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West European Politics

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The Barriers to Electoral

System Reform: A Synthesis of
Alternative Approaches
Gideon Rahat & Reuven Y. Hazan
Published online: 11 Apr 2011.

To cite this article: Gideon Rahat & Reuven Y. Hazan (2011) The Barriers to Electoral
System Reform: A Synthesis of Alternative Approaches, West European Politics, 34:3,
478-494, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2011.555976
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West European Politics,

Vol. 34, No. 3, 478494, May 2011

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The Barriers to Electoral System

Reform: A Synthesis of Alternative
Approaches
GIDEON RAHAT and REUVEN Y. HAZAN

The article suggests that a research framework that focuses on the barriers to reform
would promote the analysis of both the successes and the failures of electoral initiatives.
This framework asks what keeps the electoral system stable over time. The article
investigates what stops reform, rather than why there is a desire to reform. The barriers
framework synthesises two of the main approaches used in explaining electoral reform,
institutionalism and rational choice; it is useful because it can explain both the success
and the failure of reform initiatives, and even those cases of non-reform. Seven barriers
are listed that reformers must overcome when trying to promote electoral reform; the
article then examines the ways reformers can pass each barrier; assesses the relative
strength of the various barriers; and suggests ways to advance the study of electoral
reform by using the proposed barriers approach.

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than y to others that we know not of?
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
Anyone who still needs to be convinced that no single approach succeeds in
explaining electoral system reform should read three recently published
books by Blais (2008a), Rahat (2008) and Renwick (2010). Those who are
more easily convinced should suce with the eight-page analysis by Katz
(2007). This article adopts a similar conviction by synthesising several
approaches and proposing a more comprehensive framework for analysis.
This framework is a menu of barriers that those who aspire to reform the
electoral system will need to overcome in order to achieve their goal.
Electoral system reform is an extremely complicated issue, and our
framework aims at pushing the analysis of electoral reform further by

Correspondence Address: msgrah@mscc.huji.ac.il

ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2011.555976

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The Barriers to Electoral System Reform

479

combining two of the most prominent approaches thereby helping to clear

some of the fog.
We suggest an approach that focuses on the barriers to reform. This
approach asks what keeps the electoral system stable over time. We are
interested in what stops reform, not why there is a desire to reform. After all,
it is likely that at any given moment there is someone who is interested in
electoral reform, because, as Sartori (1968: 273) wrote, the electoral system
can be viewed as the most specic manipulative instrument of politics. The
problem is then to promote reform and to turn it from an idea into a reality.
In order to reform an electoral system, reformers need to recruit the support
of a majority, and many times of distinct majorities. We ask what stands
between them and the recruitment of majority support for electoral reform.
The barriers approach synthesises two of the main approaches used in
explaining electoral system reform, institutionalism and strategic calculations (what would later become the focus of the rational choice approach,
but some of the classic work either predates it or cannot be intellectually
classied within it). It is useful because it can explain both the success and
the failure of reform initiatives and even those cases of non-reform, that is,
where there are no signicant reform initiatives. The barriers approach lists
seven possible hurdles that reformers face when trying to promote electoral
system reform. Each barrier is presented separately, and empirical evidence
is provided to examine its signicance. We then examine the ways reformers
can pass each barrier, based on an array of tactics and strategies that
challenge the status quo. We conclude by assessing the relative strength of
the various barriers, and suggest ways to further the use of the proposed
barriers approach.
The Barriers Approach
Reformers face a series of barriers in their attempts to promote electoral
change. In this section we classify the dierent foci and deduce a list of seven
barriers (Table 1). Each barrier is described and then assessed by looking at
cases that indicate both its signicance and its limitations.1

T ABL E 1
B A R R I E R S TO EL EC T O R A L S Y S T E M R E F O R M I N D E M O C R A C IE S

Focus
Legal
Cultural
Sociological
Systemic
Seat maximising
Veto players
Game theory
Source: Elaborated from Rahat (2008).

Barrier
Procedural superiority of the status quo
Political tradition
Social structure
System-level rationale
Vested interests
Coalition politics
Disagreement over content

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Procedural Superiority of the Status Quo

Legal, or old, institutionalism focuses our attention on the procedural path
that reform faces before it is adopted. Since we are dealing with electoral
reforms within democracies, the rule of law is respected by denition. In this
context, the institutional status quo is the default. The reformers, in
contrast, face several procedural obstacles in their attempts to change the
institutional setting, and if they do not successfully overcome each and
every one of them they will fail. In other words, the institutional status
quo has inherent primacy over reform, and the necessary legislation or
amendment procedures supply the guardians of the status quo with
numerous opportunities to block reform.
Even in those cases where electoral system reform can be legislated as a
regular law and passed by a plurality, reform is not about a single, successful
attempt to recruit a plurality. Rather, reform is about maintaining and
rebuilding pluralities/majorities at dierent times (in several parliamentary
readings) and within dierent forums (the plenum, the relevant committee(s), etc.) whose composition is not necessarily similar. Moreover, the
guardians of the status quo can block reform by recruiting plurality/
majority support for the status quo at just a single point in time, by taking
advantage of opportunities to delay the progress of reform until (public)
pressure decreases, by proposing an alternative bill that divides the reform
camp, or even by introducing a simple amendment that splits the supporting
plurality/majority.
In many countries, however, electoral system reform requires more than
regular legislation, such as an amendment to the constitution or an
amendment to special laws. These may involve recruiting an absolute
majority or more, possibly even securing the consent of concurrent
majorities both in and out of parliament. In such cases, reform becomes
an even more daunting task.
It is also possible for the electorate, through a referendum, to block
reform, as was the case in Ireland in both 1959 and 1968. A party with a
majority in parliament, Fianna Fail, passed a law that replaced proportional
representation with a plurality system; but because proportionality was
stated in the constitution, they had to face a referendum and there the
majority rejected the reform (Gallagher 1996). In other cases (Italy 1953,
2005; France 1951, 1986, 1988), where reform required only the support of
a majority in parliament, the reform was adopted.
The size of the majority needed in a referendum can also be crucial.
In British Columbia, a reform that was recommended by a citizens
assembly won the support of 57 per cent in a referendum, yet was
rejected because it had been decided that 60 per cent would be needed
(LeDuc 2011). In Italy, the abolition of the proportional element in the
mixed-member majoritarian system won the support of 91.5 per cent in
one referendum (1999) and 82 per cent in the next (2000), but because

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481

turnout was lower than the necessary 50 per cent 49.6 per cent in 1999
and 32.4 per cent in 2000 the initiative was rejected (Baldini 2011).
New Zealand, on the other hand, adopted reform with a majority of
only 53 per cent.
There is a signicant correlation between the level of diculty set by the
constitutional amendment formula and the frequency of the adoption of
constitutional amendments (Lutz 1994). Yet procedures cannot fully explain
all of the variance, and other factors should be considered to explain
dierences in constitutional stability (Duchacek 1973). But even if
procedures do not tell the whole story, they should be examined because
they determine the path, or possible paths (Renwick 2011), for reform; the
opportunities set for reformers; and the magnitude and kinds of majorities
that must be recruited.
Political Tradition
According to this perspective, the institutional setting especially that of
stable, established democracies is linked to a countrys culture and to its
political tradition. It is culture and political tradition that explain the
tendency of the Anglo-American democracies toward majoritarianism, and
the tendency of Continental democracies toward consensualism including
their proportional electoral systems (Lijphart 1994, 1998). According to this
perspective, we should expect reform or even a serious consideration of it
to come about as the result of fundamental political and social change.
Under other circumstances it would seem dicult to mobilise majorities
behind support for the reform of a system that is seen as linked to political
tradition.
Indeed, the largest wave of reform and the serious deliberations
surrounding it even in some countries that maintained their electoral
systems occurred at the time that countries broke with the past and
adopted universal surage (Carstairs 1980). Proportionality replaced
majoritarian systems within a wider transformation, and was seen as a part
of the democratisation process a move that ensured the principle of one
person, one vote (Blais et al. 2004).
Since the Second World War, there have been only a few major
electoral reforms in the established democracies, and all of them have
experienced related cultural changes. Frances electoral reforms, for
example, took place in a country where two political traditions (although
in changing forms) continue to struggle. The fact that the democracies of
Italy, Japan and Israel are still relatively young might make them more
culturally susceptible to reform. New Zealand, one of the most veteran
democracies in the world (maybe the oldest, if we use universal surage
to signify the starting point), also reformed its system but only after
its cultural foundations began to change (Jackson 1994; McLeay et al.
1996).

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Social Structure
This perspective refers to the relationship between the institutional setting
and the structure of society. The stability of an established democracy is
thought to be the result of the adoption of an institutional setting that is
appropriate for the structure of its society. In a divided and heterogeneous
society, the expectation is that power will be shared through the adoption of
a consensual structure, with its central institutional feature of a proportional
electoral system. This arrangement allows various social groups to live
within a common democratic framework. By contrast, a homogenous
society can avoid power-sharing institutions and adopt a majoritarian
structure, with plurality/majority electoral systems as a main feature
(Lijphart 1984). According to this perspective, we expect a country to
preserve its electoral system as long as it ts the structure of its society.
In line with Lijpharts theory, Jackson (1994) claimed that the evolutionary
transformation of New Zealands society from homogeneity into a
multicultural society explains the pressure to reform the majoritarian
model, while Medding (1999) and Hazan (1999) pointed out that a change in
Israels power distribution among political and social forces preceded its
electoral reform.
Reform can thus be interpreted as an attempt either to adapt to societal
changes (New Zealand) or to counter their inuence (Israel), but the two are
nonetheless connected. Indeed, pressures for reform increased in both Italy
and Japan when the old justications for preserving a malfunctioning and
corrupt system were removed. The decline of the signicance of communism
(and anti-communism) alongside religion in Italy especially after the
collapse of the Soviet Union led to the re-examination of the Italian
institutional order. The end of the economic miracle in Japan also allowed a
reassessment of its institutional setting.
System-level Rationale
According to this perspective, a country will preserve its electoral system as
long as the system produces certain expected outputs. Colomer (2005)
claimed that electoral system stability or change is a result of the number of
parties: in democracies with a low eective number of parties among voters,
a majoritarian system will be adopted and preserved; in democracies with a
higher eective number of parties, proportionality will be adopted and
preserved. Blais et al. (2004) stated that the countries with multiparty
systems and coalition governments as expected from proportional
representation were those that actually adopted proportionality at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
Shugart proposed two somewhat dierent scenarios that led to systemic
pressures for electoral reform, and from these it is possible to deduce rules
for the stability of an electoral system. In the rst scenario, we expect to see

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stability in countries that have an electorally ecient system (Shugart

2001). An ecient system is dened as one that succeeds in translating the
will of the majority of the voters into policies. The ecient systems are those
that balance the positive properties of both proportionality (representation)
and majoritarianism (clear choices), alongside those of both personal
(accountability) and party-centred (a comprehensive programme) electoral
systems. From a systemic perspective, it is rational to preserve such a
balanced existing order. Shugart claimed that non-ecient electoral systems
(he called these systems extreme) are more likely to face reform pressures.
In all four cases of electoral reform in the 1990s New Zealand, Israel, Italy,
Japan he identied an extreme feature that the reforms tried to correct.
Following a somewhat similar logic although dierent in scope, as it
refers to the whole regime structure rather than to the electoral system
alone Lijphart (1987, 1993) addressed the prospects for reform in
New Zealand and Israel. He thought that New Zealand, which he located
on the majoritarian pole, should adopt a more consensual regime.
New Zealand was the natural candidate for change, as the other singlemember plurality (SMP) democracies (US, Canada, Australia) had
consensus features that compensated, like federalism. Lijphart (1993) also
argued that Israel, which he located in the consensus pole, should reform
and adopt a somewhat less proportional system.
In a more recent study, Shugart (2008) raised a second scenario,
suggesting that reform is more likely (to be seriously discussed and even,
rarely, adopted) when the electoral system does not adhere to its own
promises. That is, an SMP electoral system is likely to create reform
pressures when it manufactures a majority for the party with the second
highest number of votes, rather than for the party with the most votes, or
when it fails to create a signicant opposition by harshly under-representing
the second largest party. The failure of such a system to meet expectations
creates windows of opportunity to promote and seriously consider reform.
Vested Interests
According to Benoit (2004), electoral systems should cease to change when
the party or parties with the power to change the system do not expect to
gain seats by doing so. Parties that are favoured by the electoral system are
thus likely to have strong incentives for supporting the existing system.
Plurality systems supply valuable rewards in terms of representation and
inuence to the successful players (Blais 2008b). The party that holds a
plurality of the votes enjoys a very large bonus, and most seat majorities are
manufactured. In other words, the majority that is able to reform the system
actually has the strongest interest in its preservation. The second largest
party benets from the fact that the system encourages a duopoly, and has
the hope of eventually enjoying the rewards of being the front-runner. Thus,
even the less successful party prefers to stick with the system. We also expect

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smaller parties with a regional orientation to prefer SMP, since they can
benet from vote concentration. Blais and Shugart (2008) claim that SMP is
still with us due to its large rewards, because in the normative battleeld,
when it is pitted against the alternatives in citizens assemblies or in expert
committees moderate proportional systems usually have the upper hand.
Boix (1999) examined the wave of reform in majoritarian systems at the
beginning of the twentieth century. He explained it as resulting from the
strategy of the ruling parties to change the system in an attempt to control its
outcome adopting proportionality in order to control for possible negative
results, namely the creation of a manufactured majority for the growing
socialist parties due to the extension of universal surage. In most of the post1945 cases, electoral reform penetrated the political agenda of countries with
majoritarian systems only when one of the two large parties felt that it was
continuously prejudiced by the majoritarian system (Shugart 2008).
The replacement of the two-round system in France with proportionality
in 1986 was indeed aimed mainly at reducing the expected electoral damages
to the ruling Socialists. Yet we must remember that in most cases where
parties predicted a loss under majoritarian systems, they did not attempt to
reform the system. This may be because of legitimacy constraints a party
might fear that tinkering with the rules of the game will lead to a loss of
legitimacy, which in turn will lead to further electoral loss (Renwick 2010).
This idea of loss of legitimacy is similar to that of act contingency (Shugart
and Wattenberg 2001b), which teaches us that the barriers to reform
concern not only the consequences of reform itself but also the consequences
of the act of reform promotion. That is, the response by actors to the actual
act of reform promotion can be understood and set in terms of the barriers,
from claims that reform negatively impacts the functioning of the system or
goes against the political culture of the country to claims that reform is
merely about actors who want to empower themselves by overly selfinterested manipulations.
What about proportional systems? We expect proportionality to survive
due to the existence of seat-maximising, partisan, vested interests under two
scenarios. The rst is when there is a dominant party system, but the large
party does not possess a majority of the seats. In this case, the smaller
parties that together have the majority prefer the way that proportionality
translates votes into seats over a manufactured majority for the large party.
The second scenario in which proportional representation is likely to be
preserved is in a multiparty system with a high eective number of parties,
and where there are no two parties that are relatively large and together
possess the necessary majority for reform. Similar to the scenario above, the
smaller parties that together have a majority in parliament have a vested
interest in the existing system.
While the expectations above make sense, we still need to tackle two
additional scenarios in which either one or two parties have the needed
majority for reform. We should expect reform in a country with a

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proportional electoral system under both scenarios. However, we can make

just as strong a claim, within the realm of rational choice, that stability can
be explained by the tendencies of politicians to be risk averse. If they predict
that a reform will serve them, the politicians have to estimate what their
future support will be versus that of their rivals. In other words, there is
always uncertainty when it comes to the uncontrolled behaviour of voters
and other parties (and possibly additional actors). In his analysis of
the behaviour of the two largest Belgian parties, Pilet (2008) showed that
these parties preferred to maintain the safe status quo that they knew and
found acceptable than to speculate. We thus might assess whether parties
are satised with a system before evaluating their stands on reform and
assuming that these positions are an exclusive result of the parties being the
potential winners or losers of an electoral reform (Pilet and Bol 2011). The
stability of a system may also result from the politicians fear that attempts
to maximise their power through changes in the electoral rules will be
counter-productive, on the chance that the public will react negatively to an
attempt at manipulating the rules of the game (Katz 2007).
However, we have cases where one party (the Liberal Democrats in
Japan) or two (Likud and Labour in Israel) that had the majority needed for
reform actively promoted it, but failed to implement it. Why did they fail?
This leads to the next possible barrier.
Coalition Politics
In proportional systems, large parties often have good reason to believe that
they will gain both representation and inuence by the adoption of
majoritarian features. What blocks these large parties from reforming the
system is an immediate interest in maintaining their coalitions.
In simple terms of seat maximisation, it is hard to understand why two
parties that have a majority of the seats in a proportional setting, and can
thus reform the system to their benet, refrain from doing so. The answer to
this puzzle can be found within the rational choice approach but only if we
are ready to look beyond seat maximisation. We need to see parties as
entities that are interested more in governing than in possible future seat
maximising. For example, in Israel there was stable majority support for
electoral reform both within the two main party alliances, which together
had a large parliamentary majority, and within the general public, for
decades. Yet reform was never adopted because of coalition pressures
(Rahat 2008). It seems that coalition politics also played a role in preserving
the stability of the proportional electoral system in the Netherlands (Van der
Kolk 2007), in Belgium (Hooghe and Deschouwer 2011) and in Slovenia, the
Czech Republic and Romania (Nikolenyi 2011).
Such a scenario occurs not only in the context of inter-party politics; an
intra-party faction can also play the role of a veto actor. This happened
when the Japanese Liberal Democrats, which held a majority in parliament,

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failed to promote a reform in the 1970s due to opposition from some of its
internal factions (Renwick 2010).
Coalition politics make electoral reform dicult in that any crucial
member (a coalition partner or an intra-party faction) of the coalition
(governing coalition, or even a policy coalition on an important issue) holds
veto power against reform. In other words, even if reform has majority
support in the legislature, it is relinquished (willingly or under pressure) by
part of this majority in order to sustain the coalition government or to
maintain party cohesion. Veto players can thus derail reform in many ways
and at various stages.
Disagreement over Content
Coalition politics, the previous barrier, can be described in game theory
terms via the prisoners dilemma in order to explain why reform is hard to
promote even in oversized coalitions (Diskin and Diskin 1995). Here we are
dealing with another possible barrier to reform the need to reach an
agreement over the content of the reform among those comprising the
needed majority. Such a barrier can be seen in terms of a chicken game,
where we might see a struggle within the reform camp itself between several
actors trying to promote their own particular versions of reform. As long as
these forces do not agree among themselves, the status quo, even if
supported by only a minority, will prevail. Without an agreement on the
substance of reform, the institutional status quo could be a Condorcet
winner an option that is supported by a majority in all pair-wise matches,
despite having only minority support overall. This situation can occur when
the alternatives are rejected, one by one, by the temporary coalitions of
status quo loyalists (themselves only a minority) and those who support a
dierent version of reform. While a majority tends to prefer various reform
initiatives to the status quo, each camp refrains from supporting the reform
of the other camps (although preferable to the status quo) because it hopes
that the others will yield and support its specic version of reform, or due to
other political calculations. The result is the postponement of reform and
eventually, due to changing circumstances, the reform is either buried or
fails to pass.
How the Barriers Have Been, and Can Be, Overcome
Reformers must be determined in the sense that reform will not just occur
on its own, nor will the diculties it faces be similar to regular legislation.
After all, it is about the political fate of those who legislate, not just normal
politics. Once they are present and mobilised, these determined reformers
must face all of the barriers we outlined above. The barriers approach helps
explain stability, and in order to understand electoral system reform we need
to know not only which barriers are faced, but also how to overcome them.

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In this section, we look at some of the tactics and strategies used by

reformers to surmount these barriers.
We start with those barriers that were found by Rahat (2008) to be the
less challenging ones (political tradition, social structure and system-level
rationale). Then we look at those that were found to be eective in delaying
reform (procedural superiority of the status quo and disagreement over
content). Finally, we assess the major barriers, the vested interests in the
electoral system which is especially relevant for majoritarian systems,
especially SMP and coalition politics which is relevant for most
proportional cases.
Relatively Passable Barriers: Political Tradition, Social Structure and
System-level Rationale
The electoral reforms in the 1990s (Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Israel)
showed the political tradition, social structure and system-level rationale
barriers to be quite weak for two reasons. First, the general feeling in these
countries was that of crisis; and in such times, when the system is seen as
dysfunctional, it is easier to overcome traditional conventions and promote
change. In these instances the opponents of reform were seen as motivated
by their self-centred interests, while the reformers championed the systemic
values. Second, the proposals for mixed systems (Shugart and Wattenberg
2001a) that combined both the old and the new demonstrated sensitivity to
those elements that were perceived as positive in each countrys political
tradition. The reformers were able to claim that they were taking into
consideration both the social structure and the systemic virtues.
In those cases where reform was imposed by the elites France in 1986, Italy
in 2005 these barriers were somewhat more dicult to overcome. Reforms
imposed by the elite majority (Renwick 2010) were justiably perceived as
being a self-serving manipulation of the system and empowered the
opponents, who used tradition/culture, social structure or systemic arguments. Moreover, the promoted reforms were usually not of the mixed kind,
which could have served as a good platform to answer such criticism. Thus,
passing these barriers required the elite to pay a price in order to adopt reform,
contrary to the case of elitemass interaction where the price was paid by those
unwilling to advance reform. It is thus not a coincidence that elite-imposed
reforms passed in countries with relatively turbulent politics like Italy and
France, where manipulation of the rules is more tolerated. Yet, even in these
cases, some initiatives were put aside or abolished after the elite felt that it
would pay a price in terms of public support.
Delaying Barriers: Procedures and Disagreement over Content
There are several possible strategies to cope with the procedural barrier. One
is to choose the procedural path that is likely to give reform its best chance.

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In Italy, for example, the path of a public initiative bypassed the possible
rejection of the politicians. Another way is to create an alternative path. In
New Zealand, a referendum enabled reformers to bypass the strong vested
interests of the elected representatives. Reformers can also widen the arena
for reform (as they did in the 1990s), involving extra-parliamentary actors
and creating pressure on insiders. This means that the eld where the reform
game is played is wider than the one formally dened by legal procedures,
and thus there is more room to manoeuvre (Rahat 2008).
The solution to disagreement over the content of reform is, naturally,
a compromise. Such a compromise means that the proposed electoral system
should be seen as serving the interests of various potential supporters of
reform. We are likely to end up with a mixed system because its complexity
and multifaceted nature enable the reformers to promise many things to
many forces. Another way in which reformers may try to cope with the need
to compromise is to start by promoting ambiguous bills, with the hope that
later all reform supporters will feel compelled to nd a compromise since
they have become obligated to the cause of reform.
Major Barriers: Vested Interests and Coalition Politics
Vested interests are a powerful barrier. Asking politicians to reform is akin
to asking them to put themselves in jeopardy. One way to cope with vested
interests is to change the power balance by recruiting external actors that
do not have vested interests in the particular system, but rather in the overall
functioning of the system, such as interest groups, public opinion and
experts.
Vested interests are an even stronger barrier when the parties have
information on the workings of the proposed new system. Calculations are
dependent upon information; when information is missing or manipulated,
it might obscure the politicians objective self-interests and result in their
voting against these interests (Rahat 2006).
Electoral reform may also be promoted if political actors can be
convinced that other interests might be well served through their backing
for electoral reform, such as public support that can be translated into more
votes in the next elections. But even lesser gestures by politicians can serve
the cause of reform. Public pressure can push politicians who oppose reform
to establish a committee, or even conduct a referendum, with the intention
of showing responsiveness to the public without allowing reform to be
adopted (Massicotte 2008). Reformers can skilfully exploit these cracks in
the vested interests bastion an expert committee could turn into a
legitimising vehicle for reform rather than the anticipated cemetery, a
referendum might become an anti-hegemonic tool rather than legitimising
the status quo (New Zealand). Another tactic that can help quell some
vested interests is to oer a delay in the implementation of reform. This step
allows those in power: to enjoy the system one more time; to be seen as

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reformers who are ready to give up on their vested interests for the public
good; and to have time to adapt to the new rules from their advantageous
position.
We must emphasise that vested interests can be diverse, and even
contradicting, when considering dierent levels (personal, factional, party,
national), in various time frames (short, middle, long term), and with
contrary assumptions about future voting behaviour (loyalty or volatility).
Reformers can, therefore, manipulate information, highlighting those
interests that will benet from the reform and downplaying those that are
likely to be harmed by it. Another way to deal with the challenge of vested
interests is to inject uncertainty about the future results of reform, even up
to the point where it will be unclear who will win and who will lose. It is thus
easier to promote a mixed system one that can be used to promise a better
future to forces with dierent interests. When it is clear who wins and who
loses from electoral reform, it is often hard to convince the needed majority
to support it, especially when there are strong vested interests in the status
quo. Blais et al. (2004) demonstrated that in the non-SMP majoritarian
systems, where it was harder for parties to identify their specic interests,
electoral reforms occurred more easily.
Scholars who have closely inspected the politics of reform attribute much
more than simple self-interest to the key political leaders who were involved
in the electoral reform (Rahat 2004; Renwick 2007). While it may not be
surprising that voters, who have relatively low vested interest in the status
quo, are inuenced by values when they judge reform, scholars have found
that this applies to politicians as well (Bowler et al. 2006; Lamare and
Vowels 1996). While a major factor in the politics of electoral reform is
indeed self-interest, it does not cover the whole picture. We can expect that
values and ideology supply at least some opportunity for reformers to win
over a few supporters from the camp of those who have vested interests in
the existing system. These few votes could spell the dierence between
victory and defeat in promoting reform.
The establishment and maintenance of coalitions is part of democratic
politics, particularly in multiparty proportional systems. However, the
centrality of coalition politics is not the same throughout the entire
democratic cycle. Parties usually form coalitions with other parties that are
close to them, so that they will have to make fewer compromises. However,
there are times when parties need to be responsive to the public, and even
have a short-term interest in pointing out what dierentiates them from
ideologically similar parties and from those who have governed with them
in a coalition. This usually occurs on the eve of elections, when coalition
politics are replaced by electoral politics. If reform is popular, then
supporting and promoting it may be an electoral asset. Since in most
parliamentary settings elections can occur at any given time, then any
coalition crisis even if it is completely unrelated to the electoral system
can serve as a window of opportunity for the promotion of electoral reform.

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In Israel, for example, the reform that brought about the direct election of
the prime minister passed by taking advantage of two such windows of
opportunity (Hazan 1996).
The widening of the arena for the politics of reform can also help
overcome the coalition barrier. In regular coalition politics, each member
of the coalition can veto reform. When the arena is widened to the point
where power is highly dispersed among the actors, many veto players are
neutralised. In such a situation, fewer actors or perhaps no actor at all
would be able to make an eective threat.
The Relative Strength of the Barriers
According to the approach proposed here, reforming the electoral system
requires overcoming all of the barriers previously outlined. That is, a reform
initiative will be blocked if it cannot cope with each and every barrier. As
mentioned at the beginning of our previous section, it is possible to propose
a general assessment of the relative strength of each barrier. Beyond that,
however, we should remember that some barriers can be more signicant
(or higher) in one specic reform constellation than in another.
For example, the procedural barrier can be higher if the process needed to
pass an electoral system reform is more demanding such as a special
majority in parliament or in a referendum. Similarly, the political tradition
and the social structure barriers can be higher if the existing electoral system
is older, more steeped in tradition, and if it complements the structure of
society. Plurality systems in general, and SMPs in particular, create a higher
vested interests barrier, while proportional systems create a lower vested
interests barrier. Regardless, each of the seven barriers will always be there,
each must be passed in order to face the next barrier, and all need to be
overcome in order for electoral system reform to be implemented.
There are, of course, instances where several of the barriers are either low
or practically non-existent. For example, when a new electoral system is
forced meaning when a country must introduce a new system, such as
when it joins the European Union and must partake in European elections
the barriers are lower. Another example is when newly democratising
countries introduce an electoral system for the rst time but this is not
truly a case of electoral reform.
One should note that for the more complex cases of electoral system
reform those that were not single-handedly promoted by the elite (e.g. the
electoral reforms of the 1990s) the rational choice barriers (vested
interests, coalition politics, disagreement on reform content) are much more
central than they would be for the majority imposed reforms. At the same
time, in the case of majority imposed reforms, the cultural, sociological and
systemic institutional barriers are more signicant because the reformers
can easily be accused of taking advantage of their position to serve their
self-interests rather than those of the people, the system or the nation.

The Barriers to Electoral System Reform

491

While these accusations might not be enough to block reform on their own,
if reform opponents translate them into a likely loss of political support for
the reformers, they might succeed in blocking reform.

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Conclusion: Advancing the Study of Electoral System Change

There is no single approach that can fully explain why electoral reform
succeeds or fails (Leyenaar and Hazan 2011). This article provides a
comprehensive framework that synthesises the two most prominent
approaches used in explaining electoral reform. It also presents a novel
framework to help analyse the failure or success of electoral system reform
attempts, and even those cases of non-reform.
The barriers approach is meant to further the study of electoral reform,
but its presentation here is only the beginning. We hope that it will be
adopted by scholars who will develop it further. Hooghe and Deschouwer
(2011) and Jacobs and Leyenaar (2011) are the rst to do so. There are
questions that beg to be answered when using the barriers approach. For
example, does the content of the reform tell us which barriers will be more
dicult to overcome (such as adopting gender quotas; see Celis et al. 2011)?
Are specic barriers more important at certain stages of the reform process
(as in the policy cycle model proposed by Norris 2011)? Can electoral system
reform be crafted so that the barriers can be overcome (as in the shift
toward greater electoral system personalisation according to Renwick
2011)?
One important element of using the barriers approach, which would
further the study of electoral reform, is to assess it alongside a possibly
cross-cutting dimension concerning the extent of electoral change. That is,
we can create a dimension that begins with technical changes to the existing
electoral system, goes through minor reforms and nally reaches major
electoral change (Jacobs and Leyenaar 2011). Are all seven barriers relevant
when we are dealing with only technical change to the electoral system?
In other words, does the extent of change inuence the menu of barriers?
And does less than major reform necessarily lower the barriers, making this
type of change easier and more likely?
Also to be considered is that while our focus here was on the established
democracies, the picture may well dier for all sorts of reasons in
younger democracies. In such regimes the electoral system is likely to be
more prone to change. However, while some barriers might be weaker in the
non-established democracies, which ones and how weak becomes an
interesting part of the explanation of the frequency of change in such
systems. That is, the barriers approach can also be useful in explaining the
relative intensity of electoral reforms in the newer democracies.
Some reform initiatives do not succeed in igniting a signicant reform
promotion process. Others make progress but fall by the side of the road,
either near the beginning, at the middle or toward the end. A few reach their

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G. Rahat and R. Y. Hazan

destination. The barriers approach allows us to study all of them using a

single research tool. It does not discriminate between them based on the
simplistic distinction of the few that made it and the many that did not.
Even if most of our interest and attention is focused on the implemented
electoral reforms, the complete story of their success can only be fully
understood if we also examine both those that made it only part of the way
and those that failed even to start walking down the road of electoral
reform.

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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Sidney Verba and to Matthew Shugart for their
comments on an earlier draft (and to Sid for suggesting the quote at the start
of the article). We thank all the participants in the ECPR Lisbon workshop
for their valuable input.
Note
1. It is important to emphasise that despite the apparent terminological bias of the concepts in
the barriers approach, no normative implications are intended. That is, reform is largely
perceived to be positive, while the status quo is not, and barriers are inherently something
that must be overcome. We adopt these terms, however, because they have become de rigueur
in the eld of electoral studies, not because we regard endurance with undue reverence. We
thus acknowledge the fact that the status quo might be good or bad, and a proposed reform
is not always good a case in point is the disastrous electoral reform implemented in Israel in
1996, which was completely abolished less than seven years later (Kenig et al. 2005). In other
words, we do not address the normative question of how long an electoral system should last,
since longevity is not desirable as an end in and of itself (for a similar approach to the
endurance of constitutions see Elkins et al. 2009). Clearly, some electoral systems should
be reformed, even if they were ideal at the time of their adoption, as their entrenchment for
long periods of time could produce a lack of t that will become apparent. In short, there is
clear evidence of the benet of both periodic reform of the electoral system and its
endurance.

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