Rethinking Majoritarian Modification: Toward an Explanatory Theory of Electoral System Reform in Canada, the U.K., and New Zealand

Traditional theories of electoral reform have focused on the outcomes of reform as a way of explaining the rational-strategic actions of political elites. Recently, the literature has moved from an ex post to an ex ante approach, analyzing the context and process of reform independent of its expected outcomes. This new conceptualization of electoral reform has produced new analytic frameworks, from which I propose to explore the development of an explanatory theory of electoral reform