Wrestling with democracy
Subtitle: voting systems as politics in the twentieth-century West
By: Dennis Pilon
Series: Studies in comparative political economy and public policy -- 39; Studies in comparative political economy and public policy -- 39.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9781442645417; 9781442613508
Subjects: Politics and government; Democracy; Voting; Political parties; Elections; History
Description: 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."--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages [347]-372) and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Chapter 1: Introduction; title: Chapter 2: Contextualizing Democracy; title: Chapter 3: Prologue to the Democratic Era; title: Chapter 4: Facing the Democratic Challenge, 1900-1918; title: Chapter 5: Struggling with Democracy, 1919-39; title: Chapter 6: The Cold War Democratic Compromise, 1940-1969; title: Chapter 7: The Neoliberal Democratic Realignment, 1970-2000.