Wrestling with democracy
voting systems as politics in the 20th century west
- ISBN: 9781442613508
- Editorial: University of Toronto Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2013
- Lugar de la edición: Toronto. Canadá
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 23 cm
- Nº Pág.: 387
- Idiomas: Inglés
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.