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61 World Pol. 254 (2009)
The Competitive Road to Proportional Representation

handle is hein.journals/wpot61 and id is 275 raw text is: THE COMPETITIVE ROAD TO PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION Partisan Biases and Electoral Regime Change under Increasing Party Competition By ERNESTO CALVO* I. ROKKAN'S FORGOTTEN ROAD TO PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION Q NE of the most noteworthy political regularities in the twenti- eth century was the shift away from majoritarian electoral rules. As has been well documented, in the first half of the twenty century almost every reformed or new electoral system belonged to the pro- portional representation (PR) family. The conventional story, first in- troduced by Stein Rokkan and later formalized by Carles Boix,2 argues that shocks to the median voter and the rising threat of Socialist par- ties led incumbent elites, fearful of the electoral gains that majoritarian rules could provide to successful newcomers, to reform the electoral system. The argument is not only consistent but also fits well with ex- isting knowledge about reforms under stress in some Western Euro- pean countries.3 * I would like to thank Juan Manuel Abal Medina, Isabella Alcafliz, Kenneth Benoit, Gary Cox, Mark P Jones, Ernesto Cabrera, Tulia Falleti, Edward L. Gibson, Bernard Grofman, Timothy Helwig, Noah Kaplan, Gary King, Fabrice Lehoucq, Rick Matland, Covadonga Meseguer,Juan Pablo Micozzi, Charles Munnell, Maria Victoria Murillo, Gabriel Negretto, David Samuels, Susan Scarrow, and the participants of the Political Economy workshop at Centro de Investigaci6n y Docencia Econ6mica (Mexico) for their comments. I also thank Eric Vanhaute and Torsten Wiedemann from the Belgian Historical GIS project at Ghent University for the Belgian shapefiles. Ifiaki Sagarzazu, Kadir Yildirim, and Lizbeth Mejia provided invaluable research assistance. This research was supported by a Univer- sity of Houston Grant to Enhance and Advance Research (GEAR) grant. 1 Rokkan 1970; Boix 1999; and Grofman and Lijphart 2003. 2 Rokkan 1970; and Boix 1999. 3The argument builds on Rokkan's two roads to Proportional Representation. As presented by Rokkan, early reforms (the first road) were introduced to protect electoral minorities in the years be- fore World War I. The second road, the antisocialist phase, was common in the 1920s. According to Rokkan (1970, 157), in the prewar years, increasing competition led to the introduction of reforms to protect political minorities in the culturally heterogeneous countries of Belgium, Denmark, and Swit- zerland. Prior to World War I, threatened elites in Germany, Norway, and Sweden, introduced PR to minimize seat losses to rising Socialist parties. As presented by Grofman and Lijphart (2003, 10), the World Politics 61, no. 2 (April 2009), 254-95 Copyright © 2009 Trustees of Princeton University 10.1017/S0043887109000100

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