Electoral systems are the subject of quite a sizable literature, much of it quantitative, most of it seeking to identify the consequences of different methods of converting votes into seats. We now have a pretty good idea as to what to do if we want to increase or decrease proportionality or to encourage or discourage a multiparty system. Even if there are underexplored areas, such as the impact of electoral systems upon the relationship between parliamentarians and constituents, or contentious ones, such as the degree of responsibility we can realistically attribute to the electoral system for the level of public expenditure, the rate of economic growth, or the size of the welfare budget, it might seem that much of what can be said has already been said.

The original contribution of The Politics of Electoral Reform is that it explores not the consequences but, so to speak, the causes of electoral systems. However, it is not an exploration of the origins of all electoral systems; rather, it is an examination of the circumstances and the process of changing an electoral system in established democracies. The concern is very much with the process rather than the substance of change; for example, New Zealand moved away from the very electoral system (single member plurality) to which some reformers in Italy and Japan wanted to move. The book's purpose is not to evaluate the impact of specific changes—which would be back to the conventional treatment of electoral systems as independent variables—but to concentrate on the reform process itself, seeking to identify the circumstances under which electoral system change becomes most likely.

The book differs from much of the electoral systems literature not only in this regard but also in its fundamentally qualitative approach; there are not many numbers here, and certainly no complicated statistics. The methodology is described as “detailed comparative process tracing” (p. 255), and consists essentially of considering in detail a small number of cases in the light of a framework developed in the first section of the book. The argument, in essence, is that the reform process is not necessarily controlled by politicians, and that politicians can be influenced by conceptions of the public interest, as well as by calculations of the implications of reform for their own power interests.

The “building blocks,” the outlining of which takes more than a quarter of the book, involve primarily the motivations of actors, with some consideration also of the role of factors such as path dependence and cognitive constraints (in other words, countries select among options that for historical reasons they are already familiar with, rather than scouring the electoral systems literature and considering all possible options). As Alan Renwick points out, parties are not unified actors, and party leaders and individual members of Parliament or candidates might have quite different interests and/or values. This discussion generates 19 propositions, outlined in Chapter 3, such as “Recent entrants to the class of politicians will tend to give greater weight to values than do more seasoned politicians” (p. 49), or “The more a particular value is perceived as threatened at a particular time, the more salient it is likely to be” (p. 52). The propositions are there to act as focal points for later discussion rather than purporting to be testable hypotheses.

The empirical chapters are divided into two sections, each corresponding to a model of electoral system change. The first is “elite majority imposition,” explored through three case studies: France, Italy, and Japan. In each case, the dominant group enacted a change to the electoral system without feeling it necessary to secure popular endorsement or the consent of the opposition; France's changes in 1985 and 1986, or the Italian “legga truffa” (“swindle law”) of 1953 are examples. Sometimes this unilateral action produces a damaging backlash against the party that promoted it, as in Italy in 1953, while in France legitimacy constraints were unimportant, as voters either did not care about partisan manipulation of the electoral system or had already factored such self-interested behavior into their evaluations of the parties and, hence, were not particularly shocked. In Japan in 1956 and 1973, the Liberal Democratic Party attempted a similar step, but this time legitimacy constraints were sufficiently strong to prevent the changes being enacted.

The second model is “elite–mass interaction.” This comes about typically through the initiative of a minority of politicians, driven mainly, says Renwick, by “general values rather than their own or their party's power interests” (p. 215). These values manage to get voters interested in the subject, and then the majority of politicians are compelled to bow to popular pressure. The three cases examined here (the only cases in established democracies in recent decades, according to Renwick) are Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, all in the first half of the 1990s.

Taken as a whole, the book has the familiar strengths and weaknesses associated with the case study approach. Even if some of the six cases, such as the New Zealand reform process, are thoroughly analyzed by existing literature, others are not. Renwick's dissection of the motivations and behavior of the actors involved is invariably clear and plausible. On the other hand, it is not always apparent that any particular argument is vindicated (as opposed to merely being illustrated), or could have been refuted, by these accounts—though summary chapters (Chapters 8 and 12) discuss the implications of the case histories for the propositions discussed earlier.

Renwick himself no doubt anticipates the reaction of some readers when he says (p. 245): “This detailed understanding of the processes that lead (or do not lead) to change in electoral systems is all very well, but what does it tell us about the patterns that we should expect to find in electoral reform outcomes across space and time?” In fact, he goes on to say in the concluding chapter, we can learn a great deal. For one thing, not all cases of electoral reform can be explained by parties seeking partisan advantage. For another, he concludes that for public discontent with the status quo to become significant, it is not enough that there be an anomalous election outcome; there needs to be a crisis (economic downturn, corruption scandal) to which reformist politicians can establish a link with the electoral system so that popular anger is turned against it. While judgments can be pronounced on the 19 propositions (though, as the author notes on p. 165, “the sample is small”), it would have been useful if these had been gathered together in one table for the reader's benefit, with an indication as to whether each one has or has not been borne out by the evidence presented.

If no single theory is put forward to explain electoral system change, this, argues Renwick, is for the good reason that reality is too complex to be explained by one theory. Complexity is inherent in electoral reform, “part of the main action, not … inconvenient noise on the sidelines” (p. 250). The resulting picture “is thus much messier than parsimonious theory would suggest”—as indeed proponents of such theories would acknowledge, though they would argue that the benefits of parsimonious models outweigh their inevitable simplification of real political life.

Overall, The Politics of Electoral Reform is a fine study of its subject. The propositions that it examines are difficult to recast in fully testable form, but collectively they will undoubtedly be used to structure analyses of many more cases of electoral reform (or nonreform) in the future. This book deserves its place in any respectable library of electoral systems literature.