Democracy and the politics of electoral system choice [electronic resource] : engineering electoral dominance / Amel Ahmed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction: contradictions and ambiguities of democratization; 2. Strategies of containment: the role of repression and accommodation; 3. Strategies of competition: the logic of electoral system choice, single member plurality (SMP) vs. proportional representation (PR); 4. The United States: pre-industrial democratization and the origins of SMP; 5. The United Kingdom: safeguarding the reform acts with SMP; 6. France: the tumultuous path of electoral system choice in the third republic; 7. Belgium: minimizing the existential threat with PR; 8. Conclusions: rethinking democracy's determinisms; Appendix: the existential threat: electoral viability and ideological radicalism.

"Amel Ahmed brings new historical evidence and a novel theoretical framework to bear on the study of democratization. Looking at the politics of electoral system choice at the time of suffrage expansion among early democratizers, she shows that the electoral systems used in advanced democracies today were initially devised as exclusionary safeguards to protect pre-democratic elites from the impact of democratization and, particularly, the existential threat posed by working class mobilization"-- Provided by publisher.

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2011. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.