The electoral laws of consolidated democratic systems are often subject to a ambivalent or contradictory vulnerability:
On the one hand, they are constantly the subject of political discussions and the mass media, and the most unjust and unfair aspects of the regulations are often pinpointed, especially the mediation they perform between votes and seats. A particularly meaningful example of this is the constant criticism of the English majority system because of its non-proportional nature. Often the accusations themselves even contain contradictions, as when a proportional system is accused of not being sufficiently proportional and creating an excessive gap between the voters and those elected.
An empirical study of the more consolidated electoral systems, however, shows
great continuity among the elements of the electoral system in each country. With the possible exception of the French experience, a universal rule of behaviour can be introduced by which the electoral systems will tend to be consolidated in their basic elements, so that they will only be modified in the event of an overall crisis in the political system (like the recent Italian experience). This statement is compatible with the constant technical, minor or procedural adjustments that these very same legal
texts undergo. Among the factors that can contribute to explain the basic politics of continuity of the electoral systems, there are the following:
In the first place, one could agree with Amato that nobody is prepared to change what is certain for what is uncertain and that an electoral system, whether good or bad, gives its main agents, the political parties, certainty regarding the way it operates. It is evident that from this point of view,
even in the most democratic system imaginable, the interests of the citizens and the political parties will not necessarily coincide. These circumstances arise when it is proposed to open the list of candidacies or of preferential votes, choices desired by the citizens, but difficult for the political parties to accept. However, they are the ones who can modify the electoral law.
In the second place, it is also evident that those who can modify an electoral law are the party or the parties that have won under it (they often did so with bonuses of over-representation in the attribution of seats with
relation to the percentage of votes obtained). In short, change should be promoted by the beneficiaries under the system in force.
On the other hand, there are historical factors that make change difficult. A kind of identification is produced by the citizens of a country with its traditional electoral system to which they assimilate democracy. The older the system, the greater the identification, which permits it to continue maintaining features that would hardly be admissible in a system designed in the present day. An example of this prevalence is to be found in the election of the president of the United States through a complex system of delegates. This phenomenon has also occurred at times when overcoming a dictatorship is identified with a return to an electoral system from the previous democratic period, as occurred in Germany and Italy after World War II.
Lastly, neither are the legal drawbacks that the reform of the electoral regulation poses negligible. As already pointed out in the foregoing paragraph (see also Constitution), the main electoral procedures are constitutionalized and consequently subject to the special protection of the constitutional reform. Furthermore, special majorities are often mandated for the electoral laws to be modified, which calls for the need of a broad-scale agreement between the political forces.
In spite of the foregoing, technical or minor modifications to the electoral laws are quite common. It can be said that there is a constant need for adjustment of the procedures of this type, not only in the new democracies, where the need for corrections is more evident, but even in consolidated systems too. The reason why this need exists, must be sought, paradoxically, in the extremely regulatory nature of the procedures, which makes them very inelastic, therefore calling for constant adjustments. These modifications have to be subject to guidelines of action:
On the one hand, due to legal and political needs, they must have widespread parliamentary support; even the most innocent of reforms will tend to be presented as an attempt to manipulate the will of the people.
On the other, it should not be forgotten that basically these are procedural reforms. In these cases, when the constitution or the electoral regulation envisages the existence of independent electoral organisations, whose mission is to act for the good of the organisation and the purity of the electoral process, the reform of the regulation has to have the approval of these organisations, one way or another. In fact, it is not uncommon for them to be the promoters of the reform (see 'emc020' and 'emc41'). The opposite situation might give rise to malfunctioning, which will be all the greater, the more independence these organisations are granted in the fulfillment of their duties.
For example, it is disputable whether the September 1997 reform of the Nicaraguan Electoral Law, against the express opinion of the Supreme Electoral Council, upon whom the organisation, handling and monitoring of the elections were exclusively conferred by the constitution (art. 168) was appropriate. Forgetting this reality could mean the condemnation of the reform to impotence, making it transitory, or laying the foundation for a conflict with unforeseeable consequences among constitutional organs.
