L6: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions of Democracy: Electoral Systems Flashcards
Overall Constitutional Design Types
- Majoritarian (Westminster) Democracies
- Proportional (Consensus) Democracies
Majoritarian (Westminster) Democracies Characteristics
- Relatively high aggregation electoral rules
- Relatively high concentration of legislative authority
Proportional (Consensus) Democracies Characteristics
- Relatively low aggregation electoral rules
- Relatively low concentration of legislative authority
Common goals for Majoritarian and Proportional democracies
- Substantive Representation: Ensuring that policymakers are doing what their citizens want them to do
- Public policies according to the median citizen.
Goals for Majoritarian Democracies
- Identifiability
- Mandates
- Accountability
Goals for Majoritarian Democracies: Identifiability
- Voters should be presented with clear policy alternatives when making electoral choices
- Ideally, two political parties, with distinct policy platforms, competing for control of policymaking
Goals for Majoritarian Democracies: Mandates
- One party in this two-party system should win a majority of votes, leading to a majority of seats
- Majority party should be able to govern without help from any other party, either in the executive or the legislature
Goals for Majoritarian Democracies: - Accountability
- High clarity of responsibility should lead to high accountability
- Voters should be able to attribute outcomes easily to incumbent
- If incumbent loses elections, they should be turned out of office
Ex: electoral systems which mostly produce two-party systems and single-party majorities (Majoritarian democracies)
- First-Past-the-Post (UK, US, Canada)
- Majority Runoff (France)
- First-Past-the-Post (UK, US, Canada)
- Single Member District (SMD): 1 member per district; if plurality (most votes), it’s a win
- One-round system
- Low informational cost (must pick only 1 candidate), low transportation costs
- Majority Runoff (France)
- Two-round system, winning candidate must pass majority at the first or second round
- In second round, only the two candidates with the highest number of votes are represented
- Higher informational cost, higher transportation costs
- Voters give more information about their opinion
Goals for Proportional Democracies
- Variety of party alternatives
- Proportional influence
Goals for Proportional Democracies: Variety of party alternatives
- Voters have a choice among lots of policy alternatives
* Descriptive representation: Multiple parties representing the diversity of society
Goals for Proportional Democracies: Proportional influence
- Seat distribution in legislature should mirror vote distribution
- Governments should consist of multiple parties engaging in compromises/ consensus
- Parties in opposition should have proportionate influence in policymaking
Ex: electoral systems which produce multiparty legislatures and executive coalitions
(Proportional democracies)
- PR-list (most of continental western Europe)
- PR-MMP (Mixed Member Proportional Representation) (Germany, Japan, New Zealand)
- Single Transferable Vote (STV) (Ireland, Malta)
- Alternative Vote (AV)
PR-list
• Closed list: Voters cast a single vote for a party list, not for a candidate
• Open list: Voters cast a single vote for a candidate on the party list
• Seats are awarded to parties approximately proportional to their share of votes
• To award votes, usually “divisor” or “quota” formulas
o D’Hondt: averages in descending orders; slightly favours large parties
o LR-Hare: quota= Votes/ Seats; 1 seat per quota filled. Then give away for the rest.
• The higher the district magnitude, the more proportional the system is
• Forming a coalition may be a long process (high cost)
PR-MMP (Mixed Member Proportional Representation)
- Voters have two votes on a single ballot: one vote for a party list, one vote for a candidate
- Part of the legislature is filled with directly-elected candidates, part is filled with candidates from party lists
- Legislative seats will be roughly proportional to votes received on the party list vote
- Candidates are elected in single-member First Pass the Post districts
- Party-list seats are used to “compensate” for the disproportionality arising from FPP elections
Single Transferable Vote (STV)
- Voters rank the candidates
- Ballots go through multiple counts
- If, after any count, a candidate emerges with votes greater than quota, this candidate is elected
- “Weak” candidates are successively eliminated, votes for these eliminated candidates are transferred, and then ballots are recounted until all seats are awarded to candidates passing quota
- Lower cost system of the majority runoff
- Encourages the election of more consensual candidates
Alternative Vote (AV)
- Increases the representation of small parties
- Voters rank the candidates
- First preferences are taken into account, then second, third, etc. until a candidate reaches more than 50% of the vote.
Duverger’s Law
First-Past-the-Post leads to a two-party system,
Psychological and Mechanical effects
Mechanical effect explanation
in the mapping of vote shares to seat shares
Psychological effects
- Strategic entry: Choices of political parties themselves
- Strategic voting: If a voter’s top choice has little chance of winning, incentives to cast vote for least-disliked alternative that does have chance of winning
Conditions for strategic voting
- Short-term instrumental rationality
- Common knowledge about public voting intentions
- Uncertainty about which front-runner will win
- Strict preferences between 2nd and 3rd most-preferred candidates
Model of Two-Party Competition (Downs 1957):
Assumptions
- Voters as self-interested, rational policy-seekers
- Parties are self-interested, rational vote-seekers (do not care about policies per se)
- Parties take positions on particular issues, or develop a coherent ideology that provides voters information on issue positions, to maximize votes
- Voters are fully informed about these positions (or, at least, of general party ideology)
Model of Two-Party Competition (Downs 1957):
Model
- Voters assumed to have a most-preferred policy outcome, xi, on a given (unitary) policy dimension, their preferences are assumed to be single-peaked around xi
- Uij = −(xi − j)2, for a given policy j, function of the difference between ideal and actual policies
Model of Two-Party Competition (Downs 1957): Outcome
Proportional systems tend to produce policy makers closer to median than in majoritarian systems.
