Abstract
Many democracies changed their electoral systems since 1990s either to permit or restrict the access of small parties into parliament. In some others, governments initiated an electoral system change, yet failed to enact the reform as in the examples of New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Poland. These failed electoral reforms receive scant attention in the literature, save for a few case studies. In this paper, I model electoral reforms as driven by strategic calculations of the ruling-party whose preferences about alternative electoral systems are shaped by the dynamics of the party competition. I specifically focus on the impact of small parties on the competition between the largest two parties and develop different scenarios of permissive and restrictive reforms. This novel account expects that the ruling party initiates an electoral reform depending on whether small or new parties draw votes from its vote base or from that of its main competitor in the election. For the success of reforms, I examine the role of institutions, in particular the level of institutional protection that electoral systems have. I test the hypotheses by using an original dataset of cross-national electoral reform attempts in 32 parliamentary democracies between 1945and 2015.The findings of the study support the main hypotheses. I find that ruling parties are more likely to initiate an electoral reform restricting small party access when small parties draw votes from its vote base, but an opposite one when small parties draw votes from its main competitor in the election.