Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the Twentieth-Century West

Though sharing broadly similar processes of economic and political development from the mid-to-late nineteenth century onward, western countries have diverged greatly in their choice of voting systems: most of Europe shifted to proportional voting around the First World War, while Anglo-American countries have stuck with relative majority or majority voting rules. Using a comparative historical approach, Wrestling with Democracy examines why voting systems have (or have not) changed in western industrialized countries over the past century.

In this first single-volume study of voting system reform covering all western industrialized countries, Dennis Pilon reviews national efforts in this area over four timespans: the nineteenth century, the period around the First World War, the Cold War, and the 1990s. Pilon provocatively argues that voting system reform has been a part of larger struggles over defining democracy itself, highlighting previously overlooked episodes of reform and challenging widely held assumptions about institutional change.

Author: Dennis Pilon
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 04/04/2013
Pages: 408
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781442613508

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2013

About the Author
Pilon, Dennis: - Dennis Pilon is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at York University.

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