I will take this opportunity to respond to the question posed by Ben Ansell and David Samuels in their review: How do the findings presented in From Open Secrets to Secret Voting generalize to other political contexts? For full disclaimer, I am now writing a book entitled Democratization after Democratization, which examines the adoption of reforms that democratized electoral practices by a number of European countries. I submit that the political logic advanced in my book can take us a long way toward explaining the political cleavages over various electoral reforms that one finds in different political contexts.

The democratization of electoral practices in nineteenth-century Europe involved the adoption of reforms that corrected several vulnerabilities of the electoral process. The first were reforms of political campaigns. The main issue on the agenda was reducing voters’ vulnerability to “bribing” or “treating.” The second involved reforms in the technology of voting and the protection of the autonomy of voters at the time they cast their ballots. These reforms involved the adoption of ballot envelopes, isolating spaces, changes in the design of receptacles, and so on. Finally, a third dimension of electoral reforms sought to limit the ability of actors who were responsible for the counting of ballots to modify the actual vote count. The salience of these issues were likely to vary across political contexts.

The most significant factors affecting the demand of legislators for electoral reforms are likely to vary across these different dimensions. The main political cleavage in a reform of electoral irregularities, such as vote buying or treating, is a cleavage between “rich” and “poor” politicians, between politicians with abundant resources to provide favors to voters and those who lack these resources. In this case, politician-level attributes, such as their wealth or access to resources, should be an important predictor of their support for reforms. The costs of vote buying is also likely to vary across districts, depending on such economic conditions as the population of the district, the wealth of the voters, and so on. Thus, one expects the demand for electoral reforms ending vote buying to be predicted on a combination of politician-level factors (such as wealth) and economic variables in a district. This logic is consistent with the logic advanced in my book.

By contrast, consider another electoral reform not covered in my book due to its low salience in the German political context: reforms that attempted to limit the incidence of ballot stuffing. Politicians’ considerations about the desirability of these reforms are likely to be affected by their ability to control and influence those actors that had the prerogative to verify the outcomes of elections. In many countries, such actors were mayors. In this case, one expects the main predictor of legislators’ demand for these reforms to fall along partisan lines. Economic conditions in a district are unlikely to be a salient determinant of the political demand for these electoral reforms. One expects that candidates from parties who lacked the ability to control mayoral appointments were likely to demand the introduction of reforms limiting ballot stuffing. By contrast, one expects candidates representing parties with stronger control over the appointment of mayors to oppose such reforms. In some contexts, such as Third Republic France, such electoral coalitions limiting ballot stuffing brought together politicians located at the extremes of the political spectrum (the antirepublican Right and nonrepublican socialists) against the republican center.

As I note in my book, the landmark studies of the process of democratization of electoral practices is Charles Seymour and Donald Frary’s How the World Votes (1918), which was published nearly a century ago. Examining these questions comparatively will require considerable investment in the generation of micro-historical data of a quality and an accuracy comparable to those of the data used in my book. The key insights advanced in From Open Secrets to Secret Ballots take us quite far in unraveling these questions.