Dear SSJ-Forum subscribers:

In a post last week, Francis Rosenbluth cited Gary Cox's book _The Efficient
Secret_ as an example of rational choice work that takes into account
ideological motives in explaining political behavior. She also cites this book
in her book with Mark Ramseyer.

I took a look back at this book to see how Cox incorporates ideological
interests but ended up being struck by the disjuncture between Cox's conclusions
about the development of a party-oriented electorate in England and how his
findings were presented in R&R's book. Given the prominence of comparative
references to British politics in discussions of how electoral reform in Japan
is supposed to reshape politics there, I thought it would be interesting to
SSJ-Forum readers to examine this disjuncture.

Let me start by emphasizing the relevance to Japan. During the recent electoral
reform debate, one of the professed aims of the reformers was to foster an
increase in _party_ voting as opposed to the tendency of voters under the old
system to vote for _candidates_. See Ozawa's _Blueprint_, for example, for a
discussion of this motivation. During this debate, Ozawa and others repeatedly
refered to the British system with its single-member plurality electoral system
as their model. R&R's book, though it was written before electoral reform,
implies (by linking personal voting to the old electoral system) that the recent
reforms ought to foster more party and issue-oriented voting. The new Cambridge
volume, which I have not yet seen, apparently makes this prediction more
explicit.

Cox's analysis of how party-oriented voting developed in England in the 19th
century is cited by R&R (p. 20-21) to buttress the link between electoral system
and voting behavior. Cox documents nicely how English voters, in the
double-member (two vote) electoral districts that were common at the time, did a
lot of personal voting early in the 19th C (they would often cast their two
votes for candidates of different parties even when they had the option of
casting votes for candidates of only one party). During the course of the
century, however, they did less and less vote-splitting and starting voting much
more according to party. Much of the book is devoted to explaining why this
shift in voting behavior came about.

R&R present Cox's findings as follows: the shift toward party-oriented voting
came about "as the British Parliament enlarged districts and gradually
eliminated multi-member districts over the course of those decades.... Larger
districts made particularism a more costly strategy for individual politicians,
because they had more ground to cover and more individuals to woo for support.
At the same time, the adoption of single member districts made particularism
less necessary, because parties needed to field only a single candidate in each
district." As one can see, R&R claim that Cox's findings showed _electoral
reform_ in England was a major cause of the development of party-oriented voting
there during the 19th century. This seems to support the rational choice
prediction that a switch to an electoral system more like Britain's in Japan
will similarly lead to party-oriented voting.

If one looks at Cox's book, however, his data and his arguments actually
contradict R&R's claim. His data show that the major decline in split-voting
(from 25% of voters to 5% of voters between 1847 and 1868) _preceded_ the
electoral reform which drastically reduced the number of double-member
districts. In 1867, after the Second Reform Act, 61 percent of districts still
returned two members, and the real reduction in this type of district did not
come until the Third Reform Act in 1885. The increase in party voting leading up
to 1867, Cox argues, can be explained by expanded suffrage (yes R&R mention
this) and reforms which drastically reduced the ability of private members to
get bills passed and to direct pork, tariff cuts, and patronage to particular
groups of voters in their districts. In concluding his discussion of why
party-oriented voting developed when it did, he notes that the electoral reform
and political reforms of 1885 "should be viewed as postscripts, logical
consequences and reinforcements of the fundamental changes in parliamentary
procedure and electoral behavior." (p. 136) In other words, electoral reform was
a _result_ of party-oriented voting rather than a cause of it!

Cox's account of English electoral reforms actually does not provide us with
evidence of single-member districts being engineered to foster more
party-oriented voting. Instead, it shows us how an important part of the
explanation for why party-voting developed was restrictions on the ability of
MPs to direct pork to their constituents. None of the reforms adopted in Japan
thus far restrict the ability of _zoku_ Dietmen to take advantage of their power
in the policymaking process to deliver private goods to their constituents. If,
as it seems, political behavior is not adjusting to electoral reform as the
rational choicers predicted, it may be that the explanation (ironically) can be
found in the work of the rational choicers themselves.

Len Schoppa ljs2k[atx]virginia.edu
Department of Government & Foreign Affairs 232 Cabell Hall; University of
Virginia; Charlottesville, VA 22901 (804) 924-3211 Fax (804) 924-3359