Matching the Electoral System with the Structure of Social Cleavages as a Causality of the Electoral Reforms: Theoretical Refinement from Two Case Studies from Romania

Democracies sometimes experience crises, and electoral reform can be an end to such crises. According to the institutionalist perspective on the study of electoral reform, there are two types of factors that lead to reform, the inherent conditions and the contingent ones. My thesis is that the main inherent condition that may lead to a crisis of the political system is a disconnect between the electoral system and the structure of social cleavages. I build a theoretical model of argumentation, which argues that the electoral reforms happen in order to match the type of electoral system with the structure of social cleavages of a country. This model starts from the assumption that voters and parties alike deal with two types of incentives, the one coming from the social preferences and those coming from the electoral system’s features, when deciding to particizise and to run for the elections, and respectively, when to vote. And if these features are contradictory, in such a way that the electoral system works with reductionist effect and the social preferences work to multiply the political parties, or the electoral system has a multiplicative effect on the number of parties and the social heterogeneity give reductionist incentives to the number of parties, then the pressure for electoral system change may appear in the form of an electoral system failure or in the form of other crisis of political representation. The incongruence between the incentives of the electoral system and the structure of voters’ preferences may preclude the accurate translation of social heterogeneity into a constellation of parties. I pre-test this theoretical model on two case studies from Romania, the electoral reforms that occurred in 2008 and 2015, to further refine the theoretical model.