Election reform often follows a familiar pattern: Self-interested politicians and elites align with reformers to rail against some fundamental unfairness to the political process, proposing a reform that, among other things, could help these politicians and elites. Voters who are disillusioned with the political process become engaged and support the proposed reform, which becomes law. Things do not change much for the better after the reform, and voters get further disillusioned by the lack of improvement. The disillusionment prompts new calls for “better” reform. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In The Limits of Electoral Reform, Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan explore this reform-failure-reform cycle, asking who supports electoral reforms and why, what arguments get made in favor of electoral reform, and how often proposed electoral reforms fail to live up to the lofty promises made to secure public support. Looking comparatively across countries and within states in the United States, with a heavy emphasis on reform-loving California, Bowler and Donovan paint a rather dim picture of motivations, calculations, and results.

The authors conclude that reforms are especially likely to raise and dash voters’ opinions about the fairness and efficacy of the political process, spurring a constant appetite for ever-more reform that is doomed to fail: “Reform politics, we argue, may be at the same time both self-fulfilling and self-defeating; disappointment with one sets of reforms provides a rationale for a further round of reform attempts which also disappoint and lead to a further set of reform proposals. While this cycle may help generate more reforms, it likely does little to improve citizen engagement with politics” (p. 17).

Thus, across separate chapters and various jurisdictions, Bowler and Donovan find that the adoption of proportional representation systems, campaign finance limits, term limits, and direct democracy are unlikely to offer many of the benefits reformers tend to overpromise. The authors suggest that this overpromising is counterproductive for democracy by making voters more cynical about the potential for change and by making flaws in the current system more salient.

Bowler and Donovan are asking important questions, rightfully emphasizing that incremental reforms are exceedingly unlikely to achieve the lofty goals that reformers sometimes set out. Even after campaign finance reform, voters still see the role of money in politics as corrupt. Term limits lead to career politicians who play musical chairs instead of to a rotating cadre of citizen-legislators. Rather than limiting the power of lobbyists and special interests, term limits can empower these forces against less experienced politicians who lack political capital. While no doubt increasing the number of parties represented, changes toward proportional representation systems for choosing members of legislative bodies often fail to boost voter turnout or satisfaction with political outcomes. Direct democracy may have modest effects in boosting voter turnout, but it is less successful in educating voters or making them feel more engaged in politics.

The Limits of Electoral Reform is an important corrective for those naive enough to believe that electoral reforms can solve all of society’s ills. The authors are especially convincing in showing that reforms rarely achieve the hyperbolic benefits touted by reformers, and raise the real possibility that reform programs’ unintended effects may be to decrease voter efficacy and increase public concerns about the flaws in existing electoral arrangements. They are also careful to note problems of causation and endogeneity endemic to studies of these issues.

In two ways, however, Bowler and Donovan do not paint a full picture of the relevance of electoral reform to voters’ lives and the political process. First, they sometimes oversell their own conclusions about the lack of efficacy of election reforms. That is, they have made a convincing case that electoral reforms often fail to live up to reformers inflated promises, but that does not render the reforms inconsequential.

Thus, a reform such as the Voting Rights Act (mentioned briefly by the authors at pp. 23–24) has vastly increased the extent of minority voter representation at all levels in U.S. elections. Campaign contribution limits and other electoral reforms have blocked the most blatant attempts to curry favor with elected officials by capping the amount of money that candidates may receive directly from individuals, even if they have been less successful in restoring public confidence or in limiting the overall amount of money in elections (something many reformers oppose in any case).

Term limits break the power of the strongest legislative leaders, who at times seem to have a stranglehold on a jurisdictions’ politics. Proportional representation systems ensure that a wider variety of parties get representation in the legislature, and may give smaller parties a greater chance of having the larger parties accommodate their interests and goals. Direct democracy has been a major lever for enacting electoral reform in the first place: Few term-limits laws and strict campaign-contribution limitations would become law in the absence of the initiative process. Direct democracy has also had profound effects on public policy. California’s Proposition 13, enacted in 1978 to cap property tax bills, continues to have major effects on budgeting in California decades later.

Any full evaluation of the limits of electoral reform must consider all of these effects—intended and unintended—against a broader rubric than simply the public confidence, turnout, and efficacy measures to which Bowler and Donovan often return. The authors also mention other concerns, such as the unintended effects of term limits, but this slim volume cannot fully explore the full costs and benefits of each of these varied reforms in full depth.

The second means by which Bowler and Donovan give us only a partial picture of the true limits of reform is the relatively weak attention paid to the role of the judiciary. The authors note (p. 121) that courts have stepped in to block some direct democracy measures in the United States, which have sometimes been found to trample minority rights. And they note (at pp. 23–24) that the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s spurred serious electoral reform. But at least in the United States, the judicial role is more enduring. Courts intervene in much more than direct democracy, acting as a super-legislature on many electoral issues.

Fundamental campaign finance reform, including spending limits applied to wealthy individuals, are off the table thanks to a Supreme Court majority’s view of the United States Constitution’s First Amendment. Certain forms of political primaries are unconstitutional as applied to a political party if that party objects, again under the First Amendment. Redistricting reform must satisfy not only the federal Voting Rights Act but also court-mandated rules on equally populated districts (the “one person, one vote” rule) and prohibitions on certain considerations of race in redistricting (so-called racial gerrymandering), with both claims grounded in the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

In short, it is impossible to consider whether reformers in the United States can achieve meaningful electoral reform without considering constraints that courts have imposed over reform’s permissible scope.

Despite these limitations, Bowler and Donovan’s work should be required reading for those sincerely attracted to electoral reform. It convincingly makes the case for a mismatch between promised performance and actual results. Breaking the reform-failure-reform cycle begins with reformers who eschew overpromising and cast a skeptical eye on the motives of erstwhile political allies.