Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Plurality or Majoritarian systems
• One elected representative per constituency
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Examples include;
• First Past The Post
• Double Ballot (French Elections)
• Alternative Vote
• Supplementary Vote

Proportional systems
• Makes use of multi-member constituencies or districts, in which several representatives
are elected
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• Number of seats that a party gets in the legislature reflect is share of the popular vote
across the country
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g
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• In practice, the system is not perfectly proportional
• Proportional systems can be in three groups; lists systems, mixed systems, or hybrid
systems with a proportional elements and a single transferable vote (STV)
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• This could mean delay before a government is formed
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6% of the popular but only got 1 seat in Westminster
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7% of the popular vote and got 56 seats
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4%
of the vote
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4% of the popular vote and got 2
seats
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7% less than UKIP’s
but the amount of seats obtained was higher by 7
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2015 Election under PR – Losers
• Conservative – 240 Seats (91 Seat Loss compared to actual
result)
• Labour – 198 Seats (34 Seat Loss compared to actual result)
• SNP – 31 Seats (25 Seat Loss compared to actual result)
• Democratic Unionist Party (4 Seat Loss compared to actual
result)
• Social Democratic and Labour Party (1 Seat Loss compared to
actual result)
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Green Party – 25 seats (24 seat gain from actual result)
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2015 Election Under PR
• Conservative – 240 Seats (91)
• Labour – 198 seats (-34)
• UKIP – 82 seats (+81)
• Liberal Democrats – 51 seats
(+43)
• SNP – 31 seats (-25)
• Green Party – 25 seats (+24)
• Democratic Unionist Party –
4 seats (-4)

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Plaid Cymru – 4 Seats (+1)
Sinn Fein – 4 Seats (0)
Ulster Unionist Party – 3 Seats (+1)
Social Democratic and Labour Party
– 2 Seats (-1)
Alliance Party – 2 Seat (+2)
TUSC – 1 Seat (+1)
National Heath Action – 1 Seat (+1)
Traditional Unionist Voice – 1 Seat
(+1)
Respect Party – 1 Seat (+1)

Double Ballot
• Used in elections in France to elect the
president
• It is a voting system used to elect a single
winner where the voter casts a single vote
for their chosen candidate
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Single Transferable vote (STV)
• The Single Transferable Vote (STV) – a form of proportional representation which uses
preferential voting in multi-member constituencies
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• Each voter gets one voter which can transfer from their first-preference to their 2nd
preference, so if your preferred candidate has no change of being elected or has enough
voters already, your vote is transferred to another candidate in accordance with your
instructions
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• Used in the Australian Senate
• All elections in Malta
• Many student unions in the UK
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This in turn puts more power in the hands of
the voters, rather than the party heads, who under other systems can more easily determine who
is elected
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• Fewer voters are ‘wasted’ (i
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cast for losing candidates or unnecessarily cast for the winner)
under STV
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• With STV and multi-member constituencies, parties have a powerful electoral incentive to
present a balanced team of candidates in order to maximise the number of higher preferences
that would go to their sponsored candidates
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• Parliament is more likely to be both reflective of a nation’s views and more responsive to them
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This is was one of the reasons cited by the Arbuthnot
Commission for not recommending STV for non-local Scottish elections
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• STV can lead to donkey voting where candidates rank candidates as they appear
on the ballot paper
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• It could be argued, that a system that allows a political party to parachute its
preferred candidates into safe seats is better than one that leaves the choice
more in the hands of the voters
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Supplementary vote
• It is a shortened version of the AV method
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• Voters mark one ‘X’ in each column, although voters are not needed to make a second choice if
they do not wish to
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• If no candidate gets a majority, the top two candidates continue to second round and all other
candidates are eliminated
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• Any votes for the remaining candidates are then added to their first-round totals
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• Examples of its use; all directly elected English mayors, like the London major and police and
crime commissioners in England and Wales
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•It is relatively simple system to
understand
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• SV strongly promotes for only candidates from the main three parties
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• In such circumstances it may even be possible for voters to defeat their
preferred candidate
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• SV does not eliminate the likelihood of tactical voting
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• This is where the voter has the chance the
candidates in order of preference
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• Candidates are elected outrights if they gain
more than half of the first preference votes
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• This process continues until one candidate has
half of the votes and is elected
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Following the 2010
General Election, 2/3 of the MPs elected lacked majority support, the highest
figure in British political history
• It retains the same constituencies, meaning no need to redraw boundaries, and
no overt erosion of the constituency-MP link
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• Encourages candidates to chase second and third-preferences – lessens the need
for negative campaigning (one which does not alienate supporters of another
candidate whose second preference one wants) and reward broad-church
policies
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Electors can vote for their first-choice
candidate without fear of wasting their vote
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Disadvantages of AV
• AV is not proportional representation and in certain electoral
conditions, such as landslides, can produce a more disproportional
result than FPTP
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• Lower preferences can potentially throw up a ‘lowest common
denominator’ winner without much positive support of their own
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• FPTP voting methods can be used for single and multiple member elections
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• The two-round voting system use a first-past-the-post voting method in each of the two rounds
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• In a multiple member first-past-the-post ballot, the first number of candidates, in order of highest
vote, corresponding to the number of positions to be filled is elected
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• A multiple selection ballot where more than one candidate can be voted for is also a form of firstpast-the-post voting in which voters are allowed to cast a vote for as many candidates as there
are vacant positions; the candidate(s) with the highest number of votes is elected
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• It gives rise a single-party governments
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• It gives rise to a coherent opposition in the legislature allowing for effective
scrutiny and effective government
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• It promotes a link between constituents and their representatives, as it produces
a legislature made up of the representatives in geographical areas
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• Gives a chance for popular independent candidates to be elected
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First-Past-The-Post Disadvantages
• Excludes smaller parties from ‘fair’ representation, in the sense that a party which win
say 10% of the votes should win approximately 10% of the seats
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• It can encourage the development of political parties based on clan, ethnicity or region,
which may base their campaigns and policy platforms on conceptions that are attractive
to the majority of people in their district or region but exclude or are hostile to others
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• May be unresponsive to changes in public opinion
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3% of the
vote meaning 70
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AMS (Additional Member System)
• AMS is a hybrid voting system
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• Helps to overcome the disproportionality often associated
with FPTP elections
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• Each constituency returns a single candidate – in the style of
FPTP
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• These are the ‘additional members’
• Examples of where it is used include the Scottish Parliament,
the Welsh Assembly and the Greater London Assembly
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Advantages of AMS
• It is broadly proportional
• Each voter has a directly accountable single constituency
representative
• Every voter has at least one effective vote
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Disadvantages of AMS
• Many representatives are accountable to the party leadership rather than the
voters
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In
Wales and Scotland, for example, AMs and MSPs elected via regional list have
been seen as having ‘got in via the backdoor’ or as ‘assisted place’ or second
class’ members
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• In Germany and New Zealand, but not in the UK, extra seats are allocated to
other parties to redress the balance
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• It can be complicated, with people getting confused over exactly what they’re
supposed to do with their two votes
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• This is usually done using an electoral formula or a quota which prevents too many small
parties from winning seats
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• Open list – voters choose individual candidates from the list provided by each party and
individual candidates are elected according to the popular vote
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Candidates are
elected in the order they appear on the list (as decide by the party) until all the seats
have been filled
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Mixed systems
• Originally used to elect representatives to the German Budestag, and which has now been
adopted by numerous legislatures around the world
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• It differs by including a set of members elected by geographic constituency who are deduced from
the party totals so as to maintain overall proportionality
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• At the regional or national level (i
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above the constituency level) several different calculation
methods have been used, but the basic characteristic of the MMP is that the total number of
seats in the assembly, including the single-member seats and not only the party-list ones, are
allocated to parties proportionally to the number of votes the party gets in the party in
proportion of the ballot
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Jenkins Inquiry
• Different views about the criteria necessary for a good electoral system
• Former Labour Home Secretary – Jack Straw set out four useful criteria's
for the Jenkins inquiry – set up by the Blair government to examine the
most appropriate way of electing our MPs
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Jenkins Inquiry – Issues
• Jenkins inquiry had not absolute conditions
• In some respects the interpretation of the four ‘guidelines’ is unclear
• Strict proportionality would have tied the hands of those involved by
limiting the range of systems that they could recommend
• ‘Stable government’ is another general phase that has different meanings
• Also the words ‘a link’ might have seemed to imply that existing bonds
between an MP and his or her constituency had to be maintained in their
present form
• As for ‘voter choice’, this also sounded important – the term is capable off
different explanations

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