Does Electoral System Reform Work? Electoral System Lessons from Reforms of the 1990s

Abstract

In the early 1990s, popular discontent with politics in Italy, New Zealand, and Japan led to the enactment of new electoral systems in all three countries. The results of the reforms have been mixed, as they have dramatically altered politics in some cases but in others have been a great disappointment to many observers. This essay examines the reforms and the conditions under which they successfully addressed the problems of their party systems. The cases highlight the limitations of using electoral systems to explain political outcomes that are not direct effects of electoral rules.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.