GENERAL ELECTIONS

What are general elections?

The main mechanism through which voters express a political mandate, connect with government, and hold incumbents accountable.

Wha is Electoral integrity?

the extent to which the conduct of elections meets international standards and global norms concerning ‘good’ elections.

Who tend to have higher levels of electoral integrity?

Democracies rather than autocracies

What are the elements of electoral systems?

•Electoral formula – how votes are translated into seats.

•District magnitude - the number of seats per district.

•Ballot structure - how voters express their choices

what are the 3 electoral system families?

1. Majoritarian

2. Proportional Representation

3. Mixed Systems

What is proportional representations?

1. political parties should be represented in parliament in exact (or nearly exact) proportion to the votes they receive.

• Started being used at the end of the 19th century.

• List PR

• Single Transferrable Vote

/What are majoritarian?

• the party that gets the most votes wins.

What is an STV?

Single Transferable Votes

What can be used as a block vote?

plurality

what is Single-member district plurality?

• Voters cast a single vote for a candidate in a single-member district.

• The candidate with the most votes wins.

What is a Single-non transferrable vote (SNTV)

• Voters cast a single candidate-centered vote in a multimember district.

• candidates with the highest number of votes are elected.

• If there are N seats in the constituency, then the N candidates with the highest number of votes win. 

What is Majority-runoff two-round system (TRS).

• Any candidate who obtains an absolute majority in the first round of elections is elected.

• If no one obtains majority, then the top two vote winners go on to compete in a runoff election in the second round.

What is The Alternative Vote?

method of election in which voters rank candidates in order of preference.

what is List PR?

• Each party presents a list of candidates to voters in each multimember district.

• Voters receive a ballot with the lists of all the parties in their district.

• Parties receive seats in proportion to their overall share of the votes.

• These seats are then allocated among the candidates on their list in various ways.

What is an electoral threshold?

the minimum level of support a party needs to obtain representation.

what is a natural threshold?

a mathematical by-product of the electoral system.

what is a formal threshold

explicitly written into the electoral law.

what is a closed party list?

the order of candidates elected is determined by the party itself, and voters are not able to express a preference for a particular candidate.

what is an open party list?

voters can indicate not just their preferred party, but also their favored candidate within that party.

what is a free party list?

voters have multiple votes that they can allocate either within a single party list or across different party lists.

According to Massicotte and Blais what are mixed member systems?

Voters elect representatives through two different systems, one majoritarian and one proportional.

• Most mixed systems employ multiple electoral tiers. Often a majoritarian system used in the lowest tier (district level) and a proportional system used in the upper tier (regional or national level).

Individuals have two votes.

1. representative at the district level (candidate vote).

2. party list in the higher electoral tier (party vote).

What was Duverger’s study about?

the distinction between dualism, seen as conducive to stability, and multipartism which was seen as leading to unstable governments.

What is Duverger’s law?

“The simple majority single-ballot system favors the two-party system. Of all the hypotheses that have been defined in this book, this approaches the most nearly perhaps to a true sociological law”

What is Duverger’s hypotheses?

PR favors multipartism, as does the majority system with a second-round runoff fo

What is Cox’s correction to Diverger’s law?

• Duverger’s law only works at the constituency level!

  Cox: the number of candidates in each constituency equals the number of seats plus one.

What are mechanical effects?

The direct consequences that electoral laws have on the relation between the proportion of votes a party gets and the proportion of seats it wins in the legislature.

Duverger (1951): “Two forces working together:
a mechanical and a psychological factor”

What are the limitations of Duverger’s law?

1. Not causally responsible for unstable government.

2. Electoral system has only a limited effect on a regime’s party system, and on its potential for instability.

3. •It does not apply when there are strong regional cleavages.