Majoritarian Democracy and Institutional Reform. A Comparative Study of Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand

The project has two parts. It first develops a concept for analysing processes of institutional reform in democratic political systems. It then applies this concept to four political systems which have been selected according to a most similar cases design. The project's main aim is to show that institutional reform processes cannot satisfactorily be explained by focussing on contextual pressures for adaptation. More important are the interests of political actors that shape the reform agenda and its outcome.