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Electoral engineering strategies in majoritarian electoral systems, in particular the possibility to contain insurgent parties by manipulating electoral districts for partisan gain, are key determinants of parties' positions on the adoption of proportional representation (PR). Providing both qualitative and quantitative evidence, this paper demonstrates that partisan districting can be an effective strategy to protect incumbent parties' dominant political positions. In addition, it shows how insurgent parties push for the adoption of PR to end the practice of partisan districting. Finally, it demonstrates that incumbents – in the face of increasing electoral threats – cling to the existing majoritarian system if partisan districting allows them to influence vote-seat distortions in their favor. Together, these findings suggest that the possibility to contain insurgent parties by means of partisan districting is an important but overlooked alternative to the adoption of PR. Moreover, by demonstrating that vote-seat distortions moderate the relationship between district-level electoral threats and legislators' support for PR adoption, this paper offers an important corrective to Stein Rokkan's influential electoral threat thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does landholding inequality undermine democratization? Recent contributions have challenged the argument that landholding elites oppose suffrage extension if geographically fixed assets are unequally distributed. We advance research on this long-standing question by exploiting exogenous variance to reinvestigate the relationship. Using multiple instruments, we find that landholding inequality decreases support for suffrage extension. By focusing on traditional patterns of social control, we explore an empirically neglected mechanism linking landholding inequality and democratization. Taking advantage of four direct democratic votes between 1866 and 1877 in Switzerland, we demonstrate that landholding inequality also influences the political preferences of ordinary citizens who do not control these resources. This paper shows that high levels of landholding inequality provide local elites with the incentive and the means to align the local population's voting behaviour with their political goals. Supplementary analyses using qualitative and quantitative data further substantiate this social control mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective training systems are based on the cooperation of multiple public and private stakeholders in order to work. However, such cooperation is not self-sustaining and depends, for instance, on public policies, capable intermediary organisations and shared logics of action. In this conceptual paper, we first review the political economy literature on cooperation in collective skill formation and find that it has given insufficient attention to the systematic comparative analysis of cooperation at the decentralised level as well as the actual social practices of cooperation. The paper then develops a multidisciplinary analytical framework that allows future research to examine decentralised cooperation at the regional, sectoral and occupational levels more systematically. This framework is grounded in a synthesis of three strands of empirical research on vocational education and training, namely the comparative political economy literature on governance, corporatism and coordination, institutional labour and societal economics as well as the educational science literature.

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