Faces On The Ballot (The Personalization of Electoral Systems in Europe) - Electoral Reforms Before The Personalization Era - 1945-1989 (2016)

Electoral Reforms before the Personalization Era:
1945–1989
University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online
Faces on the Ballot: The Personalization of

Electoral Systems in Europe
Alan Renwick and Jean-Benoit Pilet
Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199685042
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685042.001.0001
Electoral Reforms before the

Personalization Era: 1945–1989
Alan Renwick
Jean-Benoit Pilet
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685042.003.0006
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter analyses the politics of electoral reform in

Europe’s existing democracies before the trend towards
greater personalization emerged around 1990. It traces the
processes that led to electoral reforms during this period as
well as selected cases of non-reform. It finds not only that
there was no trend towards electoral system personalization
between 1945 and 1990, but also that there was almost no
discussion of the intra-party dimension of the electoral system;
nor were public attitudes towards politics a factor in electoral
reform debates. Furthermore, where levels of personalization
were mentioned, they were criticized as much as they were
praised. The chapter thus shows the degree to which electoral
system personalization was not on the agenda during these
years.
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University of Colorado at Boulder; date: 13 February 2017
1945–1989
Keywords: electoral reform, intra-party dimension, personalization, process

tracing, Europe, qualitative analysis
Our core hypothesis is that the politics of electoral reform has

changed, leading to a shift in the nature of the reforms that
are enacted. Earlier reforms, we posit, were controlled by
politicians and focused on the inter-party dimension; later
reforms have become more responsive to public
disengagement and have increasingly related to the intra-
party dimension. Judging by the evidence in Chapter 3, this
change seems to have occurred—or, at least, begun to affect
electoral reform outcomes—around the start of the 1990s. In
fact, the evidence we present in this and subsequent chapters
suggests that a sharp dividing line between reform processes
of the old and new types was marked by the enactment of
personalizing reform in the Netherlands on 28 September
1989. This chapter therefore explores the politics of electoral
reform before 1989, while Chapters 7 and 8 examine electoral
reform after that date.
More specifically, we already know from Table 3.2 that

reforms to existing electoral institutions enacted between
1945 and 1989 that affected the intra-party dimension were
more or less evenly split between those that increased
personalization and those that reduced it. If our hypotheses
are correct, this chapter should reveal four further patterns.
First, processes of electoral reform during this period should
have been dominated by politicians and political parties—as
were the reform processes before 1945 that we observed in
Chapter 5—with little evidence that wider public opinion was a
factor to be taken into account. Second, arguments
surrounding electoral reforms should have been dominated by
the inter-party rather than the intra-party dimension: by
calculations of how the reforms would affect party seat shares,
not the relative weight of parties and candidates. Third,
insofar as personalization was a matter of concern, the
discourse should have focused on the interests of parties and
politicians, not those of voters. Finally, any variation among
parties in the degree of focus upon the intra-party dimension
should have related to the two factors that Chapter 5
highlighted: the degree of party centralization and parties’
ideological identities. Decentralized parties with prominent
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1945–1989
local candidates, and liberal or conservative parties, are more

likely to have favoured greater personalization than
centralized, socialist parties.
(p.108) The chapter follows a broadly chronological structure.

Section 6.1 looks at reforms in existing democratic systems
from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. Of the fifteen countries
that were independent democracies throughout this period,
ten changed their electoral systems in some significant way
during these years. Analysis of these reform episodes affords
us a window into how electoral systems were discussed and
what changes were possible. In Section 6.2, we turn our
attention to the countries that enacted no significant electoral
reforms over the same period. It would be wrong to say that a
focus solely on cases of actual reform would in itself
necessarily skew our evidence: an unthinking charge of
‘selection on the dependent variable’ misunderstands the
nature of the evidence that process tracing can provide.
Nevertheless, inclusion of non-reform cases does allow us to
extend our evidence base in several more specific ways.
Section 6.3 moves the analysis to the late 1970s and 1980s.
Electoral reform activity began to pick up during this period
and the disengagement of voters from traditional political
parties was becoming increasingly evident. It is useful,
therefore, to consider whether these changes were reflected
also in any shift in the nature of electoral reform processes.
We find that electoral reform during this period did closely

match the patterns that we expect. Furthermore, those
patterns—at least in respect of enacted electoral reforms—
persisted through to the end of the 1980s.
6.1 Electoral Reforms from the Late 1940s to the

Early 1970s
The late 1940s and 1950s were a period of significant
electoral reform activity: ten of the fifteen independent
democracies in our sample during this period experienced
reforms of one kind or another, and a total of sixteen
significant electoral reforms were enacted. The 1960s and
early 1970s, by contrast, were years of quietude: just four
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further reforms were made (see Table 3.2 on pp. 45–6 for
details).
Eight of these twenty reforms had no impact on

personalization at all: they affected only the inter-party
dimension of the electoral system by changing aspects such as
electoral formulas or party thresholds. We cannot present full
case studies of every instance of electoral reform, and so we
do not treat these cases in detail. It is clear from existing
studies that thoughts about personalization were important in
none of them. The Danish reforms of 1948 and 1961 were
negotiated among the parties and designed to affect only
proportionality and the parties’ relative prospects (Elklit 1993:
46–9; 2002: 40–2, 46). The shift in Sweden in 1952 from the
d’Hondt to a modified Sainte-Laguë proportional allocation
formula was intended to help out the new junior coalition
partner (Särlvik 2002: 247–9). The 1969 Swedish change was
part of a wider (p.109) constitutional reform package that was
negotiated over nearly two decades among the parties; as
Ruin (1988: 321) observed, ‘The Swedish version of
constitutional politics appeared as the interest politics of
political parties par excellence.’ The changes to the electoral
system created a national compensatory tier and a 4 per cent
party threshold, thereby increasing proportionality among the
parties that negotiated the deal while making it harder for any
new parties to enter (Särlvik 2002: 252–5). In the Netherlands,
an increase in the size of the lower chamber in 1956 from 100
to 150 members (designed to improve the functioning of the
legislature) had the side effect of reducing the threshold for a
party to win seats; though efforts were made to counter this
effect, they were not enacted (Daalder 1975: 229; Andeweg
2005: 497, 2009). The Italian reform of 1953 was highly
controversial, but again related only to the inter-party
dimension. In order to protect the power of the governing
coalition, it provided that any party or coalition winning an
absolute majority of the votes would automatically win almost
two thirds of the seats, but it left the open-list system
unaltered (for detailed discussion of this law, see Piretti 2003;
Quagliariello 2003; Renwick 2010: 113–17). The subsequent
Italian reform in essence repealed this so-called legge truffa,
or ‘swindle law’, again without affecting personalization. The
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West German reform of 1956 also left the intra-party

dimension untouched.
Of the twelve remaining reforms, three affected

personalization only as a side effect. Those in Denmark in
1953 and 1970 changed district magnitudes in ways that meet
our significance criteria, but in neither is there any evidence
that effects on personalization were even noticed (Elklit 1993:
49–50, 2002: 43–6). Similarly, the Norwegian reform of 1952
counts by our criteria as having reduced personalization
because it increased average district magnitudes in a context
of effectively closed lists. This move was, however, part of a
wider package of measures designed, as in Sweden at the
same time, to improve proportionality among the parties with
seats while also maintaining the barrier to entry for new
parties. We see no evidence that effects on personalization
were considered (Aardal 2002: 192–4).
The remaining cases deserve more careful attention: in each

of these cases, the reforms did directly affect the nature of the
preferences that voters could express among individual
candidates or the weight attached to these preferences in
determining who was elected. If the personalization of
electoral systems had any salience during this period, this
should be evident in the discourse surrounding these reforms.
France and Austria, 1946–51

As we saw in Chapter 5, France and Austria both began their
post-war democratic histories with closed-list proportional
electoral systems. In neither (p.110) country, however, did
this last long: a degree of list flexibility was introduced in
France in 1946 and in Austria in 1949. Both countries allowed
voters to rank candidates in order of preference. In Austria,
the final ordering was then determined using a Borda count
system: the top candidate in a list (as modified by the voter or
left in the order presented by the party) received as many
points as there were candidates on that list; with each step
lower on the list, the candidate received one point less;
candidates were then elected in order of the total points they
obtained. The French system was similar, but voters’
preferences were taken into account only if at least half of all
a list’s supporters had modified the order of names. France
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underwent a further reform in 1951, known primarily for its

drastic effects on the inter-party dimension. Two elements of
this reform affected different dimensions of personalization in
opposing directions: one reduced voters’ capacity to
differentiate their preferences, such that they could express
only support for, neutrality towards, or opposition to a
candidate; the other introduced panachage, such that voters
could express preferences across multiple party lists (see
Campbell 1958: 113–20 for full details).
In both countries, the degree of list flexibility introduced was,

in practice, minimal. In Austria, just one candidate was elected
in each of the 1949 and 1953 elections who would not have
been elected with closed lists; two candidates were thus
elected in 1956 (Müller 1983: 95). In France, no candidate was
elected because of list flexibility in 1946: no list was altered by
more than half its supporters; indeed, only one list in one
district was altered by more than a quarter of those who had
voted for it (Williams 1954: 315 n15). The introduction of
panachage in France in 1951 did affect the number of seats
won by the parties in a number of districts, but, again, in no
case did half of a list’s supporters modify their ballot papers
(Williams 1954: 444–5; Campbell 1958: 118).
Nevertheless, the introduction of the principle of list flexibility

is significant: indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, changes from
fully closed lists to more personalized arrangements have
been rare in recent decades. The origins of these reforms
therefore deserve to be understood.
Direct information on the Austrian reform is limited. We do

know, however, that it was subject to no significant public
debate. The 1945 law having been intended purely as an
interim provision, the grand coalition of the People’s Party and
the Social Democrats introduced draft legislation for a new
electoral law ahead of the 1949 elections. This initially
contained nothing on list flexibility, but such provision was
introduced at the committee stage by the People’s Party, who
subsequently voted it through (using their parliamentary
majority) against Social Democratic opposition. The only
argument that the Social Democrats offered against the
measure during the parliamentary debates was technical: that
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1945–1989
it would slow down the process of determining election

results. The People’s Party, meanwhile, appears to have done
little to explain why it thought the measure desirable (Müller
1983: 84–5, 2009).
(p.111) The dividing line in this debate mirrors that of the

interwar period, when the Social Democrats wanted to
maximize parliament’s freedom from the electorate between
elections, whereas their Christian Social rivals sought a more
direct popular voice. MacDonald reports, indeed, that
concerns had emerged by the mid-1920s that the closed-list
system unduly weakened the link between voters and their
representatives and excessively strengthened anonymous
party elites (MacDonald 1946: 51).
It appears that this reform, as expected, was dominated by the

parties, though the evidence available does not allow certainty
that others were not involved. It also fits the expectation that
such enthusiasm for greater personalization should be
stronger on the political right than the left. But why the
People’s Party introduced this measure—whether for partisan
gain or out of principled belief or for some other reason—is
not clear. It did, in its 1953 election manifesto, argue for
greater voter influence over candidate nomination and greater
use of referendums, and it said that political parties should
serve ‘the state and the general public’, not become ends in
themselves (ÖVP 1953). But we do not know whether such
thinking shaped its actions in 1949 as well.
In France, meanwhile, the three largest groups in the

Constituent Assembly elected through the closed-list
proportional representation (PR) system chosen by de Gaulle
in 1945 were the Communists, the Socialists, and the
Christian democratic Popular Republicans (MRP); there were
also Radicals and a rather disparate collection of
Conservatives. The Radicals advocated a return to the two-
round majoritarian system in single-member districts that had
been used for much of the Third Republic, while all others
with a significant voice in the Assembly favoured PR (Williams
1954: 315 n13). The three main parties united behind a
package that maintained closed lists. The constitution
proposed by the Assembly was, however, rejected by voters at
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1945–1989
a referendum; fresh elections were held and a second

Constituent Assembly created. This time, divisions among the
principal parties became more apparent, and the Socialists
pushed for panachage. The Communists and the MRP united
to defeat this; nevertheless, the limited element of preferential
voting within lists that we have described was adopted
(Williams 1954: 315). The Socialists would subsequently
secure panachage as part of the deeply contested reform
package of 1951 (Williams 1954: 317–23).
Aspects of the electoral system affecting personalization were

thus hotly contested in France during this period. All the
evidence suggests, however, that the positions adopted by the
parties reflected their own calculations of their seat-winning
potential under the various alternative systems, rather than
any wider considerations. The Radicals had been the dominant
party of the Third Republic. They were highly decentralized,
with locally popular candidates but a weak central
organization and ‘no common objective wider than electoral
success’ (Williams 1954: 318). The Communists and Socialists
were (p.112) comparatively centralized and ideological, while
the MRP, which had emerged from the Resistance movement,
had a strong collective image, but lacked well-known
personalities (Neumann 1951: 741). Thus, while the Radicals
favoured single-member districts that would focus attention on
individual candidates, the other parties favoured lists and a
concentration on collective identities. The position of the
Socialists was, however, less clear-cut than that of the
Communists or the MRP: ‘they were an old party, strong in
well-known personalities, and a decentralized party, with a
very high degree of internal freedom. From the beginning, a
large section wished to modify the rigidities of P.R. by
instituting panachage and the preferential vote’ (Williams
1954: 320). In 1951, their calculation that panachage would
bring them extra seats proved correct (Williams 1954: 323–4).
The struggle over electoral system personalization in France

during these years therefore had very little to do with the
rights of the voter or the relationship between the citizen and
democracy: it was, rather, part of the inter-party battle to
maximize seats and power. As expected, variation among the
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1945–1989
parties in the positions they adopted reflected differences in

their organizational structures; ideology, by contrast, was
subordinated to partisan calculation. Though France increased
personalization in 1946 and changed its form in 1951, this had
nothing to with the dynamics that we hypothesize emerged in
later decades.
Italy and Germany

The only change to the electoral system in the early years of
the Italian Republic that significantly affected personalization
was passed in 1948. This did two things. First, it increased by
one the number of preferences that voters could express: from
two to three in districts with up to fifteen seats and from three
to four in larger districts. Second, it changed the method of
allocating seats within the districts, such that more seats
would be allocated at district level and fewer would be
transferred to the national pool. Because seats in the national
pool were filled from closed lists, this change increased
personalization. And because the proportion of seats allocated
from the national pool changed by more than 5 percentage
points, we count the change as significant. As we noted at the
start of this section, further reform was enacted in 1953.
Though this was highly controversial, however, it had no
significant impact on personalization (it opened up national
lists, but the number of seats allocated from these lists had
already been pushed below our 5 per cent threshold by the
reform of 1948).
Unusually, the debates that generated the 1948 changes

focused almost entirely on the intra- rather than the inter-
party dimension of politics. At one end of the spectrum of
opinion, a Socialist proposal would have eliminated (p.113)
preference voting entirely. At the other end, Liberals and their

allies proposed a range of reforms intended to strengthen the
connection between voters and their representatives:
elimination of national seat pooling or the opening of the
national party lists; elimination of large districts; and an
increase in the number of preference votes (Bettinelli 1982:
348–9). Christian Democrats, meanwhile, were divided: while
some voted for the Liberals’ proposals, others opposed them.
One stressed the importance of organized political parties to
the functioning of mass democracy, and another, speaking in
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1945–1989
the Constituent Assembly in December 1947, quipped, ‘I

would prefer partitocrazia over
personalitocrazia’ (Bettinelli 1982: 348 and 361n).
In the end, those who favoured stronger preference voting got

their way on the number of preference votes. The outcome
regarding the national lists was a compromise: when the
proposal to eliminate national pooling was put to the vote, 198
Assembly deputies supported it and 198 opposed, meaning it
was not carried; instead, the weight of the national pool was
considerably reduced through the switch in electoral formula
(Bettinelli 1982: 349). A proposal to allocate national pool
seats according to preference votes, meanwhile, was rejected
by a margin of just five votes (Bettinelli 1982: 363n).
Electoral reform debates in Italy at this time thus differed

from the great majority of those analysed in this chapter:
debates around personalization, rather than proportionality,
were the dominant focus. As in 1919 and 1945–46, advocacy of
greater personalization came from the Liberals and their
allies, while Socialists and Communists took the opposing
view, and Christian Democrats were divided.
In West Germany, the electoral system was subject to intense

debate throughout the 1950s. The 1949 law was valid only for
that year’s elections. In both 1953 and 1956, the Christian
Democrats sought to replace it with substantially less
proportional rules by decoupling the proportional and
majoritarian components, thereby creating what would now be
called a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) or parallel
system. This position reflected the party’s electoral dominance
and consequent expectation that such a system would enhance
their power (e.g., Kreuzer 2004: 231–4)—indeed, the party’s
true wish was to go even further and eliminate PR entirely
(Pollock 1955: 79; Kitzinger 1960: 25). But they were rebuffed
on both occasions by the other parties: Kreuzer (2004: 231)
argues that they badly overplayed their hand in supposing
they could secure a system so clearly hostile to the interests of
the other parties.
The changes in fact enacted were much more limited. In 1953,

the one-vote form of mixed-member proportional
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1945–1989
representation (MMP) used in 1949 (where voters cast a

single ballot for both a district candidate and a Land list) was
replaced with a two-vote system: now voters, if they wished,
could vote for the candidate of one party and the list of
another. This increased voters’ freedom of choice and reduced
the scope of pooling. At the same time, (p.114) the share of
district seats was reduced from 60 per cent to 50 per cent of
the total, and the 5 per cent threshold that parties had to pass
in order to win list seats was transferred from the Land to the
national level. The 1956 reform, meanwhile, created
nationwide pooling of list votes, but we do not regard this
change as significantly affecting personalization, as districts
magnitudes were already well above our threshold of ten.
Of these various changes, the important one from the

personalization perspective was the introduction of two
separate votes. Some authors attribute the impetus behind
this to the Social Democrats (Kreuzer 2004: 233), others to the
Free Democrats (Pollock 1955: 80; Scarrow 2001: 65).
Whatever the source, however, there is universal agreement
that the intention was not to enhance voters’ freedom, but
rather to win partisan advantage. The Christian Democrats
were the largest party and had the greatest number of
incumbents; with a single ballot, they could therefore expect
to pick up votes from supporters of their district candidates
who would otherwise have voted for a different party. The
other parties made the opposite calculation, and the Free
Democrats in particular, as a small party, faced losing support
from those who perceived a vote cast for them in a single-
member district as wasted (see especially Bawn 1993: 976–86;
Kreuzer 2004: 233). Party seat-maximizing considerations
therefore dominated again, while considerations of
personalization or of ideology were absent.
Finland and Iceland

All five Scandinavian countries enacted electoral reforms
during the 1950s. As we saw at the start of this section, those
in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden either did not affect
personalization at all or affected it only incidentally, as a side
effect of changes designed to affect the competition among
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parties. Those in Finland and Iceland, by contrast, did affect

personalization more directly.
The Finnish reform of 1954 converted flexible into fully open

lists. The form of list PR that had been adopted in Finland in
1906 was unusual. A list could contain no more than three
names, but multiple lists could combine to form an ‘electoral
alliance’. Voters could support a list without alteration, or
change the order of names on a list, or submit their own list
(Törnudd 1968: 35–6). Reforms in 1933 reduced the maximum
number of names on a list to two and removed voters’ ability
to change the order of those names—a right that, according to
Törnudd (1968: 57), ‘had never had any practical significance’.
The system in place in 1945 therefore allowed voters to
determine the number of seats a party won overall and the
order in which seats were allocated to the party’s multiple
‘lists’, but not the complete ordering of all candidates: a party
could place a candidate it favoured on multiple lists alongside
popular candidates in order to promote his or her election
(p.115) (Törnudd 1968: 84). The 1954 reform reduced the
maximum number of candidates on a ‘list’ to one. As before,
voters voted by backing a list, but this now meant supporting a
single candidate. These votes entirely determined the order in
which candidates were elected.
This change involved no controversy. When the government

proposed it, ‘the only motivation given was that the same
principle had already been adopted for municipal elections
and that it would simplify balloting’ (Törnudd 1968: 57). The
parliamentary constitutional law committee had originated the
proposal, saying that the existing rules ‘can be misused so that
the candidacy of some widely supported person helps to elect
also such candidates who personally would not have had
sufficient support’ (quoted in Törnudd 1968: 57). Thus, ‘by
1954 the Parliament was familiar with the issue and well
disposed to it, so the proposal was adopted without
difficulty’ (Törnudd 1968: 57). Sundberg (2002: 75) offers a
similar interpretation, saying of the period since 1906 that ‘All
electoral reforms have been designed and implemented as
non-political technical modifications.’ It appears this can be
explained by the fact that the change had little practical
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effect: the vast majority of lists in fact already contained just

one name (Törnudd 1968: 107).
Again, therefore, we find no evidence here of a process

involving popular engagement or voters’ participation in the
political system. Nor, in this case, is there evidence of political
debate either. Though in principle significant—moving from a
flexible- to an open-list system—in practice this reform spelt
no great change and was treated as such at the time.
The 1959 reform in Iceland, by contrast, was far-reaching.

Over the preceding decades, the country had gradually moved
from a single-member plurality system towards one involving
greater proportionality. The system in place at the beginning
of the post-war period—introduced in 1942—comprised two
tiers. At the lower tier, twenty-one seats were allocated in
single-member districts by plurality, twelve in two-member
districts using PR, and eight in one further district (the city of
Reykjavík), again using PR. Eleven additional seats were
allocated in the upper, national tier in order to compensate for
disproportionalities at the lower tier. Wherever PR was used,
parties presented ranked lists and voters could change the
order of candidates within their preferred list as they wished.
The 1959 reform replaced this mixed system with a

straightforward system of two-tier list PR. The twenty-eight
lower-tier districts were merged into eight districts, most
electing five or six members, and that for Reykjavík twelve
members. The compensatory national tier contained eleven
seats as before. In addition, while the nature of the
preferences that voters could express remained unaltered, the
method of determining final list orderings was changed.
Whereas previously a Borda count system was used, as under
Austria‘s 1949 law, now the ballots as actually cast were used
to calculate only a third of the points allocated to each
candidate, whereas the parties’ (p.116) unaltered ballots
determined the remaining two thirds. As Helgason (2010a: 4)
notes, this effectively eliminated voters’ capacity to change
the order of any list and therefore reduced the personalization
of the system.
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1945–1989
Most debate around this reform focused on its effects upon

proportionality, which the reduction of malapportionment in
favour of rural areas increased (Hardarson 2002: 145–6). The
Progressives argued against the elimination of single-member
districts, saying that local representation and the connections
between voters and their representatives would be harmed
(Hardarson 2002: 146); to what extent they did so out of self-
interest (they were the principal beneficiaries of the
malapportionment) or because they were reflecting the
concerns of those whom they represented is a matter that can
only be speculated on. The case for more equitable inter-party
distribution of seats, in any case, won out.
What is most notable about this reform is that the intention of

reducing the weight of preference votes was made entirely
explicit by the reform’s supporters. Speaking during the
Second Reading debate on the Electoral Law Bill on 7 August
1959, for example, the rapporteur of the committee that had
scrutinized the bill, Jóhann Hafstein, said that all committee
members were agreed that the existing arrangements gave too
much weight to the crossing out of names on the ballot paper.
He described it as ‘very undemocratic’ that a small minority of
voters could change who was elected when the vast majority
had left the order of names unchanged (Althingi 1959). This
ignored both the fact that, under the old rules, the preferences
on unchanged ballots had the same weight as the preferences
on changed ballots and the reality that voters had only once
actually succeeded in altering final list order (Helgason 2006:
34n).
There was thus a deliberate intention in the 1959 Icelandic

reform to secure the parties’ power over who was elected.
While other aspects of the change were controversial, this
element sparked little comment.
France and Austria Again: 1958 and 1970

Two reforms before the mid-1970s remain. In 1958, as part of
the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic, France
moved from the list-based system of 1951 to a two-round
majoritarian system in single-member districts. We then find a
gap during the 1960s: no reforms with significant effects on
personalization took place anywhere in Europe in this decade.
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1945–1989
In 1970, however, Austria introduced a package of changes

that simultaneously increased district magnitudes, made list
order even harder to change than it was already, and replaced
voters’ right to rank all candidates with a single preference
vote. The French reform clearly increased personalization,
while that in Austria reduced it.
(p.117) The choice of electoral system in France in 1958—like

that in 1945—was, at first blush, surprising. With no one
willing to defend the status quo, three options were on the
table: the Communists favoured a proportional system; the
Socialists and those in the centre-left of politics advocated a
return to single-member majority elections in two rounds;
Gaullists and others on the right called for a multi-member
majoritarian system under which voters would choose among
party lists and the list with most votes would secure all the
seats in the district. As in 1945, the choice of system lay in the
hands of de Gaulle, who had himself given repeated support to
multi-member majoritarianism in the late 1940s (Goguel 1952:
37, 64; Debré 1974: 122–3). As in 1945, de Gaulle contradicted
his own previous position and confounded his closest
supporters, opting this time for two-round majority rule in
single-member districts (Williams and Harrison 1961: 101–3;
Renwick 2010: 98–9).
All of these positions appear to have been based on inter-party

calculation. The Gaullists hoped that a departmental
majoritarian system would allow them to all but sweep the
board. The Socialists feared that system for the same reason,
but hoped single-member districts would allow them to
capitalize on local pockets of strength and on the popularity of
their locally entrenched candidates (Williams and Harrison
1961: 102). The Communists based their appeal on collective
rather than individual identity and were isolated from the
alliances that might have allowed them to hold their own in a
majoritarian environment.
De Gaulle’s primary concern was similar, but his goal was not
to maximize his supporters’ seat share, but rather to rein them
in. According to Goldey and Williams (1983: 72), de Gaulle
‘had no wish to encumber himself with a Parliament full of
rigid diehards over the Algerian question, and hoped to
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1945–1989
balance them with Socialists and others, who would be critics

on some issues but might respond to his appeals over the most
crucial problem of all, thus giving him more freedom of
manoeuvre’ (see also Wahl 1959: 51).
The intra-party dimension mattered here for the most part

only for its effects upon inter-party competition: parties such
as the Communists, with a collective identity, favoured list
systems, while those such as the Socialists, with more
prominent individual candidates, preferred single-member
districts. It is likely that de Gaulle’s rejection of the list-based
majoritarian system was influenced partly by his long-standing
distaste for political parties (Frears 1977: 179; Laponce 1980:
375). But this had not dissuaded him from closed-list PR in
1945. The clinching factor in both cases appears to have been
the impact of the various options on relative party strengths.
There is no evidence of any consideration of public attitudes
towards politics at all.
As we explore in further detail in Chapter 7, by the time of the

Austrian reform of 1970, political discourse in a number of
countries had begun to raise concerns about the state of
democracy and suggest the need for personalization. Austria
was one such country. The People’s Party election manifesto of
(p.118) 1970 contained a substantial section on the
‘revivification and personalization of democracy’, urging ‘a

closer relationship between citizens and representatives’. Its
specific proposals included a reform to make it easier for
voters to modify party lists and ‘personalization of the
electoral law through the introduction of single-member
constituencies’ to fill half the seats (ÖVP 1970). The Social
Democrats’ 1970 manifesto included no such proposals, but in
1971 they called for several democratic reforms, including a
change to the electoral system that would bind representatives
more strongly to their districts while maintaining PR (SPÖ
1971).
Despite this context, Austria’s electoral system was

simultaneously depersonalized in three different ways: by
reducing voters’ capacity to rank all candidates on their
favoured list to a single preference vote; by making it harder
Page 16 of 38
1945–1989
for preference votes to change list order; and by increasing

district magnitude in what was close to a closed-list system.
Following the 1970 elections, the Social Democrats formed a

minority government. To govern effectively, they required the
support of the Freedom Party, whose price was reform of the
electoral system (Barker 1973: 261). The old system, though
broadly proportional, used relatively small districts and
therefore significantly favoured larger parties: in the 1970
election, while the People’s Party won a seat for every 26,304
votes cast for it and the Social Democrats won one seat for
every 27,604 votes, the Freedom Party needed 50,873 votes
for each of its seats (Bundesministerium für Inneres 1970: 38,
42). The introduction of larger districts would reduce this
imbalance. The Social Democrats were favourable to such
reform too: seats were apportioned to districts by total
population (including children); with small districts, this
favoured rural areas, where families were typically larger; but
with larger districts, rural and urban areas would be
combined, thereby neutralizing the effect; the Social
Democrats, as a predominantly urban party, would therefore
gain relative to the People’s Party (Stadler 1971: 292; Müller
2003: 227).
The districting changes were thus motivated by calculations of

inter-party advantage: their effects on personalization appear
to have been incidental. But that does not explain the changes
to the preference voting system. In fact, none of the available
accounts of this reform give any explanation of these latter
changes.
A plausible explanation emerges, however, if we look at the

rules in detail. Under the old Borda count form of preference
voting, the increase in district magnitude (the weighted mean
rose from 7.4 to 28.5) would, other things being equal, have
made it much easier for preference votes to change the
ordering of candidates. It is reasonable to surmise that the
shift to a single preference vote and a threshold mechanism
for determining final list order was designed to neutralize this
effect. It may be that the fact it did more than neutralize the
effect and actually reduced personalization was not
understood, (p.119) or it may be the parties sought to take
Page 17 of 38
1945–1989
advantage of the situation to extract further advantage for

themselves.
Thus, while the 1970 Austrian reform was markedly

depersonalizing in its effect, the impetus behind it came from
inter-party competition. At least some of the depersonalizing
effect—that relating to district magnitude—was a side effect of
the jockeying for inter-party advantage. It is possible that the
overall depersonalizing effect was accidental, though this is
unclear. What can be said confidently, however, is that the
reduction in personalization was not at the time the subject of
much debate. It was not until the 1980s that the issue began
to rise up the political agenda.
Electoral Reforms from the 1940s to the 1970s: Conclusions

The hypotheses that we stated at the start of this chapter can
be assessed through the evidence in this section: first, that the
power calculations of political parties and their leading
members should have dominated electoral reform processes;
second, that those calculations should have focused on the
inter-party dimension even when reforms affected the intra-
party dimension too; third, that, where intra-party
considerations came into play, these should have focused on
the parties’ not the voters’ interests; and, fourth, that
variation among parties’ positions should have been shaped by
party organizational forms and ideologies.
The evidence gives overwhelming support to the first and

second hypotheses. We identified twenty electoral reforms in
the old democracies between 1945 and 1979, twelve of which
had some effect on personalization. In none of these did we
identify any significant role for non-partisan actors. Intra-party
considerations were unsurprisingly absent from the eight
reforms that had no effects on personalization. More notably,
such considerations were also absent from at least half the
cases that did affect personalization: in Denmark in 1953 and
1970 and Norway in 1952, those impacts were unnoticed side
effects; in France in 1946 and 1951 and Germany in 1953,
parties deliberately manipulated intra-party mechanisms to
skew the inter-party distribution of seats. In several other
cases, such as Austria in 1949 and 1970, evidence is
insufficient to allow us to say whether personalizing or
Page 18 of 38
1945–1989
depersonalizing effects were intended or not. This is

frustrating, though the very absence of evidence is itself an
indicator of the low salience of personalization issues during
this period. In France in 1958, personalization considerations
were present, but had limited impact.
Turning to the third hypothesis, only in three cases does the

evidence point clearly to any deliberate attempt to alter the
personalization of the system. In Italy in 1948, politicians
presented competing views on the intra-party dimension, and
those who favoured greater personalization marginally won
out. In (p.120) Finland in 1954, the remaining limit on list
openness was seen as anomalous—though it was also so
marginal that the reform was treated essentially as technical.
In Iceland in 1959, a reduction in voters’ ability to influence
list order was explicitly sought. The Icelandic case thus fits
our hypothesis while the Italian and Finnish cases tend to go
against it. But the bigger conclusion is that thoughts of
personalization were all but absent in the great majority of
episodes of electoral reform in Europe before 1980.
With regard, finally, to the fourth hypothesis, there was no

perceptible variation among party positions in Finland or
Iceland. In the three French reforms and in Germany, such
variation clearly mirrored differences among the parties in
their organizational structures and the prominence of their
individual candidates, while ideology appears not to have been
relevant. In Austria in 1949 and Italy in 1948, party positions
did map on to ideology in the expected way, but this may be,
at least in part, because ideology had shaped the evolution of
the parties’ organizational forms over time. We therefore see
little clear evidence that ideology mattered. Rather, the
conclusion that again rings through is that party interest,
rather than either ideology or popular opinion, dominated the
outcomes.
6.2 Discourses of Non-Reform

As we indicated at the beginning of the chapter, a focus only
on cases of actual reform does not, in itself, create a selection
bias for our purposes. We are primarily interested not in
understanding why reform does or does not happen in a given
Page 19 of 38
1945–1989
time and place, but in understanding the background of

thinking about electoral systems and politics more broadly
that underpins broad trends in the electoral systems that are
chosen. Instances of electoral reform offer windows into that
thinking because they cause the issue to be talked about. They
allow us to view arguments on all sides of the debate from a
wide range of actors in relation to a wide range of electoral
systems, and there is no reason to expect this body of evidence
to be skewed in any particular direction.
Nevertheless, an exclusive focus on cases of reform would be

restrictive for two more limited reasons. First, those cases do
not cover the full range of electoral systems, for all have
occurred in countries with list-based voting systems.
Discourse in countries without such systems is therefore
missing. Second, the nature of the evidence that we can
garner from actual reforms is necessarily episodic: it does not
allow us to measure evolving patterns in electoral reform
discourse over continuous time.
In this section, we therefore supplement our analysis of

reforms by looking more deeply at two of the five countries
that experienced no reform between (p.121) 1945 and the
1970s: Ireland and the UK. Both countries belong to the
category of countries with no experience of list-based voting
(though the UK has introduced list-based systems
subsequently for elections to the European Parliament and
devolved assemblies). Our evidence from Ireland is again
episodic, focusing on the two most visible cases of non-reform
to have occurred anywhere in Europe in the period covered by
this chapter. Our UK evidence, by contrast, draws on a broad
survey of discourse over time. These two cases thus usefully
supplement the evidence we have already analysed.
Ireland
Though Ireland has experienced no electoral reform in the
post-war era that counts as significant by our criteria, it also
holds the distinction of being the only country in our sample to
have held a referendum between 1945 and 1989 on changes to
its national electoral system (Renwick 2009: 379). Indeed, it
held two such referendums: in 1959 and 1968. These allow us
to analyse the discourse surrounding electoral reform in a
Page 20 of 38
1945–1989
country using the most personalized electoral system of all:

the single transferable vote (STV).
Both referendums were called by Fianna Fáil governments.

Both of those governments held slender majorities in the
legislature. On both occasions, Fianna Fáil proposed a switch
to single-member plurality. And in both cases, the principal
argument for reform put by the government was that it would
increase the likelihood of single-party majorities, which would
promote strong and accountable government. Coakley, for
example, says baldly that Fianna Fáil called the 1959
referendum ‘in an effort to ensure stable government
majorities in the future’ (Coakley 1981: 13). Garret FitzGerald,
before entering politics, provided a detailed account of the
lengthy parliamentary debates that preceded the first
referendum. He summed up the central case that government
spokesmen put for the change:
In favour of the Government’s proposal it is argued that

the P.R. system has not worked out well in Ireland, and
that it has been responsible for the emergence of a
multiplicity of parties, leading in turn to Coalition
Government, which, it is said, has proved ineffective. It
is said that the proposed system will tend to force the
present opposition parties to unite, thus eventually
leading to a two-party system, which would ensure
effective government. Finally, it is stated that the
proposed system has shown itself in other countries to
have been most successful in building up democratic
institutions, while P.R. has tended to undermine them.
(FitzGerald 1959: 2)
Of the other parties with a significant presence in the

legislature at the time, Labour—which, with 9.1 per cent of the
vote in the preceding general election, would clearly have
suffered under plurality rule—immediately condemned the
(p.122) proposals (O’Leary 1979: 48). But Fine Gael took
longer to decide its position. As O’Leary (1979: 48) puts it,
‘The possibility that an electoral reform would ultimately help
the party to become the only alternative government, instead
of the leading partner in coalitions, must have occurred to the
Fine Gael deputies.’ Nevertheless, Fine Gael feared it would,
Page 21 of 38
1945–1989
in the short term, suffer seat losses under plurality, and it

therefore (with reluctance from some leading members)
opposed the move (O’Leary 1979: 49).
FitzGerald (1959: 6–7) sums up the case that the opposition

put for retaining the existing system:
The main argument against the Bill took the following

form. P.R. is fair, and democratic, because it ensures the
representation of all political views, including those of
minorities, in the Dáil. The new system would destroy
the Opposition, or, alternatively, would involve more
bargaining than at present, in the form of electoral pacts
which might well deprive the people of their present
opportunity to choose a one-party Government from the
ranks of the Opposition should they wish to do so.
Governments elected under the proposed system would
in many cases be minority Governments, and even where
they were not, they would appear to be in a minority,
thus weakening their moral position. By keeping new
groups, such as Sinn Féin, out of the Dáil,
unconstitutional opposition to the Government would be
encouraged.
What is notable about these summaries of the key arguments

on both sides is that they focus entirely on the inter-party
dimension of the electoral system: on its effects upon the
number of parties, the stability of government, and the
character of the party system. They make no mention at all of
intra-party matters. Indeed, O’Leary, in his detailed accounts
of both referendums, makes no mention of any arguments
other than these (O’Leary 1979: 46–58, 66–70), and the same
applies to a recent overview by Marsh (2013: 19–20). It is
clear that these were the considerations uppermost in the
minds of the politicians who led the debate.
Nevertheless, FitzGerald does identify a range of subsidiary

arguments that also received an airing during parliamentary
scrutiny, and some of these were relevant to personalization.
Supporters of the reform argued that the introduction of
single-member districts would encourage deputies to see
themselves as representatives of their whole electorate, not
Page 22 of 38
1945–1989
just a partisan constituency within it, and that partisan voting

under STV allowed some deputies to secure election without
personal effort; they also said that the change would reduce
‘friction between Deputies in the same constituency’, which
the prime minister, Éamon de Valera, said was ‘very
disedifying and tend[ed] to bring democratic representation
into disrepute’ (FitzGerald 1959: 11–12). The opposition
responded that the proposed system ‘would deprive the
electorate of the choice of candidates which they at present
enjoy: those (p.123) who support each Party will under this
system have no choice but to vote for the candidate nominated
by the Party, or else forsake their party allegiance, whereas at
present they are usually offered a choice of
candidates’ (FitzGerald 1959: 12).
Similarly, a cross-party Committee on the Constitution,

consisting of parliamentarians from the three main parties,
was established in 1966 to review the constitution as a whole.
In its 1967 report, the committee was unable to offer
consensual recommendations on the electoral system and
therefore simply listed the arguments on either side of the
debate. On both sides, arguments relating to the number of
parties, stability of government, and desirability of
proportionality in representation dominated, but on both sides
a number of points were made too that pertained to the intra-
party dimension. In favour of change, it was said that single-
member districts ‘would permit of a more direct connection
between individual Deputies and the people whom they
represent’ and ‘eliminate certain forms of undesirable
competition between Deputies, including Deputies of the same
party, which are a feature of the present system’. It was also
suggested that, by reducing the area and the population
covered by each deputy, reform would reduce their local
workload, thereby allowing them ‘to devote more time to
important Parliamentary business in the Dáil’ (Committee on
the Constitution 1967: 23–4). Supporters of the status quo
countered that the existing system provided ‘for the
supporters of a particular party a choice of candidates from
their own party, whereas under the Alternative Vote no such
choice may be available’, and allowed most citizens to take
Page 23 of 38
1945–1989
their concerns to a representative from their own party if they

preferred (Committee on the Constitution 1967: 26).
Non-party voices were audible during the referendum

campaigns too. O’Leary (1979: 57) notes the spirited
involvement of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, while
Coakley (1981: 14–15) observes that a range of international
experts—including David Butler, Enid Lakeman, and
Ferdinand Hermens—were drafted in by the competing sides.
Nevertheless, O’Leary emphasizes that the debates centred
upon the parties: ‘Miss Lakeman’s campaign’, he points out,
‘was the first evidence of public interest in the electoral
problem’ (O’Leary 1979: 57). Coakley (1981: 22–3) shows that,
compared with other Irish referendums, those of 1959 and
1968 were notable for their high levels of partisan voting.
These were therefore debates in which partisan voices were

loudest and partisan arguments dominated. There was also
some consciousness of potential effects of the proposed
change relating to the choice available to voters and the
behaviour of individual deputies. But these additional
considerations did not determine the parties’ positions and
nothing in the literature suggests they had much impact on
the public vote. Lakeman, in her account of the 1968
referendum, suggests they may have led some government
backbenchers to be less than active in their support for a Yes
vote (Lakeman 1968: 173). But (p.124) even these politicians
were responding to how the system would affect their own
power, not public opinion. Furthermore, voices welcoming
intra-party choice were balanced by those who decried its
corrosive effects.
The discourse in Ireland thus conforms to the pattern that

electoral reform debates in this period were dominated by
parties and their calculations of inter-party advantage.
Personalization was an issue that attracted little attention. The
same pattern therefore holds whether the status quo was the
virtually closed-list systems in Austria, France, and much of
Scandinavia, the flexible- or open-list systems in Finland, Italy,
and elsewhere, the mixed system in Germany, or the STV
system used in Ireland.
Page 24 of 38
1945–1989
United Kingdom
The episodic analysis that we have presented so far, because it
focuses on particular points in time, can be completed quickly,
allowing evidence to be gathered from a wide range of cases.
Non-episodic evidence, looking at patterns of discourse over
an extended period of time, allows us to map those patterns
more accurately, but is also a great deal more demanding of
resources. We therefore offer such evidence from a single
case: that of the United Kingdom. This section draws on Alan
Renwick’s ongoing research into the evolution of debates
about political reform in the UK since 1945.1
Specifically, we look at discourse surrounding electoral reform

in two newspapers—the Guardian (published six days a week)
and the Observer (published on Sundays)—between 1945 and
1975. We developed a search string, which we used to capture
all articles in these newspapers relating to any aspect of the
electoral system. Applying this to the Guardian/Observer
ProQuest database yielded 2256 articles. We filtered these for
relevance, excluding all those that focused entirely on
electoral reforms in other countries. This yielded a sample of
1192 articles, which we have coded in detail.
Figure 6.1 shows the total number of articles mentioning any

form of electoral reform in the UK during the period. As is
apparent, the saliency of this issue ebbed and flowed over the
years, though the rise in discussion in 1974—which followed
the inconclusive election of February that year—would turn
out to be enduring. But this figure includes all aspects of the
electoral system—including the franchise, proportionality, and
a range of other issues—and therefore does not yet allow us to
say anything about personalization.
The best way to focus on debates about personalization is not

to home in on discussions of particular aspects of the electoral
system: as we saw in (p.125)
Page 25 of 38
1945–1989
Chapter 2,
many aspects
of the electoral
system can
affect
Figure 6.1 Number of Newspaper

Articles Relating to Electoral Reform in
the UK, 1945–75
Note: See text for sample details.
Source:
Taken from Alan Renwick’s ongoing

research funded by Nuffield Foundation
grant OPD/38736 on ‘Political Reform in
the UK: The Evolution of Debate’.
personalization; but these may also affect—and therefore be

discussed in relation to—other desiderata, such as proportionality,
as well. It is better, rather, to look at the sorts of arguments that
actors use when they argue for or against particular reforms or
non-reforms. Figure 6.2 provides such evidence, differentiating
among the commonest reasons adduced for or against any given
proposition about the electoral system across the period.
The categories of values coloured grey in Figure 6.2 relate
clearly to proportionality and the inter-party dimension of
politics. Statements directly relating to proportionality are by
far the most common. The ‘adversary politics thesis’ embodies
the idea (which became highly salient during the 1970s, but
which surfaced in a variety of forms at other times too) that
the prevailing electoral system encouraged unhealthily
adversarial competition between two competing political
blocs. Other categories concern the benefits or costs of single-
party government and the notion that governments should be
elected on the basis of an absolute majority of the votes cast
across the country. The categories that are coloured in black
in Figure 6.2, meanwhile, relate more closely to the matters
that are of interest to us here. The bottom two categories—
Page 26 of 38
1945–1989
concerning the degree to which voters can choose among

candidates and the strength of political parties—relate directly
to the personalization of the electoral system. Statements
relating to public confidence or (p.126)
participation in
politics are
more general,
but they
typically
involve worries
that the
prevailing
electoral
institutions are
Figure 6.2 Values Evoked in UK Electoral
harming the
Reform Debates, 1945–75
link between
voters and the
Note: Number of statements
political adducing values in support of or
system. The opposition to positions regarding
category electoral reform, the Guardian and
relating to the Observer, 1945–75.
voter power,
finally, is more
ambiguous.
Statements
here focus on
the degree to which voters can influence electoral outcomes. They
are often non-specific and could refer equally to influence over
which parties or which candidates are elected.
The predominance of the inter- over the intra-party dimension
is clear: across the period as a whole, 597 statements focus on
the former and only 122 on either the latter or voters’
engagement with politics. If we add in statements from less
frequent categories that are not included in Figure 6.2, we
find that 656 relate in some way to the inter-party dimension,
147 to the intra-party dimension, and 65 to public confidence
and participation in politics or public attitudes towards
reform.
Figure 6.3 shows how the frequency of statements in these

three broad categories changes over time. The predominance
of the inter-party category is evident throughout the period.
Indeed, while the total number of statements rises markedly in
Page 27 of 38
1945–1989
the mid-1970s, the relative frequencies of these categories

show little discernible pattern over time; if anything, the
relative frequency of the intra-party dimension declines.
This evidence fits our findings for other European countries

during this period: the inter-party dimension dominates.
Furthermore, our coding also shows the dominance of
politicians in these debates: as Figure 6.4 shows, statements
by politicians dwarfed those by all other actors. Thus, whether
the evidence we look at is episodic or not, the conclusions that
we reach are the same. (p.127)
Figure 6.3 Values Evoked in UK Electoral

Reform Debates, 1945–75, by Year
Note: Number of statements
adducing values in support of or
opposition to positions regarding
electoral reform, the Guardian and
the Observer, 1945–75.
Page 28 of 38
1945–1989
6.3
(p.128)
Stirrings
of Change?
1977–89
The 1960s
and early
1970s
comprised, as Figure 6.4 Actors in Electoral Reform
we have seen, Debates in the UK, 1945–75
a period of Note: Frequency of instances in
exceptional which actors of different types are
quiescence in mentioned as making statements
the world of relating to the electoral system, the
electoral Guardian and the Observer, 1945–75.
reform. As the
1980s began
to heave into
view,
however, this started to change. While we record only four
electoral reforms of any significance between 1960 and 1976,
we find eleven between 1977 and the first half of 1989 (see
Table 3.2 on pp. 45–6). Among these reforms, those that
extended personalization outnumbered those that limited it.
Furthermore, widespread disengagement from traditional
political parties had begun. These observations might suggest
that the reform wave that clearly emerged from 1989 onwards
had begun to stir.
But we should not draw such a conclusion too quickly. Three

of the eleven reforms during this period—in Greece in 1977,
Germany in 1985, and Iceland in 1987—were rather technical
adjustments with significant effects only on proportionality.
Much of the uplift in activity was due to just one country—
Greece—which joined our sample only in 1974, but which
continued its long-standing pattern of almost constant
electoral reform (Vegleris 1981: 29). Cyprus and France also
contributed two reforms apiece. Most importantly, as the
following paragraphs show, we find no evidence that the
mechanisms that we posit to hold after 1989 underpinned any
Page 29 of 38
1945–1989
of these reform cases. In fact, despite the rise in reform

activity, we continue during this period to see the
predominance of elite power calculations in shaping outcomes.
Public opinion did have a role to play in a small number of
cases. But anti-party sentiment did not.
This section covers the reform processes in Greece, Cyprus,

and France. We postpone discussion of the Maltese case to
Chapter 8, as the reform of 1987 was the first step in a
process that continued over the following twenty years. Nor do
we examine the three reforms identified in the preceding
paragraph as affecting only the inter-party dimension.
Greece
Greece returned to democracy in 1974, after seven years of
dictatorship, with a ‘reinforced’ system of PR that heavily
favoured the larger parties. On the intra-party dimension, the
system was one of almost fully open lists: in the contest for
regular seats, only party leaders and former prime ministers
were protected, being automatically awarded as many
preferences as their party received votes in their district; in
addition, twelve ‘state deputies’ (in a legislature of 300
members) were elected from closed lists.
This system was subject to three changes during the 1980s.

The reform of 1981 was small: the number of candidates that
parties could run on their lists was increased, and the change
was just sufficient to meet our 20 per cent (p.129) threshold
for a significant increase in the level of intra-party choice (the
weighted mean number of candidates a party could run rose,
specifically, by 20.15 per cent). Much more important were
the reforms of 1985 and 1989. The 1985 reform package
simultaneously increased the overrepresentation of the largest
party and reduced the underrepresentation of the small
parties. Crucially for our purposes, it also eliminated
preference voting, replacing almost fully open lists with
entirely closed lists. The 1989 reforms reinstated preference
voting—largely restoring the system that had existed before
1985—and replaced reinforced with relatively pure PR.
We will concentrate our attention here on the two major

reforms of 1985 and 1989. Both measures were introduced by
Page 30 of 38
1945–1989
governments of Greece’s socialist party, the Panhellenic

Socialist Movement (PASOK). Throughout the years from its
foundation in 1974 until its election to government in 1981,
PASOK had propounded two policies relating to the electoral
system. First, it supported the replacement of reinforced PR—
which the right had used for decades in one form or another to
exclude the left from power—with straightforward PR (Kariotis
1992: 17–18). Second, it opposed the system of clientelism
that ‘substituted the trading of favours [rousfeti] and behind-
the-scenes intrigues [to paraskinio] for principles,
programmes and structures’ (PASOK’s founding ‘Declaration
of 3 September 1974’, as quoted in Clogg 1987: 129). In the
party’s 1981 election manifesto, this translated into a
commitment to scrap preference voting in order to raise ‘the
level of the political struggle and of parliamentary life’ (quoted
in Clogg 1987: 198).
PASOK thus presented the abolition of preference voting as a

popular move that would help challenge the corrupt practices
of a self-serving political elite. As several analysts observed,
this fitted into a broader populist rhetoric and political style
spearheaded by the party’s charismatic founder and leader,
Andreas Papandreou (e.g., Elephantis 1981; Mavrogordatos
1983: 49–50). It appears, therefore, that public opinion could,
in Greece at this time, be stirred against preference voting.
Nevertheless, it is also notable that the abolition of preference

voting neatly served the interests of the PASOK leadership.
The party was dominated by its leader: in the words of
Elephantis at the time, ‘PASOK is Andreas
Papandreou’ (Elephantis 1981: 107). Abolition of preference
voting removed the independent power base that some
deputies might have had and thus strengthened Papandreou’s
control (Clogg 1987: 144). It allowed him to replace
traditional, local clientelism with national machine politics
(Mavrogordatos 1997). The importance of elite interest in the
change is underlined by the fact that, during its first term,
when it was riding high and confident of re-election, PASOK
made no move towards fulfilling its pledge on PR.
The interest-based calculations of the PASOK leadership

determined the further reform of 1989 too. This time, PASOK
Page 31 of 38
1945–1989
knew it was heading for (p.130) electoral defeat, and so it

opted for a proportional system that would minimize its losses
and prevent majority victory for its New Democracy (ND)
opponents (Kariotis 1992: 18; Kazamias and Papadimitriou
2002: 650 n1; Foundethakis 2003: 87). The reasoning behind
the restoration of preference voting is less intuitively obvious
and has been subject to less scholarly analysis. Trantas and
colleagues (2003: 383–4 n16) do, however, offer an
interpretation. Noting that the previous abolition of
preference voting was motivated by PASOK’s desire for
greater party discipline, they say:
However, the effort was not very successful because MPs

that fell out with the leader had nothing to lose,
especially at the end of a legislative period, by coming
out openly against the party leadership. The measure
seems to have been more useful to the opposition ND
leader, Kostas Mitsotakis, than to Papandreou, since
Mitsotakis used it to get rid of some old party barons and
entrench his position as leader.
The Greek electoral reforms of the 1980s were thus dominated

by elite power interests. Public opinion did play a part: the
fact that the abolition of preference voting could be presented
as serving the interests of ordinary people made it easier to
pursue. Ultimately, however, the PASOK leadership adopted
the reforms that it calculated would advance its cause—and it
did not mind that this meant moving in contrary directions at
different times.
Cyprus
Cyprus experienced two significant electoral reforms, in 1979
and 1985. The country began its independent history with the
multi-member plurality (or block vote) system inherited from
the British: voters could vote for as many candidates as there
were seats available in their district; the candidates with most
votes were declared elected until all the seats were filled. This
was replaced in 1979 with a proportional system modelled
closely on that used at the time in Greece: low district
magnitudes and high thresholds were used to exclude small
parties (though the system was not as ‘reinforced’ as in the
Greek case); party lists were fully open, except that party
Page 32 of 38
1945–1989
leaders were automatically granted as many preferences as

their party won votes. As elaborated in the appendix to
Chapter 2, we treat this as a reform that had a neutral overall
effect on personalization: it introduced vote pooling and
stopped voters from supporting candidates across multiple
parties; but it also gave partisan voters a genuine degree of
intra-party choice for the first time. The 1985 reform was
more limited: district magnitudes and the number of
preference votes were increased; in the context of virtually
open lists, we treat the combination of these changes as
slightly increasing personalization.
(p.131) The motivations for the 1979 reform lay in the inter-
party dimension. The death in 1977 of Archbishop Makarios—
who had led Cyprus to independence in 1960 and served since
then as its president—destabilized the existing party system;
the political elite therefore wanted an electoral system that
would avoid the unpredictability of multi-member plurality,
ensuring that their own parties would win seats while new
rivals would be excluded (Christophorou 2009: 91).
In the context of a shift from multi-member plurality to PR, the

system that would have done most to preserve voters’ existing
freedom of choice among candidates would have included not
just preference voting within lists, but also panachage across
lists. We might attribute the absence of panachage in the
system chosen simply to ignorance: as just noted, the
preference voting system adopted was identical to the one
used in Greece, suggesting a limited search for options. In
fact, however, while ignorance may have played a part, there
was also strong pressure within the political elite to restrict
preference voting. When the responsible parliamentary
committee reported in July 1979 in favour of preference
voting, the members from the Communist (AKEL) and Social
Democratic (EDEK) parties dissented, arguing that preference
voting would weaken parties and turn politics from
programmes to personalities (Cypriot House of
Representatives 1979: 1926, 1929, 1937–9). During
subsequent discussion of amendments in 1980, at least one
member of the centrist Democratic Party (DIKO) adopted a
Page 33 of 38
1945–1989
similar stance (Cypriot House of Representatives 1980: 425).

All of these voices advocated fully closed lists.
We see, therefore, that it was still credible at this time,

particularly for parties on the left, to argue for the limitation
of voters’ existing electoral rights in order to protect the
primacy of parties within the political system. That is a far cry
from the environment that we find dominant in the 1990s and
later.
In 1985, though the reform was mildly personalizing, the

debate again focused on whether preference voting should be
ended. This time, the centrist DIKO joined the social
democratic EDEK in supporting abolition, while the
communist AKEL, though continuing to argue in principle for
abolition, said that this was not the time; the centre-right
Democratic Rally (DISY) said little more than that such a
reform so late in the electoral cycle might lead to
postponement of the elections (Cypriot House of
Representatives 1985). Without a clear majority for such
change, however, the status quo was, in essence, retained,
while increasing the size of the legislature and therefore
district magnitudes. The increase in the number of preference
votes, for the most part, simply preserved the existing ratio to
district magnitude.
Quite why the parties lined up as they did in 1985 is not clear.
What we can again confidently observe, however, is the
absence of the pressures towards personalization that would
rise in prominence—in Cyprus as well as elsewhere—in the
1990s.
(p.132) France
In 1985, France’s Socialist government replaced the single-
member majority system that had been chosen by de Gaulle in
1958 with a closed-list proportional system. In 1986, the newly
elected centre-right government reversed this move, restoring
the previous system in almost all respects. These reforms have
received an unusual amount of attention in the literature. All
authors agree that the Socialists under President François
Mitterrand, faced with certain defeat in the coming elections,
were hoping in 1985 to minimize their losses and prevent their
Page 34 of 38
1945–1989
rivals from securing a stable parliamentary majority (Frears

1986: 490; Knapp 1987: 92; Cole and Campbell 1989: 136;
Criddle 1992: 111; Tiersky 2000: 265; Alexander 2004: 214).
The centre-right was equally self-serving in reversing the
change a year later: its leader, Jacques Chirac, hoped to win
the presidential election in 1988 and then to dissolve the
National Assembly and secure a comfortable governing
majority (Cole and Campbell 1989: 142).
Yet the existing literature very largely ignores the question of

why the Socialists chose the most depersonalized form of PR—
the closed-list version—as the new system. Except in 1945 and
the first election of 1946, French voters had always been able
to select among individual candidates. Furthermore, though
we might suppose that the Socialists, as a party of the left,
would favour depersonalization, in fact their electoral system
preferences had long run counter to this. As we saw in Section
6.1, mildly personalizing reforms were introduced in 1946 and
1951 at the Socialists’ behest. In the 1950s, the Socialists—
including Mitterrand himself—had favoured the
personalization of single-member districts (Williams and
Harrison 1961: 102). By the early 1970s, the party had
switched to support for PR, but the system it advocated was
MMP, designed to preserve the principle of ‘scrutin
individuel’ (PS 1972: 101).
During the debates of 1985, attention focused overwhelmingly

on proportionality. The centre-right parties argued that PR
itself would destroy the strong government that was the
hallmark of the Fifth Republic and that it would weaken
democracy by depriving voters of the ability directly to choose
the government (see, for example, the speech by Jacques
Toubon on behalf of the Gaullist party during the first detailed
discussion of the matter in the National Assembly: Assemblée
Nationale 1985: 350–3). The government’s opponents thus
paid little attention to the details of the particular PR system
on the table.
Nevertheless, the government and its supporters did offer

some justification for the choice of closed lists. The defence
offered by the responsible minister, Pierre Joxe, was limited:
he argued that open lists would ‘permit all sorts of
Page 35 of 38
1945–1989
manoeuvres’, while merely flexible lists would have limited

practical effect and would therefore forsake simplicity without
commensurate gain (p.133) (Assemblée Nationale 1985: 349).
Gilbert Bonnemaison, rapporteur of the responsible Assembly
committee went further, arguing that closed lists in small,
departmental districts offered an appropriate balance between
the single-member districts of the status quo and the large
districts and nationwide pooling of remainders that had been
proposed by the Communists (Assemblée Nationale 1985:
343).
There is little in the way of clear principle in these

justifications and little, therefore, to discourage the
interpretation that the Socialist leadership simply wanted the
system that would maximize its control. As Frears (1988: 214–
15) observes, the party leaderships had long been able to
parachute favoured candidates into safe seats under the
majoritarian system, so closed lists only maintained the power
they held already. Mitterrand had repeatedly argued that
electoral systems should be chosen according to circumstance,
not fixed principle (Favier and Martin-Roland 1991: 307). He
correctly calculated that the French public, long accustomed
to seeing the electoral system used as a tool in the political
game, would not punish him at the ballot box for manipulating
the rules—including the rules affecting the intra-party
dimension—to his own advantage.
Summing Up the 1980s

Although we might have expected the 1980s to have been a
period of emerging change, the evidence from processes of
actual reform suggests that, in fact, they were not. Parties
continued to dominate reform processes, while references to
public opinion were virtually absent. The only partial
exception to this was in Greece, where, in 1981, the Socialists
had pledged an end to preference voting as part of their anti-
clientelism campaign. The evidence suggests, however, that
there was little link between public opinion and the party’s
decision to enact that change in 1985. The inter-party
dimension continued to dominate discussions—particularly in
France, where the adoption specifically of closed lists was
barely mentioned. Most notably, though the intra-party
dimension was considered to some degree, politicians in all
Page 36 of 38
1945–1989
three countries that experienced relevant reforms felt

comfortable in arguing that a freedom for voters to choose
among candidates was more harmful than beneficial. Finally,
party interests continued to take precedence over ideology:
though socialist parties introduced closed-list systems in both
Greece and France and argued for them in 1979 in Cyprus,
these same parties’ positions showed remarkable
inconsistency over time as their interests evolved. It therefore
appears that electoral reform in the 1980s took the form of
‘business as usual’.
Still, we have looked here only at cases of actual reform in the

1980s. We noted in Section 6.1 that the discourse—though not
the practice—of electoral (p.134) reform in Austria came to
emphasize the value of personalization as early as 1970. As we
will show in Chapters 7 and 8, similar arguments emerged
over the same period in a number of other countries too. Our
conclusion will be that the tide of electoral reform debate had
indeed begun to change before 1989, but that this took time to
manifest itself in actual legal change. But this will best be
examined in the context of our analysis of the reform wave
that began in the Netherlands in September 1989.
6.4 Conclusions
This chapter has examined evidence relating to one half of the
proposition that the politics of electoral reform changed
around 1989: it has analysed the nature of electoral reform
processes before that posited change occurred. The evidence
strongly supports the conclusion that, indeed, electoral
reforms over the first four decades following the Second
World War were dominated by political parties and by the
interests of those parties and their leaders. Public opinion was
virtually absent from consideration. The intra-party dimension
was only rarely a major focus of reform discussions. Even
where that dimension was explicitly considered, prominent
voices were as likely to argue that voters’ capacity to choose
among individual candidates should be limited as that it
should be enhanced.
We turn in Chapters 7 and 8 to the second half of this

proposition, by assessing whether reforms since 1989 have, as
we expect, followed a different pattern.
Page 37 of 38
1945–1989
Notes:
(1) This research is funded by Nuffield Foundation grant
number OPD/38736, on ‘Political Reform in the UK: The
Evolution of Debate’.
Access brought to you by: University of Colorado at Boulder
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Electoral Reforms before the Personalization Era:

University Press Scholarship Online

Faces on the Ballot: The Personalization of

Print publication date: 2016

Electoral Reforms before the

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter analyses the politics of electoral reform in

Keywords: electoral reform, intra-party dimension, personalization, process

Our core hypothesis is that the politics of electoral reform has

More specifically, we already know from Table 3.2 that

local candidates, and liberal or conservative parties, are more

(p.108) The chapter follows a broadly chronological structure.

We find that electoral reform during this period did closely

6.1 Electoral Reforms from the Late 1940s to the

Eight of these twenty reforms had no impact on

West German reform of 1956 also left the intra-party

Of the twelve remaining reforms, three affected

The remaining cases deserve more careful attention: in each

France and Austria, 1946–51

underwent a further reform in 1951, known primarily for its

In both countries, the degree of list flexibility introduced was,

Nevertheless, the introduction of the principle of list flexibility

Direct information on the Austrian reform is limited. We do

it would slow down the process of determining election

(p.111) The dividing line in this debate mirrors that of the

It appears that this reform, as expected, was dominated by the

In France, meanwhile, the three largest groups in the

a referendum; fresh elections were held and a second

Aspects of the electoral system affecting personalization were

The struggle over electoral system personalization in France

parties in the positions they adopted reflected differences in

Italy and Germany

Unusually, the debates that generated the 1948 changes

preference voting entirely. At the other end, Liberals and their

the Constituent Assembly in December 1947, quipped, ‘I

In the end, those who favoured stronger preference voting got

Electoral reform debates in Italy at this time thus differed

In West Germany, the electoral system was subject to intense

The changes in fact enacted were much more limited. In 1953,

representation (MMP) used in 1949 (where voters cast a

Of these various changes, the important one from the

Finland and Iceland

parties. Those in Finland and Iceland, by contrast, did affect

The Finnish reform of 1954 converted flexible into fully open

This change involved no controversy. When the government

effect: the vast majority of lists in fact already contained just

Again, therefore, we find no evidence here of a process

The 1959 reform in Iceland, by contrast, was far-reaching.

The 1959 reform replaced this mixed system with a

Most debate around this reform focused on its effects upon

What is most notable about this reform is that the intention of

There was thus a deliberate intention in the 1959 Icelandic

France and Austria Again: 1958 and 1970

In 1970, however, Austria introduced a package of changes

(p.117) The choice of electoral system in France in 1958—like

All of these positions appear to have been based on inter-party

balance them with Socialists and others, who would be critics

The intra-party dimension mattered here for the most part