PhD Thesis defence by Victor Ellenbroek
This dissertation investigates the political origins and consequences of electoral system reform and franchise extension. Because any benefit a politician or party may derive from changing either of these institutions typically comes at the expense of another politician or party, such reforms are rarely politically neutral. How, then, do they come about? Drawing on comparative case studies from Germany and the Netherlands, this dissertation argues that reform is best explained by politicians’ expectations of partisan and electoral advantage rather than by mass pressures or legitimacy concerns alone.
The first case examines electoral system reforms in Bremen and Hamburg in 2011, which replaced closed-list proportional representation with preferential-list systems that allowed voters to cast multiple votes across candidates and parties. Using difference-in-differences analyses of turnout and survey data, the chapter finds that these reforms reduced participation by roughly ten percentage points in state elections and widened educational inequalities in turnout. The reforms made voting more complex and disproportionately discouraged less-educated citizens.
The second case examines franchise reform in the Netherlands in the 1890s. Using new data on candidates’ positions, district-level socioeconomic conditions, and elec-toral outcomes, Chapter 3 evaluates competing explanations for support for suffrage reform, including revolutionary threat, landholding inequality, landed interests, and elite competition. The evidence suggests that electoral incentives were decisive. Liberal candidates were more likely to support reform in poorer districts, while candidates from the Religious bloc were more likely to do so in districts marked by strong prior religious mobilisation. These effects were also conditioned by candidates’ electoral security under the status quo: support for reform was generally weaker among candidates whose prospects under the existing franchise were already strong.
Chapter 4 then explores how the 1896 Dutch reform reshaped parliamentary behaviour. Drawing on an original dataset of more than 3,200 roll-call votes in the Dutch Lower House between 1888 and 1917, it shows that franchise expansion coincided with sharply rising party cohesion and a clearer government–opposition divide. Legislators who frequently voted against their party’s majority became more likely to exit parliament as the share of enfranchised men in their districts increased, while those who remained reduced the rate at which they dissented as their electorates expanded. Because other relevant institutional changes remained limited during this period, the Dutch case provides an unusually clear instance in which the exten-sion of voting rights can be linked to the rise of cohesive legislative parties and, by extension, to the development of modern party government.
Taken together, the dissertation contributes to debates on democratic institutions by showing that elites primarily supported or resisted reform because of the electoral and legislative advantages they expected it to bring, while the reforms themselves reshaped patterns of participation, representation, and legislative organisation.
Victor Ellenbroek currently works at the University of Groningen as a teacher (European Politics and Society at the Faculty of Arts) and as a researcher (Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties). He also holds a re:constitution fellowship.
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