Lecture 9, Feb 4th: Electoral Systems (Start of Pt 2)

  • What incentives do these systems create?

  • Voters brains

  • Context: Media as a source of info for voters

  • Mixed Member Proportional systems

  • Proportional representation

  • Every election system has some distortion

Elections

Why care about elections

  • Why care at all about elections?

  • Democratic legitimacy

  • Reveal democratic preferences

  • Accountability

  • It is a good thing for voters to be able to vote genuinely

Why care about specific electoral rules

  • Cairns 1968: The electoral system is to the politicians like price system is to the business person

  • Electoral rules translate votes into seats

  • Create distortions

How to pick btwn electoral rules

Which is best?

Proportional or non proportional

*M & P could stand for diff things, kind of annoying

Non Proportional

  • Winner takes all

    • Plurarlity rule (FPTP/ Single member plurality—SMP) —Who do I like the most

    • Majority rule (Run off, preferencial/ranked voting *IRV/AV)

  • Usually single member disctricts

  • Dominant FPTP

    • Canada

    • US (not elecotoral college )

  • Majoritarian:

    • French presdntl. election (Run off), Georgia Senate seats

    • City of San Fran (IRV)

    • Single member plurality: Most votes

    • You need a majority

    • How to manufacture a majority: Run off election (Do it again)

    • Instant run off voting (Who do you like next? Rank candidates)

    • Pros:

    • Accountability link is clear, you know who your representative is, which is valued in democracy

    • Easy to run

    • Not a large intellectual load on voters (I would argue that would be a con)

Proportional

  • Allocate seats in a district according to a proportion of votes won by the party

    • Single transferable vote (SVT)

    • Party list

  • Multimember districts

  • Purest proportionality:

    • Israeli Knesset (3.25% of threshold; you need 3.25% of votes at least but obvs not a majority) —Israel is one district with 120 seats, if labour wins 20%, 20% of seats in Knesset go to labour

    • Israel is in effect one electoral district w 120 seats

  • In Australia you can vote either for a party or rank MPs in order of preference (1-23)—High cognitive load but creates problems eg. candidates qw last names starting w A were statistically more likely to recieve a higher ranking

Each has Pros and Cons

  • Which system is best?

  • A solution: Create a hybrid system

  • Where one chamber is made up of both proportional seats and non proportional seats (Mixed Member Proportional or MMP)

    • German Bundestag: ½ seats FPTP, other ½ proportional (Party list)

    • NZ: 70 Seats are FPTP, 50+ seats are proportional (Party list)

  • Where one chamber is proportional & another chamber is non-proportional

    • Australia: House of Representatives is Single Member Majoritarian w IRV (150 members, Senate proport. w STV of party list (76 members, 8 districts)

FPTP/Single Member Plurality in Action

Eg.

X region Votes =100

S-25

L-40

M-35

Y region Votes = 50

S- 10

M- 17

L- 23

Z region Votes

S- 15

M- 18

L- 17

  • Basically, the more competeives our party system, a more that small changes in votes can create significant outcomes

  • In regions w lower populations, voters have more power

  • Strategic voting: When your party isn’t likely to win and a party you highly dislike a candidate is likely to win, you are likely to vote against that party you don’t want to win rather than the party you want to win to avoid ‘wasting’ a vote (Flaw of our system)

  • Another problem w proportional voting: The way proportional votes are distributed can impact the outcome of an election (Democratic legitimacy flaw)

  • As a small party, to win, you focus on small regional districts (take advantage of loophole)—Arguably the only way a small party can win (Geographic concentration strategy)

Effective (Versus actual) Number of Parties?

  • Duverger’s “law” (really a hypothesis)

    • SMP/FPTP leads to bipartism

    • PR leads to multipartism

  • Effective (Number of parties weighted by their support) # of parties (Laasko/Taagepera 1979): Equation

  • Canada/US may be an exception to this law: Canada has a crazy high number of parties and the states is essencially a two party state