Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies,
Louis Massicotte, André Blais and Antoine Yoshinaka, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 191Whatever one may think of the 2000 American presidential election, it
did have one salutary effect: it drew worldwide attention to the
importance of fair and impartially applied election laws. The authors of
this work needed no such wake-up call; André Blais and Louis
Massicotte enjoy a well-deserved international reputation for expertise in
this arcane field. But it is likely that their new book, a compendium and
analysis of election laws in 63 countries, will attract wider notice
because of recent events in the United States. Unfortunately (though
understandably), the extreme decentralization and complexity of American
election laws prevented the authors from including the U.S. in their
comparative database. Happily, the remaining countries in the sample offer
more than enough food for thought. The field of election law has been
sadly neglected by political scientists and legal scholars (outside the
United States); if interest in the topic continues to grow over the coming
years, this book should help to nurture a flourishing academic debate.
Judicial activism and the American election process