Wrestling with democracy : voting systems as politics in the twentieth-century West / Dennis Pilon.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 347-372) and indexes.

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Contextualizing Democracy -- Chapter 3: Prologue to the Democratic Era -- Chapter 4: Facing the Democratic Challenge 1900-1918 -- Chapter 5: Struggling with Democracy 1919-39 -- Chapter 6: The Cold War Democratic Compromise 1940-1969 -- Chapter 7: The Neoliberal Democratic Realignment 1970-2000.

"Though sharing broadly similar processes of economic and political development from the mid-to-late nineteenth century onward, western countries have diverged greatly in their choice of voting systems: most of Europe shifted to proportional voting around the First World War, while Anglo-American countries have stuck with relative majority or majority voting rules. Using a comparative historical approach, Wrestling with Democracy examines why voting systems have (or have not) changed in western industrialized countries over the past century.

In this first single-volume study of voting system reform covering all western industrialized countries, Dennis Pilon reviews national efforts in this area over four timespans: the nineteenth century, the period around the First World War, the Cold War, and the 1990s. Pilon provocatively argues that voting system reform has been a part of larger struggles over defining democracy itself, highlighting previously overlooked episodes of reform and challenging widely held assumptions about institutional change."--Pub. desc.

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