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  • Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the Twentieth-Century West by Dennis Pilon
  • Ian Bullock
Dennis Pilon, Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the Twentieth-Century West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2013)

It may be different elsewhere, but where I live (in the UK) anyone outside the rarefied ranks of political scientists expressing more than the most casual and passing interest in voting systems is in grave danger of being labelled an “anorak” – a weird and obsessive individual, humourless and socially isolated, who pursues a strange and esoteric interest analogous to a lifelong devotion in collecting train numbers. Strangely, but perhaps significantly, “anoraks” are invariably male. But no “anorak alert” is required in relation to this book. Anyone expecting a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of First Past the Post (fptp), Single Transferable Vote (stv), second ballot, or party list Proportional Representation (pr) will be disappointed. The clue is in the words “as Politics” in the subtitle.

Having discussed several other political science approaches to the study of changing voting systems and finding them, at best, inadequate, Dennis Pilon sets out to apply a “comparative historical” method. (22) The territory he explores is vast, both as regards time-scale and geographical extent. He takes us on a journey from the very late 19th to the early present century and to “the countries of north-western Europe and the Anglo-American countries of North America and Australasia” (10) which, in spite of many significant shortfalls, he takes as satisfying, by 1920, “the minimum conditions defining democratic rule.” (39) When we reach the 1990s Japan is added to “the West.”

An important key to understanding Pilon’s argument is to recognize the contested nature of the idea of democracy. Though, he says, “political scientists often carry on as if democracy is obvious” it has never been fully established what “democracy is or should be in the west.” (53) This is surely one of those truths that, though obvious, we still need to be reminded of frequently. For the neoliberals of the last 30 years democracy is always linked with free markets as though this inevitable combination is both [End Page 410] self-evident and unchallengeable. For the leftwing democrats the aspiration has always been to establish democratic control and accountability over the economy. How they have proposed to do this, and the extent of the desired control, has varied greatly from time to time and place to place. But it has always been present.

The century studied is considered in four periods: 1900–1918, 1919–1939, 1940–1969 and 1970–2000. In each there were clusters of changes in voting systems in “the West.” In the first of these, though there were demands for such change from a variety of other quarters including the socialist left, pr systems were only introduced – in Germany, Sweden, and Belgium – when the established elites were faced with a significant challenge from the left. Pilon concludes that the “key catalyst shifting consideration of proportional voting systems from the meeting rooms of reformers to the halls of power was the rise of disciplined, organized mass parties of the left in the 1890s.” (70)

This was continued in the years following World War I when the “conservative regimes dominating the European continent shifted decisively to pr as a key means of limiting the socialist left.” (153) The situation in Europe was more complex after World War II. At first, “the key occupying power, the United States, made its initial preference for pr clear as a means of limiting the left and holding national disputes in check.” But as centre-right coalitions replaced centre-left ones and the Cold War took hold, “the post-war consensus for pr gave way to a new majoritarian strategy designed to marginalize the large, powerful, and electorally popular Communist parties” a process in which both “the American state and American academe provided support for efforts to dislodge proportional voting in favour of a US-style first-past-the-post system.” (188) By the 1990s the situation had changed. The challenge from the left seemed to be in retreat. Sometimes, as in New Zealand, voting...

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