Protecting the Ballot: How first‐wave democracies ended electoral corruption. By IsabelaMares, Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2022. pp. 246. $35.00 (paper)
本书研究1850-1918年间法国、德国、英国和比利时如何消除选举舞弊，分析立法者为何同意禁止曾助其获胜的腐败行为，对理解当代新兴民主国家的选举改革有借鉴意义。
Students and observers of electoral malfeasance in contemporary emerging democracies are often blissfully unaware that electoral corruption was as widespread in the democracies of 19th-century Europe. To secure a seat in parliament, politicians in these first-wave democracies regularly engaged in bribery, economic coercion, and the misuse of state employees to mobilize and intimidate voters. These campaign strategies, then and today, undermine the integrity of the electoral process and threaten burgeoning democracies. In Protecting the Ballot, Isabela Mares performs an impressive and empirically rich analysis of how France, Germany, Britain, and Belgium eradicated electoral malfeasance between 1850 and 1918, answering the following puzzle: why would legislators ever agree to outlaw the type of electoral fraud that made their victory possible? Mares' answer represents a significant contribution to the democratization literature. Her thoroughly researched book draws on a large variety of archival records, including parliamentary deliberations and votes, data on politician's views, wealth, and campaigns, and information about local economic conditions within electoral constituencies, all of which she skilfully combines in a micro-historical analysis to uncover how legislative majorities supporting electoral reforms were created. She elegantly combines the rich qualitative and quantitative evidence from parliamentary records, highlighting differences in initial positions between political parties within and across countries and how coalitional realignment to support electoral reforms took place. Her argument starts from the assumption that politicians' initial position on electoral reforms stems directly from their access to state or private resources that could be politicized during campaigns. Politicians can enlist state employees, access state resources, or draw on private wealth to mobilize or influence voters who resist electoral change and generally hold a parliamentary majority precisely because of this resource advantage. However, economic and political changes can undermine this initial anti-reform majority. Economic development, including industrialization, urbanization, and rising income levels, increase the economic costs of some forms of electoral corruption, especially vote buying and treating (i.e., provision of food and large amounts of alcohol to voters), reducing their attractiveness. Moreover, political changes in the form of splits within the ruling party or coalition create electoral costs. Voters raise electoral costs if they punish candidates or parties that combine programmatic appeals with clientelist promises. Other candidates also raise electoral costs in electoral systems with runoffs if using illicit campaign strategies deters potential coalition partners who then support the opponent. Depending on the initial resource distribution and the extent of rising economic and electoral costs, a legislative majority supporting a specific electoral reform emerges if a group of resource-endowed politicians reconsiders the attractiveness of the status quo. Resource-endowed politicians facing the highest economic and electoral costs associated with the continued use of an illicit campaign strategy are, therefore, the pivotal legislators enabling electoral reform. The analytical strength of her theoretical framework is that it offers nuanced, empirically testable predictions regarding the composition of the reform coalition and the importance of changes in economic and electoral costs for different forms of electoral corruption. This and the legislator-level empirical evidence also account for the book's significant contribution to the democratization literature. Her argument qualifies economic modernization theory by highlighting the conditionality and limits of economic development on electoral reforms. If and only if economic development raises the economic and/or electoral costs of electoral maleficence sufficiently to shift the position of resource-rich legislators will it enable electoral reform. Consequentially, and as nicely illustrated in chapters 3 and 6 when discussing the ending of the illicit use of state resources and the curbing of election fraud in 19th-century France and Germany, reforms did not come about due to economic changes and rising economic costs, but because of elite splits and the subsequent rise of electoral costs. Similarly, her argument differs crucially from redistributive theories of democratization, which focus on how elite support for democratic reforms emerges from fiscal conflicts between economic classes or different economic elites. By shifting the analytical focus away from tax and spending decisions and onto debates about electoral rules, her framework can account for both varying positions of the different center-right political parties and the empirically observed heterogeneity of reform coalitions across various types of electoral reforms. The book ends with a short subsection highlighting implications for recent democracies. Mares highlights that electoral reform legislation will require heterogeneous political coalitions, must consider substitution opportunities among different types of electoral corruption, and advocates for information campaigns highlighting the undesirability of electoral malpractice to raise electoral costs for politicians employing illicit campaign tactics. While it is difficult to draw direct parallels between 19th-century and present-day electoral politics, I would have liked to have seen a more extensive discussion of how contextual differences might hinder electoral reform in today's emerging democracies. Because the book's empirical chapters are structured along types of electoral malpractice rather than countries, it requires some effort to piece together how reform coalitions managed to account for substitution opportunities and what contextual factors enabled them to do so. Similarly, a more detailed discussion to what extent partisanship and polarization of today's electorates, compared to 19th-century voters, might undermine the effectiveness of information campaigns aiming to raise electoral costs would have enriched this final subsection. Overall, in illuminating the legislative dynamics of electoral reforms in four 19th-century European democracies, Isabela Mares has produced an extraordinary piece of scholarly work. It highlights the time and political efforts it took to establish electoral integrity, an underappreciated aspect of the democratization process, thereby reshaping and enriching our understanding of democratization.