not behave strategically; in fact, they do so to the best of their ability. As has often been observed (e.g. Geddes, 1996; Benoit, 2004), political parties in the late 20th Century, whether status quo communists or new opposition parties, supported electoral rules that they believed were best for them. Unfortunately, uncertainty made it impossible for any political actor to predict how particular electoral designs would aect party support. Remington and Smith tell us that the political actors responsible for writing Russias electoral law were themselves well-aware of this uncertainty. As best we can determine, then, calculating politicians struggled with what they realized was inadequate information for making the choices they faced (1996, p. 1261). It is not hard to nd examples from the recent experience in Eastern Europe of the three types of uncertainty reviewed above: (1) uncertainty over the number of political parties; (2) uncertainty over the preferences of voters; and (3) uncertainty over the impact of electoral rules. 3.1. Uncertainty over the number of political parties In every new post-communist democracy, political actors were unable to predict how many parties would compete in the rst elections. In Poland, one of the most severe cases of such uncertainty, parties other than the former communist party did not exist prior to the rst election, and the number and even names of many of the tens of political parties that competed in the rst election were not known until the October 1991 election itself. In Russia, where the number of parties that competed in the party list contest was only thirteen, the nal determination of those parties that would, in fact, compete was not made until November, 1993, just 1 month before the election itself (White et al., 1997). In Hungary, where nine political parties existed prior to the rst competitive election, there was a degree of predictability lacking in Poland and Russia; nevertheless, several additional parties joined these in competing for seats in the 1990 election. 3.2. Uncertainty over the preferences of voters Party leaders had little reliable information about the preferences of voters. Although public opinion polls were taken in some countries, the results of these polls

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were notoriously inaccurate. Because the eld of parties competing was in constant ux, polls could not be accurate. But, the most serious source of inaccuracy was the volatility of voters opinions. In one of the best surveys of voter opinion in postcommunist elections, Colton (2000) records extraordinary shifts in voter preferences over the course of several weeks leading up to the 1995 parliamentary and 1996 presidential elections in Russia. The acute shifts in voters choices between former communist parties and new right-reformist parties from election to election in many of the post-communist countries attests to the continuing lack of voter identication with particular parties or even ideologies. 3.3. Uncertainty over the impact of electoral rules In dramatic support of the assertion that under conditions of uncertainty, political actors have diculty predicting the outcomes of dierent institutional arrangements (Przeworski, 1991, p. 85), there were political parties in all postcommunist countries that supported electoral rules that eliminated them from politics (Shvetsova, 2003).

4. Electoral choice and uncertainty Given a high level of uncertainty, it is rational for parties to prefer an electoral system that best ensures their future survival. Scholars have suggested that proportional representation is a safer choice for a party that is not certain what share of the vote it will receive, especially if it is unsure whether it can win a plurality of the vote (Przeworski, 1991; Lijphart, 1992; Geddes, 1996). Empirically, we know that proportional electoral systems encourage more parties than do single member district plurality systems (Duverger, 1954; Lijphart, 1994; Cox, 1997). Shvetsova models formally the eect of uncertainty on electoral rule choice (2003, pp. 194199). In her model, three states of the world are possible: (1) one in which no third party can succeed; (2) one in which only one new party can succeed; and (3) one in which several new competitors can succeed. Depending on the actors assessments of the probability of each of these states of the world occurring, the rational choice of electoral system engineers will be either PR, SMDP, or a compromise system that includes both PR and SMDP, a so-called mixed system. Her model predicts that in the majority of scenarios, actors will choose either PR or a mixed electoral system involving both proportional and single member district components (Shvetsova, 2003, Fig. 5). This may help explain why only a small minority of the worlds democracies employ single member district electoral systems. As Cox (1997, Table 3.2) shows, of the 52 democracies with populations of more than one million in 1990, just onefourth elect their national representatives exclusively in single member districts. About three-fourths of the worlds democracies elect their national representatives from multi-member districts, using either some version of proportional representation, a mixed system in which lists are used to ensure a more proportional result, or

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an alternative multi-member district system. Among the new democracies that have emerged (or re-emerged) in the past 15 years, none has adopted a single member district electoral system unless it has done so as part of a mixed system. That the electoral system of choice for most of the worlds democracies involves some form of proportional representation provides compelling evidence of the impact of uncertainty on electoral choice. Given this, the almost universal choice of some form of proportional representation in those democracies in which electoral reform was seriously entertained in the years surrounding the First World War is unlikely to represent an informed response by established parties. It is instead more protably cast as the best choice of all parties operating under uncertainty. We turn now to the standard account of electoral choice in the rst half of the 20th Century.

5. Studies of the early period As we have already observed, in his inuential analysis of the choices of electoral rules in early 20th Century Western Europe, Rokkan also emphasized the strategic concerns generated by the expansion of the surage and appearance of new parties of the left. The rising working class wanted to lower the thresholds of representation in order to gain access to the legislatures, and the most threatened of the old-established parties demanded PR to protect their position against the new waves of mobilized voters created by universal surage (Rokkan, 1970, p. 157). According to Rokkan, as the proportion of the electorate that supported the established parties decreased, those parties became more likely to support a reformed electoral system that would ensure their future survival. Thus, proportional representation was adopted because it was in the interest of established political actors to do so. Building on Rokkans work, Boix (1999) has analyzed the choice of electoral systems in the set of countries that experienced at least a period of democratic government during the interwar years (19191939) after the general introduction of adult surage. In the principal part of his analysis, he characterizes the strategic calculations of party leaders as follows: As the electoral arena changes (due to the entry of new voters or a change in voters preferences), the ruling parties modify the electoral system, depending on the emergence of new parties and the coordinating capacities of the old parties. When the new parties are strong, the old parties shift from plurality/majority to proportional representation if no old party enjoys a dominant position, but they do not do this if there is a dominant old party. When new entrants are weak, a system of non-proportional representation is maintained, regardless of the structure of the old party system (Boix, 1999, p. 609). Change in electoral rules is cast as a strategic response by established elites to the changing political arena. According to this argument, established parties favored the status quo until events convinced them that existing electoral laws allowed a new challenger to displace them, at which point they moved preemptively to support

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a reformed electoral regime to minimize their political losses. In this view, established parties acted strategically coordinating their actions when necessary to maximize or preserve their legislative strength in light of signicant changes to the distribution of preferences and number of political parties. The argument is appealing in that it appears to identify the appropriate decisionmakers as well as to provide a consistent and rational explanation of variation in choice of electoral rules. When established party leaders judge their hold on majority support to be waning, they wisely select proportional representation. If they believe their hold on majority support is not threatened, they maintain a single member district system. But this account of electoral choice as a predictable function of elite behavior hinges on two tacit assumptions. First, and most notably, it presumes that those elites possessed sucient information to be able to gauge accurately future voter preferences and the number of political parties. The role of uncertainty in the strategic calculations of party leaders is completely discounted. Second, the explanation implicitly assumes that political elites at the time operated in a Duverger-style environment, where the choices were between a form of SMDP rule and some form of PR. However, the status quo in continental Europe before the First World War involved majority rather than plurality rules, typically with provisions for runo elections. With the benet of hindsight, the consequences of electoral reform in the early part of the 20th Century may seem to have been preordained. However, as we have already emphasized, the political events surrounding the First World War culminating in full adult surage constituted a major political transformation, and we should not minimize the uncertainty this transformation generated for the key political actors at the time. Consider the expansion of the surage. Between 1900 and 1925, the size of the electorate doubled or trebled in nine major European sovereign states (Bartolini, 2000, pp. 216217, 584588).1 As shown in Fig. 1, in all but one of these cases, the expansion was abrupt, and occurred around the time of the First World War. The transformation generated by this massive and sudden inux of new voters was clearly profound and involved uncharted political territory for all key actors, established or novices. This extraordinary shift in the size of the electorate, in turn, implies that the level of uncertainty for all key actors increased by several orders of magnitude. Consider further the ways in which political leaders and parties could gather information on the distribution of voter preferences in the obvious absence of any opinion polls, bearing in mind that the meaning of past electoral results had rapidly become moot. Since, as observed above, estimates of the likely number of parties competing in future elections and the likely eects of dierent rules hinge crucially on the distribution of voter preferences, it is clear that the major political players were operating with severely limited information. Further, electoral rules were
1 For three other cases, the big expansion came later: France (1945), Belgium (1949), and Switzerland (1971).

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100 (Electorate as % of Those 20 or More)

J.T. Andrews, R.W. Jackman / Electoral Studies 24 (2005) 6584

Germany Ireland Austria Sweden Norway Netherlands Denmark United Kingdom

75

Voting Population

Italy

50

Belgium Switzerland France

25

0 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925

Year
Fig. 1. Expansion of the surage, 19001925.

changed by established as well as non-established parties and even by voters. Thus, we would expect that in early 20th Century Europe, just as in late 20th Century Central and Eastern Europe, strategic calculations often became miscalculations, so that there are many parallels between patterns of electoral reform at the beginning and end of the Century. As we show below, a closer inspection of electoral choice in the early 20th Century suggests that there was far more variation in the conditions of electoral choice across cases and far more uncertainty over voter preferences than is generally recognized. Moreover, among the set of cases considered by Boix are several in which reform of electoral rules was not on the political agenda, e.g. United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Including these countries exaggerates the number of instances in which a single member district system was actively chosen by party elites. Once inappropriate cases are set aside (those outside Western Europe), there is only one instance (Britain) in which party leaders actually chose to retain SMDP rather than adopt PR. Elsewhere in Western Europe party elites chose some version of proportional representation. Given the high levels of uncertainty that elites faced then, as now, this is the outcome that we would have expected. The question then becomes not why some countries adopted PR while others chose to retain SMDP, but instead why Britain alone chose to retain SMDP.

6. Distant miscalculations: the role of uncertainty in early 20th Century Europe The United Kingdom is an especially important case in this respect. Despite ongoing proposals for electoral reform from the late 19th Century through the early

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1920s, this was the only country where electoral reform failed. Further, and as noted above, the United Kingdom was unusual in the sense that the status quo involved a mostly single-member district plurality formula, so that the alternatives were cast in a Duverger-style environment. But the case is also noteworthy in the ways it underscores the kinds of strategic calculations made by all the key actors on the issue under uncertainty of such magnitude that it led to a major miscalculation for at least one party, and arguably for another. Since well before the last major reforms of the 19th Century, those of 18831885 enacted by William Gladstones government, many Liberals had been predisposed to some form of PR, although these sympathies were subject to considerable qualication (Bogdanor, 1981; Hart, 1992). These predispositions were doubtless reinforced by the results of the general elections from 1886 through 1900, where, despite receiving approximately 45% of the vote each time, the Liberals received less than 30% of the seats in all elections except for that of 1892, when they won 40.6% of the seats (Mackie and Rose, 1991, Table 24.3). Indeed, the gures for 1900 shown in the rst row of Table 1 typied the Liberal experience, with a seats/votes ratio of just 0.61. The gures for 1900 shown in the Table, with a seats/votes ratio of 1.19, also exemplify the Conservative experience of preceding years, and Conservatives continued to be strong (if not always unanimous) in their support for existing electoral arrangements. Perhaps in light of their seats/votes ratios from 1886 to 1900, but certainly following them, and in anticipation of an election later in the year (one that did not materialize), the Liberals in 1903 entered into a pact with Labour (secretly negotiated between Herbert Gladstone and Ramsay MacDonald). The agreement, in eect throughout the remainder of the decade, enabled Labour (until 1906 actually the Labour Representation Committee) to eld most of its candidates without any need to face Liberal opposition (Pelling, 1961). In other words, this was a pact that enabled the two parties to coordinate against Conservatives. Against this backdrop, the 1906 general election must indeed have been a pleasant event for the Liberals. Although their vote share hardly changed from 1900, they won by a landslide, picking up 215 additional seats (see Table 1). The Conservative vote share fell only slightly from 50.3 to 43.4% (while the Labour vote increased by a similar amount), but Conservatives lost a dramatic 246 seats. The pact thus worked especially well in its rst trial for the Liberals, and as Hart wryly observes, for a time after the general election of 1906 many Liberals were disposed to look more charitably on the existing electoral system than previously (1992, p. 163). Labour beneted as well. Indeed, in 1906 and the two general elections of 1910, both the Liberals and Labour enjoyed higher seats/votes ratios than did the Conservatives. Given the electoral system and Labours vote share, such Labour seats/votes ratios would clearly have been impossible absent the pact. In the 1906 election, the party elded a total of just 50 candidates: of the 29 winners, only ve had Liberal opponents, and in two of these cases the opposition was nominal. In the rst 1910 election, no successful Labour candidates faced Liberal opposition, while in the second election of that year, only two Labour candidates experienced such opposition (Pelling, 1961, pp. 1524). Even so, the benet conferred on Labour by

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Table 1 Seats/votes ratios and total seats (in parentheses) for Labour, Liberal, and Conservative parties in the UK, 19001935 Year 1900 1906 1910(1) 1910(2) 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935 Labour 0.23 0.90 0.89 0.98 0.38 0.78 1.01 0.74 1.26 0.26 0.66 (2) (29) (40) (42) (61) (142) (191) (151) (287) (47) (154) Liberala 0.61 1.35 0.94 0.92 0.86 0.65 0.87 0.40 0.41 0.80 0.51 (184) (399) (274) (272) (163) (115) (158) (44) (59) (32) (21) Conservativeb 1.19 0.54 0.87 0.87 1.37 1.45 1.11 1.42 1.11 1.39 1.31 (402) (156) (272) (271) (382) (344) (258) (415) (260) (474) (388)

Source: Mackie and Rose (1991, Tables 24.3 and 24.4). Note that, given the introduction in 1918 of adult male surage and restricted female surage (women over 30 could vote if they or their husbands were householders), the size of the electorate almost trebled from 7.7 million in 1910 to 21.4 million in 1918. a Includes Lloyd George Liberals in 1918 and 1922. b Includes Liberal Unionists from 1900 to 1910.

the pact was short-term, since the agreement applied to only a limited number of (typically two-member) seats. It thus capped the partys longer term aspirations for growth. Finally, observe that the Conservatives did poorly in the three elections covered by the pact between the Liberals and Labour. The coordination between the latter two parties held the Conservative seats/votes ratio below 1.0 in each case. Moreover, Table 1 shows that these three elections were the only instances between 1900 and 1935 in which this ratio was less than 1.0. During the war years, the question of electoral reform was much discussed. It formed the basis of a Speakers conference that recommended PR, and culminated in the Representation of the People Act of 1918 that enacted adult male and limited female surage, among other things. The 1918 Act did not, however, include PR (Ogg, 1918). It is useful to consider party support for PR in the debates that preceded the Act. The rst three panels of Table 2 show the parliamentary votes by party on proposals that came before the Commons prior to the Act (MPs were given free votes on these questions). None of the votes shown in Table 2 reveals majority support for PR. Of more interest, perhaps, the three votes reported for 1917 and early 1918 show that Conservative support for the status quo remained broad-based and strong. At the other end of the spectrum, the small Irish Nationalist minority unanimously supported PR. But support for PR was mixed among Liberal and Labour MPs. Among Liberal members, this diversity of views was longstanding: although there were many reformists in the party, the leadership had traditionally been less certain about PR, a view undoubtedly reinforced by the outcome of the 1906 election. While there was much interest in PR among the Labour rank and le, PR was rejected at the Party conference of 1914, at the prodding of the Partys chair, Ramsay

J.T. Andrews, R.W. Jackman / Electoral Studies 24 (2005) 6584 Table 2 Parliamentary votes in the UK by party on proportional representation Date: Vote:
a

75

June 1917 Yes 38 77 13 14 1 143 No 85 53 11 0 1 150

Nov 1917 Yes 29 57 15 25 2 128 No 125 70 8 0 1 204

May 1918 Yes 43 61 7 0 1 112 No 104 55 9 0 1 169

May 1924 Yes 8 107 28 0 3 146 No 147 1 90 0 2 240

Party: Conservative Liberal Labour Irish Nat. Other Total

Source: Bogdanor (1981, pp. 130131, 134). a A vote of Yes indicates support for proportional representation.

MacDonald. In his view, PR might help Labour in the short run, but in the longer term with full adult surage the plurality system would work to Labours advantage, and enable it to squeeze out competitors for the left-wing vote (Bogdanor, 1981, p. 125). This strategic position was also endorsed by the Fabians (Hart, 1992, pp. 166167).2 The 1918 election was the rst to be held with nearly full adult surage. As is clear from Table 1, the Conservatives won a clear majority of seats on the basis of just under 40% of the popular vote, an outcome that simply reinforced their antipathy toward PR. With the Liberal-Labour electoral pact of 1903 no longer in force, the Liberals garnered a seats/votes ratio of 0.86 to win 163 seats on the basis of about 27% of the vote. Thus, their seat losses compared to 1910 were roughly commensurate with their vote losses, and 1918 saw no change in the Liberal stance on PR. Labour did poorly: despite a more than trebled vote share, the party won only 61 seats. Opinion on PR within both the Liberal and Labour parties was to shift dramatically over the 6 years after 1918. While the Conservatives retained a clear majority in 1922, the election itself was a watershed: for the rst time, Labour won more seats than the Liberals and thus became the principal opposition party (see Table 1). In the same election, PR was included as part of the independent Liberal party manifesto, its rst appearance in a party program (Hart, 1992). Labour increased its seat share further in 1923, with a seats/votes ratio greater than 1.0 for the rst time, and Ramsay MacDonald formed a minority government with Liberal support. Six years after 1918, a private members bill proposing PR came before the Commons. As the last section of Table 2 shows, Liberals were now (with the benet of hindsight) almost unanimously in favor of PR. Osetting this shift, however, was
2 An additional factor complicating the picture was that many members of both the Liberal and Labour parties were more interested in the alternative vote than in PR, on the grounds that it would increase their odds of success against Conservatives in constituencies with three-way races. On the alternative vote, see, e.g. Lijphart (1994, p. 19).

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Labour support for the existing plurality system by an overwhelming three-to-one majority. By 1924 PR had thus become a partisan issue, opposed by both the Conservatives and Labour, and favored only by the Liberals. There is little in this chronology that ts well with the arguments advanced by either Rokkan or Boix. Labour became a powerful force during the 1920s, winning a plurality of seats by 1929, just 11 years after the introduction of adult surage. Despite this, there was no movement toward PR of the form anticipated by Rokkan. At the same time, coordination among party elites did not involve an attempt by the established parties to collude against the new party, but instead centered on short term calculations that involved shifting coalitions. In the rst decade of the 20th Century, Liberals and Labour coordinated with their electoral agreement; during the First World War and shortly thereafter, Liberals and Conservatives coordinated in the coalition government; after 1922, the Conservatives and Labour coordinated against the Liberals on the question of the plurality system. Thus, each party engaged in strategic behavior to maximize its own short-term interests. When two parties calculated on the information at hand that coordination might help advance their immediate discrete interests, they coordinated; otherwise, they did not. From the gures in Table 1, it is clear that one of the three key parties (the Conservatives) had made a better calculation by the mid-1920s than the others, given that the Conservative seats/votes ratio easily exceeded 1.0 throughout the 1930s. While the results of the 1929 election might have suggested that Labour had collectively made a good choice in 1924, their experiences in the 1930s would suggest otherwise (unless one believes they were employing an even longer time horizon). That the Liberals made a mistake by not pushing for PR earlier may have become clear after the fact, but their strategy made sense given the information they had at the time. The United Kingdom is a crucial case since no form of PR was adopted, in contrast to changes that occurred in the rest of early 20th Century Western Europe. Given the role of uncertainty in recent choices of electoral rules in Eastern Europe, we would expect to nd a similarly varied and complex pattern in the other early cases where some form of PR was chosen. In some instances, electoral reform did not originate with established party elites. For example, Swiss electoral rules changed from a single member district two-ballot system to a proportional system as a result of a national referendum. As shown in Table 3, the Radical Democrats had enjoyed comfortable parliamentary majorities of around 60% of the seats (based on seats/votes ratios of about 1.2) since the turn of the century, which they used to defeat a legislative proposal to amend the constitution in the summer of 1918. The proposal was then put to a national referendum and became part of federal law in February 1919, prior to the national election held later that year (Gosnell, 1930; Carstairs, 1980, p. 141). Thus, the referendum was used in this case to circumvent a parliamentary majority. The German case illustrates another pattern. With the collapse of Imperial Germany after the First World War and the ensuing domestic crisis, the Kaiser appointed the Social Democratic leader as chancellor just before he abdicated. In one of its rst actions, the new Social Democratic government adopted PR by executive at (recall that the German legislature did not become sovereign until after

J.T. Andrews, R.W. Jackman / Electoral Studies 24 (2005) 6584 Table 3 Seats/votes Ratios in Federal Elections to the Swiss Nationalrat, 19021917 Year 1902 Party Radical Democrats Catholic Conservatives Social Democrats 1.19 (59.9) 0.94 (21.6) 0.33 (4.2) 1905 1.27 (62.3) 0.96 (21.6) 0.08 (1.2) 1908 1.24 (62.9) 1.02 (21.0) 0.24 (4.2) 1911 1.22 (60.3) 1.05 (20.1) 0.40 (7.9) 1914 1.06 (59.3) 0.93 (19.6) 1.00 (10.1) 1917 1.34 (54.5) 1.34 (22.2) 0.34 (10.6)

77

Mean ratio 1.22 1.04 0.40

Main table entries are seats/votes ratios, and entries in parentheses indicate the share of legislative seats won. Includes parties that received at least 10% of the votes. Source: Calculated from gures in Mackie and Rose (1991).

1945). Observe that PR was introduced by a government of the left, in contrast to the British experience and notwithstanding the Rokkan-Boix argument (on these patterns, see Carstairs, 1980, pp. 162165; Rustow, 1950). While some have claimed that PR represented a policy commitment on the part of the Social Democrats, it is also the case that they had fared poorly under the previous electoral regime. As shown in Table 4, the average seats/votes ratio for the Social Democrats from 1893 through 1912 was about 0.6, while the corresponding gures for the Conservative and Center Parties were about 1.4. We could adduce other cases, but the point should be clear. There is little evidence from early 20th Century Western Europe that PR was adopted by established political interests in an eort to minimize their losses given the expansion of the surage. In the one case where electoral reform failed (the United Kingdom), it was blocked by an established party along with a newcomer. With the benet of considerable hindsight the Liberal strategy seems foolish while the eectiveness of the Labour strategy was hardly self-evident by the 1930s (at the time, of course,
Table 4 Seats/votes Ratios in Elections to the German Reichstag, 18931912 Year 1893 Party Conservatives Center Party National Liberals Social Democrats 1.34 (18.1) 1.27 (24.2) 0.88 (13.4) 0.48 (11.1) 1898 1.60 (14.1) 1.72 (25.7) 1.16 (11.6) 0.65 (14.1) 1903 1.36 (13.6) 1.27 (25.2) 0.92 (12.8) 0.64 (20.4) 1907 1.61 (15.1) 1.36 (26.4) 0.94 (13.6) 0.37 (10.8) 1912 1.17 (10.8) 1.40 (22.9) 0.83 (11.3) 0.80 (27.7) Mean ratio 1.42 1.40 0.95 0.59

Main table entries are seats/votes ratios, and entries in parentheses indicate the share of legislative seats won. Includes parties that received at least 10% of the votes. Source: Calculated from gures in Mackie and Rose (1991).

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uncertainty undermined the eectiveness of these strategic endeavors). In Switzerland, PR was introduced by referendum, in a move that bypassed the objections of the largest established party in the legislature. And in the singular circumstances of post-War Germany, a newcomer party (the Social Democrats) found themselves in a position where they could introduce PR by edict. 7. The puzzle of the Boix empirical results One issue remains. Boixs (1999) statistical estimates seem to challenge our emphasis on uncertainty since they indicate that electoral reform was generated by a predictable set of coalitions involving established political parties threatened by new parties of the left in the early 20th Century. In this section, we examine the robustness of his estimates in some detail to show that the challenge is more apparent than real. Following Lijphart (1994) and Taagepera and Shugart (1989), Boixs dependent variable is the eective electoral threshold, a measure that reects the proportionality of the electoral system (the lower the eective threshold, the more proportional the system). Party system characteristics are represented as a joint function of the proportion of votes received by parties of the left and the eective number of established non-socialist parties. The subsidiary claim that electoral reform is a function of geographic size (which Boix takes to reect linguistic and ethnic diversity) is evaluated using information about the geographical size of countries and an index of ethnic/linguistic fragmentation. Country values for these measures are listed in Boix (1999 Appendix A). The rst column of Table 5 reports the basic set of OLS estimates employed by Boix and corresponds to model (2) in his Table 5. Here, the eective threshold is regressed on left party strength, old party fragmentation, the product of these two party variables (Threat), and the geographical size of the country (expressed as log10 of the area in 000 km2) .3 These estimates appear to oer strong support for Boixs main argument. In particular, the coecient for Threat is signicant beyond the 0.05 level and has the correct negative sign, indicating that as the strength of left parties and the fragmentation of old parties jointly increase, the electoral system becomes more proportional.4 Additionally, the coecient on size is positive and highly signicant, suggesting that increasing size generates more disproportionality. The overall t of the model is respectable, with an adjusted R2 of 0.59. Given these estimates, particularly the statistical strength of the interactive term, Boix concludes that threat is the fundamental factor in determining the choice of an electoral threshold (1999, p. 620).
We report OLS estimates to maximize comparability with Boixs gures, along with Huber-White standard errors to correct for heteroskedasticity. These standard errors are smaller than their conventional OLS counterparts employed by Boix, and thus our use of them provides stronger apparent support for his model than he reported. 4 Boix appears concerned that against theoretical expectations, the coecients of socialism and the eective number of old parties are positive (1999, p. 620). However, these signs are actually consistent with his theoretical expectations, because the two separate party coecients cannot be evaluated individually in a multiplicative model where the eects of each of the party variables are conditional on each other (see, e.g. Friedrich, 1982).
3

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Table 5 Regressions of the average eective threshold in 19191939 on party and social characteristics (N=22) 1 Threat Left party strength Number of old parties Geographic size (Log10) Ethnic fragmentation* area dummy Constant R2 Adjusted R2 F-ratio 40.16* (10.03) 78.90* (31.48) 8.90* (3.63) 9.67* (1.60) 2 41.61* (10.53) 84.27* (34.41) 9.10* (3.62) 9.00* (1.97) 6.72 (13.13) 20.92 (12.66) 0.67 0.57 15.27 3 30.22 (18.94) 36.70 (65.59) 6.36 (6.19)

22.72 (13.08) 0.67 0.59 18.08

10.42 (20.14) 0.29 0.17 13.30

OLS estimates with Huber-White standard errors in parentheses. *P!0.05.

There is, however, little reason to take these estimates at face value. A striking feature of those gures is that the estimated coecient for geographic size has a much larger t-ratio (9.67/1.60=6.05) than the other variables. Observe that this variable is geographic size (national acreage), not population size or population density. The question is, what does geographic size reect? According to Boix, size is, above all, a proxy for the ways in which ethnic and linguistic fragmentation aects each country and the means elites devise to deal with it (1999, p. 620). Accordingly, he generates a new term that is the product of an index of ethnic/ linguistic fragmentation and a dummy variable that equals 1 for smaller countries, and zero otherwise. This new term thus species an interaction between ethnic diversity and population size. However, when Boix substitutes this new interaction term for geographic size, the t of the model is almost halved: the adjusted R2 in column 3 of his Table 1 is 0.33, as opposed to the adjusted R2 of 0.59 in column 2 of his Table 5 (or column 1 of our Table 5). In this sense, substituting information about ethnic and linguistic fragmentation for geographic size actually diminishes the performance of the model. Further, as shown in the estimates in the second column of our Table 5, when geographic size and the ethnolinguistic-size interaction are included in the same model, the estimate for the latter is much smaller than its standard error while the coecient for geographic size does not shift, and the model t is not improved. This means that geographic size cannot be taken as a proxy for ethnic-linguistic fragmentation.5 For better or for worse, and consistent with Blais and Massicotte (1997), size is clearly the key factor at work, and the size/ fragmentation interaction does not belong in the analysis. Clearly, there is no

5 Boix (1999, p. 620) uses the same test to conclude that geographic size is not a proxy for trade openness.

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support in these data for the treatment of country size as a proxy for ethnic/linguistic fragmentation. We are, indeed, at a loss to identify the mechanism by which geographic size might plausibly be said to impinge on the electoral threshold. Further analyses, not displayed here, indicate that it is not serving as a proxy for population size or for population density. Acreage alone appears to be the thing, a regularity that is dicult to explain. At the same time, sheer geographic size does play a key role in Boixs empirical analysis. Observe the estimates in column 3 of Table 5, which correspond to those in the rst and third columns, except that they do not include either of the country size terms. Here we see that when considered by themselves, neither of the two individual party terms nor their product has a systematic eect on the size of the eective threshold. Indeed, compared with the gures in column 1, the t of the model in column 3 plummets (the adjusted R2 drops from 0.59 to 0.17), and the estimated Threat coecient in column 3 is appreciably smaller than that shown in column 1. The inclusion of country size is thus crucial to Boixs analysis in the sense that it drives his statistical estimates. With this variable excluded, there is little basis for his principal claim, noted above, that threat is the fundamental factor in determining the choice of an electoral threshold.6 More broadly, this means that there is no basis for the claim that electoral reform was generated by a predictable set of coalitions involving established political parties threatened by emerging parties of the left in the early 20th Century.

8. A simpler formulation Consider now a much simpler model of electoral rule choice, one that takes into account the impact of extreme uncertainty. Our reanalysis of Boixs statistical results reinforces our view that long-term coordination among established parties is unlikely in an uncertain environment. At the same time, to say that the strategic capabilities of all parties involved, whether established or emerging, is limited by a general lack of information is not to preclude strategic calculations. Accordingly, we posit a model based on the simplest kind of strategic, seatmaximizing behavior possible: all parties base their support or opposition to a change in electoral rules in light of their performance (as manifested in their seats/ votes ratios) under current rules in the previous election. Observe that this involves short-term calculations, since we expect longer-term calculations to be shrouded in even more uncertainty. We hypothesize that as the ratio of seats to votes for the largest party increases, that partys support for an electoral system with a high electoral threshold (such as an SMDP system) also increases, whether or not that party is old and established or new. By the same token, as the seats/votes ratio of the largest party decreases, that partys support for an electoral system with a low electoral threshold (such as some form of PR) should increase, regardless of its
6

We emphasize that it is geographic size, not the size/fragmentation interaction, that is crucial here.

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Table 6 Regressions of the average eective threshold in 19191939 on seats/votes ratio of largest party (N=20) 1 Seats/votes ratio Of largest party Threat Left party strength Number of old parties Geographic size (Log10) Constant R2 Adjusted R2 F-ratio 4.20* (0.80) 38.53* (12.94) 0.61 0.57 13.48 31.93* (11.21) 2 27.45* (11.20) 3 27.66* (13.78) 15.71 (31.17) 4.89 (93.63) 4.59 (9.84)

20.91 (12.04) 0.21 0.16 4.73

17.35 (29.55) 0.38 0.22 3.34

OLS estimates with Huber-White standard errors in parentheses. *P!0.05.

ideological composition. Implicit in this formulation is the proposition that the largest party in parliament has the most inuence on any decision to change the electoral rules. Observe that this formulation is consistent with Benoit (2004) and also runs through our earlier analyses of particular cases. Barring the three elections in which they faced strategically coordinated behavior from their opponents, the British Conservatives enjoyed seats/votes ratios in excess of 1.0 from 1900 through 1935, and they strongly opposed any rule change. The Swiss Radical Democrats enjoyed similarly high ratios from 1902 through 1917, so that reform came over their objections by means of a national referendum. And the German Social Democrats introduced PR on achieving oce after the Kaisers abdication, having experienced seats/votes ratios of less than 1.0 in each of the ve previous elections in which they had participated. In Table 6, we display estimates for a model of electoral rule choice given the seats/votes ratio of the largest party in parliament, whether that party was an established conservative party or a new socialist or social democratic party (as was the case in six of the twenty countries included in the analysis). Focusing solely on the choice of electoral rules in the pre-WWII period, we use twenty of Boixs original twenty-two cases. We exclude Spain and Greece on the following grounds. Spains inter-war democratic period lasted only 5 years and ended in a military dictatorship. Greeces inter-war democratic period lasted a little longer (10 years) but also ended in a military dictatorship. Moreover, Greek electoral rules were highly uid during this period.7 Thus, for this case, analyses are highly sensitive to the choice of election from which to start ones analysis.
The extreme volatility of Greek electoral law in the inter-war years is shown in Boix (1999, Fig. 7). For discussion of the shifts involved, see Vegleris, 1981, pp. 219234) and Mavrogordatos (1983, esp. chapter 7 and Appendix 1).
7

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The estimates shown in Table 6 are consistent with our hypothesis. Specically, as shown in the rst column, the seats/votes ratio of the largest party in parliament has a signicant and positive eect on the choice of electoral system (as measured by the electoral threshold, following Boix). Further, as one can see by comparing the rst two columns in the table, this eect of the seats/votes ratio of the largest party does not hinge on the inclusion of a variable measuring the geographic size of our country cases. In this sense, the eect is more robust than those reported by Boix. Finally, the third column of Table 6 shows that our simple explanation is robust to the inclusion of the three main explanatory variables from Boixs argument, threat, size of the largest left party, and eective number of old parties. In other words, in the presence of our key explanatory variable and absent the irrelevant inuence of geographic size, Boixs key variables do not systematically inuence the electoral threshold. Given the level of uncertainty involved in changing electoral rules, we would expect the seats/votes ratio of the largest party to have a systematic eect on the electoral threshold. That parties support for a new set of electoral rules hinges systematically on how they have recently performed under the existing procedure seems about the best that they can do, and it is a result in keeping with recent analyses of rule choice in emerging democracies. Thus, an explanation that demands much less on the part of party elites performs better than an explanation that assumes the availability of sucient information to support complex strategic coordination. These results imply that the sole occasion one would expect a country to retain a single member district system is when the largest party benets substantially from the current electoral rules, so much so that it can control or dominate the choice of electoral rules. This was the case only in Britain (see the last column of Table 1 above); hence, it alone among West European democracies chose to retain SMDP. Thus, our results are broadly compatible with the empirical preponderance of PR as reported by Cox (1997); further, our estimates are consistent with the predictions of Shvetsovas model (2003).

9. Conclusion The proposition that reform of electoral systems in early 20th Century Western Europe was driven by a distinctive set of forces has a long pedigree originating with Rokkans (1970) classic treatment and manifested most recently in Boixs (1999) empirical analysis. We agree with these accounts that party leaders in the period attempted to behave strategically. What is not clear, however, is how they could do so eectively given the extreme uncertainty they confronted. Further, we have shown that the statistical evidence for the Rokkan-Boix argument is not robust. We have also shown that a model employing a much simpler decision rule is more consistent with the available data. In our view, when uncertainty is taken seriously, the early period of electoral reform closely parallels the more recent experience in Central and Eastern Europe, obviating the need to treat the rst period as distinctive.

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In his Comment on Institutional Change, Shepsle (2001) casts institutional reform as a multi-dimensional game that involves many players, many possible outcomes, and many dierent participants. He concludes that, as a result, it comes down to information (pp. 324325). That is, the ability of key actors to change the rules to benet themselves is limited by the information they have on all relevant dimensions. As we have emphasized, periods of electoral reform typically occur as a component of larger political transformations in which uncertainty becomes endemic. Accordingly, designers of electoral systems have historically not had access to the information necessary for them eectively to choose electoral rules from which they would benet. During periods of major political transformation, political parties come and go, voter preferences change often and rapidly, and complex electoral rules along with their consequences are poorly understood. Thus, any eort to explain the choice of electoral rules as a predictable strategic response to electoral threat by a stable set of actors (established parties) must be viewed with skepticism. As we have shown in our discussion of the cases, electoral rules were changed by both established and new parties in both periods of electoral reform. Further, our systematic analyses of data from the early 20th century suggests that political elites engaged in only short-term strategic behavior; that is, their support for any electoral system depended on how well they had fared in the previous election. Even so, uncertainty made it dicult (or even impossible) for party elites in either period to realize the gains they anticipated from their strategic choices.

Acknowledgements We thank the referees for their very helpful comments and the UC Davis Academic Senate for its support.

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