Book Review: Alan Renwick and Jean-Benoit Pilet, Faces on the Ballot: The Personalization of Electoral Systems in Europe
| Author | Frederico Ferreira da Silva |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917716093 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsComparative Politics |
Book Reviews 643
distribution is a key factor in the development
of labour regulation.
In sum, this book represents a major contri-
bution to the literature on the politics of labour
market regulation in Latin America and, more
generally, to scholarship on welfare state devel-
opment in developing and emerging economies.
Tim Dorlach
(Koç University, Istanbul)
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917720409
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Faces on the Ballot: The Personalization of
Electoral Systems in Europe by Alan Renwick
and Jean-Benoit Pilet. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016. 338pp., £55.00 (h/b), ISBN
9780199685042
This book investigates the existence of a trend
towards more personalised electoral systems –
as the authors put it, systems with electoral
rules that allow voters to choose which indi-
vidual candidates win seats within the legisla-
ture. It is divided into three parts. Part I is
dedicated to demonstrating the existence of
this trend, Part II explores the various factors
of the electoral reforms leading to personalisa-
tion, and Part III assesses the impact of the per-
sonalisation of electoral systems on satisfaction
with democracy and turnout.
The authors created a new dataset covering a
total of 31 European democracies between 1945
and 2009, containing the electoral system in
force at every election, as well as any electoral
reforms put into practice. Methodologically, the
book is a good example of the virtues of com-
bining quantitative and qualitative approaches
to explore different questions.
The book’s main argument is that a growing
dealignment and dissatisfaction with political
parties over the last decades, coupled with the
trend towards the personalisation of politics,
has applied pressure to develop electoral
reforms which allow citizens to further express
their preferences in personalising terms.
Overall, the authors present convincing evi-
dence of a growing trend towards personalised
electoral systems, starting in the 1980s and
increasing considerably over the following
decades, even if that trend is largely due to the
increase in the number of democracies in the
closing decade of the last century. Their efforts
to explore the causes of this phenomenon and its
effects are, however, partially undermined by
the shortage of long-term quality data. They
effectively tackle this by using qualitative meth-
ods to process-trace these reforms. According to
the results, the main driver of these reforms
seems to be voters’ dissatisfaction with democ-
racy. Paradoxically, the analysis of the impact of
these reforms shows them to be ineffective in
restoring the relationship between citizens and
politics.
This work has two major contributions.
First, by inaugurating a systematic comparative
analysis of this phenomenon, it opens many
avenues for further and necessary research on
the topic, many of which are suggested by the
authors themselves. Second, it has a policy-
recommendation potential because it analyses
the impact of these reforms and reveals their
inability to restore the democratic link.
The book is well written and I believe it
would be of interest to quite a broad audience.
Specifically, it should attract scholars working
on the personalisation of politics and on elec-
toral systems.
Frederico Ferreira da Silva
(European University Institute)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917716093
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Whether to Kill: The Cognitive Maps of
Violent and Nonviolent Individuals by
Stephanie Dornschneider. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 315pp.,
£52.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780812247701
Structural approaches to violence have proven
quite enlightening but suffer from a few signifi-
cant flaws: (1) they can often lose sight of the
individual and his or her own motivations for
participating in violent activities; (2) they work
best in cases of mass violence, in which the
actions of the individual are aligned with the
aims of the state or other collective; and (3)
they offer little to no theory about non-violence,
even though non-violent tactics have often been
used to achieve the same ends as violent means.
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