The motivations of party support for electoral reform vote-seeking, uncertainty, and diffusion

The central objective of this thesis is to shed light on the motivations of party support for electoral reform. Specifically, I mean to clarify a well-known paradox related to the observation that many parties expend tremendous energy to change the electoral system in their country though they have in theory no reason to do so because of uncertainty about voter reaction to this change and because of the transaction cost attached to any reform. Curiously, in the last two decades, electoral reform appears to have become a popular strategy with which parties attempt to contain the growing discontent among citizens about the way politics is functioning. Why is this so? Why do they favor this specific reform to achieve this goal? What reasoning drives them? I offer three specific answers to these questions. First, challenging conventional wisdom, according to which parties are primarily motivated by seat payoffs brought by the way the new electoral system translates votes into seats, I demonstrate that vote-seeking strategies constitute an even better determinant of support for electoral reform. In order to attract new voters, parties tend to support proposals that are in line with the position they take about other issues. In doing so, they seek to appear consistent with the electoral program they defended at preceding elections. Second, I offer an explanation of why vote-seeking strategies are more relevant in explaining party support for electoral reform than are calculations of expected seat gains based on the effects of the new electoral system. Uncertainty plays a pivotal role. No one can predict with complete confidence the allocation of seats resulting from an implemented reform. The empirical analyses reveal that that all parties are not equal risk-takers and that those who are more satisfied by the way the status-quo electoral system is functioning tend to be more risk-averse than others. Specifically, parties that have frequently held a governmental position tend not to support any kind of electoral reform even if they may expect direct seat payoffs or an increase of their leverage coalitional power. Finally, I explore the effect of the external stimulus represented by foreign episodes of electoral reform. In the presence of uncertainty about the consequences of an electoral system change, parties have strong incentives to look at what is happening abroad in order to make up their minds and to decide whether to support or to oppose a proposal. I demonstrate strong evidence of the existence of short-term imitation practices among legislative parties of peer-countries. The chance of a country using specific electoral system features for its national elections increases with the number of times, within the last 5 years, the same feature was adopted by countries that are culturally, geographically or historically proximate to it.(POL 3) -- UCL, 201