Theories of electoral accountability emphasize voters' ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters' ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot's effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics.

This review article provides a critique of Marilyn Lake’s Progressive New World, a monograph that postulates that Australian/Australasian transpacific exchange shaped the development of American progressivism. The review outlines the major contours of her claim, notes her ambivalence concerning her overall position, and critiques her decision to not explain/examine differences in the political culture of the United States of America and Australia. The review seeks to overcome this problem by examining key differences in the cultural history of both societies and draws on the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy and America. The review (a) develops a model which provides a means to understand how one society can impact another; (b) contrasts the origins of progressivism in the United States of America and Australia; (c) examines the work of the Australian scholar Michael Roe, who postulated that American progressivism was the independent factor impacting Australian developments; (d) distinguishes between two types of progressivism – racist conceit, pure and simple, and broader social reforms, which may or may not entrench racist conceit; and (e) examines various dimensions of progressivism which Marilyn Lake has used in developing her claim.