A New Electoral System: Majoritarian Election of Candidates with Proportional Allocation of Seats. (original) (raw)
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Electoral reform in systems of proportional representation
European Journal of Political Research, 1992
Does electoral reform produce the effects that would be expected on the basis of those features of the systems that are modified? By using knowledge from the literature on electoral systems it is possible to predict whether a reform should result in a conversion of votes into seats more proportional than that which preceded the reform or less. In each of ten cases of reform in Western Europe and Israel the reform produced the expected results. However, graphical presentation of data pooled from all ten cases suggests that party systems have the ability to adjust after just a few elections, making the effects of the new system less impressive than when it was first adopted. Graphical analysis also reveals that changes to more proportional rules tend to occur when the number of parties was already rising, while changes to less proportional rules (which would tend to decrease the number of 'relevant' parties) occur when the number of parties has already been declining.
Why electoral reform might improve representation and why it might make it worse
The debate over electoral reform has largely focused on representation in Parliament. However, the government largely controls policy-making in parliamentary systems like Canada. This article shows that a more proportional system would increase the likelihood of coalitions. Because the dominant approach to studying representation in government, ideological congruence, suggests that reforming the electoral system would make no change to the level of representation, this article focuses instead on the representation of party preferences. It shows that multi-party cabinets, common under proportional systems, involve a trade-off between including more citizens' preferred parties in government, while reducing the overall level of party preference representation. Sommaire : Le débat au sujet de la réforme électorale s'est principalement concentré sur la représentation au Parlement. Cependant, le gouvernement contrôle en large partie la prise de décisions dans les systèmes parlementaires tels que le Canada. Cet article démontre qu'un système plus proportionnel augmenterait le risque de coalitions. Étant donné que l'approche dominante pour étudier la représentation au sein du gouvernement, la congruence idéologique, laisse entendre que la ré-forme du système électoral ne changerait en rien le niveau de représentation, notre article préfère se centrer sur la représentation des préférences de partis politiques. Nos montrons que les cabinets multipartites, qui sont courants dans les systèmes proportionnels, nécessitent un compromis entre l'inclusion de plus de partis préfé-rés des citoyens et la réduction du niveau global de représentation des partis au sein du gouvernement.
Proportional Representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and Electoral Pragmatism
An exploration of competing electoral systems-single-member district plurality systems (predominant in the U.S.) versus proportional representation systems (STV in particular)-and competing theories of participatory democracy: J.S. Mill's optimistic deliberative democracy model, and Richard Posner's more pessimistic elite democracy model. Mill assumes voters are politically educable, capable of making informed contributions to legislative processes through electoral action. Posner assumes voters are too narrowly self-interested to be substantively educable. Elections, consequently, serve merely as a crude form of quality control and smooth succession of political authority. It is argued that the latter theory is plausible only under single-member district plurality electoral systems like ours, so that the electoral system grounds the theory, not the other way around. Under a single transferable vote system (Mill's preferred system), in which voters' ordinal preferences among candidates govern the outcomes in multi-member districts, Mill's deliberative dempcracy model has a realistic prospect of success. R. Nunan (18)
POLICY, 2001
During the election, many Canadians expressed dissatisfaction at being forced to vote strategically for a party they didn't particularly like but which they felt had a better chance of beating one they really didn't like. After the election, many commentators decried the fact that Parliament was again fractured along regional lines. These complaints suggest Canadians may be ready for two modest electoral reforms: preferential voting and limited proportional representation.
Theoria (Pietermaritzburg), 2002
Let us begin with the value of equality. We can define political inequality as inequality in citizens' actual capacity to influence political outcomes in ways favourable to their interests and values. Political inequalities are due to a variety of factors, which often influence one another as well as one another's effects. Depending on their sources and their effects, political inequalities may be good or bad or neutral from a moral point of view. I focus here on one source of political inequality which is generally considered to be unambiguously bad (though some defend it as a lesser evil). This is the political inequality arising from voters being assigned to territorially defined constituencies each of which sends one delegate to the legislature through a First-Past-The-Pole (FPTP, or "winner-takes-all") procedure. Such a legislative-election scheme disadvantages voters who, in terms of their interests and values, belong to a group that forms a minority within their electoral district. Insofar as the interests and values of such a group are opposed to those of the majority in the district, any political party must field a candidate who reflects the interests and values of the majority if it is to have any realistic prospect of winning the seat. And voters of the minority group will then be unable to ensure that their interests and values are represented in the legislature. This inability may be tolerable, if such a minority group exists in very few districts. But it seems unfair when a large group, far more numerous than a typical district electorate, cannot secure representation in the legislature simply because it is widely dispersed over many electoral districts. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Catholics, homosexuals, environmentalists, and single mothers may be such (mutually overlapping) dispersed groups which constitute large fractions of the national electorate in Canada or the U.S. and yet are, by themselves, utterly incapable of voting even a single one of their own into the legislature. Such dispersed minorities are politically disadvantaged in comparison to geographically concentrated minorities, such as the Mormons, who are better able to secure legislative representation proportionate to their numbers. And they are even more dramatically disadvantaged in comparison to the preponderant heterosexual white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, which achieves significant overrepresentation. In a pluralistic or multicultural society, constituencybased FPTP electoral rules may easily sustain an enduring divideand-rule cycle: the rules divide minorities through district lines into many territorial subgroups, each of which is too small to be able to make its members' votes count toward a candidate of their own. In Self-Constituting Constituencies 27