Patrick Emmenegger

Analyzing the voting behavior of Swiss members of parliament (MP) using newly collected individual, district, and cantonal level data, we show that both electoral disproportionalities and the insurgent parties’ electoral potential are important determinants of MP voting behavior on the adoption of proportional representation (PR). However, in contrast to the prominent electoral threat thesis, the insurgent party’s high electoral potential decreases the probability that MPs of established parties support PR. The reason for this relationship is partisan redistricting, whose relevance has so far been largely ignored in the literature. We demonstrate that adapting electoral district boundaries for political reasons, if possible in a given institutional context, can be a powerful alternative to the adoption of PR, because it allows established parties to retain parliamentary majorities even as an insurgent party’s electoral potential increases.

As the first country to introduce proportional representation (PR), Belgium has attracted considerable attention. Yet, we find the existing explanations for the 1899 breakthrough lacking. At the time of reform, the Catholic Party was politically dominant, advantaged by the electoral system, and facing reformist Socialists. Nevertheless, they single-handedly changed the electoral system and lost 26 seats in the first election under PR. We argue that the Catholics had good reasons to adopt PR. Majoritarian rules tend to create high levels of uncertainty because they provide incentives for non-dominant parties to cooperate. Such electoral coalitions are facilitated by multidimensional policy spaces that make electoral coalitions other than between nonsocialist parties possible. PR reduces the effectiveness of cooperation between non-dominant parties, but such certainty comes at a price. In addition, in the presence of dominant parties, divisions over electoral system reform often result in intra-party conflicts that may be more decisive than inter-party conflicts.

The First World War was a watershed moment for the development of the modern tax state. Yet, whereas the tax yield strongly increased in this period, little is known about how the tax mix changed, in particular regarding the turn to direct taxation. Examining the two ‘Sister Republics’ Switzerland and the USA, this paper demonstrates that tax reforms in this critical period for modern tax systems were conditioned by coalitions among producer groups, which had already come into existence before the war. Most notably, farmers and their position on international trade were important in shaping coalitions on the turn to direct taxation. The Great War's main role was to temporarily interrupt (Switzerland) or cement (USA) the tax system's reorientation. The paper thus shows that war-induced tax reforms have a lasting impact on the tax mix only if powerful coalitions support these reforms independently of the war effort.