Wednesday, June 26, 2013
5.59 (PC Hoofthuis)
Recent scholarship on the origins of electoral systems in advanced democracies has revealed a large degree of variation in pre-democratic electoral systems. Moreover, it has shed light on the adoption of single-member plurality (SMP) as well as proportional representation (PR) – both novel systems in the 19th century – as electoral safeguards to preserve the power of pre-democratic right parties. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to understanding the impact of PR, very little has gone into examining the impact of SMP on party formation. This paper explores the effects of the adoption of SMP in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, I examine the effects of class-based gerrymandering on working class mobilization and labor party representation. I use GIS mapping and original data on constituency make-up to chart district boundaries in the several decades following the adoption of SMP.
