Cultural Explanations of Electoral Reform: A Policy Cycle Model

Abstract Electoral reform is largely regarded as an elite-level issue, dominated by partisan interests, where citizens are usually marginalised and powerless. This perspective may help to explain what specific reforms are enacted, but it lacks the capacity to account for when and why successful reforms are raised on the policy agenda. The first section ofthis article presents a general policy cycle model identifying multiple actors in the process of electoral change. It tests the proposition that political culture – notably citizen dissatisfaction with regime legitimacy – heightens the salience of institutional reform. The following section summarises the research design testing this proposition. Results are then presented. The evidence demonstrates that democratic aspirations are a strong, significant and robust predictor of the occurrence of subsequent electoral reforms. The conclusion considers the implications of these findings, both for theories concerning regime legitimacy, as well as for revising standard accounts of processes of institutional change. Notes 1. For details, see http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org; http://www.issp.org 2. Pilet and Bol (Citation2011) point out that time spent in government can affect the party's willingness to support a seat-maximising reform. 3. On referenda in Canada see LeDuc (Citation2011). 4. A synthesis of approaches also leads to assessing the barriers to electoral reform (Rahat and Hazan Citation2011). 5. Full methodological details about the World Values Surveys, including the questionnaires, sampling procedures, fieldwork procedures, principle investigators, and organisation can be found at: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org 6. These countries are ranked as equally ‘free’ according to the 2008 Freedom House assessments of political rights and civil liberties. See Freedom in the World, http://www.freedom house.org 7. Hooghe and Deschouwer (Citation2011) on Belgium, and Nikolenyi (Citation2011) on Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Romania are two examples.