Chapter 13 - Social Cleavages and Party System

Chapter 13 - Elections and Electoral Systems

• Elections are one of the fundamental characteristics of democracies, and they are the major means by which democratic governments gain power.
• We demonstrate how each of the many electoral systems used for legislative and presidential elections at the national level works in practice. We also talk about how they affect topics like proportionality, ethnic inclusion, accountability, minority representation, and the disclosure of genuine preferences. Finally, we present an overview of electoral systems broken down by geographic location and regime type.
• In this chapter, we take a closer look at how majoritarian, proportional, and hybrid election systems function. We also go over some of the benefits and drawbacks that each of these systems has to offer. However, before we get into these concerns, let's take a look at how elections are held across the world. Elections are commonly used to choose candidates for a variety of positions.

Elections: An Overview

• Elections are not as important to authoritarian governments as they are to democratic regimes. The entire nature of modern democratic government is based on elections. Elections play both a practical and symbolic significance in democracies. Elections are the principal mechanism by which voters choose their representatives in practice.

• From 1946 to 2000, we present some summary data on legislative and presidential elections held in democracies all around the world. At least one democratic election was held in 125 nations during this time period. Table 13.1 shows that the 1990s accounted for about one-third of all democratic parliamentary and presidential elections held between 1950 and 2000.

  

• Take a look at the voting regulations to see who is eligible to vote. Despite the fact that all modern democracies allow for universal suffrage, the right to vote is not limited by race, gender, creed, or social status; they also impose certain limits on who can vote. The civic right to vote, often known as suffrage, is also known as the franchise. When a person's ability to vote is unrestricted by race, gender, religious belief, or socioeconomic standing, it is known as a universal suffrage vote.

• You might be asking why political scientists pay so much attention to the electoral formula when there are so many other methods to differentiate between voting systems. To be honest, there is no truly satisfactory answer; it has just been accepted practice.

13.1

• Dahl thinks that two aspects are crucial for defining democracies: contestation and inclusiveness, as we discussed in Chapter 5. Contestation is primarily concerned with democratic competitive methods. Inclusion, on the other hand, is concerned with who is allowed to engage in the democratic process, that is, who is allowed to vote.
• Many groups of people have historically been denied the right to vote. Many countries, for example, did not allow women to vote. New Zealand was the first country to provide women full voting rights in 1893. Liechtenstein, on the other hand, did not grant women the right to vote until 1984. Religion has been used to deny individuals the right to vote in several nations.
• Almost all democracies now offer universal suffrage, which means that everyone may vote regardless of ethnicity, gender, religious belief, or socioeconomic class.

Age

• Non Adults are often excluded from most nations on the grounds that only adults are capable of making rational decisions. Age is commonly used as a proxy for maturity in these nations. Almost many democracies use the age of eighteen as the threshold for gaining the right to vote.

Mental Health

• Individuals with mental health issues are usually barred from voting in most nations. Some nations, such as Bulgaria, Chile, and the Netherlands, have expressly incorporated these limits into their constitutions. The criteria for defining mental health, of course, differ throughout time and location.

Citizenship

• Some believe that only citizens of a country should have the right to vote since only citizens have the national community's best interests at heart. Others argue that immigrants should be allowed to vote if they pay their taxes and follow the country's rules. According to Blais, Massicotte, and Yoshinaka (2001), people have the right to vote in 48 of the sixty-one democracies studied.

District Residency

• District residency restrictions exist in a small number of democracies. Individuals should be knowledgeable about local concerns if they are to vote, according to these standards. Of course, this begs the question of what happens when individuals move to a new neighborhood.

\