The choice of Electoral System is one of the most important institutional decisions for any democracy. The choice of a particular electoral system has a profound effect on the future political life of the country concerned, and electoral systems, once chosen, often remain fairly constant as political interests solidify around and respond to the incentives presented by them. However, while conscious design has become far more prevalent recently, traditionally it has been rare for electoral systems to be consciously and deliberately selected. The global movement towards democratic governance in the 1980s and 1990s, which stimulated a new urgency in the search for enduring models of appropriate representative institutions and a fresh re-evaluation of electoral systems, has increased dramatically in the early years of this century. This process was encouraged by the realization that the choice of political institutions can have a significant impact on the wider political system. Electoral systems are today viewed as one of the most influential of all political institutions, and of crucial importance to broader issues of governance. The Electoral Systems Encyclopedia topic focuses on the design, mechanisms, and effects of different electoral systems on national, local and supranational levels. It identifies, describes and classifies 12 distinct electoral systems and discusses their relationship with the larger institutional framework as well as their impact on administrative issues. The Importance of Electoral Systems Political institutions shape the rules of the game under which democracy is practised, and it is often argued that the easiest political institution to manipulate, for good or for bad, is the electoral system. In translating the votes cast in a general election into seats in the legislature, the choice of electoral system can effectively determine who is elected and which party gains power. While many aspects of a country’s political framework are often specified in the constitution and can thus be difficult to amend, electoral system change often only involves new legislation and can thus be subject to manipulation by unscrupulous majority. Even with each voter casting exactly the same vote and with exactly the same number of votes for each party, one electoral system may lead to a coalition government or a minority government while another may allow a single party to assume majority control. Electoral Systems and Party Systems A number of other consequences of electoral systems go beyond this primary effect. Some systems encourage, or even enforce, the formation of political parties; others recognize only individual candidates. The type of party system which develops, in particular the number and the relative sizes of political parties in the legislature, is heavily influenced by the electoral system. So is the internal cohesion and discipline of parties: some systems may encourage factionalism, where different wings of one party are constantly at odds with each other, while another system might encourage parties to speak with one voice and suppress dissent. Electoral systems can also influence the way parties campaign and the way political elites behave, thus helping to determine the broader political climate; they may encourage, or retard, the forging of alliances between parties; and they can provide incentives for parties and groups to be broadly based and accommodating, or to base themselves on narrow appeals to ethnicity or kinship ties. Electoral Systems and Conflict Management These different impacts underline the important role that electoral systems often have in terms of conflict management. It is clear that different electoral systems can aggravate or moderate tension and conflict in a society. At one level, a tension exists between systems which put a premium on representation of minority groups and those which encourage strong single-party government. At another level, if an electoral system is not considered fair and the political framework does not allow the opposition to feel that they have the chance to win next time around, losers may feel compelled to seek power through illegal means, using non-democratic, confrontationalist and even violent tactics. And finally, because the choice of electoral system will determine the ease or complexity of the act of voting, it inevitably impacts on minorities and underprivileged groups. This is always important, but becomes particularly so in societies where there are a substantial number of inexperienced or illiterate voters. Psychological and Mechanical Effects Electoral systems are generally considered to have both ‘mechanical’ and ‘psychological’ effects. The mechanical impact is most apparent in the way different electoral systems tend to encourage different kinds of party system. Plurality/majority systems often tend to have a constraining effect on party numbers as only the top candidate/-s or parties in each electoral district will be elected, while proportional systems tend to be more ‘permissive’, resulting in a greater diversity of parties. The psychological impact of electoral systems reinforces this mechanical effect: under First Past The Post (FPTP) rules, voters who wish to support a minor party are often faced with a dilemma as to how best to avoid ‘wasting’ their vote, as only one candidate can be elected from any single-member district. The result of this dilemma is that many voters will not express their sincere choice but rather will vote for another candidate (usually from a major party) who they believe has a realistic chance of winning the seat. The overall effect of this is to strengthen larger parties at the expense of smaller ones. Proportional systems or systems that allow multiple ballot choices, by contrast, are more likely to facilitate the success of small parties, and hence the pressure to vote strategically is reduced. The Importance of Context It is important to realize that a given electoral system will not necessarily work in the same way in different countries. Although there are some common experiences in different regions of the world, the effects of a particular type of electoral system depend to a great extent on the socio-political context in which it is used. For example, while there remains general agreement that plurality/majority systems tend to restrict the range of legislative representation and Proportional Representation systems encourage it, the conventional wisdom that plurality/majority rules will produce a two-party system and PR a multiparty system is looking increasingly dated. In recent years, FPTP has not always facilitated the aggregation of the party system in established democracies such as Canada and India, nor has it led to the formation of strong and lasting parties in Papua New Guinea. PR has seen the election of dominant single-party regimes in Namibia, South Africa and elsewhere. More broadly, the consequences of the choice of electoral system depend on factors such as how a society is structured in terms of ideological, religious, ethnic, racial, regional, linguistic or class divisions; whether the country is an established democracy, a transitional democracy or a new democracy; whether there is an established party system, or parties are embryonic or unformed, and how many ‘serious’ parties there are; and whether a particular party’s supporters are geographically concentrated or dispersed over a wide area. The Broader Democratic Framework It is also important not to see electoral systems in isolation. Their design and effects are heavily contingent upon other structures within and outside the constitution. Electoral systems are one square of an interrelated patchwork of government systems, rules and points of access to power. Successful electoral system design comes from looking at the framework of political institutions as a whole: changing one part of this framework is likely to cause adjustments in the way other institutions within it work. For example, how does the chosen electoral system facilitate or encourage conflict resolution between party leaders and activists on the ground? How much control do party leaders have over the party’s elected representatives? Are there constitutional provisions for referendums, citizens’ initiatives or ‘direct democracy’ which may complement the institutions of representative democracy? And are the details of the electoral system specified in the constitution, as an attached schedule to the constitution, or in regular legislation? This will determine how entrenched the system is or how open it may be to change by elected majorities. There are two issues of this kind that are worth considering in more detail. The first is the degree of centralization. Is the country federal or unitary, and, if federal, are the units symmetrical in their power or asymmetrical? The second is the choice between parliamentarism and presidentialism. Both systems have their advocates, and the traditions of different countries may influence which is chosen or even foreclose debate; but the different relationship between legislative and executive institutions has important implications for electoral system design for both. The frequent debates over the direct election of mayors and heads of the executive at local level combine both issues. In most bicameral legislatures in federal systems of government, the two chambers are elected by different (or incongruent) methods. This makes sense for two prime reasons which have to do with the theory underpinning federalism. First, the second (or upper) house of a federal legislature is there to represent the provinces or states of the country, and each unit often receives equal representation regardless of population or territory size (e.g. the US Senate or South Africa’s National Council of Provinces). Second, there is little point in creating a two-chamber legislature unless there is a degree of difference between the roles and possibly also of the powers of the two chambers, and using the same electoral system for both is more likely to repeat and reinforce the majority power that controls the lower chamber—particularly if the elections to both chambers are simultaneous. Upper chambers provide the opportunity for some degree of electoral innovation to include communities of interest which may not be fully represented in national elections to a lower chamber. But when elections take place at three or more levels, to the upper chamber of the legislature, the lower chamber of the legislature, and the institutions of government at regional level, it is crucial that the systems used are considered together. It may for example be possible to promote representation of minorities at regional level while discouraging or even prohibiting it at national level. Whether this is or is not desirable is a matter of political debate and choice. At the end of the last century, the examples of enduring democracies using presidential systems were more frequent. Therefore, the commitment to presidentialism in for example Latin America and parts of South-East Asia means that the question now asked is: What aspects of institutional design help make presidentialism work? There is some evidence from the Latin American experience that stability can be problematic in countries with presidential constitutions and highly fragmented party systems, and that there are tensions between divided executive and legislative are not held concurrently. However, it appears helpful branches when the presidential electoral system is over two rounds, the legislative system is List PR, and the elections to adopt an electoral system which makes it likely that the party or coalition supporting an elected president has a significant block, although not necessarily an absolute majority, of elected members of the legislature. Plurality elections for the presidency and simultaneous presidential and legislative elections are often seen as helping to focus the party system into fewer and more viable challengers for power. However, there can be serious dangers in combining the great power that is vested in the hands of a directly elected president who is head of the executive with the use of a plurality method in a diverse or ethnically divided country where no single group has an absolute majority. The result can be devastating for legitimacy or indeed for the success of a peace process. A presidential electoral system may complement a federal system by requiring a successful candidate to achieve a winning vote not only nationwide but also a significant fraction of the vote in a minimum number of the states of the federation. The term “electoral systems” is hereby used to refer to a very specific catalogue of norms and procedures used in an election to decide how to choose those who will hold the positions in dispute. Elections can be set apart from two distinct perspectives: the first one is related to the different levels of government in which a country is divided (national, state or local level). At these levels, various authorities are elected under different systems. When two additional elements are considered —the nature of the State (unitary or federal) and the legislative system (unicameral or bicameral)—, the number of options increases. A second essential difference is the one related to the fact that positions in dispute may be single- or multi-member. This distinction is vital to analyze the functioning and the performance of the systems of government where the connection between the effects produced by the presidential and legislative elections is of crucial importance. Unfortunately, it tends to be minimized to such an extent that the most commonly used definition of electoral systems is the most basic one: the translation of votes into seats. On this basis, the catalogue of systems to integrate a single member position is limited; only one winner can be selected among the contenders, or two in some cases, when a vice president is elected along with the president as part of the same ticket. When the election entails the creation or renewal of a collegiate entity, the range of options is broaden, and its integration can be guided by different political objectives not necessarily reconcilable in practice. On the one hand, ensuring greater proportionality; and on the other, striving for the political party with the greater number of votes to be rewarded with the necessary seats to get a parliamentary majority that might allow it to govern without having to seek no agreement or support from other political forces (in opposition). These two goals are the ones that have captured the most attention of scholars, politicians and the public in general, and have guided the debates and initiatives in the field, but they are not the only ones that have been encouraged or ensured in the design and operation of the electoral systems. While the purpose of creating an electoral system with roughly proportional results is not a really complex task, that of delivering a majority government may pose serious challenges that could end up imposing big restrictions for achieving the desired objective, not because of the lack of regulatory or procedural instruments, but because its realization may require complicated political arrangements. Therefore, the process of designing and evaluating electoral systems to integrate collegiate entities is not only open to a wider range of possibilities, but has more instruments with additional variants that can make more complex its arrangement and operation. What Electoral Systems Are At the most basic level, electoral systems translate the votes cast in an election into results – the offices/seats - won by parties and candidates. The key variables are the electoral formula used (i.e. whether a plurality/majority, proportional, mixed or other system is used, and what mathematical formula is used to calculate the seat allocation), the ballot structure (i.e. whether the voter votes for a candidate or a party and whether the voter makes a single choice or expresses a series of preferences) and the district magnitude (not how many voters live in a district, but how many representatives to the legislature that district elects). It must also be stressed that, although this topic area does not focus on the administrative aspects of elections (such as the distribution of polling places, the nomination of candidates, the registration of voters, who runs the elections and so on), these issues are of critical importance, and the possible advantages of any given electoral system choice can sometimes be undermined unless due attention is paid to them. Electoral system design also affects other areas of electoral laws: the choice of electoral system has an influence on the way in which district boundaries are drawn, how voters are registered, the design of ballot papers, how votes are counted, and numerous other aspects of the electoral process. The choice of Electoral System is one of the most important institutional decisions for any democracy. The choice of a particular electoral system has a profound effect on the future political life of the country concerned, and electoral systems, once chosen, often remain fairly constant as political interests solidify around and respond to the incentives presented by them. However, while conscious design has become far more prevalent recently, traditionally it has been rare for electoral systems to be consciously and deliberately selected. Often the choice was essentially accidental, the result of an unusual combination of circumstances, of a passing trend, or of a quirk of history, with the impact of colonialism and the effects of influential neighbours often being especially strong. Any new democracy must choose (or inherit) an electoral system to elect its legislature. Equally, political crisis within an established democracy may lead to momentum for electoral system change, and even without political crisis, campaigners for political reform may attempt to put electoral system change onto the political agenda. Decisions to change, or indeed to keep in place, an electoral system are often affected by one of two circumstances:
The choices that are made may have consequences that were unforeseen when they are introduced, as well as effects which were predicted. These choices may not always be the best ones for the long-term political health of the country concerned, and at times they can have disastrous consequences for its democratic prospects. The background to a choice of electoral system can thus be as important as the choice itself. Electoral system choice is a fundamentally political process, rather than a question to which independent technical experts can produce a single ‘correct answer’. In fact, the consideration of political advantage is almost always a factor in the choice of electoral systems—sometimes it is the only consideration—while the menu of available electoral system choices is often, in reality, a relatively constrained one. Equally, however, calculations of short-term political interest can often obscure the longer-term consequences of a particular electoral system and the interests of the wider political system. Consequently, while recognizing the practical constraints, this text attempts to approach the issue of electoral system choices in as broad and comprehensive a manner as possible. As the crafting of political institutions is a critical task not only for new democracies but also for those established democracies that are seeking to adapt their systems to better reflect new political realities, this topic area also seeks to address the likely concerns of those persons in established democracies who may be redesigning electoral systems as well as those involved in debate on political institutions in new, fledgling and transitional democracies. Given this target audience, much of the academic literature on the subject is necessarily simplified, while at the same time this text attempts to address some of the more complex issues inherent in the area. If the text appears to be sometimes overly simplistic and at other times unduly complex, the explanation will usually lie in the attempt to balance the two objectives of clarity and comprehensiveness. While the contexts in which emerging and established democracies make institutional choices can vary enormously, their long-term purposes are usually the same: to develop institutions which are strong enough to promote stable democracy but flexible enough to react to changing circumstances. Each type of democracy has much to learn from the experiences of the other. Institutional design is an evolving process, and this text seeks to distil the lessons learnt from the many actual examples of institutional design around the world. The global movement towards democratic governance in the 1980s and 1990s, which stimulated a new urgency in the search for enduring models of appropriate representative institutions and a fresh re-evaluation of electoral systems, has increased dramatically in the early years of this century. This process was encouraged by the realization that the choice of political institutions can have a significant impact on the wider political system. For example, it is increasingly being recognized that an electoral system can be designed both to provide local geographic representation and to promote the principle of proportionality; can promote the development of strong and viable national political parties, and ensure the representation of women and regional minorities; and can help to ‘engineer’ cooperation and accommodation in a divided society by the creative use of particular incentives and constraints. Electoral systems are today viewed as one of the most influential of all political institutions, and of crucial importance to broader issues of governance. When an electoral system is chosen there are a number of things this system can be asked to accomplish or at least be conducive to – a stable and efficient government, coherent coalitions and strong parties are only a few. These goals – and their order of priority – are likely to differ between the different stakeholders. In addition to this, there are general principles that can be used to guide the design of electoral system, as well as the process of choice itself. Some of the more important principles are: Representation The basic task for an electoral system is to translate votes into seats; to transform the expressed will of the voters into people who will represent it. There are many views of what fair representation is – geographic representation, descriptive representation, ideological or party political representation – but regardless of the view that is taken in each country, representation as a principle is a key guide when designing the most suitable electoral system. Transparency It is important that the mechanisms of the electoral system be as transparent as possible and known to both voters and political parties and candidates well in advance in order to avoid confusion and distrust in the results they produce at elections. In addition to this, the process through which the choice of electoral system is arrived at also benefits from transparency for the same reasons. If stakeholders’ arguments and influence over the process of review, reform or adoption are presented in an open way, the process and the electoral system arrived at will have a greater chance of being seen as legitimate. Inclusiveness The electoral system will have a greater chance of being accepted as fair and legitimate if it is considered to work in an inclusive manner. This means not only that the electoral law allows as many as possible citizens to vote (including inclusive suffrage, making sure that the system is easily understandable, and assuring access for all to the polling station), but also that the mechanisms of the electoral system do not overtly discriminate against any one group in society, minority or otherwise. Also, if the process through which the electoral system is arrived at is as inclusive as possible, both the process and the system may benefit as legitimacy and ownership increase, and as more stakeholders are able to bring suggestions and participate in the process of finding the most appropriate system for the society in question. When designing an electoral system, it is best to start with a list of criteria which sum up what you want to achieve, what you want to avoid and, in a broad sense, what you want your legislature and executive government to look like. The criteria which follow cover many areas, but the list is not exhaustive, and the reader may add a host of equally valid items. It is also true that some of the criteria outlined overlap and may appear contradictory. This is because they often are contradictory: it is the nature of institutional design that trade-offs have to be made between a number of competing desires and objectives. These files focus primarily on criteria for the systems and not on the design process itself. The design process is covered in more depth in the sections Process of Change and Advice for Electoral Systems' Designers. For example, one may want to provide the opportunity for independent candidates to be elected, and at the same time to encourage the growth of strong political parties. Or electoral system designers may think it wise to craft a system which gives voters a wide degree of choice between candidates and parties, but this may make for a complicated ballot paper which causes difficulties for less-educated voters. The trick in choosing (or reforming) an electoral system is to prioritize the criteria that are most important and then assess which electoral system, or combination of systems, best maximizes the attainment of these objectives. Representation may take at least four forms. First, geographical representation implies that each region, be it a town or a city, a province or an electoral district, has members of the legislature whom it chooses and who are ultimately accountable to their area. Second, the ideological divisions within society may be represented in the legislature, whether through representatives from political parties or independent representatives or a combination of both. Third, a legislature may be representative of the party-political situation that exists within the country even if political parties do not have an ideological base. If half the voters vote for one political party but that party wins no, or hardly any, seats in the legislature, then that system cannot be said to adequately represent the will of the people. Fourth, the concept of descriptive representation considers that the legislature should be to some degree a ‘mirror of the nation’ which should look, feel, think and act in a way which reflects the people as a whole. An adequately descriptive legislature would include both men and women, the young and the old, the wealthy and the poor, and reflect the different religious affiliations, linguistic communities and ethnic groups within a society. Elections are all well and good, but they may mean little to people if it is difficult to vote or if at the end of the day their perception that their vote makes no difference to the way the country is governed. The ease of voting is determined by factors such as how complex the ballot paper is, how easy it is for the voter to get to a polling place, how up-to-date the electoral register is, and how confident the voter is that his or her ballot will be secret. Electoral participation—at least as a free choice—is also thought to increase when the outcome of elections, either at a national level or in the voter’s particular district, is likely to make a significant difference to the future direction of government. If you know that your preferred candidate has no chance of winning a seat in your particular district, what is the incentive to vote? In some electoral systems, the wasted votes (i.e. valid votes for losing candidates, as distinct from spoiled or invalid ballot papers, which are excluded from the count) can amount to a substantial proportion of the total national vote. Lastly, the actual power of the body being elected helps determine whether its election has any meaning. Hollow elections in authoritarian systems which offer no genuine choice, where legislatures have little real influence on the formation of governments or on government policy, are far less important than elections to legislatures which actually have the power to determine central elements in people’s everyday lives. Even within democratic systems, the choice of electoral system can influence the legitimacy of institutions. For example, the Australian Senate between 1919 and 1946 was elected by a highly disproportional electoral system (the Alternative Vote in multimember districts), which produced lopsided and unrepresentative results. This tended to undermine the actual legitimacy of the Senate itself in the eyes of both electors and politicians and, some observers argued, also undermined public support for the institutions of federal government in general. After the system was altered to a fairer proportional system (the Single Transferable Vote) in 1948, the Senate began to be perceived as more credible and representative, and thus respect for it and its relative importance in decision making increased. Electoral systems can be seen not only as ways to constitute governing bodies but also as mechanisms for conflict management within a society. Some systems, in some circumstances, will encourage parties to make inclusive appeals for electoral support outside their own core vote base; for instance, even if a party draws its support primarily from black voters, a particular electoral system may give it the incentive to appeal also to white, or other, voters. Thus, the party’s policy platform would come less divisive and exclusionary, and more unifying and inclusive. Similar electoral system incentives might make parties less ethnically, regionally, linguistically or ideologically exclusive. Examples of how different electoral systems have worked as tools of conflict management are given throughout this text. On the other side of the coin, electoral systems can encourage voters to look outside their own group and think of voting for parties which traditionally have represented a different group. Such voting behaviour breeds accommodation and community building. Systems which give the voter more than one vote or allow the voter to order candidates preferentially provide the space for voters to cut across preconceived social boundaries. At the 1998 Good Friday agreement election in Northern Ireland, for instance, vote transfers under the STV system benefited ‘pro-peace’ parties while still providing broadly proportional outcomes. At the 2003 election, however, a shift in first-preference votes towards hard-line parties tended to outweigh such effects. The prospects for a stable and efficient government are not determined by the electoral system alone, but the results a system produces can contribute to stability in a number of important respects. The key questions are
The perception of whether results are fair or not varies widely from country to country. Twice in the United Kingdom (UK) (in 1951 and 1974) the party winning the most votes in the country as a whole won fewer seats than its opponents, but this was considered more a quirk of a basically sound system than an outright unfairness which should be reversed. Conversely, similar results in New Zealand in 1978 and 1981, in which the National Party retained office despite winning fewer votes than the Labour opposition, are credited as starting the reform movement which led to a change of electoral system. The question whether the government of the day can enact legislation efficiently is partly linked to whether it can assemble a working majority in the legislature, and this in turn is linked to the electoral system. As a general rule of thumb, plurality/majority electoral systems are more likely to produce legislatures where one party can outvote the combined opposition, while PR systems are more likely to give rise to coalition governments. Nevertheless, it has to be remembered that PR systems can also produce single-party majorities, and plurality/majority systems can leave no one party with a working majority. Much depends on the structure of the party system and the nature of the society itself. Finally, the system should, as far as possible, act in an electorally neutral manner towards all parties and candidates; it should not openly discriminate against any political grouping. The perception that electoral politics in a democracy is an uneven playing field is a sign that the political order is weak and that instability may not be far around the corner. A dramatic example of this was the 1998 election in Lesotho, in which the Lesotho Congress for Democracy won every seat in the legislature with only 60 per cent of the votes under an FPTP system. The public unrest that followed, culminating in a request for military intervention in the country by the Southern African Development Community, demonstrated that such a result was not merely unfair but also dangerous, and the electoral system was consequently changed for future elections. Accountability is one of the bedrocks of representative government. Its absence may indeed lead to long-term instability. An accountable political system is one in which the government is responsible to the voters to the highest degree possible. Voters should be able to influence the shape of the government, either by altering the coalition of parties in power or by throwing out of office a single party which has failed to deliver. Suitably designed electoral systems facilitate this objective. The conventional wisdom in this area may be simplistic. Traditionally, plurality/majority systems like FPTP were seen as leading to single parties taking office, while PR systems were associated with multiparty coalitions. While the broad logic of this association remains valid, there have been sufficient examples in recent years of FPTP elections leading to multiparty cabinets (e.g. in India) or of PR elections leading to the election of a strong single-party government (e.g. in South Africa) to raise doubts about the automatic assumption that one kind of electoral system will lead to particular governance outcomes. But clearly, electoral systems do have a major impact on broader issues of governance, for both presidential and parliamentary systems. Accountability at the individual level is the ability of the electorate to effectively check on those who, once elected, betray the promises they made during the campaign or demonstrate incompetence or idleness in office and ‘throw the rascals out’. Some systems emphasize the role of locally popular candidates, rather than on candidates nominated by a strong central party. Plurality/majority systems have traditionally been seen as maximizing the ability of voters to throw out unsatisfactory individual representatives. Again, this sometimes remains valid. However, the connection becomes tenuous where voters identify primarily with parties rather than candidates, as in the UK. At the same time, open and free list systems and STV are designed to allow voters to exercise candidate choice in the context of a proportional system. The weight of evidence from both established and new democracies suggests that longer-term democratic consolidation—that is, the extent to which a democratic regime is insulated from domestic challenges to the stability of the political order—requires the growth and maintenance of strong and effective political parties, and thus the electoral system should encourage this rather than promote party fragmentation. To do this, electoral systems can be framed specifically to exclude parties with a small or minimal level of support. The development of the role of parties as a vehicle for individual political leaders is another trend which can be facilitated or retarded by electoral system design decisions. Most experts also agree that the electoral system should encourage the development of parties which are based on broad political values and ideologies as well as specific policy programmes, rather than narrow ethnic, racial or regional concerns. As well as lessening the threat of societal conflict, parties which are based on these broad ‘crosscutting cleavages’ are more likely to reflect national opinion than those which are based predominantly on sectarian or regional concerns. Effective governance relies not only on those in power but, almost as much, on those who oppose and oversee them. The electoral system should help ensure the presence of a viable opposition grouping which can critically assess legislation, question the performance of the executive, safeguard minority rights, and represent its constituents effectively. Opposition groupings should have enough representatives to be effective (assuming that their performance at the ballot box warrants it) and in a parliamentary system should be able to present a realistic alternative to the current government. Obviously the strength of the opposition depends on many other factors besides the choice of electoral system, but if the system itself makes the opposition impotent, democratic governance is inherently weakened. A major reason for the change to an MMP electoral system in New Zealand, for example, was the systematic under-representation of smaller opposition parties under FPTP. At the same time, the electoral system should hinder the development of a ‘winner takes all’ attitude which leaves rulers blind to other views and the needs and desires of opposition voters, and sees both elections and government itself as zero-sum contests. In a presidential system, the president needs the reliable support of a substantial group of legislators: however, the role of others in opposing and scrutinizing government legislative proposals is equally important. The separation of powers between legislature and executive effectively gives the task of executive oversight to all legislators, not only the opposition members. This makes it important to give particular thought to the elements of the electoral system which concern the relative importance of political parties and candidates, alongside the relationship between parties and their elected members. Elections do not take place on the pages of academic books but in the real world, and for this reason the choice of any electoral system is, to some degree, dependent on the cost and administrative capacities of the country involved. Although donor countries often provide substantial financial support for the first, and even the second, election in a country in transition to democracy, this is unlikely to be available in the long term even if it were desirable. A sustainable political framework takes into account the resources of a country both in terms of the availability of people with the skills to be election administrators and in terms of the financial demands on the national budget. For example, a poor country may not be able to afford the multiple elections required under a Two-Round System or be able easily to administer a complicated preferential vote count. However, simplicity in the short term may not always make for cost effectiveness in the longer run. An electoral system may be cheap and easy to administer but it may not answer the pressing needs of a country—and when an electoral system is at odds with a country’s needs the results can be disastrous. Alternatively, a system which appears at the outset to be a little more expensive to administer and more complex to understand may in the long run help to ensure the stability of the country and the positive direction of democratic consolidation. Finally, the design of electoral systems today takes place in the context of a number of international covenants, treaties and other kinds of legal instruments affecting political issues. While there is no single complete set of universally agreed international standards for elections, there is consensus that such standards include:
Moreover, while there is no legal stipulation that a particular kind of electoral system is preferable to another, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of issues that are affected by electoral systems, such as the fair representation of all citizens, the equality of women and men, the rights of minorities, special considerations for the disabled, and so on. These are formalized in international legal instruments such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in the various conventions and commitments concerning democratic elections made by regional organizations such as the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Organization of American States (OAS), Council of Europe (COE) and the Commonwealth. The ten outlined criteria are at times in conflict with each other or even mutually exclusive. The designers of an electoral system must therefore go through a careful process of prioritizing which criteria are most important to the particular political context before moving on to assess which system will do the best job. A useful way forward is first to list the things which must be avoided at all costs, such as political catastrophes which could lead to the breakdown of democracy. For example, an ethnically divided country might want above all to avoid excluding minority ethnic groups from representation in order to promote the legitimacy of the electoral process and avoid the perception that the electoral system was unfair. In contrast, while these issues might still be important to it, a fledgling democracy elsewhere might have different priorities—perhaps to ensure that a government can enact legislation efficiently without fear of gridlock, or that voters are able to remove discredited leaders if they so wish. Establishing the priorities among such competing criteria can only be the domain of the domestic actors involved in the institutional design process. The process through which an electoral system is designed or altered has a great effect on the type of the system which results, its appropriateness for the political situation, and the degree of legitimacy and popular support it will ultimately enjoy. Electoral systems are very rarely designed on a blank slate where no precedents exist. Even the efforts spent to design an electoral system in Afghanistan and Iraq had historical multiparty competitive precedents to draw on (albeit distant in time and casting little light on what may work in the future). Fiji, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar are recent examples of countries going from very tough circumstances—as coups d’état—to the establishment of electoral systems and institutions where previous experiences were considered. Some key questions of electoral system design, or on the change of an existing one, are:
There are several circumstances that give rise to a process of review, adjustment and, taken to the extreme, to the complete replacement of the electoral system:
While electoral systems are an extremely important institution affecting the way in which a country’s system of government works, traditionally they have not been formally specified in constitutions, the highest source of law. In recent years, however, this has started to change. Today, a number of countries have ‘embedded’ details about the electoral system in their constitution or in a separate schedule to the constitution. The significance of this for electoral reformers is that constitutionally entrenched laws are usually much harder to change than ordinary laws, usually requiring a special majority in the legislature, a national referendum abuses or some other confirmatory mechanism, which shields such systems from easy alteration. For example, the South African constitution states that the electoral system for the National Assembly elections shall result ‘in general in proportionality’ and so reform options are limited to PR-type systems unless a constitutional amendment is made. However, the details of the electoral system are still more often to be found in regular law and thus can be changed by a simple majority in the legislature. This may have the advantage of making the system more responsive to changes in public opinion and political needs, but it also contains the danger of majorities in a legislature unilaterally altering systems to give themselves political advantage. The opportunities for reform rely on both the legal mechanisms for change and the political context within which calls for change are made. Not all movements for electoral system change are successful. Almost all recent examples of major change have occurred in one of two sets of circumstances. The first is in the course of a transition to democracy or shortly afterwards, when the whole political framework is ‘up for grabs’. The second is when there is a crisis of governance in an established democracy. Two examples are the perceived illegitimacy of two successive majority governments elected with fewer votes than their major opponents in New Zealand, and the perception that high levels of corruption in Italy and Japan were endemic to the political system rather than the results of the actions of particular individuals. Even when there is huge popular distrust and dissatisfaction with the political system, change still needs to be agreed by the current holders of power. Political elites are only likely to act if they can see benefit to themselves from change or if they are frightened of the electoral consequences to themselves of failing to change. Even when convinced, they will, unsurprisingly and almost inevitably, seek to choose a system that maximizes the benefit to themselves. If they are unsure how this can be achieved or if different interests seek different solutions, negotiated compromises may be likely—perhaps involving mixed systems. However, agreements and changes may not turn out to have the effects intended by their proponents or may produce other, unintended effects. In Mexico, reforms in 1994 designed by the governing party to make concessions to the opposition led to the most disproportional result in later years. The cases of South Africa and Chile illustrate the fact that political realities and the desire of ruling parties to maintain their power and influence can be just as much a block on electoral system reform as legal hurdles. In South Africa there have been widespread calls for an element of local accountability to be built in to the closed-list PR system of large electoral districts under which elected representatives are perceived as detached from their electors. These were reinforced by the majority findings of a presidential commission which reported in January 2003, but the government shied away from changes that would reduce its control over candidate selection and caucus voting behaviour, and declined to entertain reform. In Chile, General Pinochet’s legacy was to rig the electoral system to advantage his allies and it was only a few decades after his removal from power, that the system was finally changed. In New Zealand, the use of referendums during the process of change resulted initially from a political move—an attempt by the leader of one major party to wrong-foot the other major party during a general election campaign. In the first referendum, the electorate was asked whether it wanted change at all and to indicate its preferred new system from four options. In the second, the chosen new system was pitted against the retention of the previous system. As a result, the new multi-member proportional system was adopted with a clear expression of public legitimacy. Electoral systems will inevitably need to adapt over time if they are to respond adequately to new political, demographic and legislative trends and needs. However, once a system is in place, those who have benefited from it are likely to resist change. Without a transition or a major political crisis as catalyst, it appears that change at the margins may well be more likely than fundamental reform. In post-conflict transitions, this creates a tension between the practical constraints that may affect the implementation of elections driven for example by the political imperatives of a peace agreement, and the desirability of getting the system right at the beginning. To try to engineer improvements within existing systems, reformers may consider changing district magnitude, threshold levels or quota formulae. Many significant reforms proposed in the past few years have involved adding a List PR element on to an existing FPTP system to create a mixed, more proportional system (e.g. the changes enacted in Lesotho and Thailand). It is the task of reformers not only to understand the legal form of the technical arguments for and the implications of potential change but also to understand and be able to explain the political arguments and the implications for the wider political framework of the country. Significant voices in civil society, academia, and the media may contribute to developing a public perception that change is necessary. But a sufficient number of those in power will need to be convinced of the benefits, including the benefits to them. Even with the current increased interest in electoral systems, the number of people, both in elite circles and in society generally, who understand the likely impact of changes may be very limited. This is further complicated by the fact that the operation of electoral systems in practice may be heavily dependent on apparently minor points of detail. Reformers may need not only to fully work through and explain the legal detail that would be necessary to implement change, but also to make technical projections and simulations (often using data from previous elections) to show, for example, the shape and implications of proposals on electoral districts or the potential impact on the representation of political parties. Technical simulations can also be used to ensure that all contingencies are covered and to evaluate apparently unlikely outcomes: it is better to answer questions while change is being promoted than in the middle of a crisis later! Of course, not all effects of a new electoral system will be known in advance. In fact, designing an electoral system when it is unclear what the results of an election held under it will be in terms of actual vote and seat distribution may even be helpful when it comes to arriving at a system that will be seen to be the most fair to all actors involved. As much as possible of the technical details and mechanical effects should however be known to all and understood in advance of a change. Voter involvement programmes, for example, inviting members of the public to participate in mock elections under a potential new system, may attract media attention and increase familiarity with proposals for change. Comparative experience can provide relevant elements for the analysis and implementation of new variables in the electoral systems. Studying what happens in a region or in the world can provide examples of the way electoral systems have operated under certain political and social circumstances. And while other experiences are never the same to those prevailing within a country, they can be used as a basis for a more conscious analysis which might allow for the implementation of improvements. Likewise, these contrasting mechanisms may also help to identify and solve potencial problems—for example, voter difficulty with ballot papers—which a new system may generate. Voters, election administrators, politicians and commentators all tend to be comfortable with what is familiar. Years of use may have smoothed the rough edges of established systems. A new system can thus be a leap into the unknown, and problems in implementation can arise from its unfamiliarity. This cannot be avoided completely, and the planners of change cannot sit back when legislative changes are in place. A process of change is complete only with intensive voter education programmes to explain to all participants how the new system works and with the design and agreement of user-friendly implementing regulations. The most effective voter education—and election administrator education—takes time and its therefore important to start early. Unfortunately, in reality time is often in short supply to an electoral management body (EMB) organizing an election under a new system, but it need not to be if good planning is applied. All good negotiators use time pressure before a final agreement is reached, and this is particularly true when the new system is the product of hard negotiation between political actors. Something similar happened a few weeks before the 2012 elections in El Salvador, when the electoral management body was not able to agree on the company to be hired to run the voter´s education campaign and had to sign agreements with social organizations in order to spread the new way of voting. An effective EMB will nonetheless prepare an election as much as possible as early as possible. Having discussed the process of change in some depth, a word of caution is needed on its possible effects in the immediate future. Because electoral systems have psychological as well as mechanical effects, the long-term effect of changes may take some time to work through. Parties, candidates and voters may take two or even three electoral processes to fully observe and respond to the positive and negative effects of particular changes. The tendency towards mixed systems may accentuate this, as the overall effect on candidates and voters of mixed incentives may be less clear. Judgement may be necessary as to whether problems in a new or amended electoral system are merely transitional or whether they show that the system is fundamentally flawed and requires urgent amendment or replacement. In Fiji, the 2000 and 2006 coups brought back the debate on the importance of ethnicity in politics. Since the Alternative Vote system used previously brought more division than expected in an already divided society as the Fijian, for the 2014 elections a new Proportional Representation electoral system consisting of a single nationwide district was used in order to promote the participation of more political parties and to achieve more stability. The Italian referendum in 1993, leading to a change to a Mixed Member Proportional System for the elections the following year, marked the beginning of a series of significant changes in electoral systems all over the world. In the vast majority of the cases, changes have been made on the margins, with a new seat allocation formula, a new number of electoral districts, or an extra few appointed members in the legislature; but many countries have also gone through reform processes that have altered their electoral system completely. For instance, after the coups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar, elections were held after a transitional period under a Parallel System in 2006 and 2013, respectively. Another example is Fiji with its 2014 elections held under a Proportional Representation System after experiencing coups in 1987, 2000 and 2006. There are some other cases where an electoral system was unsuccessfully replaced only to be used again, such as in Kyrgyzstan and more recently in Bulgaria, where a Mixed system was used in the 2009 election instead of one of Proportional Representation System, which was then reinstated in 2013. As Table 1 shows, the trend is rather clear. Most countries that have changed electoral systems have done so in the direction of more proportionality, either by adding a PR element to a plurality system (making it a Parallel or MMP system) or by completely replacing their old system with List PR. The most common switch has been from a plurality/majority system to a mixed system, and there is not one example of a change in the opposite direction. The new plurality/majority systems all come from within the same family. The debate about reforming the electoral systems as a way to achieve greater representation is still in many countries´ agendas. Such is the case of the United Kingdom, where a referendum on the voting system was held in 2011; however, the proposal was rejected with 67.90% (13’013,123) of the votes cast against it and 32.10% (6’152,607) in favour.  *Bhutan held elections for the first time in 2008 under the First Past the Post System and under the Two-Round System in 2013. *The Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa) held elections for the first time in 2006 under a Mixed electoral system. *Madagascar adopted a Parallel system in 2013. *Bulgaria changed from a Proportional Representation system to a Mixed electoral system in 2009 and back to PR in 2013. Once a decision has been made about the important goals to be achieved—and the important pitfalls to be avoided—in a new electoral system, there are a group of electoral system design variables and elements which can be used to help achieve these goals. They include, among others:
These variables will work differently in different combinations. Their use may depend on the level of information that is or can be available within a society, for example the numbers, diversity, and location of the population. Their effect will also depend on other institutional framework tools, such as the choice between parliamentarism and presidentialism, the requirements for registration and management of political parties, the relationship between political parties and elected members, and the role of instruments of direct democracy—referendums, citizens’ initiatives, and recall. It is worth emphasizing again that there is never a single ‘correct solution’ that can be imposed in a vacuum. There are countless electoral system variations, but essentially they can be divided into 12 main systems, the majority of which fall into three broad families. The most common way to look at electoral systems is to group them according to how closely they translate national votes won into legislative seats won, that is, how proportional they are. To do this, one needs to look at both the votes-to-seats relationship and the level of wasted votes. If we take the proportionality principle into account, along with some other considerations such as how many members are elected from each district and how many votes the voter has, we are left with the family structure illustrated in figure 1. For example, South Africa used a classically proportional electoral system for its elections of 2004, and with 69.69 per cent of the popular vote the African National Congress (ANC) won 69.75 per cent of the national seats. The electoral system was highly proportional, and the number of wasted votes (i.e. those which were cast for parties which did not win seats in the Assembly) was only 0.74 per cent of the total. In direct contrast, in Mongolia in 2000, a Two-Round System only requiring a plurality of 25 per cent of the votes for candidates to be elected resulted in the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) winning 72 seats in the 76-member Parliament with around 52 per cent of the popular vote. This result was mirrored in Djibouti’s Party Block Vote election of 2003 when all 65 legislative seats were won by the Rassemblement Populaire pour le Progrès with 62.7 per cent of the vote. However, under some circumstances, non-proportional electoral systems (such as FPTP) can give rise to relatively proportional overall results, for example, when party support is concentrated in regional fiefdoms. This was the case in another Southern African country, Malawi, in 2004. In that election, the Malawian Congress Party won 30 per cent of the seats with 25 per cent of the votes, the United Democratic Front won 27 per cent of the seats with 25 per cent of the votes, and the Alliance for Democracy won a little more than 3 per cent of the seats with just under 4 per cent of the votes. The overall level of proportionality was high, but the clue to the fact that this was not inherently a proportional system, and so cannot be categorized as such, was that the wasted votes still amounted to almost half of all votes cast. Equally, some design factors accentuate disproportionality. Systems with a high level of malapportionment often produce disproportional results, as do proportional systems with high thresholds—which can result in a high level of wasted votes, as in Turkey in 2002, where a 10 per cent threshold resulted in 46 per cent of votes being wasted. The principle of plurality/majority systems is simple. After votes have been cast and totalled, those candidates or parties with the most votes are declared the winners (there may also be additional conditions). However, the way this is achieved in practice varies widely. Five varieties of plurality/majority systems can be identified:
In an FPTP system (sometimes known as a plurality single-member district system) the winner is the candidate with the most votes but not necessarily an absolute majority of the votes. When this system is used in multi-member districts, it becomes the Block Vote. Voters have as many votes as there are seats to be filled, and the highest-polling candidates fill the positions regardless of the percentage of the vote they achieve. This system—with the change that voters vote for party lists instead of individual candidates—becomes the Party Block Vote. Majoritarian systems, such as the Alternative Vote and the Two-Round System, try to ensure that the winning candidate receives an absolute majority (i.e. over 50 per cent). Each system in essence makes use of voters’ second preferences to produce a winner with an absolute majority if one does not emerge from the first round of voting. The First Past The Post system is the simplest form of plurality/majority system, using single member districts and candidate-centred voting. The voter is presented with the names of the nominated candidates and votes by choosing one, and only one, of them. The winning candidate is simply the person who wins the most votes; in theory he or she could be elected with two votes, if every other candidate only secured a single vote. Along with the UK, the cases most often analysed are Canada, India, and the United States.
Indian FPTP ballot paper Advantages of FPTP First Past The Post, like other plurality/majority electoral systems, is defended primarily on the grounds of simplicity and its tendency to produce winners who are representatives beholden to defined geographic areas and governability. The most often cited advantages are that:
Disadvantages of FPTP However, FPTP is frequently criticized for a number of reasons. These include:
The Block Vote is simply the use of plurality voting in multi-member districts. Voters have as many votes as there are seats to be filled in their district, and are usually free to vote for individual candidates regardless of party affiliation. In most BV systems, they may use as many, or as few, of their votes as they wish. The system was used in Jordan in 1989, in Mongolia in 1992, and in the Philippines and Thailand until 1997, but was changed in all these countries as a result of unease with the results it produced. Advantages of BV The Block Vote is often applauded for retaining the voter’s ability to vote for individual candidates and allowing for reasonably-sized geographical districts, while at the same time increasing the role of parties compared with FPTP and strengthening those parties which demonstrate most coherence and organizational ability. Disadvantages of BV However, the Block Vote can have unpredictable and often undesirable impacts on election outcomes. For example, when voters cast all their votes for the candidates of a single party, the system tends to exaggerate most of the disadvantages of FPTP, in particular its disproportionality. When parties nominate a candidate for each vacancy in a Block Vote system and encourage voters to support every member of their slate, this is particularly likely. In Mauritius in 1982 and 1995, for example, the party in opposition before the election won every seat in the legislature with only 64 per cent and 65 per cent of the vote, respectively. This created severe difficulties for the effective functioning of a parliamentary system based on concepts of government and opposition. The use of ‘best loser’ seats in Mauritius only partially compensates for this weakness. In Thailand, the Block Vote was seen as having encouraged the fragmentation of the party system. Because it enables electors to vote for candidates of more than one party in the same district, members of the same party may be encouraged to compete against each other for support. The Block Vote was thus sometimes seen in this country as being a contributor to internal party factionalism and corruption, which eventually led to its replacement. Besides Thailand, some other countries have abandoned the Block Vote in favour of other systems. Thailand and the Philippines both changed from BV to a mixed system in the late 1990s. In both cases, a major justification for the change was the need to combat vote-buying and strengthen the development of political parties. Under Party Block Vote, unlike FPTP, there are multi-member districts. Voters have a single vote, and choose between party lists of candidates rather than between individuals. The party which wins most votes takes all the seats in the district, and its entire list of candidates is duly elected. As in FPTP, there is no requirement for the winner to have an absolute majority of the votes. As of 2004, PBV was used as the only system or the major component of the system in four countries—Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti and Singapore. Advantages of PBV PBV is simple to use, encourages strong parties and allows for parties to put up mixed slates of candidates in order to facilitate minority representation. It can be used to help to ensure balanced ethnic representation, as it enables parties to present ethnically diverse lists of candidates for election—and may indeed be designed to require them to do so. Disadvantages of PBV However, the Party Block Vote also suffers from most of the disadvantages of FPTP, and may indeed produce highly disproportional results where one party wins almost all of the seats with a simple majority of the votes. In Djibouti’s 1997 election, the ruling Union for the Presidential Majority coalition won every seat, leaving the two opposition parties without any representation in the legislature. Some electoral amendments were introduced by the government of Djibouti in 2012, through which some seats in parliament were allotted proportionally and the rest of them under the same PBV system. This change showed more equitable outcomes to other parties in the 2013 election. Elections under Alternative Vote are usually held in single-member districts, like FPTP elections. However, AV gives voters considerably more options than FPTP when marking their ballot paper. Rather than simply indicating their favoured candidate, under AV electors rank the candidates in the order of their choice, by marking a ‘1’ for their favourite, ‘2’ for their second choice, ‘3’ for their third choice and so on. The system thus enables voters to express their preferences between candidates rather than simply their first choice. For this reason, it is often known as ‘preferential voting’ in the countries which use it. (The Borda Count, STV, and the Supplementary Vote are also preferential systems). AV also differs from FPTP in the way votes are counted. Like FPTP or TRS, a candidate who has won an absolute majority of the votes (50 per cent plus one) is immediately elected. However, if no candidate has an absolute majority, under AV the candidate with the lowest number of first preferences is ‘eliminated’ from the count, and his or her ballots are examined for their second preferences. Each ballot is then transferred to whichever remaining candidate has the highest preference in the order as marked on the ballot paper. This process is repeated until one candidate has an absolute majority, and is declared duly elected. AV is thus a majoritarian system. It is possible, but not essential, in preferential systems such as AV to require voters to number all, or most, of the candidates on the ballot paper. This avoids the possibility of votes becoming ‘wasted’ at a later stage in the count because they bear no further valid preferences. However, it can lead to an increase in the number of invalid votes, and it can sometimes give substantial importance to preferences between candidates to which the voter is indifferent or actively dislikes. Australian AV ballot paper Advantages of AV One advantage of transferring ballots is that it enables the votes of several candidates to accumulate, so that diverse but related interests can be combined to win representation. AV also enables supporters of candidates who have little hope of being elected to influence, via their second and later preferences, the election of a major candidate. For this reason, it is sometimes argued that AV is the best system for promoting centrist politics, as it can compel candidates to seek not only the votes of their own supporters but also the ‘second preferences’ of others. To attract these preferences, candidates must make broadly-based appeals rather than focusing on narrower issues. The experience of AV in Australia tends to support these arguments: the major parties, for example, typically try to strike bargains with minor parties for the second preferences of their supporters prior to an election—a process known as ‘preference swapping’. Furthermore, because of the majority support requirement, AV increases the consent given to elected members, and thus can enhance their perceived legitimacy. The experience of AV in Papua New Guinea and in Australia suggests that it can provide significant incentives for accommodatory and cooperative politics. In recent years, AV, or its variant the Supplementary Vote, has also been adopted for presidential and mayoral elections in Bosnia, London, and San Francisco. Disadvantages of AV Nevertheless, AV also has a number of disadvantages. First, it requires a reasonable degree of literacy and numeracy to be used effectively, and because it operates in single-member districts it can often produce results that are disproportional when compared to PR systems—or even in some cases compared with FPTP. Also, the potential of AV for promoting centrist outcomes is very dependent on underlying social and demographic conditions: while it successfully promoted interethnic accommodation in Papua New Guinea during the 1960s and 1970s, it has been criticized in another Pacific country, Fiji, since it was implemented there in 1997. Moreover, as its use in the Australian Senate from 1919 to 1946 noted, AV does not work well when applied to larger, multi-member districts. The central feature of the Two-Round System is as the name suggests: it is not one election but takes place in two rounds, often a short time apart. The first round is conducted in the same way as a single-round plurality/majority election. In the most common form of TRS, this is conducted using FPTP. It is, however, also possible to conduct TRS in multi-member districts using Block Vote (as in Kiribati) or Party Block Vote (as in Mali). A candidate or party that receives a specified proportion of the vote is elected outright, with no need for a second ballot. This proportion is normally an absolute majority of valid votes cast, although several countries use a different figure when using TRS to elect a president. If no candidate or party receives an absolute majority, then a second round of voting is held and the winner of this round is declared elected. The details of how the second round is conducted vary in practice from case to case. The most common method is for it to be a straight run-off contest between the two highest vote winners from the first round; this is called majority run-off TRS. It produces a result that is truly majoritarian in that one of the two participants will necessarily achieve an absolute majority of votes and be declared the winner. A second method, majority-plurality TRS, is used for legislative elections in France, the country most often associated with the Two-Round System. In these elections, any candidate who has received the votes of over 12.5 per cent of the registered electorate in the first round can stand in the second round. Whoever wins the highest number of votes in the second round is then declared elected, regardless of whether they have won an absolute majority or not. Unlike majority run-off, this system is not truly majoritarian, as there may be up to five or six candidates contesting the second round of elections. Advantages of TRS
Disadvantages of TRS
The rationale underpinning all PR systems is to consciously reduce the disparity between a party's share of the national vote and its share of the parliamentary seats; if a major party wins 40 per cent of the votes, it should win approximately 40 per cent of the seats, and a minor party with 10 per cent of the votes should also gain 10 per cent of the legislative seats. This congruity between a party’s share of the vote and its share of the seats provides an incentive for all parties to support and participate in the system. PR requires the use of electoral districts with more than one member: it is not possible to divide a single seat elected on a single occasion proportionally. There are two major types of PR system—List PR and Single Transferable Vote (STV). Proportionality is often seen as being best achieved by the use of party lists, where political parties present lists of candidates to the voters on a national or regional basis, but preferential voting can work equally well: the Single Transferable Vote, where voters rank-order candidates in multi-member districts, is another well-established proportional system. There are many important issues which can have a major impact on how a PR system works in practice. The greater the number of representatives to be elected from a district, the more proportional the electoral system will be. PR systems also differ in the range of choice given to the voter—whether the voter can choose between political parties, individual candidates, or both. In many respects, the strongest arguments for PR derive from the way in which the system avoids the anomalous results of plurality/majority systems and is better able to produce a representative legislature. For many new democracies, particularly those which face deep societal divisions, the inclusion of all significant groups in the legislature can be a near-essential condition for democratic consolidation. Failing to ensure that both minorities and majorities have a stake in developing political systems can have catastrophic consequences, such as seeking power through illegal means. PR systems in general are praised for the way in which they:
Most of the criticisms of PR in general are based around the tendency of PR systems to give rise to coalition governments and a fragmented party system. The arguments most often cited against PR are that it leads to:
In its most simple form, List PR involves each party presenting a list of candidates to the electorate in each multi-member electoral district. Voters vote for a party, and parties receive seats in proportion to their overall share of the vote in the electoral district. Winning candidates are taken from the lists in order of their position on the lists. The choice of List PR does not in itself completely specify the electoral system: more details must be determined. The system used to calculate the allocation of seats after the votes have been counted can be either a Highest Average or a Largest Remainder Method. The formula chosen has a small but sometimes critical effect on the outcomes of elections under PR. In Cambodia in 1998, a change in the formula a few weeks before polling day turned out to have the effect of giving the largest party 64 seats, instead of 59, in a 121-seat National Assembly. The change had not been well publicized, and it was with difficulty that the opposition accepted the results. This example clearly demonstrates the importance for electoral system designers of apparently minor details. Cambodian closed List PR ballot paper There are several other important issues that need to be considered in defining precisely how a List PR system will work. A formal threshold may be required for representation in the legislature: a high threshold (for example 10 per cent, as used by Turkey) is likely to exclude smaller parties, while a low threshold (for example 2 per cent, as used by Israel) may promote their representation. In South Africa, there is no formal threshold, and in 2004 the African Christian Democratic Party won six seats out of 400 with only 1.6 per cent of the national vote. List PR systems also differ depending on whether and how the voter can choose between candidates as well as parties, that is, whether lists are closed, open or free (panachage). This choice has implications for the complexity of the ballot paper. Other choices include arrangements for formal or informal ‘vote pooling’; the scope for agreements between parties, such as that provided by systems which use apparentement; and the definition of district boundaries. Advantages of List PR
Disadvantages of List PR In addition to the general issues already identified relating to PR systems, the following additional disadvantages may be considered:
STV has long been advocated by political scientists as one of the most attractive electoral systems, but its use for legislative elections has been limited to a few cases—the Republic of Ireland since 1921, Malta since 1947, and once in Estonia in 1990. It is also used for elections to the Australian Federal Senate and in several Australian states, and for European and local elections in Northern Ireland. It has been adopted for local elections in Scotland and in some authorities in New Zealand. It was also chosen as the recommendation of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. The core principles of the system were independently invented in the 19th century by Thomas Hare in Britain and Carl Andræ in Denmark. STV uses multi-member districts, and voters rank candidates in order of preference on the ballot paper in the same manner as under the Alternative Vote system. In most cases, this preference marking is optional, and voters are not required to rank-order all candidates; if they wish, they can mark only one. After the total number of first-preference votes are tallied, the count then begins by establishing the quota of votes required for the election of a single candidate. The quota used is normally the Droop quota, calculated by the simple formula: Quota = (votes / (seats +1)) +1 The result is determined through a series of counts. At the first count, the total number of first-preference votes for each candidate is ascertained. Any candidate who has a number of first preferences greater than or equal to the quota is immediately elected. In second and subsequent counts, the surplus votes of elected candidates (i.e. those votes above the quota) are redistributed according to the second preferences on the ballot papers. For fairness, all the candidate’s ballot papers can be redistributed, but each at a fractional percentage of one vote, so that the total redistributed vote equals the candidate’s surplus (the Republic of Ireland uses a weighted sample instead of distributing fractions). If a candidate had 100 votes, for example, and their surplus was five votes, then each ballot paper would be redistributed according to its second preference at the value of 1/20th of a vote. After any count, if no candidate has a surplus of votes over the quota, the candidate with the lowest total of votes is eliminated. His or her votes are then redistributed in the next count to the candidates left in the race according to the second and then lower preferences shown. The process of successive counts, after each of which surplus votes are redistributed or a candidate is eliminated, continues until either all the seats for the electoral district are filled by candidates who have received the quota, or the number of candidates left in the count is only one more than the number of seats to be filled, in which case all remaining candidates bar one are elected without receiving a full quota. Advantages of STV The advantages claimed for PR generally apply to STV systems. In addition, as a mechanism for choosing representatives, STV is perhaps the most sophisticated of all electoral systems, allowing for choice between parties and between candidates within parties. The final results retain a fair degree of proportionality, and the fact that in most actual examples of STV the multi-member districts are relatively small means that a geographical link between voter and representative is retained. Furthermore, voters can influence the composition of post-election coalitions, as has been the case in the Republic of Ireland, and the system provides incentives for interparty accommodation through the reciprocal exchange of preferences between parties. STV also provides a better chance for the election of popular independent candidates than List PR, because voters are choosing between candidates rather than between parties (although a party-list option can be added to an STV election; this is done for the Australian Senate). Disadvantages of STV The disadvantages claimed for PR generally also apply to STV systems. In addition:
Proportional Representation electoral systems require to a larger extent than other systems that the designer also considers a number of issues in addition to the choice of electoral system type. These issues will affect the results of the elections both mechanically and through psychological effects by changing the incentives for voters and political parties alike. Often, these effects will appear to be minor, and this may very well be true in practice. However, even minor differences in results can sometimes have serious implications on the setup of the legislature and the formation of government, and – perhaps most importantly – the perception of the legitimacy of the elections and the results. Also, even though many of these choices are likely to only affect the outcome slightly, some – like the choice of electoral district magnitude – will have considerable implications on the translation of votes into seats, and are thus likely to become a highly political issue. Therefore, a designer is advised to consider all these issues well in advance of an election and to be aware of the likely administrative as well as political implications the different options will have. There is near-universal agreement among electoral specialists that the crucial determinant of an electoral system's ability to translate votes cast into seats won proportionally is the district magnitude, which is the number of members to be elected in each electoral district. Under a system such as FPTP, AV, or the Two-Round System, there is a district magnitude of one; voters are electing a single representative. By contrast, all PR systems, some plurality/majority systems such as Block Vote and PBV, and some other systems such as Limited Vote and SNTV, require electoral districts which elect more than one member. Under any proportional system, the number of members to be chosen in each district determines, to a significant extent, how proportional the election results will be. The systems which achieve the greatest degree of proportionality will use very large districts, because such districts are able to ensure that even very small parties are represented in the legislature. In smaller districts, the effective threshold is higher. For example, in a district in which there are only three members to be elected, a party must gain at least 25 per cent +1 of the vote to be assured of winning a seat. A party which has the support of only 10 per cent of the electorate would be unlikely to win a seat, and the votes of this party’s supporters could therefore be said to have been wasted. In a nine-seat district, by contrast, 10 per cent +1 of the vote would guarantee that a party wins at least one seat. The problem is that as districts are made larger—both in terms of the number of seats and often, as a consequence, in terms of their geographic size as well—so the linkage between an elected member and his or her constituency grows weaker. This can have serious consequences in societies where local factors play a strong role in politics or where voters expect their member to maintain strong links with the electorate and act as their ‘delegate’ in the legislature. Because of this, there has been a lively debate about the best district magnitude. Most scholars agree, as a general principle, that district magnitudes of between three and seven seats tend to work quite well, and it has been suggested that odd numbers such as three, five and seven work better in practice than even numbers, particularly in a two-party system. However, this is only a rough guide, and there are many situations in which a higher number may be both desirable and necessary to ensure satisfactory representation and proportionality. In many countries, the electoral districts follow pre-existing administrative divisions, perhaps state or provincial boundaries, which means that there may be wide variations in their size. However, this approach both eliminates the need to draw additional boundaries for elections and may make it possible to relate electoral districts to existing identified and accepted communities. Numbers at the high and low ends of the spectrum tend to deliver more extreme results. At one end of the spectrum, a whole country can form one electoral district, which normally means that the number of votes needed for election is extremely low and even very small parties can gain election. In Israel, for example, the whole country forms one district of 120 members, which means that election results are highly proportional, but also means that parties with only small shares of the vote can gain representation and that the link between an elected member and any geographical area is extremely weak. At the other end of the spectrum, PR systems can be applied to situations in which there is a district magnitude of only two. For example, a system of List PR is applied to two-member districts in Chile. This delivers results which are quite disproportional, because no more than two parties can win representation in each district. This has tended to undermine the benefits of PR in terms of representation and legitimacy. These examples, from the opposite ends of the spectrum, both serve to underline the crucial importance of district magnitude in any PR electoral system. It is arguably the single most important institutional choice when designing a PR system, and is also of crucial importance for a number of non-PR systems as well. The Single Non-Transferable Vote, for example tends to deliver moderately proportional results despite not being in essence a proportional formula, precisely because it is used in multi-member districts. Similarly, the Single Transferable Vote when applied to single-member districts becomes the Alternative Vote, which retains some of the advantages of STV but not its proportionality. In Party Block Vote and Block Vote systems, as district magnitude increases, proportionality is likely to decrease. To sum up, when designing an electoral system, district magnitude is in many ways the key factor in determining how the system will operate in practice, the strength of the link between voters and elected members, and the overall proportionality of election results. On a related note, the party magnitude (the average number of successful candidates from the same party in the same electoral district) is an important factor in determining who will be elected. If only one candidate from a party is elected in a district, that candidate may well be male and a member of the majority ethnic or social groups in the district. If two or more are elected, balanced tickets may have more effect, making it likely that more women and more candidates from minorities will be successful. Larger districts (seven or more seats in size) and a relatively small number of parties will increase the party magnitude. All electoral systems have thresholds of representation: that is, the minimum level of support which a party needs to gain representation. Thresholds can be legally imposed (formal thresholds) or exist as a mathematical property of the electoral system (effective or natural thresholds). Formal thresholds are written into the constitutional or legal provisions which define the PR system. In the mixed systems of Germany, New Zealand, and Russia, for example, there is a 5 per cent threshold in the PR section: parties which fail to secure 5 per cent of the vote nationwide are ineligible to be awarded seats from the PR lists. This concept had its origins in the desire to limit the election of extremist groups in Germany, and is designed to stop very small parties from gaining representation. However, in both Germany and New Zealand there exist ‘back-door’ routes for a party to be entitled to seats from the lists; in the case of New Zealand, a party must win at least one constituency seat, and in the case of Germany three seats, to bypass the threshold requirements. In Russia in 1995, there were no back-door routes, and almost half of the party-list votes were wasted. Elsewhere, legal thresholds range from 0.67 per cent in the Netherlands to 10 per cent in Turkey. Parties which gain less than this percentage of the vote are excluded from the count. A striking example of this was the 2002 Turkish election, in which so many parties failed to clear the 10 per cent threshold that 46 per cent of all votes were wasted. In all these cases, the existence of a formal threshold tends to increase the overall level of disproportionality, because votes for those parties which would otherwise have gained representation are wasted. In Poland in 1993, even with a comparatively low threshold of 5 per cent for parties and 8 per cent for coalitions, over 34 per cent of the votes were cast for parties and coalitions which did not surmount it. An effective, hidden, or natural threshold is created as a mathematical by-product of features of electoral systems, of which district magnitude is the most important. For example, in a district with four seats under a PR system, just as any candidate with more than 20 per cent of the vote will be elected, any candidate with less than about 10 per cent (the exact figure will vary depending on the configuration of parties, candidates, and votes) is unlikely to be elected. While the List PR system is based on the principle that parties or political groupings present candidates, it is possible to give voters a degree of choice within List PR between the candidates nominated as well as between the parties. There are essentially three options that can be chosen—open, closed, and free lists. The majority of List PR systems in the world are closed, meaning that the order of candidates elected by that list is fixed by the party itself, and voters are not able to express a preference for a particular candidate. The List PR system used in South Africa is a good example of a closed list. The ballot paper contains the party names and symbols, and a photograph of the party leader, but no names of individual candidates. Voters simply choose the party they prefer; the individual candidates elected as a result are predetermined by the parties themselves. This means that parties can include some candidates (perhaps members of minority ethnic and linguistic groups, or women) who might have difficulty getting elected otherwise. The negative aspect of closed lists is that voters have no say in determining who the representative of their party will be. Closed lists are also unresponsive to rapid changes in events. In East Germany’s pre-unification elections of 1990, the top-ranked candidate of one party was exposed as a secret-police informer only four days before the election, and immediately expelled from the party; but because lists were closed, electors had no choice but to vote for him if they wanted to support his former party. Many List PR systems in Western Europe use open lists, in which voters can indicate not just their favoured party but their favoured candidate within that party. In most of these systems, the vote for a candidate as well as a party is optional and, because most voters mark their ballots for parties only rather than candidates, the candidate-choice option of the ballot paper often has limited effect. However, in Sweden, over 25 per cent of the voters regularly choose a candidate as well as a party, and a number of individuals are elected who would not be if the list were closed. In Brazil and Finland, voters must vote for candidates: the number of seats received by each party is determined by the total number of votes gained by its candidates, and the order in which the party’s candidates are elected to these seats is determined by the number of individual votes they receive. While this gives voters much greater freedom over their choice of candidate, it also has some less desirable side effects. Because candidates from within the same party are effectively competing with each other for votes, this form of open list can lead to internal party conflict and fragmentation. It also means that the potential benefits to the party of having lists which feature a diverse slate of candidates can be overturned. In open-list PR elections in Sri Lanka, for example, the attempts of major Sinhalese parties to include minority Tamil candidates in winnable positions on their party lists have been rendered ineffective because many voters deliberately voted for lower-placed Sinhalese candidates instead. In Kosovo, a switch from closed to open lists actually enhanced the presence of more extremist candidates. On the same note, open lists have sometimes proved to be disadvantageous for the representation of women in highly patriarchal societies, although in Poland voters have shown themselves willing to use open list to elect more women than would have resulted from the nominations made by the parties if closed lists had been used. Other devices are used in a small number of jurisdictions to add additional flexibility to open-list systems. In Ecuador, Luxembourg and Switzerland, electors have as many votes as there are seats to be filled and can distribute them to candidates either within a single party list or across several party lists as they see fit. The capacity to vote for more than one candidate across different party lists (known as panachage) or to cast more than one vote for a single highly favoured candidate (known as cumulation) both provide an additional measure of control to the voter and are categorized here as free list systems. High effective thresholds can serve to discriminate against small parties–indeed, in some cases this is their express purpose. But in many cases, an inbuilt discrimination against smaller parties is seen as undesirable, particularly where several small parties with similar support bases ‘split’ their combined votes and consequently fall below the threshold, when one aligned grouping would have gained enough combined votes to win some seats in the legislature. To get around this problem, some countries which use List PR systems also allow small parties to group together for electoral purposes, thus forming a cartel—or apparentement or stembusaccoord—to contest the election. This means that the parties themselves remain as separate entities, and are listed separately on the ballot paper, but that the votes gained by each are counted as if they belonged to the entire cartel, thus increasing the chances that the combined vote total will be above the threshold and hence that they may be able to gain additional representation. This device is a feature of a number of List PR systems in continental Europe, in Latin America (where the umbrella parties are called lema) and in Israel. They are nevertheless a rarity within PR systems in Africa and Asia, and were abolished in Indonesia in 1999 after some small parties discovered that, although their cartel gained representation overall, they as parties actually lost seats. Nowadays, the coalition system has become an important way to contest elections in Indonesia due to the new electoral rules since only a political party or coalition of political parties that wins 25% of the votes or gets at least 20% of the seats in the legislature can nominate candidates for president. A common misconception is that independent candidates cannot run under proportional systems. This is not true, although most elections under List PR systems, will be carried out exclusively with candidates who belong to a political party. Under STV however, the very system is candidate centred and independent candidates are very common in elections in for example the Republic of Ireland. Many times, an independent candidate will simply be treated as a one person party, presenting a list with only one name on it and will gain the seat if he or she receives enough votes in the election. Mixed electoral systems attempt to combine the positive attributes of both plurality/majority (or other) and PR electoral systems. In a mixed system, there are two electoral systems using different formulae running alongside each other. The votes are cast by the same voters and contribute to the election of representatives under both systems. One of those systems is a plurality/majority system (or occasionally an ‘other’ system), usually a single-member district system, and the other a List PR system. There are two forms of mixed system. When the results of the two types of election are linked, with seat allocations at the PR level being dependent on what happens in the plurality/majority (or other) district seats and compensating for any disproportionality that arises there, the system is called a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system. Where the two sets of elections are detached and distinct and are not dependent on each other for seat allocations, the system is called a Parallel system. While an MMP system generally results in proportional outcomes, a Parallel system is likely to give results the proportionality of which falls somewhere between that of a plurality/majority and that of a PR system. Parallel and MMP systems have been widely adopted by new democracies in Africa and the former Soviet Union. Under MMP systems, the PR seats are awarded to compensate for any disproportionality produced by the district seat results. For example, if one party wins 10 per cent of the vote nationally but no district seats, then it will be awarded enough seats from the PR lists to bring its representation up to 10 per cent of the seats in the legislature. Voters may get two separate choices, as in Germany and New Zealand. Alternatively, voters may make only one choice, with the party totals being derived from the totals for the individual district candidates. The proportion of seats allocated according to the two elements of the system vary from country to country. Lesotho’s post-conflict electoral system, adopted in 2002, contains 80 FPTP seats and 40 compensatory ones while Germany elects 299 candidates under each system. Although MMP is designed to produce proportional results, it is possible that the disproportionality in the single-member district results is so great that the list seats cannot fully compensate for it. This is more likely when the PR electoral districts are defined not at national level but at regional or provincial level. A party can then win more plurality/majority seats in a region or province than its party vote in the region would entitle it to. To deal with this, proportionality can be closely approached if the size of the legislature is slightly increased: the extra seats are called overhang mandates or Überhangsmandaten. This has occurred in most elections in Germany and is also possible in New Zealand. In Lesotho, by contrast, the size of the legislature is fixed, and the results of the first MMP election in 2002 were not fully proportional. While MMP retains the proportionality benefits of PR systems, it also ensures that elected representatives are linked to geographical districts. However, where voters have two votes—one for the party and one for their local representative—it is not always understood that the vote for the local representative is less important than the party vote in determining the overall allocation of seats in the legislature. Furthermore, MMP can create two classes of legislators—one group primarily responsible and beholden to a constituency, and another from the national party list without geographical ties and beholden to the party. This may have implications for the cohesiveness of groups of elected party representatives. In translating votes into seats, MMP can be as proportional an electoral system as pure List PR, and therefore shares many of the previously cited advantages and disadvantages of PR. However, one reason why MMP is sometimes seen as less preferable than straight List PR is that it can give rise to what are called ‘strategic voting’ anomalies. In New Zealand in 1996, in the constituency of Wellington Central, some National Party strategists urged voters not to vote for the National Party candidate because they had calculated that under MMP his election would not give the National Party another seat but simply replace an MP who would be elected from their party list. It was therefore better for the National Party to see a candidate elected from another party, providing that candidate was in sympathy with the National Party’s ideas and ideology, than for votes to be ‘wasted’ in support of their own candidate. Parallel systems also use both PR and plurality/majority components, but unlike MMP systems, the PR component of a parallel system does not compensate for any disproportionality within the plurality/majority districts. (It is also possible for the non-PR component of a Parallel system to come from the family of ‘other’ systems, as in Taiwan which uses SNTV.) In a Parallel system, as in MMP, each voter may receive either one ballot paper which is used to cast a vote both for a candidate and for his or her party, as is done in South Korea (the Republic of Korea), or two separate ballot papers, one for the plurality/majority seat and one for the PR seats, as is done for example in Japan, Lithuania, and Thailand. Parallel systems have been a product of electoral system design over the last decade and a half—perhaps because they appear to combine the benefits of PR lists with those of plurality/majority (or other) representation. Advantages of Parallel Systems In terms of disproportionality, Parallel systems usually give results which fall somewhere between pure plurality/majority and pure PR systems. One advantage is that, when there are enough PR seats, small minority parties which have been unsuccessful in the plurality/majority elections can still be rewarded for their votes by winning seats in the proportional allocation. In addition, a Parallel system should, in theory, fragment the party system less than a pure PR electoral system. Disadvantages of Parallel Systems As with MMP, it is likely that two classes of representatives will be created. Also, Parallel systems do not guarantee overall proportionality, and some parties may still be shut out of representation despite winning substantial numbers of votes. Parallel systems are also relatively complex and can leave voters confused as to the nature and operation of the electoral system. Three systems do not fit neatly under any one of the above-mentioned categories. The Single Non-Transferable Vote is a multi-member-district, candidate-centred system in which voters have one vote. Limited Vote is very much like SNTV but gives voters more than one vote (however, unlike Block Vote, not as many as there are seats to be filled). Borda Count is a preferential system in single- or multi-member districts. These systems tend to translate votes cast into seats in a way that falls somewhere between the proportionality of PR systems and the results of plurality/majority systems. Under SNTV, each voter casts one vote for a candidate but (unlike FPTP) there is more than one seat to be filled in each electoral district. Those candidates with the highest vote totals fill these positions. SNTV can face political parties with a challenge. In, for example, a four-member district, a candidate with just over 20 per cent of the vote is guaranteed election. A party with 50 per cent of the vote could thus expect to win two seats in a four-member district. If each candidate polls 25 per cent, this will happen. If, however, one candidate polls 40 per cent and the other 10 per cent, the second candidate may not be elected. If the party puts up three candidates, the danger of ‘vote-splitting’ makes it even less likely that the party will win two seats. Nowadays, SNTV is used for legislative elections in Afghanistan, Pitcairn Islands, Vanuatu and in 90 of the 150 seat of Jordan’s Lower Chamber, the Senate elections in Indonesia and in 6 of the 113 seats under the Parallel system in Taiwan. The best known application of this system was for the integration of the Japanese Lower House between 1948 and 1993. Advantages of Single Non-Transferable Vote
Disadvantages of Single Non-Transferable Vote
Like SNTV, the Limited Vote is a plurality/majority system used in multi-member districts. Unlike SNTV, electors have more than one vote—but fewer votes than there are candidates to be elected. Counting is identical to SNTV, with the candidates with the highest vote totals winning the seats. This system is used for various local-level elections, but its application at the national level is restricted to Gibraltar and to Spain, where it has been used to elect the Spanish upper house, the Senate, since 1977. In this case, with large multi-member districts, each voter has one vote less than the number of members to be elected. Like SNTV, LV is simple for voters and relatively easy to count. However, it tends to produce less proportional results than SNTV. Many of the arguments relating to internal party competition, party management issues, and clientelistic politics apply to LV in a similar way as to SNTV. A final—and unique—example of electoral system design is the modified Borda Count used in the tiny Pacific country of Nauru. The Borda Count is a preferential electoral system in which electors rank candidates as for the Alternative Vote. It can be used in both single- and multimember districts. There is only one count, there are no eliminations and preferences are simply tallied as ‘fractional votes’: in the modified Borda Count devised by Nauru, a first preference is worth one, a second preference is worth half, a third preference is worth one-third and so on. These are summed and the candidate(s) with the highest total(s) are declared the winners. The advantages and disadvantages of the Borda Count are similar to the ones of the other preferential electoral systems. Voters are able to express a detailed set of preferences, but on the other hand the system requires at least some level of numeracy to work, and it may be hard for voters to fully understand. The level of proportionality and number of wasted votes will depend largely on the size of the districts. Many electoral systems, both plurality/majority and proportional, have a single tier of representation: each voter in the country votes once and there is one set of elected representatives. In one-tier List PR systems, the lists may be at national level, as in Namibia and the Netherlands, or at regional level, as in Finland and Switzerland. In mixed systems, there are usually two tiers of representatives, those elected under the plurality/majority system and those elected under the proportional system. In Hungary, however, there are three tiers: plurality/majority representatives of single member districts elected using TRS; and representatives at both regional and national levels elected using List PR. It is also possible for an electoral system to have two tiers without being mixed in character. Two-tier proportional systems may have both national and regional lists (as in South Africa) or regional lists only (as in Denmark). In the two-tier plurality/majority system of the British Virgin Islands, there are representatives elected from single-member districts using FPTP and representatives elected from the Islands as a whole using Block Vote. Table 6: Variations on Proportional Representation Electoral systems with two or more tiers need to be distinguished from hybrid systems, in which one part of a country elects its representatives using one electoral system, and another distinct part of the country elects representatives using a different system. In Panama, about two-thirds of the representatives are elected from multimember districts using List PR, while the remaining third are elected from single member districts using FPTP with no overlap of the two types of districts. Table 7 summarizes advantages and disadvantages of the principal electoral systems. It is important to keep in mind that the advantages and disadvantages presented here can vary from case to case and depend on a large number of factors. For example, turnout can in fact be high under an FPTP system, and a List PR system can produce strong legislative support for a president. Also, what is seen as an advantage in one context or by one party can be viewed as something negative in another context or by another party. Table 7: Five Electoral System Options: Advantages and Disadvantages
Electoral regulations can affect a number of different areas relating to how the citizens of a country are represented. Many of these effects are direct results of the choice of electoral system itself, while others come from more explicit design of additional provisions in the constitution or electoral law. There are many ways to enhance the representation of women. Proportional systems tend to result in the election of more women, primarily by eliminating the disincentive inherent in FPTP systems of needing to present a single "most acceptable" candidate. Electoral systems which use reasonably large district magnitudes encourage parties to nominate women on the basis that balanced tickets will increase their electoral chances. Some List PR countries also require that women make up a certain proportion of the candidates nominated by each party. In addition to the choice of electoral system, there are also a number of other strategies that can be used to increase the number of women representatives.
Systems that guarantee women representation in the legislature vary where both their success and their consequences are concerned. For example, reserved seats may help guarantee that women make it into elected positions of office, but some women have argued that quotas end up being a way to appease, and ultimately sideline, women or to privilege the female relatives and friends of traditional male politicians rather than encouraging females to develop careers in politics, which can take many years. Since entry into politics is often done at the local level, even by male politicians, it may make more sense to institute quotas, at least initially, at the local rather than the national level. Being elected to a legislature does not necessarily mean being given substantive decision-making power, and in some countries women legislators, particularly those elected from reserved or special seats, are marginalized from real decision-making responsibility. Yet in other countries, women have used the position afforded to them by quotas to make significant contributions to policy making and influence ‘traditional’ policy making. For further details and data, see the IDEA/Stockholm University Global Database for Electoral Quotas for Women at www.quotaproject.org. There are also many ways to enhance the representation of minorities and communal groups. Again, electoral systems which use reasonably large district magnitudes encourage parties to nominate candidates from minorities on the grounds that balanced tickets will increase their electoral chances. A very low threshold, or the complete elimination of a formal threshold, in PR systems can also facilitate the representation of hitherto under-represented or unrepresented groups by encouraging the formation of parties specifically representing them. In plurality/majority systems in particular, seats are sometimes set aside in the legislature for minorities and communal groups. Reserved seats can be used to ensure the representation of specific minority groups in the legislature. Seats are reserved for identifiable ethnic or religious minorities in countries as diverse as Colombia (‘black communities’), Croatia (the Hungarian, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, German, and Austrian minorities), India (the scheduled tribes and castes), Jordan (Christians and Circassians), Niger (Tuareg), New Zealand (Maori), Pakistan (non-Muslim minorities), Palestine (Christians and Samaritans), Samoa (non-indigenous minorities), Slovenia (Hungarians and Italians), Taiwan (the ‘aboriginal’ community) and Iraq (Christians, Sabeans, Shabaks and Yizidis). Representatives from these reserved seats are usually elected in much the same manner as other representatives, but are sometimes elected only by members of the particular minority community designated in the electoral law. This requires a communal roll (a roll of those voters who, by belonging to that particular community, are eligible to vote in that election). While it is often deemed to be a normative good to represent small communities of interest, it has also been argued that it is a better strategy to design structures which give rise to a representative legislature without overt manipulation of the electoral law or legal obligation, and that quota seats may breed resentment on the part of majority populations and exacerbate mistrust between various cultural groups. Instead of formally reserved seats, regions can be over-represented to facilitate the increased representation of geographically concentrated groups. In the UK, Scotland and Wales have more MPs in the British House of Commons than they would be entitled to if population size alone were the only criterion. The same is true in the mountainous regions of Nepal. Another possibility is the best loser system used in Mauritius, whereby some of the highest-polling losing candidates from a particular ethnic group are awarded seats in the legislature in order to balance overall ethnic representation. Electoral boundaries can also be manipulated to promote the representation of particular groups. The Voting Rights Act in the United States has in the past allowed the government to draw weirdly shaped districts with the sole purpose of creating majority Black, Latino, or Asian-American districts; this might be called ‘affirmative gerrymandering’. However, the manipulation of any electoral system to promote or protect minority representation is rarely uncontroversial. A number of ethnically heterogeneous societies have taken the concept of reserved seats to its logical extension. Not only are seats divided on a communal basis, but the entire system of representation in the legislature is similarly based on communal considerations. There is a separate electoral register for each defined community, which elects only members of its ‘own group’ to the legislature. In Lebanon, multi-member districts are defined, in each of which an allocation of seats between confessional groups is determined. Representatives are elected by Block Vote from communal rolls separately to the seats allocated for each confessional group. However, it is important to say that most communal roll arrangements were abandoned after it became clear that communal electorates, while guaranteeing group representation, often had the perverse effect of undermining the path of accommodation between different groups, since there were no incentives for political intermixing between communities. The tasks of defining a member of a particular group and distributing seats fairly between them were also full of pitfalls. In India, for example, the independent districts which had existed under colonial rule for Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others were abolished at independence, although some reserved seats remain in order to represent the scheduled tribes and castes. Similar communal roll systems used at various times in Pakistan, Cyprus, and Zimbabwe have also been abandoned. Fiji discontinued the use of lists with communal distinctions for the 2014 elections. While some communal roll arrangements give the task of determining who falls into which category to some form of registration body, others give this choice to the individual. The predominant example of a communal roll system still in place among contemporary democracies is the optional separate roll for Maori voters in New Zealand. Maori electors can choose to be on either the national electoral roll or a specific Maori roll, which now elects seven Maori representatives to the legislature. The results of New Zealand’s first PR elections since 1996 could, however, be said to have weakened the rationale for the communal system: twice as many Maori representatives have been elected from the general rolls as from the specific Maori roll. Elections, whether they be for national, executive, legislative, state-wide, or local bodies, may not necessarily be held on a single day (or specific days) but can instead be staggered. The reasons for separating elections over a significant period of time can be both practical and political. Staggering of elections usually occurs when there are major logistical preparations involved (e.g. elections to the lower house of India, the Lok Sabha, take place on four days over the course of several weeks due to the need to redeploy security forces to cover all of the polling places) or when security concerns require it. Administrative and security considerations mean that it is far easier for the Indian Electoral Commission to sequence the holding of legislative votes across both time and states. The difficulties facing staggered elections include ballot security; in order for areas voting later not to be influenced by areas voting earlier, ballot papers need to be held at a secure centralized point until all voting has taken place, when all votes can be counted at once. More common is the staggering over time of presidential, legislative, and federal state elections. There is evidence to suggest that holding presidential and legislative elections on the same day can advantage the president’s party, and can make executive-legislative fragmentation less likely and thus make government more coherent—especially in embryonic democracies. However, if there is a desire to accentuate a separation of powers or there are logistical capabilities to consider, then it may be necessary or prudent to separate presidential and legislative elections. Remote voting is used in many countries, both old and new democracies, around the world, to broaden participation. Remote voting may take place in person somewhere other than an assigned polling station or at another time, or votes may be sent by post or cast by an appointed proxy. When the requirements to qualify as a remote voter are minimal, remote voting can make up a significant proportion of the total vote. In Finland, it has been as high as 37 per cent of all votes cast, and in the 2003 legislative elections in the Marshall Islands it was 58 per cent. In Sweden, where it is commonly about 30 per cent, voters can also change their pre-cast vote if they subsequently travel to their allocated polling station on election day. However, its use may have implications for electoral system design, with issues of election integrity being salient. Remote voting is easiest to administer under a nationwide List PR system with only one list per party, and most complicated under a system using single-member districts, which would require placing ballots from many constituencies in many different locations. Particularly if out-of-country voting is to be implemented, the practicalities of getting the right ballot paper to each elector need to be considered carefully. Requiring a country’s embassies to issue ballot papers may not sit easily with a system with a significant number of electoral districts, because of the logistic challenge of ensuring that each embassy receives the right selection of ballot papers and gives the right ballot paper to each elector. If ballot papers are to be despatched by post, there will be an impact on the election timetable in that the ballots will have to be readied farther in advance of election day. Once cast, out-of-country votes can be included in the absentee voter’s home district (as in New Zealand); counted within single (or multiple) out-of-country districts (as in Croatia); attached to one or more particular districts (as in Indonesia); or merely added to the national vote totals when seats are allocated under a nationally based List PR system (as in The Netherlands). There is an established relationship between the level of turnout in elections and the electoral system chosen. PR systems are in general linked with higher turnout. In plurality/majority systems, turnout tends to be higher when national election results are expected to be close than when one party looks certain to win, and also higher in individual districts where results are expected to be closer. As a measure to improve electoral legitimacy, some countries, notably several of the post-communist former republics of the USSR, introduced mandatory minimum turnout levels: if the turnout in an electoral district did not reach, for example, 50 per cent, the election would not be considered valid. However, the use of mandatory turnout levels can create administrative nightmares if repeated elections consistently fail to achieve the required turnout levels, leaving electoral districts in limbo. Ukraine, for example, abolished mandatory turnout provisions for the 1998 elections after the experience of repeated by-elections failing to reach the required turnout in 1994. Several countries address the issue of participation by using compulsory voting, including Australia, Belgium, Greece and many countries in Latin America. Many other countries, however, reject compulsory voting on principle. While it is probably equally compatible with any electoral system, its use can be considered simultaneously with other turnout-related issues. In post-conflict and transitional situations, there is often little time for debate and reflection. The political momentum generated by a peace agreement or by the fall of an authoritarian regime can lead to pressures for elections to take place quickly. While a general discussion of the political desirability and constraints surrounding transitional elections is outside the scope of this text, there are some particular issues and pressures which relate to electoral system design. The time needed to set up the infrastructure for different electoral systems varies. For example, electoral registration and boundary delimitation are both time-consuming exercises which can lead to legitimacy problems. At one extreme, if all voters vote in person and voters are marked at the polling station, List PR with one national district may be feasible without either registration or boundary delimitation. At the other extreme, a plurality/majority system with single-member districts may require both if no acceptable framework is in place. In any event, the system adopted for a first transitional election may not be the most suitable in the longer term—although a process of continual change in which voters and parties are never able to adapt to the effects of the evolving system may also be undesirable. Those negotiating a new institutional framework or electoral law may wish to be as inclusive as possible and therefore be compelled to make entry to elections easy both by setting relaxed criteria for nomination and by adopting an electoral system in which any threshold for representation—either formal or effective—is low. Link to voter registration. Conversely, there are often concerns about the fragmentation of the party system driven by the politics of personality and ethnicity, and the negotiators and designers may thus want to set the bar for representation higher. The flowering of a multiplicity of parties is, however, a feature of elections in countries emerging from authoritarianism, and unsuccessful parties usually disappear of their own accord. Arguments are sometimes offered suggesting that, when building democracy in a fragile or divided political environment, it may be politically desirable to start with local elections and build over time to provincial and national elections as the infrastructure and political situation allow—as has been proposed in Sudan. If such a strategy is chosen, it is important that the system is both designed to meet the political requirements of the local elections and feasible to organize given the timetable. Provisions for voting by refugees and displaced persons may be particularly significant in post-conflict elections. The influence and importance of out-of-country voting is well illustrated by Bosnia and Herzegovina. 314,000 voters, out of a total of some 2 million, were registered to vote outside the country’s borders in 1998, over half of them in Croatia and the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro), the remainder in 51 other countries. Of these, 66 per cent cast valid ballots. Electoral systems have long been considered to have specific effects on issues of governance, policy making and political stability. Different electoral systems have marked implications for governance in parliamentary systems. In particular, there is an inbuilt tension between electoral systems which maximize the potential for one-party government (e.g. plurality/majority systems) and those which make multiparty coalitions more likely (e.g. proportional systems). Both constellations have clear policy impacts: single-party government makes decisive policy making and clarity of responsibility much easier, while coalitions are more likely to produce more representative policies and more inclusive decision making. Similarly, major shifts in government policy are easier to achieve under single-party government, while coalitions are more likely to see issues discussed and debated before any changes are made. Almost all countries which have a presidential or semi-presidential constitution elect the president directly. In addition, some republics which have parliamentary constitutions nevertheless elect their head of state directly. In presidential systems, the extent to which an elected president can claim a popular mandate and legitimacy depends significantly on the means by which he or she is elected. Presidents who have clear majority support are likely to have much greater legitimacy and be in a stronger position to push their own policy agenda than those elected on a small plurality of the vote. This has an important impact on relations between the president and the legislature. A president elected by a clear absolute majority of the population can command a great deal of legitimacy in any conflict with the legislature. By contrast, Salvador Allende’s election in Chile in 1970 on 36 per cent of the vote, and opposed by a right-wing Congress, helped create the conditions for the 1973 military coup. The relationship between the legislature and the executive differs between parliamentary, semi-presidential, and presidential systems. In a presidential or semi-presidential system, the president’s position does not depend on maintaining the confidence of the legislature: such a president cannot be removed from office on purely policy grounds. However, experience in Latin America in particular indicates that a directly elected president without a substantial block of support in the legislature will find successful government difficult. In presidential and semi-presidential democracies, the electoral systems for the presidency and the legislature therefore need to be considered together, although the different roles of the president and the legislature bring different factors into play in making the two choices of system. The synchronization or otherwise of the presidential and legislative elections and the provisions which may encourage or discourage fragmentation of parties and the relationship between parties and elected members should be considered at the same time. In principle, any of the single-member district systems can be used for the direct election of a president. When a president is to be elected as the executive head of state, there is often a strong normative and practical preference for systems which ensure a victory by an absolute majority. The majority of all countries that have direct presidential elections use a Two-Round system. The separation of the two rounds leads to efforts by the leading candidates to attract second-round support and endorsement from those eliminated after the first round. Such agreements are sometimes driven primarily by the desire for victory. They are thus perhaps less likely to reflect compatibility of policies and programmes than are pre-poll preference-swapping agreements reached between candidates in preferential systems with a single polling day. In addition, presidential elections held under TRS increase the cost of elections and the resources needed to run them, and the drop-off in turnout between the first and second rounds of voting can often be severe and damaging. For this reason, other options such as the Alternative Vote and the Supplementary Vote are increasingly being examined. The most straightforward way of electing a president is to simply award the office to the candidate who wins a plurality of the votes, even if this is less than an absolute majority. This is the case for presidential elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, the Comoros Islands, Equatorial Guinea, Guyana, Honduras, Iceland, Kiribati, South Korea, Malawi, Mexico, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, the Philippines, Rwanda, Singapore, Taiwan, Tunisia, Venezuela, and Zambia. Clearly, such a system is simple, cheap, and efficient, but in a strongly competitive multi-candidate contest, it leaves open the possibility that the president will be elected with so few votes that he or she is not seen as the choice of a substantial majority of the electorate—and indeed may specifically be opposed by a substantial majority: the majority voted against him or her. Examples include Venezuela in 1993, when Rafael Caldera won the presidency with 30.5 per cent of the popular vote, and the May 1992 election in the Philippines, when Fidel Ramos was elected from a seven-candidate field with only 24 per cent of the popular vote. Taiwan experienced a major political shift in 2000 when the challenger Chen Shuibian won the presidency with just 39 per cent of the vote, less than 3 per cent ahead of the next candidate. The United States is unique in conducting its national presidential election by FPTP at federal state level. The FPTP winner in each federal state gains all the votes of that state in an electoral college, with two exceptions, Maine and Nebraska, where the votes of the state are allocated two (corresponding to the state’s two Senate seats) to the FPTP winner state-wide, and one to the FPTP winner of each individual congressional district in the state. The Electoral College then elects the president by absolute majority. This can lead to a situation in which the winning candidate polls fewer votes than the runner-up—as in 2000 when the Republican candidate George W. Bush won despite polling some half a million fewer votes than the Democrat candidate, Al Gore. As in legislative elections, one way to avoid candidates being elected with only a small proportion of the popular vote is to hold a second ballot if no one candidate wins an absolute majority on the first round. This can either be between the top two candidates (majority run-off) or between more than two candidates (majority-plurality). France, most Latin American countries, all the five post-Soviet Central Asian republics, and many countries in francophone Africa use TRS to elect their presidents. Elsewhere in Africa, the system is used by Angola, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, São Tomé and Principe, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe; in Europe, apart from France, it is used by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine; and it is found in Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Timor-Leste, and Yemen. There are a number of adaptations to straight majority run-off and majority-plurality rules. In Costa Rica, a candidate can win on the first round with only 40 per cent of the vote; conversely, in Sierra Leone, a second round is only avoided if one candidate gets 55 per cent in the first. In Argentina, a successful candidate must poll 45 per cent, or 40 per cent plus a lead of more than 10 per cent over the second-placed candidate. A similar 40 per cent threshold with a 10 per cent margin exists in Ecuador. A number of countries also have minimum turnout rates for their presidential elections, typically 50 per cent, as is the case in many of the former Soviet republics; this is an additional mechanism for ensuring the legitimacy of the result but has substantial cost and logistical implications if the minimum turnout is not met and the election has to be re-run. Apart from those countries where parties could create winning pre-election alliances so that presidential candidates could be elected in the first round (e.g. in Brazil in 1994 and Chile in 1989 and 1994), the experience of TRS has appeared problematic in Latin America. For example, in the 1990 elections in Peru, Alberto Fujimori obtained 56 per cent of the votes in the second round, but his party won only 14 of 60 seats in the Senate and 33 seats of 180 in the Chamber of Deputies. In Brazil in 1989, Fernando Collor de Mello was elected in the second round with just under half of the votes, but his party won, in non-concurrent legislative elections, only three of the 75 Senate seats and only 40 of 503 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The problems of governance which have resulted demonstrate the importance of considering interlinked institutional provisions together. Although TRS produced presidents who had the second-round support of a majority of the electorate, it existed alongside systems for election to the legislature which did not guarantee those presidents significant legislative support. While the successful candidates gathered the support of other parties between the first and second rounds, there was little to enable them to keep that support in place after the elections. One way of getting around the disadvantages of TRS is to merge the first and second round into one election. There are several ways of doing this. AV is one obvious solution; it is used to elect the president of the Republic of Ireland. A lower-placed candidate who picks up many second-preference votes can overtake higher-placed candidates. The most recent example of a president winning through the transfer of preferences in this manner was the 1990 election of Mary Robinson to the Irish presidency. A second possibility is the preferential system used for presidential elections in Sri Lanka and for London mayoral elections, known as the Supplementary Vote. Voters are asked to mark not only their first-choice candidate but also their second (and, in Sri Lanka, their third) choices. The way in which this is done differs: in Sri Lanka, voters are asked to place the numbers ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’ next to the names of the candidates, in the same manner as unde r AVand STV. In London, no numbers are required; the ballot paper contains two columns, for a first-choice vote and a second-choice vote, respectively. Voters are asked to mark their first-choice and second-choice candidates accordingly. This means that voters do not have to write in any numbers themselves. Counting is the same in both cases: if a candidate gains an absolute majority of first-preference votes, he or she is immediately declared elected. However, if no candidate gains an absolute majority, all candidates other than the top two are eliminated and their second- (or, in Sri Lanka, second- and third-) choice votes are passed on to one or the other of the two leading candidates, according to the preference ordering marked. Whoever achieves the highest number of votes at the end of this process is declared elected. The disadvantages of the Supplementary Vote system include its additional complexity and the fact that voters are effectively required to guess who the top two candidates will be in order to make full use of their vote. Despite these differences, both AV and the Supplementary Vote have the same core aim: to make sure that whoever wins the election will have the support of an absolute majority of the electorate. The use of preference votes to express a second choice means that a second round of voting is not required, and this results in significant cost savings as well as benefits in administrative, logistics, and security terms. A few countries combine their presidential elections with a so-called distribution requirement, which requires candidates to gain a regional spread of votes, in addition to an absolute majority, before they can be declared duly elected. In Indonesia, which held its first direct presidential elections in 2004, a successful presidential and vice-presidential candidate team needed to gain an absolute majority of the national vote and at least 20 per cent of the vote in over half of all provinces to avoid a second round of voting. This requirement was inspired by Nigeria, another large and regionally diverse country, where presidential candidates need not only to win an absolute majority of the vote nationally but also to secure at least one-third of the vote in at least two-thirds of the country’s provinces. Distribution requirements do have the benefit of encouraging presidential candidates to make appeals outside their own regional or ethnic base, and if appropriately applied can work very well. However, the specification of two requirements for victory always carries the possibility that no candidate will fulfil both. It is important that designers note this possibility and include provisions to resolve it, because a system which produces no winner and no method of finding a winner could create a vacuum of power fraught with the dangers of instability. The second round in Indonesia merely requires a simple majority for the winner to be declared elected, but Nigeria retains the distribution requirement for the second round too, which creates the possibility of a third round. If this were to take place in practice, it could have implications both for the length of the election period and for the financial and administrative resources required. Distribution requirements introduce strategic imperatives for candidates. In Kenya, to be elected president, a candidate has to receive a plurality overall and at least 25 per cent of the vote in at least five out of the eight provinces. Even so, throughout the 1990s, a divided opposition allowed Daniel Arap Moi to remain president with less than an absolute majority of the vote. Distribution requirements can also be built into nomination requirements. Not all legislatures consist only of one chamber; particularly in larger countries, many are bicameral. Around the world, about two-thirds of all countries have unicameral legislatures, while the remaining one-third have some kind of second chamber. Most second chambers (often called upper houses or senates) exist for one or both of two reasons. The first is to provide a different type of representation or represent different interests, most often the regions or provinces of a country. The second is to act as a ‘house of review’, to provide a brake or delay against impetuous decisions in a lower chamber. The powers of upper houses are often less than those of lower chambers, especially when they are chambers of review. The structures of these vary widely, but in general the most common use of second chambers is in federal systems to represent the constituent units of the federation. For example, the states in the USA, Brazil, and Australia, the Länder in Germany, and the provinces in South Africa are all separately represented in an upper house. Typically, this involves a weighting in favour of the smaller states or provinces, as there tends to be an assumption of equality of representation between them. In addition, many second chambers feature staggered elections: half the chamber is elected every three years in Australia and Japan; one-third of the chamber is elected every second year in the USA and India, and so on. Some countries whose upper houses are ‘houses of review’ place special restrictions on them. In Thailand, for example, the Senate is now elected, but senators are prohibited from belonging to a political party or campaigning for election. A less common type of alternative representation is the deliberate use of the second chamber to represent particular ethnic, linguistic, religious, or cultural groups. A second chamber may also deliberately contain representatives of civil society. In Malawi, for instance, before the Senate was abolished in 2001, the constitution provided for 32 of the 80 senators to be chosen by elected senators from a list of candidates nominated by social ‘interest groups’. These groups are identified as women’s organizations, the disabled, health and education groups, the business and farming sectors, the trade unions, eminent members of society, and religious leaders. The much-maligned British House of Lords is occasionally defended on the grounds that it contains individuals with specific policy expertise who can check government legislation drawn up by generalist politicians. Similarly, second chambers in countries like Fiji and Botswana are used to represent traditional chiefs, although these are appointed in the first case and elected in the second. Because of these variations, many second chambers are partly elected, indirectly elected or unelected. Of those that are elected, most jurisdictions have chosen to reflect the different roles of the two houses by using different electoral systems for the upper house and the lower house. In Australia, for example, the lower house is elected by a majoritarian system (AV) while the upper house, which represents the various states, is elected using a proportional system (STV). This has meant that minority interests which would normally not be able to win election to the lower house still have a chance of gaining election, in the context of state representation, in the upper house. In Indonesia, the lower house is elected by List PR, while the upper house uses SNTV to elect four representatives from each province. In Colombia, while both houses are elected by PR, the Senate is elected from one nationwide district, thus making it more likely that small parties and minority interests will be represented in that chamber. As noted above, the requirements for designing an electoral system vary depending on the type of body to be elected and its function and powers. When a body is designed to serve supranational, provincial, or local interests, the considerations involved in the choice of system are different from those involved when designing national legislative bodies. Supranational bodies with significant decision-making power encompassing a number of countries, such as the European Parliament, are as yet a rarity but may become more commonplace with the globalization of politics and the aggregation of interests at a regional level. The European Union (EU) has adopted, and now made effective, a requirement for all member states to adopt a proportional system for elections to the European Parliament: 26 member states use List PR —included Croatia which was just incorporated to the EU in July 2013—, and two (the Republic of Ireland and Malta) use STV. Seats are allocated to member states not purely in proportion to population but by a tiered system which gives equal numbers of representatives to countries of approximately equal size but also over-represents smaller countries. The designers of such systems give greater priority to choosing systems which produce regional and partisan balance than to localized geographical representation. Currently, the European Parliament has 766 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) representing over 700 million people, which makes small district connections between voter and representative impossible. The legislatures of regions or states within a federation may use the same electoral system as the national legislature (symmetry), as happens in South Africa’s closed-list PR system, or they may use different systems (asymmetry), as in the UK, where the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales are elected by MMP and the national legislature is elected by FPTP. The system for a state legislature may give primacy to the inclusion of minority groups within its borders or balance between urban and rural interests. The more autonomy a region has, the less the pressure for its electoral arrangements to mirror those of other states or provinces. The very fact of its being an autonomous jurisdiction implies that its attributes and needs are quite distinct from those of other areas. Any of the electoral systems outlined under this topic area can be used at the local or municipal government level, but often there are a number of special considerations arising from the particular role of local government. In particular, because local government is more about the ‘nuts and bolts’ issues of everyday life, geographical representation is more often given primacy. Single-member districts can be used to give every neighbourhood a say in local affairs, especially where political parties are weak or non-existent. Where these districts are small, they are usually highly homogeneous. This is sometimes seen to be a good thing, but if diversity within a local government district is required, the ‘spokes of a wheel’ principle of districting can be applied. Here, district boundaries are not circles drawn around identifiable neighbourhoods but are segments of a circle centring on the city centre and ending in the suburbs. This means that one district includes both the urban and the suburban voters, and makes for a mix of economic class and ethnicity. In contrast, the municipalities in some countries which use PR systems for local government have one single-list PR district which can proportionally reflect all the different political opinions in the municipality. In order to achieve this, however, specific space may need to be made for representatives of local associations who are not driven by party-political ideology to nominate lists, and perhaps also for independents to be nominated as single-person lists. It is also true that the choice of local electoral system may be made as part of a compromise involving the system for the national legislature. For example, in some newly democratizing countries such as Congo (Brazzaville) and Mali, tradition and the French influence have resulted in a Two-Round System for the national legislature, while a desire to be inclusive and more fully reflect regional and ethnic loyalties resulted in the choice of PR for municipal elections. The debate between parliamentarism and presidentialism in national constitutions has a counterpart in discussion of the structure of local government. Directly elected governors and mayors who head executive authorities that are separate from the elected local legislative body are becoming more popular worldwide, at the expense of elected authorities with collective committee structures directly responsible for services. The range of systems available for electing governors and mayors is in principle the same as that for the direct election of presidents, and parallels may also be drawn when considering the issues surrounding the relationship between the electoral system and the legislative–executive relationship at local level. Different kinds of electoral system are likely to encourage different kinds of party organization and party system. While it is important for party systems to be as representative as possible, most experts favour systems which encourage the development of parties based on broad political values and ideologies and specific policy programmes, rather than narrow ethnic, racial, or regional concerns. As well as reducing the threat of societal conflict, parties which are based on these broad ‘crosscutting cleavages’ are more likely to reflect national opinion than those that are based predominantly on sectarian or regional concerns. Highly centralized political systems using closed-list PR are the most likely to encourage strong party organizations; conversely, decentralized, district-based systems like FPTP may have the opposite effect. But there are many other electoral variables that can be used to influence the development of party systems. For example, new democracies like Russia and Indonesia have attempted to shape the development of their nascent party systems by providing institutional incentives for the formation of national rather than regional political parties. Other countries such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea have used party registration and funding requirements to achieve similar objectives. Access to public and/or private funding is a key issue that cuts across electoral system design, and is often the single biggest constraint on the emergence of viable new parties. Just as electoral system choice will affect the way in which the political party system develops, the political party system in place affects electoral system choice. Existing parties are unlikely to support changes that are likely to seriously disadvantage them, or changes that open the possibility of new, rival parties gaining entry to the political party system, unless there is a strong political imperative. The range of options for electoral system change may thus be constrained in practice. Different kinds of electoral system also result in different relationships between individual candidates and their supporters. In general, systems which make use of single-member electoral districts, such as most plurality/majority systems, are seen as encouraging individual candidates to see themselves as the delegates of particular geographical areas and beholden to the interests of their local electorate. By contrast, systems which use large multi-member districts, such as most PR systems, are more likely to deliver representatives whose primary loyalty lies with their party on national issues. Both approaches have their merits, which is one of the reasons for the rise in popularity of mixed systems that combine both local and national-level representatives. The question of accountability is often raised in discussions of political parties and electoral systems, especially in relation to individual elected members. The relationships between electors, elected members, and political parties are affected not only by the electoral system but also by other provisions of the political legislative framework such as term limits, provisions regulating the relationship between parties and their members who are also elected representatives, or provisions barring elected members from changing parties without resigning from the legislature. The freedom for voters to choose between candidates as opposed to parties is another aspect of accountability. Many countries in recent years have therefore introduced a greater element of candidate-centred voting into their electoral systems, for example, by introducing open lists in PR elections. Direct democracy is the term used to describe particular forms of vote within any democratic system. The term direct democracy is commonly used to refer to three distinct types of vote or instruments:
The common characteristic of these instruments is that they all give citizens the right to be directly involved in the political decision making process. Direct democracy is therefore often seen as conflicting with representative democracy, in which voters elect representatives to make decisions on their behalf. Alternatively, direct democracy can be viewed as a sometimes necessary means for the citizens to correct or limit the excesses of elected representatives and leaders, or by the government as a means of ensuring itself of a mandate to undertake what might otherwise be perceived as unpopular measures. Broad arguments are advanced in favour of and against direct democracy. Proponents argue that direct democracy can help to reduce the "democratic deficit", in which voters are losing confidence and interest in traditional models of representative democracy. They claim that by putting power back in the hands of the people, people will take a greater interest and role in issues of governance, thereby increasing the legitimacy of the democratic systems. In contrast, critics argue that it undermines and weakens representative government, and that placing power in the hands of the people can threaten the rights of minorities in society. It is also argued that many voters do not have sufficient understanding to make informed decisions about referendum issues, especially in the case of complex constitutional issues. Voter education and campaign information are therefore significant issues in relation to direct democracy. The following links look at the three different instruments of direct democracy in more detail, drawing attention to how they are designed and administered, and outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each. "Referendum" is the term given to a direct vote of the electorate required by the legal framework or requested by the Executive or Legislative on an issue of public policy, in contrast with votes cast at elections, which are made in relation to parties or individual candidates and generally reflect voters' preferences over a range of different issues. Referendums may be held in relation to particular circumstances (e.g., to amend a country's constitution) or in relation to particular political issues (e.g., whether or not to join an international organisation) but are in general held in relation to issues of major political significance. The terms used to define referendums may differ in different countries. The following are the most common types of referendums held in countries across the world: Mandatory or obligatory referendum A mandatory or obligatory referendum is a vote of the electorate which is called automatically under circumstances defined in the constitution or in the legislation. The consequences of the vote are usually binding. Therefore, if a proposal passes, the government or appropriate authority is compelled to implement it. Mandatory referendums may be required in relation to pre-determined issues. Typically, these are issues of major national significance, for example, adoption of international treaties, transfer of authority to international bodies, and taxes and public expenditure commitments. In addition, in many countries, proposed amendments to the constitution must be affirmed by a referendum. Alternatively, mandatory referendums may be required in pre-determined situations. One example is in Presidential systems, where in the case of disagreement between the President and the Legislature, a referendum may be required to resolve the dispute. Optional or facultative referendum The second category of referendum is the optional or facultative referendum. These are votes of the electorate which are called by a formal demand, which may emanate from the executive, from a number of members of the legislature, from a number of citizens or from some other defined agent. The consequences of the vote may or may not be binding. A government can decide to initiate a referendum on a major political issue. It might do so because public pressure for a referendum forces it to hold one, or it might choose to hold a referendum because it is divided on the issue at hand. Optional referendums initiated by the government have been held frequently in Europe on the issue of European Union integration (although in some cases, such referendums have been mandatory because they involve an amendment to a country's constitution). Although these referendums may not be legally binding, it may be politically difficult for a government to ignore the outcome. A further type of optional referendum is the abrogative referendum. An abrogative referendum is a vote of the electorate which may decide to either retain or repeal a law or decree that has been agreed and promulgated by the legislature and already implemented. Usually, citizens force a vote by collecting a certain number of signatures in support of a vote . Location of the referendum in the institutional framework There are therefore key design features that help to define different types of referendums. The first and perhaps most important is how the referendum fits within a country's overall legal system; are referendums mandatory under a country's constitution or other laws? Is a referendum required to be held, or has it been initiated by the government, legislature, or citizens? Issues A second key feature is that of the issues in relation to which referendums can be held. If the circumstances in which referendums can be held are clearly specified in a country's legal framework, the issues on which referendums can be held will be known. Typically, these will relate to issues of major constitutional or political significance, such as a country's constitution, sovereignty, or international relations. A large proportion of referendums held in Europe, for example, have been connected to the issue of European integration. However, where referendums are optional, the subject matter on which they are held may vary. Without restrictions, abrogative referendums could relate to any issue that is the subject of legislation. Some countries that provide for holding optional/abrogative referendums therefore place restrictions on the issues that can be the subject of referendums. In Uruguay, for example, referendums cannot be held in relation to fiscal policy or laws relating to the executive, whilst in Colombia, political amnesty is barred from being the subject of a referendum. Combination of polls When a referendum is held, it must be decided whether or not it is to be combined with another poll (e.g., an ordinary general election), or whether the referendum is to be held separately. It is sometimes argued that combining polls can increase the risk that voters will confuse separate issues (e.g., the performance of the incumbent government can be confused with the issue on which the referendum is being held). However, from an administrative point of view, it may be more cost effective to hold a referendum at the same time as an election. The referendum question or ballot text A second important issue relates to the wording of the referendum question or ballot text put on the ballot paper. Studies suggest that the wording of the question can have an important effect on the outcome of a referendum. Who determines the exact question that appears on the ballot is therefore significant. Is the government responsible for framing the question, even in cases when the government initiates the referendum and therefore has an interest in designing the question to increase the chances of achieving its own desired outcome? Does the Electoral Management Body have oversight of the question? Whoever designs the question, it is important that the question put to voters is clear and straightforward. Studies have generally shown that when voters are in doubt about a referendum issue, they tend to be conservative and maintain the status quo. Campaign regulations In relation to the referendum campaign, it is vital to make sure that the voters hear the case put forward on both sides of an issue. Hence, campaign regulations may be implemented to try to ensure that there is a level playing field between organisations campaigning for and against the referendum. These might include limits on campaign expenditure (although in some countries limits may be deemed unconstitutional) and/or controls on the acceptance of campaign contributions, and control on the access to the media. In Quebec, all interested organisations must group themselves into two umbrella groups, while elsewhere any number of organisations can campaign independently for or against an issue being referred to the voters. The role of the government and provision of information The role of the government in a referendum campaign can also be important. Is the government allowed to campaign for the outcome it supports? Does it distribute its own promotional material or run government broadcasts outlining its views? Similarly, is there a neutral source of information, separate from the government and referendum campaigners, and/or are there requirements providing for the dissemination of non-partisan information about the issue to voters? Does the Electoral Management Body have a role in providing information to voters? If information is provided through a neutral channel, who can put information into this channel? Voters may be more inclined to trust information from sources other than campaigners, and a source of information that is perceived to be neutral will be important to many voters. Turnout/majority requirements Finally, a critical issue is when a proposal is judged to have passed. In some countries, a specified approval quorum is necessary for a proposal to pass. That is, a minimum number or percentage of the entire electorate should support the proposal. In others, a referendum vote is only binding if a specified turnout threshold is reached. Finally, some countries require a double majority to pass (e.g., when a referendum must achieve a majority of the overall total votes cast and a majority of votes in at least a specified proportion of defined lower level electoral areas). Clearly, the requirements for a successful referendum have an impact on the likelihood of whether a referendum passes or not. The outcome of a referendum may either be legally binding or not. It is legally binding if the government or appropriate authority is compelled to implement it; it is non-binding if it is only advisory upon the government or appropriate authority. The legal consequences of a vote have to be clearly specified either in the constitution or in the ad-hoc decisions that call a referendum. In this context, it is important to distinguish between the legal and political consequences. Even though a referendum is legally consultative, it may for political reasons be difficult for a government or authority to evade the outcome. Several arguments are advanced in support of and in opposition to referendums. Supporters of the use of referendums argue that, in the context of increasing voter apathy and disenchantment with traditional forms of democracy, direct democracy can help to re-engage voters with politics and democracy. Another argument advanced in favour of referendums is that they can be used to resolve political problems, particularly for incumbent governments; where a governing party is divided over an issue, for example, holding a referendum can help reach a solution on the issue without splitting the party (one example of this is the 1975 UK referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EC, an issue over which the ruling Labour government was deeply divided). There is also an argument that governments need a specific popular mandate for any transcendental changes that were not part of the original platform on which they campaigned. This is particularly the case when an amendment to a constitution which itself was approved by referendum is under consideration. There are also a number of arguments made against the use of referendums. One is that it weakens representative democracy by undermining the role and importance of elected representatives. Further to this point, referendums are sometimes seen as a means available to elected representatives to avoid having to take an unpopular position on a controversial issue. Another is that voters do not always have the capacity or information to make informed decisions about the issue at stake, and instead may make ill-informed decisions based on partial knowledge or on the basis of unrelated factors such as the state of the economy. This trend may be exacerbated in the case of referendums on complex issues such as constitutional change or international treaties, with which voters are likely to be unfamiliar. Opponents of referendums also argue that, if the executive has the power to determine when referendums are held, they can be used as a political tool to suit the needs of the governing party rather than the interests of democracy. They also claim that, since in many countries turnout at referendums is lower than at national elections, the argument that referendums increase the legitimacy of political decisions does not stand up. However, experts in Switzerland (where a number of direct democracy votes take place each year) believe that, although turnout at referendums is around 45%, more than 45% of electors participate in direct democracy, since different voters participate in the different votes that interest them. The citizens’ initiative instrument allows a certain number of citizens to initiate a vote of the electorate on a proposal outlined by those citizens. The proposal may, for example, amend the constitution, repeal or amend an existing law, or adopt (or require the legislature to adopt) an entirely new law. The number of signatures required to place an initiative on the ballot varies, but is usually a proportion of the number of voters who voted at the most recent election, or a fixed number or proportion of registered voters. Depending on the design of the initiative process, if the ballot measure is passed by voters, it may become part of the state or country's law. The initiative process therefore provides citizens with an opportunity to directly frame the laws and/or constitution under which they live. The use of the initiative instrument varies substantially across different countries. The following are examples of common types of citizens’ initiative: Constitutional Constitutional initiatives can be used to propose amendments to a country or state’s constitution. The number of signatures required to place a constitutional measure on the ballot is usually higher than the number required to place other types of measure on the ballot. Statutory Using a statutory initiative, citizens can propose statutory measures to be placed on the ballot. A lower signature threshold is usually required for this type of initiative. Direct If an initiative is a direct initiative, then the measure that is circulated in petition or placed on the ballot automatically becomes law if it is approved by voters, without any involvement by the legislature. Indirect In contrast, indirect initiatives allow for the involvement of the legislature in framing the laws that arise from the initiative process. This involvement might take a number of different forms. In some countries or states, when a petition has met the required threshold, the legislature is able to formulate its own proposal to go on the ballot as well, to offer voters an alternative between the citizens’ initiative and the legislature's response. Alternatively, the legislature may have a role after a measure has passed, e.g. if a ballot measure is approved by voters, the legislature may have some scope to amend the measure or to draft the actual law mandated by the successful initiative. Agenda Initiatives and Abrogative Referendums There are two other types of direct democracy mechanisms which are commonly labelled as initiatives, because they are invoked when citizens collect enough signatures in support of a measure. These are the agenda initiative and the abrogative referendum. An agenda initiative is a “special” direct democracy instrument because it enables a number of citizens to submit a proposal which must be considered by the legislature but which is not put to a vote of the electorate. Details about the abrogative referendum can be found in the section on referendums. A number of important issues arise in relation to the process of preparing, circulating, and approving a citizens’ initiative. The significance of each of these issues varies, however, according to the relevant constitutional and political context. Initiating the process In order to start an initiative, proponents of the measure are required to collect the signatures of a specified number of supporters of the initiative and file them with the relevant government office. Ballot language must generally be proposed by the circulators and approved by the electoral management body or by the highest legal office of the relevant jurisdiction – e.g., Attorney General. Ballot title Once a proposition is filed, the first key issue is the wording of the ballot title to be circulated in petition and which will appear on the ballot. Typically, the ballot title will be a short summary of the proposed measure. The proposed measure will normally have been drafted by the individual or group proposing it, or by a legal team engaged by them, whilst the ballot title will normally be drafted by the office responsible for overseeing the administration of the initiative process. Agreeing the ballot title can be a long process, since whilst administrators aim to ensure that the ballot title clearly and accurately reflects the measure being proposed, proponents seek to put forward a title that maximises the chances of it being passed. Well funded initiative campaigns may file various versions of the same proposition then conduct opinion polls to assess the relative popularity of each, in order to ensure the proposition that is taken forward stands the highest chance of success. Signature collection and verification Once an initiative has been filed and the title agreed, its proponents must begin the process of collecting the relevant number of signatures required to get the initiative on the ballot. Signatures and identifying information such as voter registration number and/or address are often gathered on official forms provided by the electoral management body which include the full text or a summary of the proposal. The number of signatures required can be expressed as a percentage of the electorate or as a fixed number of signatures from registered voters; these thresholds can vary from about one or two percent of the electorate up to 10 or even 20 percent. In addition, some geographical distribution of signatures, in a number or percentage of voters from all or most of the relevant geographical subdivisions, may be required for qualified support. Signature verification is undertaken by the department responsible for administering direct democracy and will normally be undertaken on a random sampling basis. Opponents are sometimes also given the opportunity to inspect the petitions and to file objections to individual signatures or to the entire submission on the grounds that it does not fulfil the legal requirements. Usually, a proportion of the signatures collected will be found to be invalid, so proponents generally seek to collect a number of signatures in excess of the actual threshold. If and when the relevant number of signatures is collected, the initiative is included on the ballot (usually in the next election in the appropriate jurisdiction). Campaigning and the provision of information During the petition circulation stage and in particular once an initiative has qualified for the ballot, proponents and opponents of initiatives will run campaigns for and against the measure. As with a referendum campaign, in some places, campaigning is regulated; contributions or expenditure may be capped. In others, however, there may be difficulties in implementing campaign controls because of the constitution; in many US states, for example, courts have ruled that expenditure limits are unconstitutional, because campaign expenditure has been equated with freedom of speech, which cannot be restricted. This has become a contentious issue because of concern in the US over the role of money and the initiative industry . In addition to campaigns run by organisations campaigning for or against the initiative, the administration responsible for overseeing the initiative process will often publish an information pamphlet providing voters with information about the proposal. Typically, this might include a statement from the pro- and anti- campaigners, as well as a non-partisan analysis of the measure produced by the government. It might also include statements from other individuals and organisations which support or oppose the measure. Number of initiatives on the ballot Because there are not normally any limits on the number of initiatives that can be included on a ballot, it may be the case that there are multiple initiatives on any given ballot. The number of initiatives on a ballot normally depends simply on the number of initiatives that have qualified for the ballot in the relevant period before the election (some initiative proponents will deliberately time petition circulation in order to ensure that the initiative appears on the ballot for one particular election rather than another). In the US state of Oregon, there were 26 different initiatives on the ballot at the 2000 Presidential election. The "initiative industry" In a number of US states in particular, concern has been expressed that the use of citizens’ initiatives is increasingly professionalized, and that the "initiative industry," rather than citizens, determines which measures make it onto the ballot. Professional firms can assist with virtually all aspects of the initiative process, including: initial drafting of the initiative; opinion polling and focus group research; negotiation over the ballot title; securing endorsements to be used in campaigning; petition circulation; proposing counter-initiatives; and campaigning for the initiative once it has qualified. One area of concern to some observers has been the use of paid signature collectors to circulate the initiative in an effort to qualify the measure for the ballot. This is perhaps because the use of companies acting for profit to collect signatures arguably seems most at odds with the concept of citizen-backed initiatives which are promoted by ordinary citizens who believe in a measure. It is almost accepted in some countries that, without the assistance of professional signature collectors, it will be virtually impossible to get an initiative on the ballot, meaning that only well-financed campaigners are able to get initiatives to the ballot. Some US states have tried to legislate against this by banning the use of paid signature collectors, or requiring professional firms to pay collectors by the hour rather than per signature. This has been ruled unconstitutional in some states, however. There have also been controversies regarding whether paid signature collectors must be registered voters in the jurisdiction where the petitions are circulated. Counter-initiatives In some places where citizens’ initiatives are proposed frequently, one trend is for opponents to propose a counter-initiative as a means of opposing the original initiative measure. This tactic can be successful in that the existence of two related but opposing initiatives increases voter uncertainty and confusion about an issue, increasing the likelihood that voters will simply oppose both measures. Use of this tactic may be effective for opponents of specific initiatives, but it also increases the number of initiatives in circulation and potentially on the ballot. Role of the legislature, government officials and courts The role of the legislature, government officials, and courts in relation to citizens’ initiatives tends to be strictly defined and rather limited. As outlined above, there is a role for the legislature in relation to indirect initiatives, where there may be an opportunity for it to amend initiative measures, or propose their own alternatives. However, in cases where the design of the initiative process does not provide for the involvement of the legislature, the only reviews that are permitted by the state in relation to initiative proposals is whether or not they comply with the administrative requirements imposed, i.e., are there enough proponents, have enough valid signatures been gathered? A further administrative task is to draft and agree the summary of the ballot title. In some places, where there are strict controls on the scope of initiatives, administrators might also be responsible for checking that the initiative proposal deals only with one issue or very closely related issues. In systems where initiatives need to be translated into more than one language, administrators might also be responsible for confirming whether the translation of the initiative proposal means the same in all the relevant languages. However, other than these legally defined administrative tasks, there is often no role for officials or the courts in reviewing the constitutionality of initiative proposals, that is, the quality of being in accordance with and not contradictory to the constitution of a country. Advantages It is argued that the simple existence of the initiative mechanism acts as a check on the activities of the legislature. This is because legislators are more likely to introduce certain reforms and measures if the initiative mechanism exists, because it is likely that if they do not, an initiative on the issue will be launched. One example is that US researchers have shown that US states that use the initiative process are more likely than those that do not, to have introduced governance reform policies (e.g., term limits, campaign finance controls). Another indication of this is the number of initiatives that are introduced but subsequently withdrawn in Switzerland, because the introduction of the initiative has in itself forced the legislature to address the issue. It is therefore claimed that the initiative process makes legislatures more responsive. Disadvantages One often cited disadvantage of citizens’ initiatives is that they result in badly drafted law, since (except in the case of indirect initiatives) the wording of the measure as initially proposed ends up as statute if the measure is passed. It is argued that the failure to use the expertise provided by government lawyers and officials who are familiar with the drafting process leads to laws that can be meaningless or ineffective, or have to be re-drafted, because the individuals or lawyers who draft the measures are not experienced in legislative drafting. Additionally, in some cases, statute created by the initiative process is found to be unconstitutional. A further disadvantage is the sheer number and complexity of issues that voters are expected to vote on. It is argued that it is impossible for voters to make informed decisions when there are a substantial number of initiatives on the ballot. A related argument is that citizens cannot be expected to make decisions on complex issues that they, unlike elected representatives, do not have the time to learn about. A frequent criticism of citizens’ initiatives is that they are only really accessible to well-resourced organisations and interests, and that the process is therefore hijacked by special interest groups promoting their own interests. Empirical evidence about the success of well-financed interest groups is mixed: some research has suggested that money does not in fact have a major effect on the outcome of citizens’ initiatives, whilst other studies have highlighted the role of money, in particular in defeating initiatives. However, there can be no doubting the importance of professional firms in the initial stage of the initiative process, in particular in terms of signature collection. A common criticism of citizens’ initiatives (and other forms of direct democracy) is that they enable the "tyranny of the majority." This term refers to the electoral power of majority groups in society being used to restrict or hinder the rights of unpopular minority groups. Critics argue that without the moderating influence of the legislature, legislation may be passed which actively targets the rights of groups within society which are unpopular. However, research undertaken in the US has produced different conclusions about whether initiatives do actually restrict the rights of minorities or not. Recall is the name given to an instrument by which a specified number of citizens can demand a vote of the electorate on whether an elected holder of public office should be removed from that office before the end of his/her term of office. Combining elements of the initiative instrument and a normal candidate election, a recall initiative is launched when a recall motion is filed with the relevant administration. Proponents are then required to gather a specified number of signatures in support of the recall measure. Typically, the number of signatures required will be a proportion of the votes cast for the officer who is the subject of the recall at the last ordinary election to that office. If and when the recall petition acquires enough valid signatures, the issue is put to voters at a ballot to determine firstly, whether or not the officer in question should be recalled and secondly, who should replace the officer if the recall measure is successful. The recall mechanism is the least common of the three direct democracy mechanisms. Although many US states include provisions for the recall in their constitutions, the mechanism is not used at national level in the US. Provision for the recall mechanism outside the US and at national level is rare, even in countries where direct democracy is widely used (e.g., Switzerland). Having said this, however, in 2004 Venezuela held the first ever presidential recall. There are sometimes limits on when a recall can proceed – e.g., not in the first or last year of a term – and on who is eligible to vote in the recall; in Colombia, only those individuals who voted in the original election are eligible to vote in any recall. Restrictions on which officers the mechanism applies to Where a country or state's constitution provides for use of the recall mechanism, relevant legal provisions will need to specify which elected officials the mechanism can be applied to. Only in Venezuela does the recall mechanism apply to a country's elected head of state. However, in most US states, the recall mechanism can be used to recall all elected state officials, from local and county officials up to the office of Governor. Judges may also be the subject of recall campaigns. In some states, some on-elected officials such as administrative officers can also be recalled. Restrictions on applying the recall mechanism In some places that have adopted the recall mechanism, officers can only be recalled if it can be demonstrated that they have acted improperly (e.g., the US state of Minnesota, where the grounds for recall of an elected official are serious malfeasance or nonfeasance during the term of office, or Colombia, where an official must be shown not to have carried out their campaign promises). In others, there are no requirements for officials to have acted improperly or incompetently, and the simple fact of enough signatures being collected is enough to force a recall vote. Number of signatures required to force a ballot The number of signatures required in order to hold a recall ballot clearly has a significant effect on the likelihood of being able to do so; the fewer the number of signatures required, the more likely it is that a vote on whether an officer should be recalled will take place. At the 2003 California recall, recall proponents were required to gather signatures of 12% of the vote for Governor at the last election in a period of 160 days. Many other US states require 25% of voters to support a recall; California's threshold of 12% is the lowest in the United States. Verification of signatures As with the citizens’ initiative mechanism, the requirement to produce a specified number of signatures in order to hold a ballot creates the need to collect and verify signatures. Signatures are normally only valid if they are collected from individuals who are registered to vote in the jurisdiction of the officer who is the subject of the recall. Verification of signatures is undertaken by the office administering the recall initiative. The importance of the signature collection and the verification process is demonstrated by the high-profile Chavez recall initiative in Venezuela, where the National Electoral Council initially ruled that a large number of signatures collected by recall proponents were ineligible. Combining the votes on the recall and a successor One feature of the recall mechanism which varies in different places is whether, once a recall petition has collected enough valid signatures, the recall ballot is combined with the vote for a replacement officer if the recall is successful. In some places, the votes are combined, meaning that voters have to vote on two issues: firstly, whether or not the officer in question should be removed from office, and secondly, who should replace the officer if the recall is successful. In such cases, if the recall vote is defeated, the vote on a successor is irrelevant and is ignored. However, if the recall vote passes, the candidate who achieves the most support on the second vote is elected as a successor to the recalled officer. Alternatively, an initial ballot on whether or not to recall the officer is held, and only if the recall vote is passed is a second vote on a successor held. There are arguments for and against each of these alternatives. One argument against combining the votes is that the combination might confuse voters about the process, and that it prevents voters from focusing solely on the recall issue. Arguably, when voters make a decision about whether to support the recall, they should be able to focus on the issue at hand and the performance of the incumbent, without the distraction of possible successors. On the other hand, combining the two votes leads to cost savings and increases administrative efficiency. A further issue is that combining the recall and successor vote could mean that the vote for (i.e. to retain) an incumbent who is successfully recalled is actually higher than the plurality vote in favour of the successor, which could give a legitimacy problem. This scenario might be avoided by using voting systems such as the Alternative Vote or Supplementary Vote. However, this would mean that a combined vote would become increasingly complicated for voters. The recall in a party-based electoral system More generally, there is a question of compatibility of recall with the electoral system. If the electoral system is candidate-based, there is no problem. If, however, it is party based, should the voters have the right to recall a specific representative nominated by a party? Would there be a difference between representatives chosen by the voters under open list proportional representation? In general, in list systems, who fills a vacancy caused by a successful recall: the party or the voters? Proponents of the recall mechanism argue that it acts as a discipline on elected officials, in that elected representatives will be less likely to make unpopular decisions if it may make them more likely to be the subject of a recall campaign. However, the same argument is also used against the recall: opponents argue that the recall mechanism completely undermines representative government by making elected officials afraid to make unpopular but necessary decisions. A further argument in favour of direct democracy is that it provides voters with the continued opportunity to make a democratic decision about who governs them, since they do not have only one opportunity every three to five years to elect the people who will represent them, but retain a degree of control over the decision for the duration of the office. However, it is claimed by opponents of the recall that the mechanism could be used irresponsibly, and that it could be used by political parties as a political weapon against rival incumbents. The claim that the recall mechanism was being used as a political tool was made by many Democrats against Republican activists in relation to the 2003 California Recall. In any country, the logistics capacity and the availability of skilled human resources may constrain the available options for electoral system choice, as may the amount of money available. Even when donor funding is available, issues of the long-term sustainability of electoral system choice are important. This does not, however, mean that the most straightforward and least expensive system is always the best choice. It may well be a false economy, as a dysfunctional electoral system can have a negative impact on a country’s entire political system and on its democratic stability. Any choice of electoral system has a wide range of administrative consequences, including those addressed in the following files. Any single-member district system requires the time-consuming and potentially expensive process of drawing boundaries for relatively small constituencies. The way in which they are demarcated will depend on issues such as population size, cohesiveness, transportation and communication networks, ‘communities of interest’, and contiguity. Furthermore, this is rarely a one-off task, as boundaries have to be adjusted regularly to take population changes into account. FPTP, AV, and TRS systems produce the most administrative headaches on this score. The BV, PBV, SNTV, LV, and STV systems also require electoral districts to be demarcated but are somewhat easier to manage because they use multi-member districts, which will be fewer in number and larger. Drawing districts for the majoritarian element of a mixed system poses similar challenges. When multi-member districts are used, it is possible to avoid the need to adjust boundaries by changing the number of representatives elected from each electoral district instead—a method of particular value when established units such as provinces are used as electoral districts. List PR systems are often the cheapest and easiest to administer because they use either one single national constituency, which means that no boundaries need be drawn at all, or very large multi-member districts which dovetail with pre-existing state or provincial boundaries. UN-sponsored elections in Sierra Leone in 1996, Liberia in 1997, and Kosovo in 2001 were all conducted under a national List PR system, partly because the displacement of people and the lack of accurate census data meant that electoral authorities did not have the population data necessary to draw smaller districts. Voter registration is the most complex and controversial, and often least successful, part of electoral administration. By its nature, it involves collecting in a standardized format specific information from a vast number of voters, and then arranging and distributing these data in a form that can be used at election time—moreover, in such a way as to ensure that only eligible electors engage in the voting process and to guard against multiple voting, personation, and the like. The political sensitivity of these matters and the laborious nature of the task itself mean that voter registration is often one of the most expensive, time-consuming, and controversial parts of the entire electoral process. Voter registration requirements are influenced by the design of the electoral system. A system which uses single-member districts usually requires that each voter be registered within the boundaries of a specified district. This means that FPTP, AV, TRS, and BC (when using single-member districts) are the most expensive and administratively time-consuming systems in terms of voter registration, alongside Parallel and MMP systems which contain single-member districts. The fewer, multimember districts of the BV, PBV, SNTV, and STV systems make the process a little easier, while large-district List PR systems are the least complicated. Arrangements for registration for out-of-country voting may be particularly difficult. The simplicity of List PR in this context has been a contributing factor in its adoption in some major transitional elections, such as South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. It should be emphasized, however, that variations in electoral systems have only a minor impact on the often extremely high cost of voter registration. Ballot papers should be as friendly as possible to all voters in order to maximize participation and reduce the number of spoilt or ‘invalid’ votes. This often entails the use of symbols for parties and candidates, photographs, and colours. FPTP and AV ballot papers are often easiest to print and, in most cases, have a relatively small number of names. TRS ballot papers are similarly easy, but in many cases new ballot papers have to be printed for the second round of voting, thus effectively doubling the production cost; and consideration also has to be given to allowing sufficient time to print the papers for the second ballot. Parallel and MMP systems often require the printing of at least two ballot papers for a single polling day, and use two (or more) very different electoral systems, with logistical implications for the training of election officials and the way in which people vote. SNTV, BV, BC, and STV ballot papers are more complex than FPTP ballot papers because they will have more candidates, and therefore more symbols and photographs (if these are used). Lastly, List PR ballot papers can span the continuum of complexity. They can be very simple, as in a closed-list system, or quite complex, as the open list system where a vote can be cast for one or more candidates from a list, and there is also the possibility of issuing a preferential vote or electing candidates from different parties (panachage), such as in Switzerland or Ecuador where the voter can either vote for all the candidates of a single list, for some preferences within a list or between lists. That is why it is very important that besides choosing the most suitable electoral system for each country, special attention be devoted to the design and production of easily understandable ballots for all people, especially those with lower education. Clearly the nature of, and the need for, voter education will vary dramatically from society to society, but when it comes to educating voters on how to fill out their ballot papers, there are identifiable differences between the different systems. The principles behind voting under preferential systems such as AV, STV, or Borda Count are quite complex, and if they are being used for the first time, voter education needs to address this issue, particularly if the voter is obliged to number all candidates in order of preference, as is the case in Australia. The increasing use of mixed systems, many of which give voters two ballot papers, also creates an additional level of complexity for voters. By contrast, the principles behind single-vote systems such as FPTP, PBV, or SNTV are very easy to understand. The remaining systems fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Therefore, besides placing special emphasis on the challenge of implementing a new electoral system or on the change of some of its components, it is also important to be very careful with the information and guidance to be provided to the electorate, since confusion may be generated when there is not enough knowledge about a new way to vote. Inappropriate voter education might cause that large part of the population does not vote, votes wrongly or simply nulls its vote. FPTP, AV, BV, SNTV, List PR, Borda Count, and STV all generally require just one election on one day (though the size of India’s FPTP elections require that they be held over a period of four weeks), as do Parallel and MMP systems. Two-Round systems are more costly and difficult to administer because they often require the whole electoral process to be re-run a week or a fortnight after the first round. If a seat becomes vacant between elections, List PR systems often simply fill it with the next candidate on the list of the party of the former representative, thus eliminating the need to hold another election. However, plurality/majority systems often have provisions for filling vacant seats through a by-election. When other systems are in use, either approach may be possible: under STV, the Republic of Ireland holds by-elections for vacant seats in the legislature, but Australia does not do so for Senate vacancies. It is also possible to avoid by-elections by electing alternates at the same time as the ordinary representatives, as is done for example in Bolivia. By-elections are smaller and therefore less costly than normal elections, but in some countries they will nevertheless put a significant burden on the budget, and seats are sometimes left vacant for long periods because of a lack of capacity to arrange by-elections. This is an especially salient problem in some countries in Southern Africa where the HIV/AIDS epidemic often leads to a large number of vacant seats between elections. In some circumstances, by-elections can have a wider political impact than merely replacing individual members, and are seen to act as a mid-term test of the performance of the government. In addition, if the number of vacancies to be filled during a parliamentary term is significant, this can lead to a change in the composition of the legislature and an altered power base for the government. There are some elements associated to the electoral system that have an influence on the process of the count of votes, and that, according to their complexity, can further delay the process of scrutiny. For example, FPTP, SNTV, and simple closed-list PR systems are easiest to count, as only one vote total figure for each party or candidate is required to work out the results. The BV and LV systems require the polling officials to count a number of votes on a single ballot paper, and Parallel and MMP systems often require the counting of two ballot papers. AV, BC, and STV, as preferential systems requiring numbers to be marked on the ballot, are more complex to count since it may involve a first count of the votes obtained by each political party or party list, and then of the total of votes received by each candidate in each list. Therefore, the more complex an electoral system is, the more time should be invested in the count of votes, as it is more likely to find inconsistencies. So, we must not forget that both processes, the counting of votes and the training of election officers, always go hand in hand. The stresses which any electoral system places on a country’s administrative capacity will be determined primarily by history, context, experience, and resources, but a cursory glance at the different cost and administrative variables does offer some clues to the potential costs of various systems. List PR systems, especially national closed-list systems, score well when it comes to being cheap to run and requiring few administrative resources. So does PBV. Next come SNTV and LV systems, followed by BV and FPTP; and a little further down by the AV, STV, Parallel, Borda Count, and MMP systems. The system which is most likely to put pressure on any country’s administrative capacity is the Two-Round System. One of the clearest conclusions to be drawn from the comparative study of electoral systems is simply the range and utility of the options available. Often, designers and drafters of constitutional, political, and electoral frameworks simply choose the electoral system they know best—often, in new democracies, the system of the former colonial power if there was one—rather than fully investigating the alternatives. Sometimes the elements of a peace settlement or external pressures constrain the options available. The major purpose of this text is to provide some of the knowledge for informed decisions to be made. It does not necessarily advocate wholesale changes to existing electoral systems; in fact, the comparative experience of electoral reform to date suggests that moderate reform, building on those parts of an existing system which work well, is often a better option than jumping to a completely new and unfamiliar system. There is much to be learned from the experience of others. For example, a country with an FPTP system which wishes to move to a more proportional system while still retaining the geographical link to constituents might want to consider the experience of New Zealand, which adopted an MMP system in 1993, or Lesotho, which did so in 2002. A similar country which wants to keep single-member districts but encourage inter-group accommodation and compromise could evaluate the experience of AV in the Oceania region (Fiji or Papua New Guinea in particular). Any deeply divided country that wishes to make the transition to democracy would be well advised to consider both the multi-ethnic power-sharing government the List PR electoral system in South Africa has facilitated and the more troubled history of the Northern Ireland Assembly elected by STV. Lastly, a country which simply wishes to reduce the cost and instability created by a TRS system for electing a president could examine the AV option used by the Republic of Ireland. In all these cases, the choice of electoral system has had a clear impact on the politics of that country. The following guidelines summarize the advice contained in this topic area: Keep It Simple and Clear Effective and sustainable electoral system designs are more likely to be easily understood by the voter and the politician. Too much complexity can lead to misunderstandings, unintended consequences, and voter mistrust of the results. Don't be Afraid to Innovate Many of the successful electoral systems used in the world today themselves represent innovative approaches to specific problems, and have been proved to work well. There is much to learn from the experience of others—both neighbouring countries and seemingly quite different cases. Pay Attention to Contextual and Temporal Factors Electoral systems do not work in a vacuum. Their success depends on a happy marriage of political institutions and cultural traditions. The first point of departure for any would-be electoral system designer should be to ask: What is the political and social context I am working within? The second might be: Am I designing a permanent system or one which needs to get us through a transitional period? Don't Underestimate the Electorate While simplicity is important, it is equally dangerous to underestimate the voters’ ability to comprehend and successfully use a wide variety of different electoral systems. Complex preferential systems, for example, have been used successfully in developing countries in the Asia–Pacific region, while the experience of many recent elections in new democracies has underlined the important distinction between ‘functional’ literacy and ‘political’ literacy. Even in very poor countries, voters often have, and wish to express, relatively sophisticated orderings of political preferences and choices. Testing with appropriately drawn focus groups can provide useful information on what will and will not be usable. Err on the Side of Inclusion Wherever possible, whether in divided or relatively homogeneous societies, the electoral system should err on the side of including all significant interests in the legislature. Regardless of whether minorities are based on ideological, ethnic, racial, linguistic, regional, or religious identities, the exclusion of significant shades of opinion from legislatures, particularly in the developing world, has often been catastrophically counterproductive. Process is a Key Factor in Choice The way in which a particular electoral system is chosen is also extremely important in ensuring its overall legitimacy. A process in which most or all groups are included, including the electorate at large, is likely to result in significantly broader acceptance of the end result than a decision perceived as being motivated by partisan self-interest alone. Although partisan considerations are unavoidable when discussing the choice of electoral systems, broad cross-party and public support for any institution is crucial to its being accepted and respected. The reform of the New Zealand electoral system from FPTP to MMP, for example, involved two referendums which served to legitimize the final outcome. By contrast, the French Socialist government’s decision in 1986 to switch from the existing Two-Round System to PR was widely perceived as being motivated by partisan considerations, and was quickly reversed as soon the government lost power in 1988. Build Legitimacy and Acceptance Among All Key Actors All groupings which wish to play a part in the democratic process should feel that the electoral system to be used is fair and gives them the same chance of electoral success as anyone else. The paramount aim should be that those who ‘lose’ the election cannot translate their disappointment into a rejection of the system itself or use the electoral system as an excuse to destabilize the path of democratic consolidation. In 1990, in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were voted out of the government but accepted the defeat, in part because they accepted the fairness of the electoral system. Cambodia, Mozambique, and South Africa were able to end their bloody civil wars through institutional arrangements which were broadly acceptable to all sides. Try to Maximize Voter Influence Voters should feel that elections provide them with a measure of influence over governments and government policy. Choice can be maximized in a number of different ways. Voters may be able to choose between parties, between candidates of different parties, and between candidates of the same party. They may also be able to vote under different systems when it comes to presidential, upper house, lower house, regional, and local government elections. They should also feel confident that their vote has a genuine impact on the formation of the government, not just on the composition of the legislature. But Balance That Against Encouraging Coherent Political Parties The desire to maximize voter influence should be balanced against the need to encourage coherent and viable political parties. Maximum voter choice on the ballot paper may produce such a fragmented legislature that no one ends up with the result they were hoping for. There is widespread agreement among political scientists that broadly-based, coherent political parties are among the most important factors in promoting effective and sustainable democracy. Long-Term Stability and Short-Term Advantage Are Not Always Compatible When political actors negotiate over a new electoral system, they often push proposals which they believe will advantage their party in the coming elections. However, this can often be an unwise strategy, particularly in developing nations, as one party’s short-term success or dominance may lead to long-term political breakdown and social unrest. For example, in negotiations prior to the transitional 1994 election, South Africa’s ANC could reasonably have argued for the retention of the existing FPTP electoral system, which would probably have given it, as by far the largest party, a seat bonus over and above its share of the national vote. That it argued for a form of PR, and thus won fewer seats than it could have under FPTP, was a testament to the fact that it saw long-term stability as more desirable than short-term electoral gratification. Similarly, electoral systems need to be responsive enough to react effectively to changing political circumstances and the growth of new political movements. Even in established democracies, support for the major parties is rarely stable, while politics in new democracies is almost always highly dynamic, and a party which benefits from the electoral arrangements at one election may not necessarily benefit at the next. Don't Think of the Electoral System as a Panacea for All Ills While it is true that if one wants to change the nature of political competition, the electoral system may be the most effective instrument for doing so, electoral systems can never be the panacea for all the political ills of a country. The overall effects of other variables, particularly a country’s political culture, usually have a much greater impact on its democratic prospects than institutional factors such as electoral systems. Moreover, the positive effects of a well-crafted electoral system can be all too easily submerged by an inappropriate constitutional dispensation, the dominance of forces of discord internally, or the weight of external threats to the sovereignty of the country. But Conversely Don’t Underestimate its Influence Throughout the world, the social constraints on democracy are considerable, but they still leave room for conscious political strategies which may further or hamper successful democratization. Electoral systems are not a panacea, but they are central to the structuring of stability in any polity. Skilful electoral system engineering may not prevent or eradicate deep enmities, but appropriate institutions can nudge the political system in the direction of reduced conflict and greater government accountability. In other words, while most of the changes that can be achieved by tailoring electoral systems are necessarily at the margins, it is often these marginal impacts that make the difference between democracy being consolidated or being undermined. Be Mindful of the Electorate's Willingness to Embrace Change Electoral system change might seem a good idea to political insiders who understand the flaws of the existing system, but unless proposals for reform are presented in an appropriate way, the public may well reject tinkering with the system, perceiving reform to be nothing more than a case of politicians altering the rules for their own benefit. Most damaging are situations when the change is seen to be a blatant manoeuvre for political gain (as was the case in Chile in 1989, in Jordan in 1993, and in Kyrgyzstan on several occasions since 1995, or when the system alters so frequently that the voters do not quite know where they are (as some observers have argued is the case in Bolivia). And Don't Assume that Defects can Easily be Fixed Later All electoral systems create winners and losers, and therefore vested interests. When a system is already in place, these are part of the political environment. At a time of change, however, it may be unwise to assume that it will be easy to gain acceptance later to fix problems which arise. If a review of the system is intended, it may be sensible for it to be incorporated into the legal instruments containing the system change. Take the time needed to get it right the first time. Avoid Being a Slave to Past Systems Nevertheless, all too often electoral systems that are inappropriate to a new democracy’s needs have been inherited or carried over from colonial times without any thought as to how they will work within the new political realities. Almost all the former British colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, for example, adopted FPTP systems. In many of these new democracies, particularly those facing ethnic divisions, this system proved utterly inappropriate to their needs. Similarly, it has been argued that many of the former French colonies in West Africa which retained the TRS system (such as Mali) suffered damaging polarization as a result; and many post-communist regimes retain minimum turnout or majority requirements inherited from the Soviet era. Assess the Likely Impact of Any New System on Societal Conflict As noted at the very start of this text, electoral systems can be seen not only as mechanisms for choosing legislatures and presidents but also as a tool of conflict management within a society. Some systems, in some circumstances, will encourage parties to make inclusive appeals for support outside their own core support base. Unfortunately, it is more often the case in the world today that the presence of inappropriate electoral systems serves actually to exacerbate negative tendencies which already exist, for example, by encouraging parties to see elections as ‘zero-sum’ contests and thus to act in a hostile and exclusionary manner to anyone outside their home group. When designing any political institution, the bottom line is that, even if it does not help to reduce tensions within society, it should, at the very least, not make matters worse. Try and Imagine Unusual or Unlikely Contingencies Too often, electoral systems are designed to avoid the mistakes of the past, especially the immediate past. Care should be taken in doing so not to overreact and create a system that goes too far in terms of correcting previous problems. Furthermore, electoral system designers would do well to pose themselves some unusual questions to avoid embarrassment in the long run. What if nobody wins under the system proposed? Is it possible that one party could win all the seats? What if you have to award more seats than you have places in the legislature? What do you do if candidates tie? Might the system mean that, in some districts, it is better for a party supporter not to vote for their preferred party or candidate? Is the system clear and comprehensible? Has context been taken into account? Is the system appropriate for the time? Are the mechanisms for future reform clear? Does the system avoid underestimating the electorate? Is the system as inclusive as possible? Was the design process perceived to be legitimate? Will the election results be seen as legitimate? Are unusual contingencies taken into account? Is the system financially and administratively sustainable? Will the voters feel motivated to participate? Is a competitive party system encouraged? Does the system fit into a holistic constitutional framework? Will the system help to alleviate conflict rather than exacerbate it?
Absentee voting – Another term for remote voting. Additional Member System – Another term for Mixed Member Proportional System. Alternative Vote (AV) – A candidate-centred preferential plurality/majority system used in single-member districts in which voters use numbers to mark their preferences on the ballot paper. A candidate who receives an absolute majority (50 per cent plus 1) of valid first-preference votes is declared elected. If no candidates achieves an absolute majority of first preferences, the least successful candidates are eliminated and their votes reallocated until one candidate has an absolute majority of valid votes remaining. Apparentement – A term of French origin for a provision which can be included in List Proportional Representation (List PR) systems which enables two or more parties or groupings which fight separate campaigns to reach agreement that their votes will be combined for the purpose of seat allocation. See also Lema and Stembusaccord. Average district magnitude – For a country, local authority or supranational institution, the number of representatives to be elected divided by the number of electoral districts. See also District magnitude. Ballotage – Another term for a two-round system, used primarily in Latin America. Ballot structure – The way in which electoral choices are presented on the ballot paper, in particular whether the ballot is candidate-centred or party-centred. Bicameral legislature – A legislature made up of two houses, usually known as an upper house and a lower house. Block Vote (BV) – A plurality/majority system used in multi-member districts in which electors have as many votes as there are candidates to be elected. Voting is candidate-centred. The candidates with the highest vote totals win the seats. Borda Count (BC) – A candidate-centred preferential system used in either single- or multi-member districts in which voters use numbers to mark their preferences on the ballot paper and each preference marked is then assigned a value using equal steps. For example, in a ten-candidate field a first preference I worth one, a second preference is worth 0.9 and so on, with a tenth preference worth 0.1. These are summed and the candidate(s) with the highest total(s) is/are declared elected. See also Modified Borda Count. Boundary Delimitation – The process by which a country, local authority area or area of a supranational institution is divided into electoral districts. Candidate-centred ballot – A form of ballot in which an elector chooses between candidates rather than between parties and political groupings. Circoncscription – The term most frequently used for electoral district in francophone countries. See Electoral district. Closed list – A form of List PR in which electors are restricted to voting only for a party or political grouping, and cannot express a preference for any candidate within a party list. See also Open list and Free list. Communal Roll – A register of electors for which the qualification for registration is a determinable criterion such as, religion, ethnicity, language or gender. All electors who meet the criterion may be entered in the communal roll automatically, or each such elector may be able to choose whether or not to be entered. This register is used for the election of representatives of the group defined be the criterion from electoral districts specified for that purpose. Compensatory Seats – The List PR seats in a Mixed Member Proportional system which are awarded to parties or groupings to correct disproportionality in their representation in the results of elections held under the first part of the MMP system, normally under a plurality/majority system. Constituency – A synonym for electoral district used predominantly in some Anglophone countries. See Electoral district. Contiguous district – An electoral district that can be enclosed in a single continuous boundary line. Cross-cutting cleavages – Political allegiances of voters which cut across ethnic, religious and class divisions in a society. Cumulation – The capacity within some electoral systems for voters to cast more than one vote for a favoured candidate. Democratic consolidation – The process by which a country’s political institutions and democratic procedures become legitimized, stable and broadly accepted by both political actors and the wider population. D’Hondt Formula – One of the options for the series of divisors used to distribute seats in List PR systems which adopt the Highest Average Method. The votes of a party or grouping are divided successively by 1, 2, 3… as seats are allocated to it. Of the available formulas, D’Hondt tends to be the most favourable to larger parties. See also Saint-Laguë Formula. Distribution requirements – The requirement that to win election a candidate must win not merely a specified proportion of the vote nationally but also a specified degree of support in a number of different states or regions. District – Used in this topic area to mean electoral district. District magnitude – For an electoral district, the number of representatives to be elected from it. See also Average district magnitude. Droop Quota – A variant of quota used in proportional representation systems which use the Largest Remainder Method, defined as the total valid vote divided by the number of seats to be filled in the electoral district plus one. Also known as Hagenbach-Bischoff Quota. See Quota (a). See also Hare Quota and Imperiali Quota. Elector – A person who is both qualified and registered to vote at an election. Electoral district – One of the geographic areas into which a country, local authority or supranational institution may be divided for electoral purposes. See also Circonscription, Constituency, Electorate (b) and Riding. An electoral district may elect one or more representatives to an elected body. See Single-member district and Multi-member district. Electoral formula – That part of the electoral system dealing specifically with the translation of votes into seats. Electoral law – One or more pieces of legislation governing all aspects of the process for electing the political institutions defined in a country’s constitution or institutional framework. Electoral management body (EMB) – The organization tasked under electoral law with the responsibility for the conduct of elections. The EMB in most countries consists either of an independent commission appointed for the purpose or of part of a specified government department. Electoral regulations – Rules subsidiary to legislation made, often by the electoral management body, under powers contained in the electoral law which govern aspects of the organization and administration of an election. Electoral system – That part of the electoral law and regulations which determines how parties and candidates are elected to a body as representatives. Its three most significant components are the electoral formula, the ballot structure and the district magnitude. Electorate – May have one of two distinct meanings: a. The total number of electors registered to vote in an electoral district.b. A synonym for electoral district used predominantly in some anglophone countries. See Electoral district. External voting – A mechanism by which voters who are permanently or temporarily absent from a country are enabled to cast a vote, also called out-of-country voting. First Past The Post (FPTP) – The simplest form of plurality/majority electoral system, using single-member districts and candidate-centred voting. The winning candidate is the one who gains more votes than any other candidate, even if this is not an absolute majority of valid votes. Free list – A form of List PR in which voters may vote for a party or grouping and in addition for one or more candidates, whether or not those candidates are nominated by that party or grouping. Also known as panachage. See also Closed list and Open list. Gerrymandering – The deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries so as to advantage or disadvantage a particular political interest. Hagenbach-Bischoff Quota – Another term for the Droop Quota. Hare Quota – A variant of quota used in proportional representation systems which use the Largest Remainder Method, defined as the total valid vote divided by the number of seats to be filled in the electoral district. See Quota (a). Also known as Hare-Niemeyer. See also Droop Quota and Imperiali Quota. Heterogeneous district – An electoral district in which, either by design or as a result of the operation of other criteria for boundary delimitation, the electorate manifests social, ethnic, religious or linguistic diversity. Highest Average Method – A principle for converting votes into seats in List PR systems. One seat is allocated in a district at each of a series of counts to the party or grouping with the highest vote total. When a seat is allocated, the original vote of the party that wins it is reduced by division. The most common series of divisors used are D’Hondt and Sainte-Leaguë. The Highest Average Method tends to be more favourable to larger parties than its alternative, the Largest Remainder Method. Homogenous district – An electoral district in which, either by design or as a result of the operation of other criteria for boundary delimitation, the electorate manifests substantial social, ethnic, religious or linguistic uniformity. Hybrid System – The result of dividing a country into two or more non-overlapping areas, in each of which a different electoral system is used. Imperiali Quota – A variant of quota used in proportional representation systemswhich use the Largest Remainder Method, deined as the toal valid vote divided by the number of seats to be filled in the electoral district plus two. See also Droop Quota and Hare Quota. Index of disproportionality – A figure which is designed to measure the degree of deviation from proportionality in the allocation of seats to parties or groupings which participated in the election. It is most commonly defined as the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences for each party or grouping between the percentage of votes received and the percentage of seats gained. Invalid votes – Votes which cannot be counted in favour of any participant in an election due to accidental or deliberate errors of marking by the voter. Largest Remainder Method – A principle for converting votes into seats in List PR systems. After parties and groupings have been allocated seats in an electoral district because they have received full quotas (a) of votes, some seats will be unfilled, and some votes remain – for each party, less than a full quota (a). The remaining seats are then awarded to parties and groupings in order of the number of left/over votes they possess. The Largest Remainder Method tends to be more favourable to smaller parties than the alternative approach, the Highest Average Method. Lema – A term used in Latin America for an umbreslla list including two or more sub-lists which receive votes separately byt whose votes are counted together for the purposes of seat allocation in some List PR systems. See also Apparentement and Stembusaccord. Limited Vote (LV) – An electoral systemused in multi-member districts in which electors have more than one vote, but fewer votes than there are candidates to be elected. The candidates with the highest vote totals win the seats, in the same way as in a Block Vote system and in SNTV. List Proportional Representation (List PR) – A system in which each participant party or grouping presents a list of candidates for an electoral district, voters vote for a party, and parties receive seats in proportion to their overall share of the vote. Winning candidates are taken from the lists. See Closed list, Open list and Free list. Lower house – One of the two chambers in a bicameral legislature, usually seen as comprising `the representatives of the people’. It is the more powerful chamber when the powers of the two chambers are unequal. Majoritarian – Designed to produce an absolute majority (50 per cent plus 1) of votes. Malapportionment – The uneven distribution of voters between electoral districts. Manufactured majority – An election result, more commonly found where a plurality/majority system is used, in which a single party or coalition wins less than 50 per cent of the valid votes but an absolute majority of the seats in an elected body. Member state – A country which is a member of a supranational institution, for example the European Union. Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) – A mixed system in which all the voters use the first electoral system, usually a plurality/majority system, to elect some of the representatives to an elected body/ The remaining seats are then allocated to parties and groupings using the second electoral system, normally List PR, so as to compensate for disproportionality in their representation in the results from the first electoral system. Mixed systems – A system in which the choices expressed by voters are used to elect representatives through two different systems, one proportional representation system and one plurality/majority system. There are two kinds of mixed systems: Parallel systems and Mixed Member Proportional systems. Modified Borda Count – A candidate-centred, preferential system used in either single- or multi-member districts in which voters use numbers to mark their preferences on the ballot paper and each preference marked is then assigned a value calculated by using the series of divisors 1, 2, 3… For example, in a ten-candidate field a first preference is worth one, a second preference is worth 0.5, a third preference 0.3333, and so on. These are summed and the candidate(s) with the highest total(s) is/are declare elected. See also Borda Count. Multi-member district – A district from which more than one representative is elected to a legislature or elected body. See also Single-member district. Multiple-tier system – An electoral system in which two or more sets of representatives are elected to the same chamber by the entire electorate of a country. The multiple tiers may be electoral districts defined at different levels within a country, for example, single-member districts and regions, or regions and the country as a whole. Systems in which two distinct sets of representatives are elected from the same level are also multiple-tier systems. All mixed systems are multiple-tier systems. One Person One Vote One Value – A principle of representation in which each elected representative represents the same number of electors, and under which malapportionment is minimized. Open list – A form of List PR in which voters can express a preference both for a party or grouping for one, or sometimes more, candidates within that party or grouping. See also Closed list and Free list. Out-of-country voting – A mechanism by which voters who are permanently or temporarily absent from a country are enabled to case a vote. See External voting. See also Remote voting. Overhang mandate – See Überhangsmandat. Panachage – The term used in francophone countries for the version of List PR in which voters may vote for a party or grouping and in addition for one or more candidates, whether or not those candidates are nominated by that party or grouping. See also Free list. Parallel System – A mixed system in which the choices expressed by the voters are used to elect representatives through two different systems, usually one plurality/majority system and one proportional representation system, but where no account is taken of the seats allocated under the first system in calculating the results in the second system. See also Mixed-Member Proportional. Party Block Vote (PBV) – A plurality/majority system using multi-member districts in which voters cast a single party-centred vote for a party of choice, and do not choose between candidates. The party with most votes will win every seat in the electoral district. Party-centred ballot – A form of ballot in which a voter chooses between parties or groupings, rather than individual candidates. Party magnitude – For an electoral district, the average number of representatives elected by each party and grouping. For a country, the average of the party magnitudes for all electoral districts. Personation – The fraudulent casting of the vote of a registered elector by another person. Plurality/majority systems – Plurality/majority systems are based on the principle that a candidate(s) or party with a plurality of votes (i.e. more than any other) or a majority of votes (i.e. 50 per cent plus one – an absolute majority) is/are declared the winner(s). Such a system may use single-member districts – for example, First Past The Post, Alternative Vote or the Two-Round System – or multi-member districts – for example, the Block Vote and Party Block Vote. Preferential voting systems – Electoral systems in which voters rank parties or candidates on the ballot paper in order of their choice. The Alternative Vote, the Borda Count, the Single Transferable Vote and the Supplementary Vote are all examples of preferential voting systems. Proportional Representation (PR) – An electoral system family based on the principle of the conscious translation of the overall votes of a party or grouping into a corresponding proportion of seats in an elected body. For example, a party which wins 30 per cent of the votes will receive approximately 30 per cent of the seats. All PR systems require the use of multi-member districts. There are two major types of PR system, List PR and the Single Transferable Vote (STV). Quota – May have one of two distinct meanings: a. The number of votes which guarantees a party of candidate two win one seat in a particular electoral district in a proportional representation system. There are three variants in common use, the Hare, Droop (or Hagenbach-Bischoff) and Imperiali quotas. b. A number of seats in an elected body or a proportion of candidates nominated by a party or grouping which are required by law to be filled by representatives of a particular kind; most commonly used to ensure the nomination and election of a minimum number of women. Regional fiefdom – A situation in which one party wins all, or nearly all, of the seats in a particular geographic region or a country. Remote voting – A mechanism by which voters are enabled to cast a vote which does not involve their attendance at a polling station on the day or days fixed for voting. See also Out-of-country voting. Reserved seats – Seats in which a determinable criterion such as religion, ethnicity, language or gender is a requirement for nomination or election. Riding – A synonym for electoral district used in some countries. See Electoral district. Sainte-Laguë Formula – one of the options for the series of divisors used to distribute seats in List PR systems which adopt the Highest Average Method. The votes of a party or grouping are divided successively by 1, 3, 5… as seats are allocated to it. See also D’Hondt Formula. Single-member district – An electoral district from which only one member is elected to a legislature or elected body. See also Multi-member district. Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) – An electoral system in which voters vast a single candidate-centred vote for one candidate in a multi-member district. The candidates with the highest vote totals are declared elected. Single Transferable Vote (STV) – A preferential candidate-centred proportional representation system used in multi-member districts. Candidates that surpass a specified quota (see Quota (a)) of first-preference votes are immediately elected. In successive counts, votes are redistributed from least successful candidates, who are eliminated, and votes surplus to the quota are redistributed from successful candidates, until sufficient candidates are declared elected. Spoilt votes – See Invalid votes. State – Used in this topic area to denote a sub-national unit of a country often in the context of a federal constitution. Stembusaccord – A term of Dutch origin for a provision which can be included in List PR systems which enables two or more parties or groupings which are fighting separate campaigns to reach agreement that their votes will be combined for the purpose of seat allocation. See also Apparentement and Lema. Supplementary vote – A candidate-centred, preferential plurality/majority system, similar to the Alternative Vote. If no candidate achieves an absolute majority of first preferences, all candidates except the two leading candidates are eliminated and their votes reallocated according to the second, third and so on preferences expressed. The candidate with the highest number of votes is declared elected. Supranational institution – an organization created by a number of countries by treaty where power is held by independent appointed officials or by representatives elected by the legislatures or people of the member states. Threshold – The minimum level of support which a party needs to gain representation in the legislature. A threshold may be a formal threshold, which is a figure laid down in the constitution or the law, usually in the form of a percentage of the valid votes cast, or an effective or natural threshold, which is a mathematical property of the electoral system in use. Two-Round System (TRS) – A plurality/majority system in which a second election is held if no candidate achieves a given level of votes, most commonly an absolute majority (50 per cent plus one), in the first election round. A Two-Round System may take a majority-plurality form, in which it is possible for more than two candidates to contest the second round. An example is the French system, in which any candidate who has received the votes of over 12.5 per cent of the registered electorate in the first round can stand in the second round. The candidate who wins the highest number of votes in the second round is then declared elected, regardless of whether they have won an absolute majority. Alternatively, a Two-Round System may take a majority run-off form, in which only the top two candidates in the first round contest the second round.Überhangsmandat – An additional seat in a legislature which results in an MMP system when a party or grouping wins more seats in a region under the first, usually plurality/majority, electoral system than the number to which it would be entitled in total on the basis of its proportion of the vote. Also known as excess mandate or overhang mandate. Upper house – One of the two chambers in a bicameral legislature, often seen either as containing `the representatives of regions/federal states’ or as `a chamber of review’. The less powerful chamber when the powers of the two chambers are unequal. Wasted votes – Valid votes which no not ultimately count towards the election of any candidate or party.
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Herron, `Mixed Electoral Rules: Impact on Party Systems’, Electoral Studies: An International Journal, 23/4 (December 2004), pp. 735-768Nohlen, Dieter, Elections and Electoral Systems (Delhi: MacMillan, 1996)Nohlen, Dieter (ed.), Enciclopedia Electoral Latinamericana y del Caribe (San José, Costa Rica: Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos (IIDH)/CAPEL, 1993)Nohlen, Dieter et al., Elections in Africa (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) Nohlen, Dieter et al., Elections in the Asia-Pacific Region (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Norris, Pippa, Electoral Enigeering: Voting Rules and Political Behaviour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Pitkin, Hanna F., The Concept of Representation (Berkerly, Calif.: University of California Press, 1967)Rae, Douglas W., The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967)Reilly, Ben, Democracy in Divided Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Reilly, Ben , `The Global Spread of Preferential Voting: Australian Institutional Imperialism?’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 39/2 (July 2004), pp. 253-266Reynolds, Andrew (ed.), The Architecture of Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Reynolds, Andrew (ed.), Electoral Systems and Democratization in Southern Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Rule, Wilma and Joseph Zimmerman (eds), Electoral Systems in Comparative Perspective: Their Impact on Women and Minorities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwodd, 1994)Sartori, Giovanni, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry Into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Shugart, Mathew S. and John Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Shugart, Mathew S. and Martin P. Wattenberg, Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Sisk, Timothy D., Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996) Taagepera, Rein and Matthew S. Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989)
The Electoral System topic area was developed largely based on Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook (2005) written by Andrew Reynolds, Ben Reilly and Andrew Ellis, together with José Antonio Cheibub, Karen Cox, Dong Lisheng, Jørgen Elklit, Michael Gallagher, Allen Hicken, Carlos Huneeus, Eugene Huskey, Stina Larserud, Vijay Patidar, Nigel S. Roberts, Richard Vengroff and Jeffrey A. Weldon. It also builds on the files developed for the Electoral System topic area first developed for the Administration and Cost of Elections Project. Stina Larserud of the Electoral Processes Programme at International IDEA was the lead writer for this updated topic area. Stina Larserud joined International IDEA in July, 2003. Having studied in Sweden and in Australia, Ms Larserud holds a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Uppsala, Sweden in comparative politics and institutional design. Ms Larserud acts as a member of a polling station commission at elections and referendums in Sweden. Marie Hohwu-Christensen, Linda Ederberg, Therese Pearce Laanela, Antonio Spinelli and Sara Staino have also provided valuable support to the lead writer during the development of this topic area.
On December 10, 1983, Argentina returned to democracy after almost eight years of authoritarian rule, and since then has had free and fair elections. When Alfonsín transferred the presidential sash to Carlos Saúl Menem in 1989 it was the first time in Argentinean history that a fairly elected president from one party transferred the presidency to a fairly elected president of another party. In April 1994 elections were held to form a Constituent Assembly. Among the many amendments to the 1853 Constitution were provisions for presidential reelection, reduction of the president's term, abolition of the electoral college system, and the adoption of a second round of voting under certain circumstances. The presidential term was reduced from six to four years, and a second round of voting will be required if no candidate receives at least 45 per cent of the vote in the first round or if the winner has 40 per cent of the vote but a margin of victory over the second-place candidate of less than 10 percent. However, the reform did not touch some of the prominent features of Argentinean electoral system - strong federalism, proportional representation (PR), see List PR, closed-list ballots, see Open, Closed and Free Lists, and a threshold of three per cent of the electoral register in each district. Under the new constitution the president, who is chief of state and head of government, is directly elected for a four-year term by universal adult suffrage. The National Congress (Congreso de la nación) has two chambers. The Chamber of Deputies (Cámara de Diputados) has 257 members elected for a four-year term by proportional representation, with half of the seats renewed every two years. They are eligible for re-election. Prior to the reform, senators were indirectly elected for a nine-year term by the provincial legislatures. Now the members of the Senate are elected in 25 three-seat electoral districts (24 provinces and the city of Buenos Aires) for a six-year term, with one-third renewed every two years. Each of the 25 electoral districts chooses three senators directly. Two seats are awarded to the most-voted party and one to the second-largest party. Governors, Municipal Mayors, and local authorities are elected according to their provincial or municipal constitutions. Deputies are still elected by closed lists, which means that citizens are not allowed to change the order of candidates or to cross out names on the list. Moreover, most parties use closed primaries to select and order their lists. Rank and file and party elites therefore have an important impact on legislators' behavior. Each of the 25 electoral districts has its own electoral laws. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that eleven provinces practice the "double simultaneous vote," as in Uruguay. This law allows simultaneous intra- and inter-party competition. Political parties present several candidates who compete against one another but whose votes are added together to define which party pooled the most votes. The winner is the most-voted candidate in the most-voted party. Two partisan and institutional features contributed to the success of Argentinean democracy from democratization in 1983 to the 1994 constitutional reform. First, the two-party system ensured that the president would have a sizable bloc of legislators in congress. Second, these legislators practiced a moderate to high level of discipline, enabling presidents to pass legislation with relative ease. Nonetheless, four additional elements that triggered the reform of 1994 were undermining the performance of the democratic system. First, the federal government controlled the flow of resources from the central government to the provinces. Second, the capacity of the president to interfere with the judicial branch undermined the system of checks and balances. Third, the closed party lists for legislative elections produced a great deal of discomfort among citizens who claimed that legislators were more loyal to party leaders than to their constituents' problems. Finally, the abuse of presidential decrees of necessity and urgency weakened the congress' ability to check the executive. The reform of the 1853 constitution in August 1994 was the result of an extra-parliamentary agreement known as the "Pacto de Olivos" signed between Menem and former president Raúl Alfonsín. On the one hand, Menem's major objective was reelection, and it was achieved. On the other hand, Alfonsín objectives were more diffuse and difficult to understand. In essence he wanted to give a more pronounced parliamentarian style to Argentinean politics. This is why the "chief of cabinet" was created: an official who could be removed by the congress. Neverthless, the creation of this office did not reduce the high concentration of power in the presidency. In May 1995 President Menem secured re-election with 49.8 per cent of the vote, but a major transformation occurred in the party system: a third force, FREPASO, came in second place with 29.3 per cent of the vote, leaving the Radicals in a historically low third place with 17 per cent of the votes. In the legislative elections of October 1997 the opposition Radicals and FREPASO built a coalition called "Alianza" in many provinces to defeat the Peronist party. As a result of these elections, not only were the Peronists defeated in the largest provinces, but they also lost control of the province of Buenos Aires, where almost 40 per cent of all Argentinean citizens live. The leader of FREPASO, Graciela Fernández Mejide, a human rights activist, became the most serious challenger for the yet-unknown Peronist party candidate for the 1999 presidential race. The 1997 legislative elections raised an important question about Argentina's political future. The incumbent Peronist party lost almost 10 percent of its support and its majority in the lower chamber, thus it will have to strike deals with the opposition if it is to pass legislation. Australia is by far the most well established and best known example of Alternative Vote (AV), see Alternative Vote, in action. The system was introduced by the Nationalist government in Australia in 1918 to replace the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP), see First Past the Post (FPTP), system after it became clear that several aligned conservative candidates all standing in the same electorate could split their vote between them under first-past-the-post, thus handing victory to the less popular but more disciplined Labor Party forces. Its introduction was thus intimately related to the need to counter the possibilities of vote splitting and to encourage and reward collaboration or coalition arrangements between parties. This ability to aggregate aligned interests, rather than divide them, has long been a (largely unrecognised) feature of Australian electoral politics, but it has not been until relatively recently that the full potential of preference distribution as an instrument for influencing policy decisions has been made clear. There is an important difference between "full preferential" and "optional preferential" versions of AV. If the decision to mark preferences beyond the first choice is left to the voter, rather than being made compulsory, then the winning candidate must gain an absolute majority of votes in the count, but not necessarily a majority of those cast. A ballot where preferences have not or cannot be assigned to a continuing candidate are said to "exhaust". By contrast, in Australia it is a legislative requirement for all preferences to be marked to cast a valid ballot. A major consequence of this is that parties distribute "how to vote" cards to their supporters on voting day, giving them the party's preferred preference ordering for all candidates which can then be copied on to the ballot by the electors, large proportions of whom do just that. Commentators on Australian politics historically tended to regard the alternative vote as a variation of FPTP, in most cases giving results nearly identical to that system in terms of election outcomes and the structure of party systems. Douglas Rae, for example, in his seminal work on the consequences of electoral laws, stated baldly that "the Australian system behaves in all its particulars as if it were a single-member district plurality formula". A number of other commentators have argued that preferential voting makes little difference to Australian electoral results and have not been central in determining how governments are constituted. The common element in all these judgements is the fact that they were predominantly based on the Australian federal elections of the 1950s and 1960s where, with the notable exception of the role of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), preference distribution had little effect on electoral outcomes. Today preferences play a much more important role in deciding the outcome of Australian elections than in previous decades. It is not possible to assume that voters' primary choice would be replicated under a FPTP system, but if it were the results of the 1961, 1969, and 1990 elections would have been reversed. The decline of what was a very stable two party system, the rise of minor parties, and the increasing influence of independent candidates have all meant that the impact of preference voting has been higher during the 1990s than at any time in the past. Table 1 sets out the proportion of seats in which a distribution of preferences has been necessary to determine the result. The second column is the percentage of seats in which the eventual winner did not lead on first preferences, and thus produced a different outcome than would have been the case under FPTP. Table 1: Proportion of Seats Where Preferences Distributed and Outcomes Changed, 1963-1996
The most graphic example of preference votes directly affecting the choice of government occurred at the 1990 federal election, where the incumbent Australian Labor Party (ALP) was polling badly and looked to be heading for electoral defeat, and where voter support for left-of-centre parties such as the Australian Democrats and Greens reached its height. The ALP, under the influence of senior strategist Senator Graham Richardson, assiduously courted the green vote, both indirectly via interactions with the major environmental lobby groups and directly via media appeals to potential green voters, appealing directly for the second or third preferences of minor party supporters, offering policy concessions on key issues and arguing that the Labor Party was far closer to their core interests than the major alternative, the Liberal/National coalition. This strategy was markedly successful: with minor party support levels at an all time high of around 17 percent, the ALP was the beneficiary of around two-thirds of all preferences from Democrat and Green voters - a figure which probably made the difference between it winning and losing the election. This was thus a "win-win" situation for both groups: the ALP gained government with less than 40 percent of the first-preference vote, while the minor parties, which did not win lower house seats, nonetheless saw their preferred major party in government and committed to favourable policies in their areas of concern. To see how this type of preference swapping worked in practice, one needs only examine the victory of the ALP's Neville Newell in the seat of Richmond at the 1990 federal election. Newell scored only 27 percent of the first preference vote. The coalition candidate, and then leader of the National Party, Charles Blunt won over 41 percent of first preferences, and looked set for an easy victory. However, the count saw a combination of preferences from minor parties and independents, especially the anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott, flow through to Newell and enable him to win the seat with 50.5 percent of the full preference vote. Table 2: Example: Counting in the 1990's Federal Elections
The success of the ALP's strategy in 1990 was notable not least because historically the process of preference transfers has tended to benefit the non-Labor parties rather than the ALP. AV has had two main positive effects on the non-Labor parties: it facilitated the coalition arrangement between the Liberal and Country (now National) parties by enabling them both to stand candidates in some seats without the danger of vote splitting, and it enabled the preferences of one small party, the DLP, to flow predominantly against the ALP and hugely assist the coalition maintain government in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the ALP advocated a return to first-past-the-post (FPTP). But when the ALP regained office in 1983, its policy was to retain AV, but make the expression of preferences optional rather than compulsory. Optional Preferential AV Optional preferential AV is identical to full preferential AV except that voters are not required to express a preference for every candidate; if they wish, they can express a preference for only one. In the words of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, optional preferential voting is "perhaps the only electoral procedure in the world which allows electors to express their indifference to candidates. "A national survey in 1979 showed that the majority of Australian electors favoured the optional version, with 72 percent for optional and only 26 percent favouring compulsory preference marking. One clear advantage of the optional version is that the problems of spoilt ballots due to numbering errors associated with the full preferential system are largely removed. For this reason, optional preference marking is probably the only form of AV suited to conditions of low literacy or numeracy. Optional preferential AV is currently used for state elections in New South Wales, where it was introduced by the Wran Labor government in 1981, and in Queensland, where it was introduced in 1992 on the recommendation of the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission, who considered that full preferential voting forced voters to express preferences for candidates about whom they may know little or nothing. The rate of "plumping" for one candidate only, without marking subsequent preferences, has increased over time in both these cases. The decision to express preferences also appears to be closely related to the recommendations made by parties on their "how-to-vote" cards. In a survey conducted at two by-elections in 1992, fully 75 percent of electors followed party voting directions, resulting in plumping rates of 43 percent in one district (Gordon) and 63 percent in another (Kuring-gai). In the Kuring-gai case, less than 33 percent of electors filled in all squares on the ballot paper. In Queensland, plumping rates stood at 23 percent at the first OPV election in 1992, but were significantly higher in those cases where how-to-vote material from one of the major parties did not suggest preferences. There is also a clear partisan component to plumping rates, which reflects the long-standing coalition arrangements between the Liberal and National parties: in both NSW and Queensland. Labor voters are considerably more likely to "plump" than supporters of the coalition parties. The Effects of AV In Australia, interest in preferential voting tends to increase with its perceived partisan effect. The influence of preferences on electoral outcomes has clearly increased in recent decades and played a crucial role in the 1990 Labor victory in particular. The collapse of the Democrat vote in 1993 and the Coalition landslide at the 1996 federal election has meant that the effects of preference distribution have received less attention since then, although it has facilitated the election of increasing numbers of independent candidates (two in 1993, five in 1996), most of whom win their seats by overtaking major party candidates on preferences. Analyses of the effects of AV in Australia have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on its partisan impacts. Some commentators have seen the system as an instrument for maintaining the dominance of the two major parties, the ALP and the Liberal/National Coalition, and for restricting the role of minor parties in the lower house to one of influencing the policies of the major parties rather than gaining election themselves. Others claim that it can enhance the power and position of minor parties, especially if they have the potential to hold the balance of power between two major parties. There is widespread agreement that AV has facilitated coalition arrangements such as that between the Liberal and National parties, and that it works to the advantage of centre candidates and parties, encouraging moderate policy positions and a search for the "middle ground". The sometimes fiery and aggressive rhetoric of Australian politics has often distracted observers from recognising just how much co-operative behaviour there is between parties - via preference swapping deals, for example - and how close the major parties are on most substantive policy issues. There is little doubt that the AV electoral system provides a significant institutional encouragement for these centrist tendencies. Notes: [1] Source: Hughes, C.A. and Graham, B.D. (1968), A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics, 1890-1964, Australian National University Press, Canberra; Hughes, C.A. (1977), A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics, 1965-1974, Australian National University Press, Canberra; Hughes, C.A. (1986), A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics, 1975-1984, Australian National University Press, Sydney; Hughes, C.A. (1997), "Individual Electoral Districts" in C. Bean, S. Bennett, M. Simms and J. Warhurst (eds), The Politics of Retribution: the 1996 Australian Federal Election, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 166-167. [2] Source: Australian Electoral Commission, 1990 Election Statistics, AEC, Canberra. Bolivia's democratic experience has been characterized by the search for ways to solve the basic problem of Latin American presidential regimes, which have regularly slipped into stalemates between executives and legislatures led by minority governments. Most presidential systems in Latin America pose the fundamental problem that they are embedded in multi-party systems with proportional representation; this has been defined as the "difficult equation of presidentialism", and has been a permanent source of political conflicts which has adversely affected the chances of democratic consolidation. In Bolivia the problem has been partly solved through a basic institutional shift from "presidentialism" with minority governments to a "parliamentarized presidentialism" based on majority governments. This distinctive system of government is a "mestizo child", with both parliamentary and presidentialist features. It is presidentialist because the president serves for a fixed term and, even though chosen by Congress, does not depend on its continuing confidence. But it is "parliamentarised" because the president is chosen by the legislature on the basis of post-electoral bargaining, so ensuring majority legislative support and the compatibility of executive and legislative powers. The mainspring of the system is a dynamic common in parliamentary regimes: the politics of coalition. Like parties everywhere, Bolivian parties strive to maximize their respective vote shares, but they do not expect popular balloting to be the last stage of arbitration. Rather, they focus on post-electoral bargaining, and it is this that will determine who actually ends up in the congressional majority and with the executive power. The dominant pattern has been that of coordinated congressional and government coalitions, which has enhanced both the stability of the executive authority and the compatibility of executive and legislative powers. Since the resumption of "free and fair" elections in 1979, the Bolivian party system, which evolved from a highly fragmented one to a moderate multi-party system of six effective parties, has proved unable to produce a single predominant party, or even alternating majorities. Thus, Article 90 of the Constitution, the guiding principle for the electoral system, has defined the normal method for choosing the president. It makes no explicit provision for political pacts, but it is its requirement that presidents be chosen by Congress when no single candidate wins a majority of the popular vote that has created broad scope for bargaining and coalition-building among political parties. One key dimension of Bolivian "parliamentarised presidentialism" is the List PR electoral system. In fact, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the electoral system helped reinforce the patterns of inter-party competition and coalition building, but the system also had many shortcomings and was prone to fraud and manipulation. One of the crucial issues of democratic stability and legitimacy has been the establishment of coherent rules of the game. The Bolivian electoral reforms in 1986, 1991, and 1994 were characterized by short-term calculations and contingent reactions to political pressures, and not by research or deliberate political engineering. Moreover, party leaderships lacked experience and were unable to develop a coherent reform strategy. The result was that the elections in 1985, 1989, and 1993 were all held under different PR formulas. The D'Hondt formula, introduced in 1956, was replaced in 1986 by a so-called double quotient of participation and allocation of seats, which hindered the access of small parties to Congress. In 1989 a further change established the Sainte-Lagu formula for the presidential and parliamentary elections in 1993, which encouraged, in turn, the representation of very small parties. Nevertheless, the first wave of weighty changes had paradoxically less to do with the change of the prevailing PR system than with the establishment of an autonomous Electoral Court, the adoption of on-site vote validation of ballots at polling places, and the abolition of mechanisms that made it possible for regional electoral courts to distort results. However, the constitutional reform of August 1994 introduced a second wave of changes, and brought about the most major shift in the PR system so far by introducing, with some modifications, the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system of Germany and New Zealand. At first this revision led to the "contradictory" adoption of parallel First Past the Post (FPTP) and PR systems - basically, a mixed PR system in terms of voting criteria but not in terms of outcomes. Thus in August 1996, Congress had to pass a new law concerning the application of Article 60 of the Constitution to remove some obvious defects. It re-established the D'Hondt formula of PR and created a three-percent threshold for seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Henceforth, 68 deputies out of a constitutionally-fixed number of 130 will be chosen by FPTP voting in single-member districts, while the remainder will be chosen by party list voting according to proportional representation, in nine regional multi-member districts. Unlike Germany and Venezuela, there is no provision for additional seats. Seats are allocated directly to candidates winning in single-member districts, even if a party wins in only one district and obtains no PR seats. As in Germany, the overall distribution of seats, however, will be decided by applying the PR formula in a compensatory fashion, with a three-percent threshold for representation at the national level. If a party wins 10 seats through the overall List PR voting, and five seats in single-member districts, it is ultimately entitled to ten parliamentary seats. The most striking phenomenon in the Bolivian experience of electoral reform has been the use of democratic procedures and mechanisms. Reforms were discussed in multi-party commissions and reaching multi-party consensus was a sine qua non condition for congressional approval. No referendum was called because the Bolivian Constitution does not allow this mechanism of legitimization. From 1989 through 1992, inter-party debate unfolded around two key proposals, which were, in turn, rejected. The Acción Democrática Nacionalista and the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria advocated plurality for presidential elections, so that the Congress would only have confirmed the candidate winning the plurality of votes; meanwhile, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) proposed the French-style Two-Round (majority-runoff) System (TRS). Both proposals started from the premise that the congressional election of presidents through party bargaining did not respect the people's will, and decisions were taken behind closed doors; people voted, but did not choose the president. A consensus was finally reached based on the MNR's proposal to adopt an MMP system for the legislature and, furthermore, to reduce the number of presidential candidates able to obtain a plurality of votes at the parliamentary election from three to two, and to establish a five-year mandate for the president, the vice-president, and members of parliament. The real shift to MMP-style PR stemmed from discontent with vote manipulation in the 1989 general election, but the specific causes of the reforms were three-fold: the concern about a process of de-legitimization of party representation because closed party lists weakened the links between MPs and voters; the disillusionment of citizens with a lack of political responsiveness and accountability of governing parties; and finally a desire to reduce the growing alienation between parties and society by fostering constituency representation. In the presidential and parliamentary elections of June 1997, these electoral reforms did not have the effects expected, as the party system became more fragmented and polarized than the one elected in 1993. For example, in 1993 the largest party won 35.6 percent of the vote; in 1997, the largest party - a different one - won only 22.3 percent. Only seven parties won seats in 1997, compared to nine in 1993, but the delegations were much more equal in size, making for a significantly more fragmented congress. There were three reasons for this unexpected outcome. First, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of incumbent president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada lost nearly half of its share of the vote, depriving it of its temporary dominant position vis-a-vis its competitors. Second, in 1993 the MNR's two principal rivals, AND and MIR, were joined in an alliance called the Patriotic Accord; before 1997 this pact broke apart, and ADN and MIR ran separate presidential candidates and presented separate congressional lists. It is tempting to argue that there would have been fewer parties if these two events had not transpired; however, the MMP electoral system actually appears to have worsened the fragmentation. Due to the unusually high degree of regional concentration of party support, more parties (seven) won seats in the new single-member districts than in the multimember districts (five parties). Overall, the new parties were more personalist than before, but it is difficult to attribute this outcome to the mixed electoral system, as many of the personalist deputies were elected by PR. In 2002 Brazilians went to the polls to choose a new president, the members of the bicameral national legislature, governors for the component parts of the federation (26 states plus the Federal District of Brasília), and members of the unicameral state legislative assemblies. This was the fourth direct election since the end of the military regime in 1985 of the president and all other major legislative and executive posts. Presidential elections in Brazil take place under a two-round majority run-off system, with candidates competing for votes throughout the country’s 8,511,965 sq km area. Following a constitutional amendment approved in June 1997, presidents are now allowed to run for re-election once. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the incumbent at the time the amendment was approved, won re-election in 1998 in the first round with 53.1 per cent of the vote. However, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva polled 46 per cent in the first round in 2002 and was elected in the run-off round. The rules governing legislative elections have remained essentially unchanged since they were first established in 1946. The Senate is the chamber where the regions of Brazil are represented: each of the 27 component parts of the federation is represented by three senators who are elected by plurality for an eight-year term. Membership is renewed every four years by one-third and two-thirds, in alternation: when two senators are to be elected, voters have two votes under a Block Vote (BV) system. The Chamber of Deputies has 513 members who compete in 27 multi-member electoral districts, corresponding to the 26 states and Brasília. Their magnitude is determined by population, subject to the restriction that no state can have fewer than eight or more than 70 representatives. Elections take place under a system of open-list PR. Each voter has one vote to cast, which can be given to a political party or to an individual. Votes given to candidates from each party are pooled and added to the votes received by that party to give a total party vote, which is used to determine the number of seats to be allocated to each party. The candidates with the most votes on each party list win the seats allocated to that party. Seat allocation has been made under the D’Hondt Formula since 1950. Parties that do not gain a full quota in a district are, however, excluded from gaining a seat. Until 1998 the calculation of the quota was based on the total number of valid and blank votes, making the threshold for representation higher. Deliberate Malapportionment The rules for the Chamber of Deputies elections are probably the most controversial element of the Brazilian electoral system. The floor and the ceiling on the size of electoral districts mean that representation in the Chamber in terms of population is uneven across the states. This seriously violates the principle of ‘one person, one vote, one value’ (OPOVOV), as the number of votes necessary to elect one representative in São Paulo, which has over 25 million voters and 70 seats, is ten times higher than it is in Amapá, which has about 290,000 voters and eight seats. The resulting malapportionment benefits the less populous states, which tend to be poorer and more reliant on agriculture, and is disadvantageous to the larger states, which are richer and more industrialized. For this reason it has been blamed as one of the main mechanisms for reinforcing traditionalism in politics and thereby weakening political parties. However, this needs to be qualified. The only significant loser from malapportionment is the state of São Paulo, where the number of representatives would increase by about 40 if the size of the electoral districts reflected population size strictly. Some other states are marginally under-represented, the second-biggest loss occurring in Minas Gerais (about four representatives). The losses due to malapportionment are therefore concentrated. They also reflect the goals of the makers of the 1946 constitution, who were concerned with finding a formula that would prevent São Paulo (and to a lesser extent Minas Gerais) from dominating the federation as they had done during the period known as the First Republic (1899–1930). To the extent that malapportionment favours relatively poor states politically, it may help to promote a regional redistribution of wealth that is of no small consequence in a country with such high levels of regional inequality as Brazil. In addition, the frequent assumption that over-represented states are capable of systematically blocking legislation of national scope remains to be proved. It is not necessarily the case that the pattern of politics that characterizes the over-represented states is any different from the one in the under-represented ones. Clientelistic practices exist in all states, and elections are mass phenomena that generate a high degree of competition. If clientelism characterizes Brazilian politics, malapportionment of the Chamber of Deputies is unlikely to be a significant cause. Competition Between Parties—and Within Parties One of the main features of the system of open-list PR for the Chamber of Deputies is that it induces both inter- and intra-party competition. These elections are quite competitive. For example, in 2002 a total of 4,901 candidates stood for the 513 seats in the Chamber. In only nine of the 27 districts were there fewer than 100 candidates; the lowest number was 66 for eight seats in Tocantins. There were 793 candidates for 70 seats from São Paulo, 602 for 46 seats from Rio, and 554 for 53 seats from Minas Gerais. Parties compete with each other. Candidates, seeking to be elected for the seats which their parties gain, compete among themselves for the votes their parties obtain. This is said to lead to personalism, which is considered to be at the root of the weakness of Brazil’s political parties, to clientelistic ties between voters and their representatives, and to a national legislature that is primarily concerned with local rather than national, and clientelistic rather than programmatic, issues. Again, this view needs to be qualified. First, the view that it is personalism that mainly drives voters’ decisions in elections to the legislature in Brazil is far from well established. Although the proportion of preference votes (when the voter chooses a specific candidate, not simply the party) is far larger than the proportion of party votes, these figures say very little about how voters actually decide. If voters give greater relative weight to the individual than to the party, many voters who vote for a specific candidate would presumably also vote for that candidate even if he or she were to change parties. While no studies have tried to address this issue directly, scattered evidence indicates that representatives who switch parties in the middle of the legislative term are less likely to be re-elected, which suggests that they are not able to carry with them the votes that got them elected in the first place. Voters and Their Representatives Even less is known about the ties between voters and their representatives. A great deal of effort has been spent trying to uncover the pattern of clientelism and localized favours that must have served as the basis for a successful electoral campaign and legislative career. Successful candidates, it is said, are those who bring ‘pork’ to their ‘constituency’. In Brazil’s multi-member district system, however, the individual member is one of at least eight representing the district, which makes it difficult to establish the link between a particular member and a new spending project. Even though some candidates may and do try to carve de facto geographic constituencies for themselves, this is not the only, and may not even be the most effective, way of getting into the Chamber of Deputies. One study of the geographical distribution of the votes of successful candidates demonstrates that in 1994 and 1998 only about 17 per cent of representatives adopted such a strategy, that is, were able to obtain the largest share of votes in a cluster of geographically concentrated localities. The others adopted different strategies, such as sharing with competitors a relatively defined geographic area, dominating localities that were distant from each other, or obtaining relatively small shares of their total vote in geographically dispersed areas. Given the level of competition of elections and the lack of legally protected constituencies, it is unlikely that a representative will feel safe about his or her ‘bailiwick’. Indeed, rates of re-election are not very high: estimates put it at around 60 per cent of those who seek re-election. Thus, clientelism does not characterize, at least not exclusively, the ties between representatives and voters. Does the Electoral System Contribute to Party Fragmentation? There is much we still need to know about the way in which the system of open-list PR with large electoral districts, such as the one that exists in Brazil, operates. We do know, however, that elections are extremely competitive, that the advantage of incumbency is relatively weak, and that deputies’ relations with their electoral districts differ, so that there is no dominant strategy for a successful candidacy. The extent in which the electoral system induces clientelism and individualism inside the Chamber of Deputies is at least questionable. While it is beyond the scope of this overview to discuss the mechanisms which the president and the party leaders may use to shape the behaviour of individual deputies, deputies face other pressures in addition to the demands of localized and particularistic constituencies. These pressures are a counterbalance to increased party fragmentation. Party fragmentation in the Brazilian legislature has been held responsible for a number of the malaises the country has suffered from in the past 15 years. The high degree of fragmentation of the party system is usually attributed to a combination of factors, which include the electoral system and its individualistic tendencies, the characteristics of presidential systems, and the strong federalism adopted by the 1988 constitution. The degree of fragmentation in the Chamber of Deputies has, however, remained constant, at around eight effective parties, since the 1990 election. Some aspects of the electoral law tend to favour the larger parties and work against fragmentation. Examples include the adding of blank votes to the base on which the electoral quota is calculated (which makes the quota larger and hence more difficult to achieve), and the exclusion of all parties that do not obtain one quota in a district from winning a remainder seat. The links between presidentialism and party systems are not yet well enough understood. This leaves federalism as a possible cause of fragmentation of the party system. Some of the national parties in Brazil are de facto coalitions of regional parties. Smaller parties emerge out of these coalitions for purely local reasons, thus leading to a multiplication of parties at the national level. Whether this is the real or the only reason why new parties emerge, it remains unclear whether federalism is a cause of fragmentation or simply a reflection of the variety of regional interests that a country as large as Brazil must accommodate in order to operate democratically. When three of the remaining British colonies in North American federated in 1867 - the same year Britain extended its suffrage to 10 percent of the electorate - the new Dominion of Canada naturally adopted British institutions of electoral democracy. Canada's founding fathers, in contrast with their Australian counterparts two generations later, failed to ask if the British First Past the Post (FPTP) system was suited to a federal country dispersed over far-flung regions. Though some local and provincial experimentation with different systems of election took place after the Western provinces entered confederation earlier this century, it proved short-lived. Today, not only are the 308 Members of Parliament elected through FPTP, but so are all members of the ten provincial legislatures and three territories. Indeed, over the years, the federal electoral system moved even more closely to the pure FPTP plurality model as the few two-member districts that existed were gradually eliminated. That FPTP is appropriate for Canada has largely been taken for granted in part because Canadians' familiarity with electoral experiences outside its borders generally extends only to the US and UK. Yet, this does not fully explain how a country so much concerned with constitutional reform has not proven open to altering its electoral institutions - especially, as we shall see, given the anomalies they have produced. This is not to say that reform to a more proportional system has never been proposed; only that it has not made it to the political agenda. The Task Force on Canadian Unity (Pepin-Robarts Commission) in its 1979 Report included a recommendation for just over 20 percent of the seats in the House of Commons to be accorded to the parties proportional to their support and from those provinces in which there was underrepresentation. A slightly different proposal was submitted by the left-leaning New Democratic Party, the party most underrepresented under FPTP. Yet when the Trudeau government rejected the Pepin-Robarts report, electoral reform of the House of Commons was also shelved. The fact that the issue was off the political agenda became clear ten years later when Pierre Lortie, Chairman of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing set up by the Mulroney government in 1990, made it clear that changing the electoral system as such was outside the Commission's mandate. Discussion of electoral reform of federal legislative institutions concentrated on a proposal supported by the Western provinces to turn the appointed upper chamber, the Senate, into an elected one. But when Senate reform died with the rejection of a Constitutional amendment proposal in a 1992 referendum, this possible avenue to electoral regimes other than FPTP was closed. Ironically, the distorting effects of the FPTP electoral system on representation in the House of Commons - combined with Canadians' tendency to identify politically along regional lines - have probably never been greater than in the two federal elections that took place in the 1990s. In 1993, the voters repudiated the ruling Progressive Conservatives, but the electoral system almost decimated Canada's oldest party. Rather than electing the 46 members of 295 that a proportional system would have given them, the Tories managed to elect only two. In contrast, the two regionally-based parties, the Bloc Québécois and Reform, with 13.5 and 19 percent of the popular vote respectively, elected 54 and 52 MPs. In 1997, of the 301 seats in Parliament, the Liberals won 155, Reform 60, the Bloc Québécois 44, the NDP 21 and the Tories 20. Had the seats been distributed according to the parties' popular support, the Conservatives would have placed third with 58 seats, just behind Reform's 59, with the NDP up and the Bloc Québecois down to 33 each, leaving the Liberals with 118. Two thirds of the Liberals' seats came from Ontario, while Reform dominated the Western provinces, and the Bloc Québécois Québec - "quartering Canada" - as The Economist put it, producing what Canadian pundits called a "Rainbow Parliament." Had the seat been distributed according to the popular support for the parties, Liberals, Conservatives, and NDPers would have won seats in all provinces or regions; Reformers in all but Québec. And this, of course, is to leave out the fact that under PR the parties would have had an incentive to expend their efforts and resources beyond the regions where they do well: the Conservatives would have put far more effort into the West; the NDP and Reform would have worked much harder for support in Québec. Indeed, there is good reason to assume that the low turnout of just over two-thirds of registered voters is linked to the fact that in most ridings only one or two of the parties were real contenders, with supporters of the others effectively disenfranchised. Electoral reform toward a more proportional system was proposed by a number of columnists and editorialists in the wake of the two elections, and raised by the leaders of the Progressive Conservative Party, but only wistfully. And in November 1997, a private member's bill was submitted by a leading member of the NDP proposing Parliament endorse PR and appoint an all-party committee to conduct public consultation on the question and report back with a concrete proposal which would then be put to Canadians for their approval a national referendum. Yet, like other private members' bills, this one will die on the order paper. By and large, politicians view electoral reform as a non-starter in which they are unwilling to invest precious political capital. While this is understandable it is also regrettable. While the FPTP system has produced some majority governments, the tendency of the system to polarize rather than promote compromise has not necessarily served Canada well. As a thought experiment, one can imagine the outcome if the one serious recent effort to bring electoral reform to a provincial political agenda had succeeded. This was in Québec in the early 1980s when an investigatory commission advocated adoption of a regional-list system of PR, a recommendation endorsed by the Québec cabinet but one that due to lack of support from the opposition, and even in the governing party caucus - was never presented to the legislature. Had it been adopted, the balance of power today would be held by parties representing the twenty-five percent of Québeckers who want change but prefer a compromise short of the sovereignty favoured by the Parti Québécois. The only electoral reform efforts that made it to the political agenda were provisions adopted in certain Western provinces allowing for the recall of legislators. As far as electoral-system reform is concerned, the only real prospect might be for Canada to once again follow Britain's example. If Britain proves prepared seriously to consider changing the electoral system it bestowed upon Canada, Canadians might follow suit. The government of the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the full endorsement of the province’s Legislative Assembly, has initiated a historic, unique and precedent-setting process on electoral reform by establishing the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. This is the first time that a government has given a randomly selected group of citizens the opportunity and responsibility to independently review the electoral system and have its recommendation submitted to the public for approval at a referendum. The 1996 election for the British Columbia provincial legislature was conducted under an FPTP system. It resulted in the New Democratic Party (NDP), with 39 per cent of the popular vote, winning 39 seats in the Legislative Assembly—more than the 33 seats gained by the Liberal Party, which had won 42 per cent of the popular vote. The NDP, with less popular support than the Liberal Party, thus formed the government for the next five years. This result motivated the Liberal Party to make electoral reform a priority in its political campaign for the next election. At the 2001 election the Liberal Party promised to implement electoral reform through a Citizens’ Assembly: following an election victory which gave it 97 per cent of the seats in the legislature with 58 per cent of the popular vote, it clearly had the mandate to pursue these objectives. The typical approach used in Canada for the development of public policy issues where the government is seeking public review is to establish a commission or board of public inquiry, usually led by judges, experts or political leaders. After inviting submissions from the public, and following a period of wider consultation, the government makes a decision on the actions that will follow, taking into account the report produced by the commission. The blueprint of the Citizens’ Assembly and the framing of its terms of reference were prepared by Gordon Gibson, an author on democracy and former political party leader active in business and public affairs, and the new government in consultation with electoral reform experts. There were two unique and precedent-setting features for British Columbia: the people appointed would not be experts or specialists in the field of electoral reform, but would instead be randomly selected citizens from across the province; and, if a change were recommended, the question would be put directly to the citizens of the province at a referendum and would not be filtered through the government. The Citizens’ Assembly that resulted was a non-partisan and independent group of 160 men and women of all ages from across the province of British Columbia, chosen by random selection from the electoral register. The selection phase was designed to give a balanced list of men and women, reflective of the age distribution of the population of British Columbia as reported in the 2001 census, including two members from the aboriginal community, and representing the whole of the province. This was followed by an intense learning phase for the Assembly during which various electoral system experts produced learning materials (all also available to the general public) and held sessions with the members to inform them of the different systems available and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. At the conclusion of the learning phase a report, Preliminary Statement to the People of British Columbia, was sent to various groups in society, including members of the Legislative Assembly, libraries, municipal district offices, schools and universities, to inform the public of the preliminary conclusions of the Citizens’ Assembly. This report was followed by a phase of public hearings, during which about 3,000 people attended some 50 hearings held in all areas of the province. During the subsequent deliberation phase, plenary sessions and discussion groups were held at which the Assembly narrowed down the choice of electoral systems to two and, as a group, sketched out the details of each system. The first day of that phase featured a repeat of some of the best presentations heard during the public hearings—presentations that advocated a variety of electoral systems and features. The objectives of all these phases were to identify the elements essential to a British Columbian electoral system, review thoroughly all electoral system options in the light of these elements and, most importantly, to increase public awareness, inclusion and participation. The three essential elements arrived at in the end were voter choice, local representation and proportionality. Finally, in late October 2004, the Assembly presented its recommendation, in which it supported (by 146 in favour to seven against) changing the FPTP system to STV. The completion of the Citizens’ Assembly process then required the publication of the formal final report and the submission of the recommendation to referendum. This participatory model attracted significant interest from groups across Canada. The concept was recommended to other governments within Canada as a good way of involving citizens in issues that should be the domain of citizens, and a similar process to the one in British Columbia was initiated by the Ontario government. Other elections in Canada have also contributed to the growing support for a review of electoral processes. Federal majority governments have often been elected with significantly less than 50 per cent of the popular vote. As a result, a number of initiatives for a change of the electoral system at federal level, including Fair Vote Canada (FVC), have emerged, as have many individual lobbyists and advocates. There is reason to think that the experience with the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly will have significant impact on the future of the debate on electoral system change, and on the process of review and change in particular, on a federal level in Canada. Following pressure from both the NDP and the Conservative Party, the following amendment to the Speech from the Throne was unanimously accepted in October 2004: ‘an Order of Reference to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs instructing the committee to recommend a process that engages citizens and parliamentarians in an examination of our electoral system with a review of all options’. The future impact of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on the process of review and change of electoral systems on an international scale remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that its establishment and work have raised interest in and added to the empirical knowledge of participatory processes around the world. The Swiss parliament has two chambers, the National Council and the Council of States. In the National Council, the cantons are represented according to population. In the Council of States, each canton has two representatives, but there are also a few half-cantons with one representative each. For the National Council, there are uniform electoral rules for the country at large; for the Council of States, it is up to each canton to determine the electoral rules as long as they are democratic. When modern Switzerland was founded in 1848, the electoral rules for the National Council were winner-take-all in single member districts such as FPTP, see First Past the Post (FPTP). After World War I, the rules were changed to party list proportionality, see List PR. Currently, the National Council has 200 members that are elected in 26 electoral districts, corresponding to the 26 Swiss cantons and half-cantons. The largest canton, Zurich, elects 35 representatives, and the smallest cantons, only one. The parties submit candidate lists in each canton containing the names of their candidates for that canton's seats. The results are counted separately for each canton. Having 26 electoral districts instead of a single national district works against the smaller parties. If Switzerland were treated as a single electoral district, only one-half of one percent of the vote would be needed to win one of the 200 National Council seats. With elections taking place in 26 separate districts, however, a higher percentage of votes is needed to win. In Zurich, a party must win about three percent of the vote to win one of the canton's 35 seats. In the small cantons with only one seat, the party with the most votes wins the seat. Thus, if the number of seats per district is reduced to one, the proportionality system becomes a system of winner-take-all (FPTP). In contrast to countries like Germany, Switzerland has no minimal threshold of votes that a party must reach to receive any representation at all. Thus the principle of proportionality is applied in its pure form. The candidates on the party lists are ranked by the voters and not by the parties. The latter merely submit a list of names without rank, usually in alphabetical order. The number of names cannot be more than the number of seats to be filled from each respective canton. In ranking the individual candidates the voters have three options:
The only condition is that the overall number of names is not greater than the number of seats to be elected from the canton. A voter also can decide to make no changes at all on the list. In this case, no preference is given to any of the candidates, but the ballot counts for the number of seats attributed to the party. Voters may further complicate their list by writing in candidates from other parties (panachage). Thus, a Socialist voter may put a Free Democratic candidate on the list, either once or twice. With this write-in possibility, computation of the results becomes very complicated. In the above example, the Free Democratic write-in candidate counts for the Free Democratic party and detracts from the Socialist party strength; the voter has split their vote between the two parties. Voters can go even further and write in candidates from as many parties as they wish, but, again, the total number of names is not allowed to exceed the number of seats in the canton. The computation of the results proceeds in the following way: for each canton, the number of seats each party receives is determined on the basis of the total votes for candidates of this party. Second, candidates win these seats in order of their ranking. This ranking is based on the number of times a candidate's name appears on all the lists, including write-ins on other parties' lists. The freedom of choice that the Swiss system permits the voter weakens the party's control over its candidates, and thus party discipline is low. Although a Swiss party still controls whether or not a candidate gets listed, it cannot determine a candidate's chances of election through rank on the list. Once candidates are listed, they are on their own and must try to get a maximum number of voters to write them in twice, and a minimum to cross them out. Although this system seems to give great power to the electorate, it also increases the influence of interest groups. These groups inform their members about the candidates who favour their interests and for whom two votes should be cast, as well as about candidates who should be crossed out because they do not favour the group's interests. A teachers' group, for example, will inform its members which candidates are sympathetic to teachers' needs and which are not. Letters are sent out by a large number of groups ranging from business groups to trade unions. Candidates depend on political parties only for getting listed on the ballot; to be elected, they must obtain the support of a large number of different interest groups. The Swiss still vote for party lists, but their electoral system allows them to express preferences for and against particular candidates. The election also takes place in relatively small districts, where voters feel more at home than in a single national district. These factors together personalize the relations between voters and candidates. With this electoral system the Swiss currently have 14 parties in the National Council. Besides taking part in elections, Swiss voters have also a great say through the referendum, see Referendum. Indeed, of all the national referenda held in Western democracies since World War II, more than two-thirds were held in Switzerland. Voters have the right to call for a popular referendum on every bill decided by parliament. The only requirement is that 50,000 signatures be obtained, which is relatively easy in a country of 7 million inhabitants. The voters also have the final say on constitutional amendments. All constitutional amendments decided by parliament must be submitted to the voters. A minimum of 100,000 voters can also submit a constitutional amendment of their own, which will first be debated by parliament but finally decided in a popular referendum. This instrument of the popular constitutional initiative is widely used and can be applied to whatever question the people wish to decide. When the referendum was introduced in the 19th century, it was expected that its effect would be innovative. The founders of modern Switzerland anticipated that the voters would be open to change, but the opposite was true and the referendum has often had a delaying effect. The best example is the introduction of female suffrage only in 1971. Parliament was prepared much earlier than male voters to grant women the right to vote. This example is typical in the sense that it shows how it often takes a long time to convince the Swiss voters to accept a new idea. A detailed overview of the numerous direct democracy mechanisms used in Switzerland Direct democracy was introduced at federal level in Switzerland in 1848, although in some Swiss cantons forms of direct democracy have been used since the fourteenth century. A variety of direct democracy mechanisms are provided for at both federal and cantonal level, with Swiss voters given the chance to cast their votes in federal ballots on average four times a year. When it comes to direct democracy, Switzerland is usually cited as the country that is the closest to having a directly democratic system of government. Although Switzerland retains features of a representative democracy (e.g. it has an elected Parliament), various forms of direct democracy are used frequently at national, cantonal and local (commune) level. This case study focuses on the mechanisms and use of Switzerland's direct democracy. History and background Direct democracy has a long standing tradition in some of the Swiss cantons, going back as far as the fourteenth century. When Switzerland became a federal state in 1848, direct democracy instruments were introduced at the national level as well. The federal constitution introduced the principle of holding a mandatory referendum in order to change the constitution, as well as the popular initiative for a total revision of the constitution. Further rights of referendums were introduced in 1874, and the popular initiative for a partial revision of the constitution in 1891. Between 1848 and February 2004, 517 referendums were held, whilst between 1892 and May 2004, 244 initiatives were proposed. Forms of direct democracy - federal level Numerous different direct democracy mechanisms can be used at federal level in Switzerland. The mechanisms fall into two broad categories: referendums and initiatives - there is no provision for use of the recall in Switzerland. Each mechanism can be used to achieve different results, and has different design features. Referendums Unlike in other countries, in Switzerland it is not the government that decides if a referendum is held on an issue; the circumstances under which referendums are used are clearly prescribed within the country's constitution. The first type of direct democracy mechanism is the mandatory referendum, i.e., a referendum that the government must call in relation to certain important political issues. These are:
The first three kinds of mandatory referendums require a double majority to pass; that is, they must achieve a popular majority (a majority of the votes cast at the referendum) whilst at the same time achieving a majority vote in a majority of the cantons. The latter three, which take place as part of the initiative process, only need a popular majority. Optional referendums can be held in relation to new or amended federal acts and/or international treaties. The optional legislative referendum is held in relation to all federal laws and urgent federal laws which are due to be valid for more than a year. The optional referendum on international treaties is held in relation to international treaties that are of unlimited duration and may not be terminated, and international treaties that provide for membership of international organisations or contain legislative provisions that have to be implemented by enacting federal laws Optional referendums are called if 50,000 signatures are collected in support of a referendum within 100 days, or if eight cantons request a referendum, and pass with a popular majority. Until 2004, an optional referendum has never been successfully requested by a group of cantons; the first referendum initiated by the cantons was held on 16 May 2004. Initiatives Initiatives can be used to propose changes to the federal constitution. In addition, in 2003 Switzerland adopted a new form of initiative, to be used in relation to more general statutory provisions. Once an initiative is filed, a specified number of valid signatures (i.e. signatures of registered voters) are required in order to force the Federal Council and Parliament to consider the initiative and to hold a referendum on the initiative proposal. Amendments to the constitution can be proposed using two different initiative mechanisms. The popular initiative for a partial revision of the constitution provides voters with the opportunity to propose a draft revision to part of the federal constitution. 100,000 voters must sign an initiative in order for a referendum to be held on the proposal. The popular initiative for a total revision of the constitution also requires the support of 100,000 voters in an initiative. In both cases, the signatures must be collected within 18 months of the initiative being filed. From late 2006, the general popular initiative has been available to Swiss voters. This mechanism can be used to force a referendum on the adoption of a general proposal that will be incorporated on a constitutional and/or legislative level, providing that 100,000 signatures are collected in support of the initiative. Until 2006, initiatives in Switzerland were submitted as a general proposition or in the text that would be adopted if the initiative measure is successful. However, after the implementation of the general popular initiative, the popular initiative for a partial revision of the constitution will only be accepted in the form of a written text proposition (general propositions in relation to the constitution should be made using the general popular initiative). In response to initiatives which meet the required signature threshold, the Swiss Parliament advises the people on whether to adopt or reject the proposal. In addition, the government is also able to formulate a counter-proposal that is included on the ballot. The "double-yes" vote allows voters to approve both the original initiative and the government's response to it, and indicate which of the two measures they prefer. The measure which receives the most support is passed. Forms of direct democracy - cantonal level Use of direct democracy is even more extensive in Switzerland's 26 cantons (i.e., state authorities). However, use of direct democracy varies between the cantons; between 1970-2003 Zurich held 457, whilst Ticino held just 53 (the canton of Jura held just 45 referendums, but was only formally established (by referendum) in 1979). In addition to the referendum and initiative mechanisms used at federal level, the following mechanisms are also used in some or all of the Swiss cantons. Unlike at federal level, the legislative initiative has for some time provided voters in all cantons with the opportunity to propose additions to laws. In some cantons, the administrative initiative to launch a canton initiative can be used to demand that certain work is undertaken in public administration (e.g., building a new school or a new road). In addition, some cantons provide for the , an initiative to force the canton to table a motion to the Federal Assembly. All the Swiss cantons provide for legislative referendums on legislation passed by the cantonal parliament; however, in different cantons, these may be mandatory or optional. Administrative referendums may be held on major public projects that will incur high levels of public expenditure (and may lead to increases in taxes); these are sometime called fiscal referendums. Lastly, administrative referendums may be held on the non-fiscal issues of public administration listed above. Characteristics of the use of direct democracy in Switzerland Turnout Swiss voters are given the opportunity to vote in federal referendums on average four times a year. Typically, voters will also vote on a number of cantonal and local issues on the day of a federal ballot. Over the second part of the twentieth century, turnout at federal referendums fell from around 50-70% to an average of around 40%; this mirrored a similar decline in turnout at federal elections from 80% to around 45%. One suggestion is that this comparatively low turnout is due to the sheer number of votes that the Swiss are able to vote in; however, it is argued by many that a far higher proportion of the population is politically active than appears so from the figure of 40%, since it is not always the same 40-45% of voters who vote at each opportunity. Issues Given the numerous opportunities for using direct democracy in Switzerland, it is perhaps not surprising that the variety of issues on which referendums are held is extremely wide. Since 1990, referendums have been held on such diverse issues as:
Impact of direct democracy Undoubtedly, direct democracy has played a key role in shaping the modern Swiss political system. Yet it is important to question the actual impact of direct democracy on the legislative issues that, in other countries, are the responsibility of elected representatives. On one reading, it could be argued that the impact has been limited: in the first century of using the initiative (1891-2004), just 14 initiatives were passed in Switzerland. Yet to consider this statistic alone ignores the considerable, indirect impact of direct democracy. Although the majority of initiatives fail, the fact that there has been an initiative, and therefore a campaign, increases publicity surrounding the issue in question and public knowledge of it. This may well increase pressure on the government to introduce measures dealing with the issue, even if it is not required to by virtue of a successful referendum. An initiative might therefore be successful in achieving some of its proponents' aims, even if it is not successful in the sense of having passed. This trend explains why many initiatives are filed but subsequently withdrawn; because sometimes a government chooses to act before an initiative reaches the referendum stage. A further impact of the direct democracy mechanisms within Switzerland is that the government is forced to seek a wider consensus about the statutory (and constitutional) measures that it seeks to introduce than is the case in a purely representative system. In a representative system, the party of government may, in the absence of a large majority, have to develop cross-party consensus on an issue in order to ensure that the measure is approved. In the Swiss system, the possibility of an optional referendum forces the government to ensure consensus with groups outside of Parliament so as to prevent the possibility of such groups seeking to overturn the new legislation. Conversely, the significance of direct democracy in the Swiss system is often cited as the reason for the weakness of Swiss political parties and the relatively low significance attached to normal elections. This is because, given the prominence of direct democracy, political parties are not solely responsible for controlling the federal agenda. In addition, direct democracy often raises cross-cutting issues on which members of political parties might not be in agreement. Chile’s electoral system can only be understood in the context of the long period of authoritarian rule under General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90), whose aim was to establish a regime of protected, authoritarian democracy, of which the electoral system was one component. The dictatorship abolished PR, which had been in force prior to the military coup of 11 September 1973. PR was the response to the cleavages in Chile’s social structure since the 19th century and had produced a multiparty system. By the 1960s this had consolidated into six major parties—two on the left (the Socialists and the Communists), two in the centre (the Christian Democrats and the Radicals), and two on the right (the Liberals and the Conservatives, who merged in 1966 to form the National Party). The Binomial System: a Legacy of Authoritarianism In Chile’s bicameral constitutional arrangements, the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, consists of 120 members elected for a four-year term, two for each of the 60 electoral districts. The Senate has 38 elected members, two for each of the 19 districts, elected for an eight-year term: there are elections for half of the seats every four years, simultaneously with elections to the Chamber of Deputies. There are in addition nine non-elected members, the ‘institutional’ or ‘designated’ senators, named by the National Security Council (four), the Supreme Court (three) and the president (two), and one ex-officio life member, former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle. (The original 13 senatorial districts of the 1980 constitution were expanded to 19 in the 1989 constitutional reforms to reduce the power of the non-elected senators.) These arrangements were negotiated by Pinochet and his supporters as they fell from power during the transition to democracy. Parties, coalitions or independents present lists, normally containing a maximum of two candidates per district, in elections both for the Chamber of Deputies and for the Senate. Voters vote for the candidate of their choice. The first seat goes to whichever list receives the most votes in total: the representative elected is the individual candidate on that list who receives the highest vote. To take both seats, the most successful list must receive twice the number of votes of the second list. This system forces the parties to form electoral coalitions because the effective threshold is very high: 33.4 per cent of the total vote for the top list is required to win one seat. However, a list needs to receive 66.7 per cent of the total vote to be guaranteed both seats. There are two major electoral coalitions, which in 2001 won all the seats in the Chamber of Deputies except one. The centre–left Concertación por la Democracia is formed by four parties opposed to the Pinochet regime (the Socialists, the Democracy Party, the Christian Democrats and the Radicals) and ruled from the return to democracy in March 1990 up until March 2010. The right-wing opposition Alliance for Chile (the Independent Democrat Union, UDI, and National Renewal, RN) supported the Pinochet regime. In practice the Concertación list contains one candidate from each of two groupings within the coalition, that is, one from the Christian Democrats and another from the Socialists, the Democracy Party and the Radicals. There is no district in which there is competition between the Socialists and the Democracy Party. On the opposition list, the UDI and National Renewal normally present one candidate each in all districts. The result of this electoral system is that almost all districts return one representative from the Concertación and one from the Alliance for Chile. The system could create competition between the two candidates on a list for the one seat it will win, but in practice even this is severely limited by elite accommodation within both coalitions. This electoral system is unique because in practice it favours the largest minority, not the majority. It is thus not a majoritarian system. It is a system which uses a proportional mechanism, but the results it produces are not proportional, since it allows an electoral list to take half the seats with only 34 per cent of the votes. The only reason why this distortion has not occurred in practice is the limits to electoral competition. The electoral system was set up by the military regime following the plebiscite of 5 October 1988. The plebiscite had two goals: to approve the 1980 constitution and to elect General Pinochet as president for a further eight years. In this non-competitive election (there was no other candidate), Pinochet was defeated by the Concertación. This triggered the transition to democracy, with congressional and presidential elections in 1989, the presidential election being won by the opposition candidate Patricio Aylwin (Christian Democrat). The electoral system was designed to favour the two right-wing parties, which had backed Pinochet’s candidacy, in the face of a predictable electoral victory for their opponents. In the three presidential and four congressional elections held between 1990 and 2000, the Concertación has received most votes, but has never controlled the Senate because the majority of the institutional senators have supported the opposition. The Drawbacks of the Binomial System for the Parties and for Democracy Several objections to the electoral system have been voiced. First, it forces the parties into electoral coalitions because of the high vote threshold required to win a seat. Second, it has a negative impact on representation because it has kept the Communist Party out of Congress, despite its relevance up to 1973 and its 5–7 per cent share of the national vote in the new democracy. Third, since each coalition will normally win one seat, the real contest takes place among the member parties, rather than between rival alliances and parties. These disputes endanger stability in the coalitions; in the 2001 senatorial elections the UDI and the RN avoided them and named a single consensus candidate in seven of the nine districts, or ran only a weak competitor who would not challenge the leadership’s candidate. Fourth, the system hands enormous power to the party leaders, who virtually choose the winners when they make up the lists. With no real competition in many districts, the elections hold little interest for the voters, and even less so when there is no candidate of their own party to vote for. The deficiencies have led the government to propose that there should be electoral reforms and to suggest that, instead of the two-member districts, larger districts that would yield more proportional results would be more appropriate. This has made little headway, however, because the Concertación parties fear the resulting uncertainty, and the opposition defends the current system because of the advantage it gives them. Presidential Elections The 1980 constitution establishes a two-round system for presidential elections. An absolute majority is required for victory in the first round, with a run-off round (ballotage) if this does not occur. The institution of ballotage tends to strengthen coalition politics. The winners of the presidential elections in 1989 and 1993—Christian Democrats Patricio Aylwin and Eduardo Frei, respectively—were elected with absolute majorities, but in 1999 there was only a scant 30,000-vote difference between Ricardo Lagos and his right-wing opponent, Joaquín Lavín. Lagos won with 50.27 per cent of the vote in the second round. (Under the previous (1925) constitution, when no candidate won an absolute majority, Congress decided the presidency, as occurred in 1946, 1958 and 1970. In each case it elected the candidate with the highest vote.) Registration and Voting: Voluntary or Compulsory? A further problem perceived in the current electoral system is that registration is voluntary but voting is compulsory. New electoral registers were opened in February 1987, when the military regime was preparing the October 1988 plebiscite, the old registers having been burned by the military in 1973. The democratic opposition mobilized strongly to get voters registered; its strategy was to defeat Pinochet at the polls in order to achieve democracy, and it succeeded in getting 92 per cent of eligible voters to register. Since then, however, the number of registered voters has not increased in line with the voting age population, as young people now show little interest in participating in elections. In the 2001 congressional elections 80 per cent of 10 million potential voters were registered; in the 2004 municipal elections the figure was 77 per cent. Low registration among young voters led the government to propose automatic registration and voluntary voting. The Concertación parties support automatic registration, but there is no consensus on voluntary voting. They fear that overall participation will fall and that the financial costs of campaigning to mobilize voters will rise and rise, thus favouring the right-wing parties. The opposition, particularly the UDI, rejects automatic registration and supports voluntary voting. Supporters of the binomial system claim that it has helped governability because there are two big coalitions, one in government and one in opposition. However, this view is mistaken: the Concertación as a coalition was created before the binomial system was introduced, as an alliance to work against authoritarian rule and promote a return to democracy by politicians who had learned from their past conflicts (which led to the crisis and breakdown of democracy in 1973) and had agreed on a strategy of elite cooperation within a political system somewhat comparable to a consociational democracy. The country is governable despite the binomial system, not because of it. The system cannot last indefinitely because it damages the political parties and poses limitations to democracy, but it will be difficult to abolish because change would create uncertainty about the impact on party support. It would also require a constitutional amendment, because the binomial character of the Senate is in the constitution. There is consensus in Congress between the Concertación and the Alliance for Chile on eliminating the non-elected senators and former presidents as life members. With the ‘household contract responsibility system’ introduced in the Chinese countryside in the late 1970s, farmers began to produce for their families. As production was decentralized, the collective-oriented organization of the People’s Communes became outdated. The earliest villagers’ committees (VCs) emerged in the Guangxi Autonomous Region in 1980–1. Formed without the knowledge of the local authorities, these organizations were created by village elders, former cadres and community-minded villagers. The intention was to address a decline in social order and a broader political crisis as production brigades and teams stopped functioning at the grass-roots level. Within months, local officials had reported this development to the central government. The National People’s Congress (NPC) leaders encouraged experiments with this new form of organization. In 1982, VCs were written into the constitution as elected mass organizations of self-government (article 111). In contrast to the relationship between the commune and production brigade or production team, the newly restored township—the lowest level of government—does not lead the VC but only exercises guidance over it. Another difference is the introduction of direct election by all eligible voters. In 1987, the Provisional Organic Law of Villagers’ Committees was passed, setting out general principles for direct elections to VCs and defining the tasks and responsibilities of the VCs. Implementation of the law, including the enactment of detailed regulations, was left to the provincial and lower-level authorities. The quality of elections and overall implementation varied considerably, and after ten years perhaps only 25 per cent of the more than 658,000 villages (for the end of 2002) in China had experienced direct elections in full accordance with the law. In 1998, the NPC made the Organic Law permanent. The law has clarified and improved some aspects of the prescribed election procedures and strengthened the rules on transparency and popular control of VCs. The permanent law is seen by many as a political and legal consolidation of the village election process, but its full implementation remains a challenge—perhaps even more so after the introduction of more demanding standards, for instance, in relation to secret polling booths and the direct nomination of candidates. The quality of elections across the country still varies considerably. The VC members are elected for three years, with no limit on the number of terms for which a person can be re-elected. The VCs usually consist of between three and seven members, one of whom is chair and one or two vice-chairs. Although there is variation from province to province, VCs generally oversee all the administrative matters of a village, including budget management, public utilities, dispute resolution, public safety, social order and security, health issues and local business management. A large village can consist of more than 10,000 people, while small ones might only have several hundred. The ‘average village’ has 1,000–2,000 inhabitants. VCs report to the Village Assembly or the Village Representative Assembly. As the former meet only once or twice a year, the latter, composed of 25–50 people from the village and selected by Villagers’ Small Groups, play a greater role in decision making and in the supervision of the VCs. A Village Election Committee administers village elections. Village elections have now been held in all 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. By 2003, the provinces of Fujian and Liaoning, two front-runners in this regard, had completed eight and seven elections, respectively, and 19 provinces had held between four and six elections. At least one province held its first village elections as late as 2000. There is no single election day for all VC elections across the country. During a province’s designated election year, the counties and townships within the province together decide the election days for the villages within their jurisdictions. Each election adheres to the same basic framework. The first step in the process is the registration of voters, which is handled by the Village Election Committee. A list of registered voters must be prepared and publicly displayed 20 days prior to the election. Voters are allowed to challenge the registration lists. Except for those who have been deprived of political rights, all those aged 18 or above enjoy the right to vote and to be elected without regard to ethnicity, race, sex, profession, family background, religious belief, level of education, property or period of residence in the community. One important challenge is the large number of voters whose residence registrations are in their ‘home village’, but who live and work a long distance away, often in a major urban area. It is difficult or impossible for most such voters to get back to their village on election day. At the same time, they cannot attend the elections in the cities in which they work and reside. Therefore they cannot actually exercise their right to vote. Following voter registration, candidates are nominated directly by villagers. In most provinces, the requirement is to have only one more candidate than there are seats to be filled as chair, deputy chair, and ordinary members. In recent years, nominations in some provinces have been organized through villagers attending either a meeting of the Village Assembly or a meeting of the Villagers’ Small Group, while the latest development in other provinces is to have no pre-election nomination. In these areas, voters receive either a blank piece of paper or a blank ballot paper with only the different positions indicated above the relevant columns. If the election fails to produce a new committee or to fill all positions it de facto becomes a first-round election, and a run-off election follows. The final election must be direct. The use of secret ballots and polling booths (or rooms) is mandatory in most provinces. There are three voting styles: (a) mass voting, where all voters go to a central voting place in the morning, vote, and remain there until the end of the count; (b) individual voting throughout the course of the day of the election; and (c) proxy or absentee voting, or ‘roving boxes’. Most of the provinces use mass voting. The ballot papers used contain names of candidates listed under the post for which they are standing; and the voting is done by the voter marking the names of the candidates he or she wishes to elect. The voter can mark as many candidates as there are posts (one chair, one or two vice-chairs, and a number of committee members) in the village. For an election to be considered valid an absolute majority of eligible voters must cast their ballots and winning candidates are required to get 50 per cent of the vote plus one. When no candidate receives a majority, a run-off election is held within three days. In run-off elections, candidates are only required to receive 33 per cent of all votes cast. Winners take up their positions immediately. Village elections are important in that the election law mandates the basic norms of a democratic process—secret ballot, direct election and multiple candidates (even though their numbers are very restricted). Other elections in China have yet to implement these norms. The progress made in relation to VC elections has raised expectations as to whether and when direct elections will work their way up from the village to the township, county, and even higher levels of government. Each round of VC elections also strengthens local capacity to administer electoral processes. An assessment of the significance of China’s village elections has much to do with the question whether such ‘limited democracy’ can lead to genuine democracy. There are different ways of assessing how democratic elections are. The three universal criteria of free, fair and meaningful elections are appropriate terms of reference. China does not meet any recognized standards of free and fair elections in choosing its national parliament and local councils, and in many cases elected village leaders do not exercise as much authority as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretaries do. However, just because the village elections are not fully free or fair, and some VCs do not command complete authority, it cannot be concluded that they are completely unfree, unfair, or meaningless. Elections should not be evaluated against some absolute standard but rather viewed as positioned on a democratic continuum. The VC elections have produced a ripple effect as village CCP branch elections in some cases have invited ordinary villagers to cast a vote of confidence, and some experiments with elections of township government leaders have taken place. China’s democratization now appears to require that the top leadership’s political decisions find an echo at the grass roots. After two decades of continuously improved direct elections at the village level, elections at higher levels of government appear technically feasible; the question is whether and how there will be further change in the direction of democratization. After the use of the absolute-majority Two Round System (TRS) in the German Empire, and the use of a pure proportional representation system in the Weimar Republic, see, a new electoral system was established by the Parliamentary Council in 1949. The system was created by the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany - the West German Constitution. It was thus a result of inter-party bargaining between democratic forces in West Germany. Like the Basic Law, it was originally considered to be provisional, but has remained essentially unchanged since 1949. The German electoral system is classified as a personalised proportional system ("Personalisierte Verhältniswahl") or, as it is known in New Zealand as a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system. Its essence is the way in which it combines a personal vote in single-member districts with the principle of proportional representation. Currently, the German parliament (Bundestag) has 622 seats, not including possible surplus seats (see below). Each voter has two votes. The first vote (Erststimme) is a personal vote, given to a particular (party) candidate in one of the 299 single-member constituencies. The second vote (Zweitstimme) is a party vote, given to a party list at the federal state level (Landesliste). Candidates are allowed to compete in single-member districts as well as simultaneously for the party list. The candidates who achieve a plurality in the single-member districts are elected (Direktmandate). However, the second vote determines how many representatives will be sent from each party to the Bundestag. On the national level, all the second votes (Zweitstimmen) for the parties are totalled. Only parties obtaining more than five percent of the votes at the national level or, alternatively, having three members elected directly in the single-member constituencies, are considered in the national allocation of list PR seats. The number of representatives from each party that has passed the legal threshold is calculated according to the Hare formula. Seats are then allocated within the 16 federal states (Länder). The number of seats won directly by a party in the single-member districts of a particular federal state are then subtracted from the total number of seats allocated to that party's list. The remaining seats are assigned to the closed party list. Should a party win more Direktmandate seats in a particular federal state than the number of seats allocated to it by the second votes, these surplus seats (Überhangmandate) are kept by that party. In such a case, the total number of seats in the Bundestag temporarily increases. The German system is not, as sometimes supposed, a mixed system, but a PR system. It differs from pure proportional representation only in that the five percent threshold at national level excludes very small parties from parliamentary representation, and thanks to proportional representation a relatively wide range of social and political forces are represented in Parliament. Furthermore, the electoral system is, to some extent, open to social and political changes. In spite of the threshold, new political parties supported by a substantial part of the electorate have access to Parliament. Besides the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Free Democratic Party (FDP), which have been in the Bundestag since 1949, a new Green Party (GRÜNE) gained seats in 1983 and 1987. After falling below the threshold in 1990, the Greens, in a coalition with Alliance '90, were able to return to Parliament in 1994. After German unification, even small East German parties gained parliamentary seats. In the all-German elections of 1990, the East German Alliance '90/Greens and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) cleared the five percent threshold which was applied, separately in the territory of former East Germany and former West Germany, for that one election. Four years later, the PDS took advantage of the "alternative clause" by winning four of the required three Direktmandate seats. The personal vote for a candidate in single-member constituencies aims to ensure a close relationship between voters and their representatives. In practice, however, the advantage of these districts should not be overestimated. In Germany, elections in the single-member districts are mainly based on party preferences and not on the personality of the candidates. The initial hopes that MMP would guarantee a close voter-representative relationship have consequently only partly materialized, despite efforts by representatives to establish strong links with their constituencies. Nevertheless, this constituency element within a PR system does at least help to bridge the gap between voters and representatives which is normally widened by ordinary closed-list PR systems. Furthermore, the two-vote system enables voters to split their votes strategically between existing or possible coalition partners. In fact, vote splitting is common among the supporters of smaller parties. Since candidates of smaller parties have little chance of winning a single-member district, their supporters frequently give their first vote to a constituency candidate from the larger coalition party. Similarly, supporters of bigger parties may "lend" their second vote to a minor party within the coalition, in order to ensure that it will pass the legal threshold. Thus, vote splitting is strategically used by voters to support the coalition partner of "their" party or, at least, to indicate their coalition preferences. By producing highly proportional outcomes, the electoral system makes manufactured majorities, where one party wins an absolute majority of the parliamentary seats on a minority of the popular votes, very unlikely. In fact, over the last five decades in Germany, manufactured majorities have never occurred. Majority governments have usually been coalition governments, and any change of government has resulted from changes in the configuration of the coalition. German coalition governments are usually stable and regarded as legitimate by the electorate, and, because of a coalition's built-in incentives to co-operate, many Germans prefer a coalition government to a single-party government. The main checking function is fulfilled by an opposition, which is fairly represented. It is important to note that the relationship between government and opposition in German politics is more consensual and co-operative than conflictual or hostile. This, however, is a result of history and political culture rather than of the electoral system per se. To date, the MMP system has not shown any great drawbacks in Germany. It has lasted long enough to have a high level of institutionalized legitimacy; the basic principles of single-member districts and list PR representation have been left unaltered since 1949. However, some minor changes of the electoral system have taken place. Chief among these was the switch to two separate votes in 1953, before then the voter had only a single vote to apply to both district and national PR allocation. Nevertheless, several attempts to reform the electoral system substantially have been made since 1949, and most intensely in the 1960s, when opponents of the PR system demanded the introduction of a FPTP system. This was partly due to political manoeuverings to enhance the position of the stronger parties, and partly based on a theoretical school of thought which favoured the British model; but all attempts were unsuccessful. More recently, the electoral system has been criticized for producing too many surplus seats without compensating the disadvantaged parties in Parliament. Aware of the constitutional and methodological inconsistencies of the previous electoral rule, Congress approved a reform of the Electoral Law in March of 2000 to introduce "vote pooling". In this modified version, each party pools votes obtained by individual candidates and the total sum of votes obtained will be used to distribute seats according to a D'Hondt formula of proportional representation. Party leaders in turn distribute allocated seats to the most voted candidates within each party. The revised version of the electoral formula will be first applied at the national level in the 2002 general elections. Finally, the election of National deputies was also eliminated for the 2002 election, leaving Congress with provincial representations only. Despite extreme and frequent experimentation with its electoral framework, Ecuador has not been able to promote an effective combination of representative politicians with effective government. Over time, there has been a permanent government effort to manipulate the electoral system to reduce party system fragmentation and encourage the formation of pre electoral alliances that could eventually lend support to government-led initiatives in the legislature. The adoption of a two round system of presidential election and its modified threshold or the overrepresenting of larger parties through a modified PR formula were meant to give both legitimacy as well as ample party support for presidential candidates when taking office. Opposed to the logic of "majority building", different social and ethnic groups, as well as entrepreneurial politicians claimed that the electoral system privileged party interests over citizens' demands and sought to relax electoral restrictions to political participation and promoted the candidacies of "independent" politicians. In turn, the proliferation of independent candidates in the mid and late 90's made coalition formation in Congress unpredictable. The constitutional battle over the requisites to maintain party registry well illustrates the tension between governability and representation. The 1979 Law of Political Parties established that parties that did not obtain 5% of effective votes in two consecutive elections would lose their electoral registry. This prohibition was declared unconstitutional in 1983, reinstated in 1994 as 4%, abolished in 1996 and reinstated in 1998 as 5% again. While the advocates of governability argued that smaller parties contributed to legislative fragmentation and unpredictable coalition building in Congress, defenders of representation argued that Ecuadorian minorities deserved to be represented by those parties. In the meantime, small and usually personalistic parties were able to survive for several years. Ecuador has not found a power sharing formula to promote democratic governance. One open issue for debate is the adoption of a mixed-member system for the legislature. In principle, this could reconcile the need for direct provincial representation of the heterogeneous Ecuadorian population with the election of nationally oriented politicians. Another issue is the introduction of some parliamentary features like cabinet sharing would make potential coalition partners (parties) more accountable to their electorate and responsible to the government. In any case, an effective electoral system would need to mature over time (without being subject to sudden changes) and would have to take into consideration other political institutions and historical traditions of the country. In June 2004 the citizens of 25 European countries went to the polls to elect their representatives to the European Parliament. Many were doing so for the first time, while others were in countries with experience of up to five previous elections to the Parliament. In 2004, all were conducting their elections under a proportional electoral system. The first piece of legislation covering elections to the European Parliament came in 1976, when the Act Concerning the Election of the Representatives of the Assembly by Direct Universal Suffrage was agreed. As the name implies, this act determined the principles for direct elections of the representatives from each member state. In the early days of the EU, the members of the European Parliament were nominated by the legislature in each member state, with no direct input from the electorate. The passing of the 1976 act meant that from then on the members would be elected by direct universal suffrage in each member state; and in 1979 the first European Parliament elections were held in the then nine member states—Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom—resulting in a total of 410 elected members. The act of 1976 determined many things regarding the elections, such as the length of the parliamentary term and the eligibility of candidates, but did not in itself determine the actual electoral system to be used in these elections. It did, however, give the European Parliament the task of drawing up a proposal for a uniform electoral procedure. Until such a procedure came into force, the act left the electoral procedures to the national provisions of the member states. As most member states at the time were using a PR system of one form or another to elect their legislatures, either alone or as one component of the electoral system, the choice of which electoral system to use for the European Parliament was a simple one. Belgium, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands were already familiar with the List PR system in one form or another, and all their representatives were therefore elected under a List PR system (except for the one representative of Greenland, included within the representation of Denmark, who was elected by FPTP until Greenland left the European Community in 1985). The Republic of Ireland chose to elect its representatives using its preferential STV system. There were only two exceptions: the UK with its FPTP electoral system and France with its Two-Round system for national elections were both unfamiliar with the PR system. The UK simply copied the electoral system used for the elections to the House of Commons and applied it to the European Parliament elections as well. This system suited the two largest parties, Labour and the Conservatives, very well, and made it difficult for any third party to enter the arena. Resistance against a representative holding a dual mandate also contributed to the adoption of FPTP for European Parliament elections in the UK. If serving in both the European Parliament and the British Parliament simultaneously were to be prohibited, as some British politicians wanted, and some form of PR were also to be adopted, party lists would be likely to be made up of unknown candidates not elected to any other national or local body, which would carry the risk of undermining the perceived importance of the elections. A candidate-centred, single-member district system, where candidates would be closer to their electorate, was thought to be a better solution. None of this thinking applied to Northern Ireland. Concern to ensure the representation of majority and minority communities, combined with the fact that the parties of England, Scotland and Wales do not normally contest elections there, resulted in the use of STV for Northern Ireland’s three seats. An attempt was made to challenge in the courts the use of FPTP for European Parliament elections in England, Scotland and Wales on the basis of the requirement contained in the act for a uniform electoral procedure to be proposed, but this was unsuccessful. The system used in England, Scotland and Wales only changed in 1999 when the European Parliamentary Elections Act was passed, as the UK anticipated the changes that would be forced on it as the process which led to the 2002 Council decision (see below) got under way. From 1999 onwards, the UK joined the other member states in the use of a PR system, choosing List PR with closed lists and regional electoral districts. In France—despite its using TRS for the elections to the national legislature—a closed List PR system with one national district was adopted as early as 1977, before the first European Parliament elections in 1979. The reasons for this were many. One of the main advantages of a plurality/majority system—the formation of stable majority governments—was clearly not relevant for these elections, and the proportional representation of all political parties was seen as a much more important criterion for the design of the electoral system. The nationwide district in combination with a 5 per cent threshold was thought of as providing a balance between a high level of proportionality on the one hand, and the desire to exclude parties with little support on the other. The ability to fill vacant seats between elections with the next person on the list, thus eliminating the need to hold by-elections, was another advantage that led to the adoption of the List PR system. After five elections, the wish to strengthen the relationship between voters and representatives, and the desire for greater geographical representation (a disproportionate number of those elected had been residents of Paris), led to the nationwide district being abandoned before the election in 2004. It was replaced by eight multi-member districts for the election of France’s 78 representatives to the European Parliament. The next piece of important legislation on the European Parliament elections was concluded in 2002 with the Council Decision 8964/02 amending the Act Concerning the Election of the Representatives of the Assembly by Direct Universal Suffrage—an amendment to the 1976 act. Twenty-six years after the establishment of provisions for direct elections, this decision specified a common electoral system family for European Parliament elections for all member states. Article 1 reads: ‘In each Member State, members of the European Parliament shall be elected on the basis of proportional representation, using the list system or the single transferable vote.’ For the 2004 elections, all 25 member states thus used a PR electoral system. While all these systems belong to the same family, they also differ in some respects. Twenty-three countries (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK) use List PR, while Malta and the Republic of Ireland use the Single Transferable Vote. This difference may be expected, since the List PR system makes up at least a part of the electoral system for the national legislatures of 21 of the 23 countries (France and the UK being the exceptions), while the Republic of Ireland and Malta both use STV for their national elections. In the 23 countries using List PR, some used closed lists, while others have chosen open lists—a choice which in most cases mirrors that made for national elections, although Greece is one exception. Equally, some member states, especially the smaller ones, elect their members from one national district, while others have set up a number of districts at regional level. The threshold for gaining representation in the different member states also varies. The 2002 decision allows for the individual countries to determine the threshold, but sets the ceiling for any formal threshold at 5 per cent. Some countries, for example Cyprus, Hungary and Sweden, use formal thresholds, again for the most part mirroring their use at national level (although Belgium, which uses a formal threshold for national elections, does not do so for European Parliament elections). Not only the formal thresholds, but also the actual level of support needed to gain representation—natural thresholds—vary significantly between member states. The reason for the variations in thresholds is found in the combination of the number of representatives to be elected from each country and the level at which the electoral districts are defined (more specifically, the number of representatives to be elected from each district). Italy, with one nationwide district and 78 representatives to elect, has a very low effective threshold of under 1 per cent, while the four electoral districts and 13 representatives of the Republic of Ireland mean that a successful candidate under STV will need to win a much higher proportion of the vote. In 2004, the winning candidates in Ireland received between 12.9 and 25.9 per cent of the first-preference votes in their district. While a common electoral system family is now specified for European Parliament elections, there is little sign of any momentum for further integration. Although party groups are formed within the European Parliament, there is no sign that national parties are willing to relinquish any significant leading role to pan-European parties. There is thus every likelihood that decisions about electoral system details will remain in the hands of national politicians, influenced by their own interests and their existing national traditions. Debate seems more likely to centre on the low voter turnout in European Parliament elections, which remains a major concern of the EU member states. Despite the use of a PR system in all countries—an electoral system family which is usually linked to a higher voter turnout than other systems—turnout is still strikingly low. At the 2004 elections, the 15 countries that were members before enlargement in 2004 had an average turnout of 52.9 per cent, and the 10 new member states an even lower figure of 40.2 per cent. It appears that as long as the electorate sees European Parliament elections as being secondary, with little clarity as to what changes result when representation changes at elections, interest and turnout will remain low. The electoral systems used are not seen as a controversial element, and there is very little serious debate about their amendment. It is therefore likely that the electoral systems will remain fairly constant in the near future. Historical Background The electoral system in Spain has a long history. It began early in the 19th century, in extraordinary circumstances arising from the invasion of the country by the Napoleonic army. The power vacuum created opened the way for a call for a national assembly (las Cortes) by a Central Council (Junta) - the leaders of the resistance - in the Andalusian city-port of Cadiz. The deputies, who came from all regions of Metropolitan Spain and abroad, were elected by popular vote (according to the "Instructions for the election of deputies" of 1810, which was attached to the notice of meeting and was the embryo of electoral law). This assembly, at its first meeting, declared itself a sovereign and constitutive body and became the first modern parliament in Spanish history. It ended with the enactment of the Constitution of 1812. The text of the Constitution clearly drew its inspiration from liberal thinking (the term "liberal", applied to politics, has its origin internationally in the name that was given to the group of progressive deputies in the Cadiz parliament) and for Spanish people has always been the symbol of political freedom. The drafting of this first Constitution in the Spanish language, which incorporated many ideas from the French revolution and models from the Constitution of the United States, also found inspiration in the old democratic traditions of the Spanish municipalities. In the constitutional text of 1812, the latter regained their former status of elective institutions (the municipalities in the historical and political history of Spain have always played a key role in the defence of freedom). The "Cortes de Cadiz" (the Cadiz Parliament) have been regarded as the starting-point for democratic ideas and the right to vote, not only in Spain but also in the whole of the Hispanic world. This was because, together with the deputies from Metropolitan Spain, those from the then Spanish provinces of America (one of the three groups of representatives who met in Cadiz called itself the party of the "Americans"), participated in drafting the text. Some of the latter would later be leaders of movements for independence in Latin America. The Constitution of Cadiz would thus inspire not only subsequent Spanish constitutions, but would also serve as the basis for the first constitutions of the new independent Latin American states. (We would say in passing that in almost all Latin American countries the process of independence began in the struggles for the democratization of power in the town councils.) It is interesting that, for this reason, many of the first electoral laws in the 19th century in Spanish-speaking countries on both sides of the Atlantic had as their common point of reference the same constitutional text. Following from this essential introduction, the electoral laws that were to govern the right to vote began formally in Spain from 1837, with universal suffrage being established in 1869, and were consolidated by the law of 1907. However, Spain's stormy history throughout the 19th century and part of the 20th century meant resounding retreats and advances in the process towards the exercise of democratic liberties and hence towards the functioning of the electoral system. The Second Republic, proclaimed in 1931 after the results of the municipal elections that forced the king to abdicate, also introduced women's suffrage. Spanish women, who voted from the General Elections of 1931 onwards, did so long before this happened in other countries of Western Europe (before France for example). The triumph of the Popular Front in the elections of 1936, the results of which were doubted by none, within a few months unleashed an anti-democratic reaction and the outbreak of the civil war from 1936-39. It ended in victory for General Franco made possible by the internecine conflicts of the republican forces and by the strong external military support from fascist regimes. It is a known fact that the establishment of a dictatorship imposed for nearly 40 years an interruption in the exercise of democratic rights. Nevertheless, these nearly four decades were not sufficient, as the Spanish political transition later came to prove, to wipe either the past or the accumulated experience of a century of electoral legislation, from historic memory: between 1810 and 1936 twelve electoral laws had been passed and many other regulations governing the holding of 55 parliamentary elections in Spain over this long period. The fact was, even before the death of Franco and within Spain, that in intellectual circles and among members of the democratic opposition parties who were beginning to come out of political hiding, the subject of the most appropriate electoral system for the country was already being discussed and studied. Immediately after the death of Franco in November 1975, this question leapt into the media and an extensive debate was begun on the advantages and disadvantages of both the electoral system operated during the Second Republic and of the different systems used in other countries. Development Within The Political Transition Following the death of the aged dictator, an almost general consensus agreed on the necessity of reaching a pact between the political forces, including the reformist wing of the old regime. A peaceful transition had to be made by means of just, transparent, and reliable elections through an electoral system which would give suitable opportunities to the whole of the wide political spectrum, including the nationalist parties, to compete for representation in the future parliament. One year after Franco's death, in December 1976, the Spanish people were asked to approve by referendum the law for the Political Reform of the state. Avoiding any break with old institutions, this signified a first recognition of the principle of popular sovereignty, enabling citizens to declare themselves freely and to choose either a political system based on democracy, or a continuation of the dictatorship. In the first alternative, by voting "Yes", legitimacy and a free mandate would be given by the vote to the calling of a democratic constitutive parliament, which would have to be elected six months later. It would be based on an electoral system that would have to be approved should the result of the referendum be "Yes" to democracy. The results were overwhelming for the "Yes" vote, as only two-percent of the Spanish electorate voted "No" to democracy. Approved by referendum, the political reform set up a bi-cameral parliament, comprising a Congress of 350 deputies (based on a ratio of 1 deputy per 100,000 inhabitants) and a Senate of 297 senators (this number having altered subsequently). The debate on the establishment of an electoral system to form these chambers revolved around the two principal aspects which are the foundation of all electoral systems: on what territorial basis should the constituencies be established; and which electoral formula was it appropriate to adopt in the historic/political context of the country? The strong influence of history upon the various Spanish regions meant that the electoral system adopted as from 1977 had to balance the purely "population" component (i.e. had to assign to each territorial demarcation a number of deputies for election in accord with the number of inhabitants with the right to vote) with a formula which would allow the population of each territory to have a minimum representation in accord with the variable of territorial size. We should point out that Spain is a country characterized by great demographic imbalances over its land area. Hence, the electoral system adopted in regard to assignment of seats per constituency was based on a "two-tier" mixed system of proportional representation, combining elections at the provincial level with national party lists. The territorial demarcation of each constituency was linked to the division of Spain into provinces (there are 50 provinces), to which were added two constituencies covering two Spanish cities situated outside the peninsula. The distribution of the 350 Congressional seats was made in such a way that each constituency would have two seats permanently assigned to it on a territorial basis, with the rest of the seats being distributed by assignment to each constituency in accord with the variable of "population". This is the variable which makes it possible that in some cases, from one election to another, the number of deputies which each constituency may elect can vary slightly, the Constitution subsequently determined the number of seats able to be held in the Congress of Deputies at between 300 and 400. In practice, however, the initial 350 parliamentary seats have been maintained to date, divided between the 52 constituencies according to the system described. To compensate for the effects of assigning seats to the constituencies on the basis of this "territorial/population" system (which favoured some candidacies more than others assign), the electoral system sought a corrective element in the formula for turning votes into seats. The simple majority systems such as FPTP or TRS, which would have accentuated the disproportional effects of the "two-tier" mixed system, were ruled out, and the system of closed party-list PRs was chosen, with the d'Hondt formula used to allocate seats. Multiple ballot papers containing closed blocked lists and Hondt's Law on proportionality was instituted for the adjudication of seats per province, which could in this case favour other candidacies. At the same time, the exclusion barrier against a candidacy entering into the distribution of seats was established at a minimum of three percent of the vote in each constituency. The system for the Senate, which is a chamber of territorial representation, currently composed of 264 senators (this can vary by one more or one less), is organized very differently, since only 208 seats are elected by direct election. These are assigned by the distribution of four seats to each of the provincial constituencies, independently of their population, the elector being able to vote for three of the candidates who appear on a single ballot paper (on which each political grouping presents three candidates for election and has three boxes). Under this system of "open list" PR for example, it is possible to choose to vote for a single candidate or for three candidates of three different parties. The remainders of the senators (56 in the current legislature) are elected by indirect vote by the parliaments of the 17 autonomous regions ("Communities"). With regard to active voting rights (to be able to elect) and passive voting rights (to be eligible), the Spanish electoral system gave both practically without restriction to all citizens of full age (18 years), excluding only those convicted by final sentence of the courts or, in the case of candidates for election, those who actively exercise certain public functions (judges, the military, high positions in the administration, etc.) Furthermore, candidates would not be obliged to make any kind of financial deposit to compete in the elections. It was considered preferable to eliminate any kind of discrimination in the submission of candidacies for financial reasons, even at the risk of some possible abuses, although they would have to be presented by a legally registered party (to register a political party is extremely easy) or by a group of electors. Finally, regarding participation in an election, the elector was left entirely free to decide whether to exercise his right to vote or not - the imposition of compulsory voting in the context of transition from a dictatorship to a democracy would have been an ideological contradiction. According to the planned time-scale, three months after the constitutional referendum, the first electoral rules (as described above) were provisionally approved, and three months later the general elections to appoint the constitutive parliament took place. The integrative capacity of the electoral system described - fundamental for a political transition to be truly viable - despite imperfections such as are found in any electoral system, was proven by the fact that the right, the centre, the socialists, the communists, and the Basque and Catalan nationalists obtained a parliamentary representation sufficiently aligned to their expectations. This parliamentary plurality, obtained without excessive fragmentation and which reflected the great ideological currents within the country, was fundamental to a real consensus on the Constitution text. Its complex preparation required more than a year and there is no doubt that from the standpoint of comparative law, it can be considered from many aspects to be one of the most advanced in the world. Among the provisions of the Constitution (Article 8), perhaps one of the most important and far-reaching was that of granting Parliament exclusive power to draw up the electoral rules, and also that of establishing that electoral law should have the status of constitutional law. Any amendment, however minuscule, should be submitted to the scrutiny of the Constitutional Commission of Parliament and follow the formal procedures reserved for constitutional laws. After approval by referendum in 1978 of the new Spanish Constitution, the constitutive Parliament, which had fulfilled its function of drawing up the basic law of the State, was immediately dissolved. New General Elections were called which would pave the way for the first ordinary legislature, and also the first municipal elections of the democracy, so bringing to an end the initial phase of the Spanish political transition. Legal And Functional Focus Of The Electoral System The Spanish electoral system, as essentially an instrument for guaranteeing an egalitarian and democratic vote and translating votes in terms of political representation, has been a truly effective model, so much so that it has continued to remain virtually consolidated and unaltered for twenty years after its principal outlines were approved by consensus in the initial phase of transition. (It has made possible majorities and relatively stable governments, as well as the changeover in 1982 and in 1996.) The first Constitutional Electoral Law passed in 1985 ratified the bases of the system devised in 1977 and expanded the development of the regulations applied during the period of political transition. It is quite true that a certain debate has been opened on the opportunity of introducing a few modifications into the electoral system and adopting the system of open lists instead of closed lists, with timid proposals being heard favouring the establishment of single-member constituencies and candidacies. However, it seems very unlikely that in the complex context of Spanish politics/elections, the advantages of other systems will compensate for the difficulties that would arise, especially regarding single-member constituencies, of which all political circles are aware. This being said, the validity of the Spanish electoral system lies both in its being politically functional (within the framework of Spanish society) and in the legitimacy that it has gradually acquired throughout the numerous electoral processes organized in the thirty-year life span of the system. No political force of any persuasion has ever brought a global accusation of electoral fraud, and the irregularities complained of have always been very parochial. All candidates accept the provisional electoral results announced by the Home Office on the night of the ballot as reliable, by the media and by the electorate. The reason for this was the deep-rooted conviction held by those who drafted Spanish electoral legislation, that any electoral system, which theoretically might be considered the best in the world, could in practice be useless. If the procedures for its application left any margin for manipulation in such essential areas as the compilation of electoral lists, the registration of candidacies, the counting of votes and many others, both technical and administrative, which directly affected the democratic validity of the electoral process. To avoid risks of this kind, both in the Constitution and in the first draft of the Electoral Law (L.O.R.E.G.), Electoral Law was considered to be a branch of Constitutional Law. A legalistic approach was established, imposing maximum guarantees and restraining subjective interpretations facilitated by silence or ambiguities in the rules and preventing the executive power from dictating "ad hoc" rules which might lead to possible manipulations in any phase of the process of establishing the right to vote. In Spain therefore, by virtue of this philosophy, the Government or the administration in its wider sense has no legal power to regulate or introduce provisions affecting the electoral regulations. The executive is merely able to approve a decree calling an election or technical decrees to be applied to the law. Ever since the Constitution was drafted, the executive and the administration have only played an instrumental role, and are merely organizers of the electoral process. This premise is now embedded in Spanish electoral culture, and although the electoral system has not changed fundamentally, the aspect that is developing through parliamentary debate is that of the actual functioning of electoral regulations in relation to the organization of the electoral process, its control, and technical modernization. It is to be noted also that the concept of Spanish Electoral Law, since its adoption as constitutional/organic law, is as a unit and, as stated in its preamble, responds to "the need to treat in a unified and global manner" all aspects of the electoral process. There are no lack of examples in western Europe of models of the "puzzle" type of legislation, where the Law or Electoral Code is a general regulating framework which needs to be accompanied or completed either by other laws or by a body of laws, or else by decree, regulations, circulars, etc. emanating from the executive. (Instead of facilitating transparency these finish by creating a legal labyrinth). However, the Spanish parliament at that time ruled out the use of any outdated model of fragmented electoral legislation as a reference and decided to incorporate all provisions into the same text, so that it would be functional and coherent, and clearly and concisely written. In this sense, the Electoral Law constitutes a veritable manual of procedure, covering in ordered fashion not only the constitutional principles guiding the electoral system, but also the precise provisions and their time schedules which must regulate the control, financing, management, and administration of any electoral process, taking into account also their different classification (parliamentary, local etc. elections). Description of the Functional Elements of the System Operations of Supervision and Control of the Electoral Process: The body that is charged with these functions has been created with the name of Electoral Council, which in some Latin American countries is called "electoral power." The Electoral Council has its own hierarchy and is based on territory: Central Electoral Council; Provincial and Area Councils; and Electoral Councils of the Autonomous Communities (in Spain there is a system of practically federal decentralization, with 17 autonomous regions). The composition of this Body is mixed one part of its members being appointed by the Council of Judicial Power and the other by Parliament. The Central Electoral Council is permanent; it has 13 members of whom eight are judges of the Supreme Court appointed by lot and the other five members, appointed by Parliament, hold University Chairs in the fields of Law, Political Sciences, or Sociology. The President is elected from among the judges and the Secretary (without vote) is the General Secretary of the Congress of Deputies. The Central Electoral Council is renewed 90 days after the constitution of a new Parliament following the elections. Its office is within the Parliamentary buildings. Electoral Councils, within their respective territorial ambit, have absolute power over all matters relating to elections and to the organization of the process, although for reasons of efficiency they do not take on the specific tasks of physically organizing the elections, but devote their services entirely to the validation of the operations and to the control and supervision of their legality. Operations of preparation and revision of the Electoral Census: Spanish citizens acquire the capacity to vote and their eligibility to do so on attaining 18 years of age, and are automatically included on the electoral lists. Spaniards ordinarily resident abroad are also included on special electoral lists. Foreigners of member countries of the European Union and of Norway, ordinarily resident in Spain, are also entered on the electoral lists, are able to vote and are eligible in municipal elections. Those who have attained 17 years of age are included on an attached list, so that they can vote if they have reached 18 years on polling day. No elector's card is issued since identity is checked at the electoral tables; this is by identity card or passport. Electors (currently some 30 million) receive a card at their home address, which is not valid for voting, but shows that they are registered on the Census, and the electoral table to which they belong. The management of the Electoral Census is in the hands of the Electoral Census Office, an organization which is under the direct supervision of the Electoral Councils and financially dependent on the National Statistics Council (attached to the Ministry of Finance). The basic information for the census is supplied by the City Councils (there are just over 8,000 municipalities which must compulsorily declare increases and decreases in population, changes of address, and changes in cartography), and by Consulates and Civil Registers in the case of deaths. An important step in the modernization of the management of the Electoral Census has been taken recently with the reform of the Electoral Law of 1995; instead of the previous yearly updating of the electoral lists, a monthly updating has been imposed. The considerable investment in the relevant computerization placed upon the executive by the actual reform of the Law means that in the short term the margin of error is minimal. Currently, every election takes as its basis the electoral census of the month before it was called, and the lists for each electoral month are exhibited publicly at the polling stations one-week after the call is made. Electors can object immediately in cases of error or non-registration. Operations of organizations relating to the electoral process: The Home Office is responsible for the logistics and financial management of expenses incurred in the organization of elections. It must also, of course, attend to security for the peaceful running of the electoral campaign and the free exercise of the right to vote. The various police and Civil Guard corps receive training in their academies on these matters and on polling day carry a pocket card which reminds them of the relevant provisions of the Constitution and the Electoral Law. Regarding logistics and financial management, a Deputy Manager is charged with organizing the elections and planning the electoral time schedule in accordance with the provisions of the various articles of the Electoral Law which, as has been said, are very precise and determine all time periods, including the hours of opening and closing of the polling stations. In the areas of electoral management within its remit, the Home Office has a dependent relationship vis-a-vis the Central Electoral Council, and always consults the latter on any problem or query that may arise in the various phases of the electoral process. The instructions of the Electoral Council - even if sometimes the election technical workers have different opinions when their practical application poses problems - are heeded without delay. At territorial level, on the instructions of the Home Office, the State administrative services in each province take charge of the specific tasks of storage and distribution of electoral material, as well as of the printing of ballot papers and envelopes. The Home Office also contracts with publicity agents on audiovisual campaigns which are broadcast during the process to inform or remind electors of certain matters (display of lists, procedure for voting by post, identity papers required to vote, etc.). A very important function of the Home Office is that of providing the public with the provisional results of the vote-count, to which enormous human resources are devoted. Once the counting of votes is over, thousands of electoral agents representing the administration take a copy of the results at each one of approximately 50,000 electoral tables distributed throughout the country, and send them by telephone to regional computerized centers, which process the information and send it to the central computer. In Spain the speed of transmission of the provisional results is greatly assisted by the fact that all the electoral colleges have a telephone on the premises or close by. Considerable funds are also devoted to this operation (a figure of some US$5,000,000 could be indicated.) The result of all this great effort on the night of the election has been to make ever shorter the time taken to inform the country of the detailed results of the elections, so that four hours after the close of the voting operations at the 50,000 electoral tables, the detailed count is computerized and made known practically one hundred percent. The competing political groupings and the communication media have direct lines connected to the central computer at the Home Office, giving them access in real time and from the beginning, to the development of the vote count. From 1996 the counting process has been made known worldwide on the Internet. Currently, the feasibility of introducing the electronic vote is being studied, although it is not yet very clear if the investment in this new technology - some testing has already been done - is worthwhile, as it would only reduce by some three hours the speed record that Spain has achieved with the present system of processing the provisional vote count. Another uncertain aspect is that of the maintenance and inspection of the thousands of electronic voting devices which would have to be monitored before a new election. The "web" vote is also being studied. Operations of control of electors and candidates in the electoral process: In Spain the presence of international observers was not formally requested by any political party during the first elections of the transition thirty years ago. This was because, on the one hand, the now legalized principal political parties already had an infrastructure and organization sufficient to guarantee, with militants and sympathizers, the development of the campaign. They could also ensure proper conduct of the vote by the presence of their legally accredited delegates in almost all of the voting stations in the respective constituencies. On the other hand, the Spanish electoral system introduced from the outset the principle that the sovereignty of the people should translate into active control of the sovereign act of voting by the electors themselves, they being the ones who should preside over and organize the process of voting and vote-counting. The Electoral Law, as subsequently developed, has continued to define these two aspects in greater detail. Regarding the ability to control candidates in the electoral process, Spanish legislation offers nothing new. The candidacies are submitted to the Electoral Councils in each constituency, which use objective criteria in assessing their validity; it is compulsory also for each political grouping competing in the elections to appoint a Representative to the Central Electoral Council within a maximum of nine days after the election is called, to act as legal spokesperson for the candidacies. This does not mean that these Representatives participate in the deliberations of that organization. In regard to control of the vote by the electorate itself, it may in fact be new for some people that it is compulsory for the three members of the electoral tables (one President and two Members) to be electors registered on the electoral tables' list. The procedure for their appointment endeavours to avoid any manipulation, as a public drawing of lots is held at a plenary meeting held in each Town Hall between 25 and 29 days after the elections are called. At this meeting three titular members are appointed and six alternate members, who must all be present at the table on polling day in case the titular members are absent. The Presidents are those with the highest educational level. Electors appointed by lot have a legal obligation to take up these duties and the appointments are notified to them by official letter from the Electoral Council, delivered to their home address. Together with this notification they receive an Instructions Manual supervised by the Central Electoral Council. These manuals, like the rest of the electoral documents, are published by the Home Office in bilingual editions for those constituencies, which have Catalan, Basque, or Galician as their official language, as well as in Castilian, which is the official language for the whole State. In Spain the Spanish language does not exist officially in the Constitution, which only refers to what is historically called the Castilian language; it is known abroad as the Spanish language, since in Article Three of the Constitution, the other languages cited are considered Spanish languages. The appointment of the members of the tables by lot from among the electorate and the guarantees given for them to exercise their mandate in sovereign fashion, which is generally done with a great sense of responsibility, have also been a key factor in ensuring that fraud is actually very difficult at the voting stage, the counting stage, (a public count on the same premises as the vote), and the subsequent delivery by the President and another member of the table, of the original and a copy in a sealed envelope to the nearest Judge. The representatives of the candidacies (who each have a copy of the electoral list of the table and must sign the Minutes of proceedings, of which they receive a copy) also play a part. On public display at the voting station is a notice with the results, whilst a further copy in a sealed envelope is handed by the waiting third member of the table to the Postal worker who collects it at each voting station for onward transmission to the Area or Provincial Electoral Council which will carry out the final count. In view of the key function of electoral tables, the Electoral Law has introduced specific requirements regarding the number of electors at the tables, and has established sections or areas comprising a minimum of 500 electors and a maximum of 2,000 who are subdivided into tables (in practice the maximum limit of electors per table is set at 1,000 electors). Also a territorial criterion is imposed, that in each municipality, however few inhabitants it may have, at least one table is established even though the electors may be fewer than 500. The electoral list of each table is in alphabetical order of surnames. The Electoral Law also determines that the duration of voting is 11 hours (ample time as voting formalities are carried out very quickly) and voting stations may not close between 9.00 hours and 20.00 hours, even if all the electors on the list have voted. Operations of financial management of the electoral process: this is an important area of management throughout the phases of the electoral process. According to the Spanish Electoral Law, the State must subsidize not only the actual organizational and logistical expenses incurred by any election but also, in compliance with the Constitutional Law on the Funding of Political Parties, it must subsidize the electoral expenses of the political groupings which compete in elections to the Central, Local, or European Parliaments. The expense of elections to the regional autonomous Parliaments must be borne by each Autonomous Community along the same principles. The Home Office department in charge of running the elections is responsible both for the preparation of the budget and for the administration of public electoral funds according to the precise provisions of the Electoral Law. In fact, the Home Office acts as the administrative body empowered to contract for the external materials and services needed to organize the elections; it also acts simply as the intermediary between the Treasury and the active participants competing in the elections. The Electoral Law provides - within the financial limit approved by Parliament - that after the 29 days for publication of the decree calling an election, the parties or political groupings which have previously obtained representation, may have an advance of funds equivalent to 30 percent of the total subsidies which they obtained in the previous election. The total subsidy that they receive at the end of the new electoral process, provided they gain representation, will depend on the number of votes. The money is paid by the State after expiry of the period allowed for contentious claims and after submitting (100 days after the ballot) detailed documents covering all electoral income and expenses on accounts opened for this purpose by the candidacies, which can be inspected throughout the electoral process by the Electoral Councils and the National Audit Office. The Electoral Law prohibits private or company donations to the electoral campaign of a political party or grouping of electors other than in a very small individual amount (approximately US $7,000). Should they not obtain representation or obtain fewer votes than those used for the initial computation, candidatures must return the subsidies advanced either wholly or in part. The expenses subsidized by the State that are connected with the electoral activity of the candidatures are general: voting papers and envelopes; advertising and publicity expenses to gain votes; hire of premises and offices for the campaign; financial indemnities paid to non-permanent staff of the parties, taken on during the campaign; transport and travel expenses of the candidates, leaders and support staff of the campaign; and correspondence or mailing expenses. In addition, bank interest on financial loans legally made to the campaign organization up to the date on which the State pays the total subsidy relating to each candidacy according to its electoral results. We would clarify that there is a possible modification of electoral legislation currently under discussion regarding the subsidizing of political parties and electoral campaigns, due to problems of corruption. Spain, like many other countries in Western Europe, has suffered from this in recent years. It is generated above all by the secret and illegal financing of some electoral campaigns, where the costs are too high and where the legal limits of maximum expenses established for public funds are not normally observed. The debate is tending towards greater possibility of financing by private persons or companies, by substantially raising the maximum level of such contributions currently contemplated in the Law. However, should the electoral legislation be modified, private financial contributions would always be subject, by parliamentary consensus, to compulsory publication and control. The Transition from Territorial State It would not be possible to conclude a description of the Spanish political regime and of its electoral system without briefly mentioning something just as important historically as the transition from authoritarian state par excellence to an exemplary democratic one. We refer to the transition that was made in parallel with that previously described, from super-centralized State to strongly decentralized State - a transition which at the political and sociological level has undoubtedly been more difficult and complex than that from dictatorship to democracy. Perhaps it was the toughest problem that the 1978 Constitution had to tackle. In practice, for many Spanish people whom we could call ultra-conservative, just as for many who have a progressive political ideology, it has been, and still is, difficult to accept the recognition accorded to nationalists, linguistic diversity, and the creation of self-government in the various Spanish regions which have been invested with ever wider powers. Furthermore, the arrival of democracy facilitated an explosion of strong nationalist claims, which have since been largely assimilated into the political system through the electoral mechanisms underpinning the decentralization process. Notably, the system even allows HB, the political candidacy linked with the terrorist group ETA, to stand lawfully in all elections (legislative, municipal, Basque Country/Autonomous, and European). Everyone has always accepted the results, although for some years they have shown a strong decline in the HB vote. Within the framework of all these tensions, the Spanish pattern of decentralization was original, in that it took account of the existence of different demands for autonomy vis-a-vis central power. These were very strong in Catalonia and in the Basque country, moderate in other areas, and practically nil in quite a number of regions, and it was able to devise a long-term strategy for the steady harmonization of the self-governing capacities of each territory. On these principles the division of Spain was organized into 17 Autonomous Communities, each having a Parliament elected by universal suffrage. These parliaments were instituted successively, the transition from the State model beginning with the autonomous elections of the Basque Country and of Catalonia held at the beginning of 1980. The parliaments of Galicia and Andalucia were elected subsequently, in 1981 and 1982 respectively. These four regions are the ones called "historic nationalities". The remaining 13 autonomous parliaments were established as from the autonomous elections held simultaneously with the local elections of 1983. In the State decentralizing process, one of the basic features of the general harmonization was precisely the adoption of a similar electoral system throughout the land: the election of the autonomous parliaments (although their deputies vary in number) is governed by the same rules for distribution of seats as for the election of deputies to the central Parliament (las Cortes). Each Autonomous Community has its own Electoral Law, which should align with the General Electoral Law in its basic procedures. Based on these autonomous parliamentary assemblies elected by universal suffrage, a phenomenon of moderately developing regionalism has been generated in many places where this consciousness did not exist. However, there is also a phenomenon of integration of nationalisms within a robust and organized framework, which allows the central and autonomous powers to negotiate on bases of legitimacy, which both obtain at the ballot box. It is these negotiations which have allowed a high degree of decentralization (much greater than that within many states formally termed "federal") which today is accepted by the majority. The Finnish electoral system was introduced in 1906. Elections were held the following year, which were the first free proportional elections for both men and women. In 1917 Finland became independent from Russia, and the founding Constitution of the new Republic was put into force in 1919; later a variant of parliamentarism known as semi-presidentialism was developed. Since 1906, all women and men have been eligible to vote and to be nominated in elections. The age of eligibility has been successively lowered from 24 in 1906 to 21 in 1944, to 20 in 1969 and to 18 in 1972. One distinctive feature of Finnish elections is the exceptionally high numbers of ballots cast in absentia by post. At the 1995 election, 43.4 percent of the valid votes were so cast. The Finnish parliament consists of 200 MPs elected from 15 districts. In all districts, except on the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, the allocation of seats to parties (including electoral alliances) is proportional to the votes following a d'Hondt system of party list Proportional Representation, see Mixed Member Proportional. Before 1954, voters had to choose between candidate lists (a list included a maximum of two candidates and one alternate); later changes to the system mean that it is now possible to vote for one individual candidate only. This change transformed the Finnish electoral system into a rare type of list system, which obliges voting for individual candidates. The election of candidates from the party list is not predetermined, but depends entirely on the number of individual votes cast for each candidate. The voter picks the allotted number of his or her candidate (the list of candidates, each with an identifying number, hangs in front of the voter) and writes it down on the ballot. As a result, the election is not exclusively a competition between parties; it is also a competition between single candidates on the party list. Neither is the electorate given the option to vote for a party per se; but only for individual candidates nominated, but not ranked by a party or a non-party list. While the Åland Islands district elects a single member, the other 14 districts are all multi-member. The district magnitude is determined by the population size, which favours the constituencies in the rural north and east. Proportionality is still high in overall parliamentary results, although variation between constituencies in this respect is large. In general, urbanised constituencies are more proportional, and more rural areas produce more disproportional results. As the d'Hondt formula of allocating seats favours large parties, in Finland small parties usually take the opportunity of joining an electoral alliance with one or more parties. Electoral alliances are made at the district level, which means that one party can join different alliances in all 14 districts; the alliances therefore have varying degrees of success. In addition, according to the electoral law of 1969, a candidate can only be nominated in one constituency. Before that a candidate could be nominated in all districts, the optimal electoral strategy for a charismatic small-party leader. Most small parties join electoral alliances, and without this option proportionality between votes and seats would, to some degree, be weakened. The development of political institutions able to provide stable and effective government has been a daunting challenge in Indonesia, a huge and ethnically diverse country of nearly 20,000 islands whose unity was based on common resistance to colonialism. Political identity in Indonesia is a complex subject, in the past often based on links to different strands of Islam, to a more secular nationalism, or in some areas to Christianity—to which assessment of leadership qualities and the impact of corruption now, in 2004, appear to have been added. Devising electoral systems that are inclusive and effective in the context of the Indonesian unitary state has never been easy. The first general election in Indonesia after the 1945 proclamation of independence took place in 1955. A PR system using 15 regions was adopted without challenge. Seats were distributed in proportion to population, with a small extra allocation for Outer Island regions. The Largest Remainder Method using the Hare Quota was adopted. Parties or organizations could nominate lists, and individual candidates could also be nominated. Voters could vote either for a list or by writing in the name of one candidate. The resulting legislature included representatives of 27 parties and lists, plus one individual member. The four largest parties all received between 16 per cent and 23 per cent of the vote. Not only was no single party able to command a majority in the legislature; not even two parties were. It was difficult to form governments, and their ability to retain the confidence of the legislature was limited. The Constituent Assembly, elected shortly afterwards to draw up a permanent constitution, had a similar political balance and failed to reach agreement. General loss of confidence in political institutions and rebellions against the unitary state led President Soekarno to impose an authoritarian regime in 1959. This lasted until it was replaced by the New Order of President Soeharto in the mid-1960s, which established virtually complete dominance of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Elections took place, but campaigns were heavily restricted, many candidates were disqualified, and the rules were applied disproportionately against opponents of the government. The desire for complete central control over the choice of candidates contributed to the choice of closed-list PR. Soeharto sought to allay fears of Javanese political domination, and Java received only just over half of the seats to be elected, despite having over 70 per cent of the registered electorate in 1955. Although this figure has fallen, it was still 61 per cent in 2004. The Transition to Democracy: The 1999 Elections After the Soeharto regime fell in 1998, new electoral legislation was finalized in late January 1999. The electoral system—described as a ‘proportional system with district characteristics’—was unique. It was the clear product of incremental political negotiation against a time deadline. This agreement was reached in the legislature by the parties of the Soeharto era, which were under pressure from the new parties and others outside the negotiations, in addition to defending their own positions and coming under pressure from their own power bases. Given these pressures, it is unlikely that the end result of the negotiation could have been substantially different. At the June 1999 election, each voter cast a single vote for a political party. The 27 provinces were retained as electoral districts, ranging in magnitude from four to 82 seats. The number of seats won by each party in each province was determined using the principles of PR, and each candidate on each party list was linked by the party to one of the second-tier districts (kota, city authorities, and kabupaten, authorities in non-city areas) within the province. Because of deep-rooted concern to maintain the unity of the state, there were provisions that made it impossible to register a specifically regional party. The law on political parties required all parties contesting the elections to be organized in at least nine provinces. The legislation was not clear on essential detail. The method for converting votes cast into seats gained was not included. Nor were there rules for identifying which candidates from a party’s list would occupy the seats gained by that party. These issues were resolved only at a very late stage. The final seat allocation regulations retained the Largest Remainder Method using the Hare Quota. The allocation of candidates to seats won was much more complex. In practice, few central party leaderships even complied with the regulations, and leaderships took de facto powers simply to tell the Election Commission which candidates had been elected to the seats their party had won. The 1999 elections were nonetheless judged to have been the first since 1955 to be acceptable overall, despite specific or localized concerns. Five parties gained more than 2 per cent of the vote: their relative strengths varied widely in the different parts of Indonesia. Sixteen other parties gained representation. Reflection on the 1999 elections was rapidly overtaken by a full review of the 1945 constitution. The completion of this review in 2002 led to fundamental changes, including the introduction of the separation of powers, the principle of checks and balances, direct election of the president and vice-president, and the establishment of a regionally based elected second chamber with very limited powers. Four portmanteau amendments were passed to the constitution, completely changing the way in which the institutions will work in future, and five new laws—on elections, presidential elections, political parties, the structure of elected bodies, and the establishment of the Constitutional Court—were passed. Indonesia now falls recognizably within the mainstream of the family of presidential democracies. Single-Member Plurality Fails to Find Favour for Elections to the Legislature After 1999, there was considerable advocacy of a single-member district (SMD) plurality system among the media and in academia in particular, as the accountability of elected members was widely perceived to be lacking in the legislature elected in 1999. Even if the 1999 electoral system is viewed not as a political deal but as a brave attempt to marry the principles of List PR and the accountability of elected members to the electoral district, no constituency–member link was created in practice. However, simulations made after the 1999 elections suggested that a plurality SMD system would be likely to produce results in Indonesia that were more disproportional than almost anywhere else in the world. Steadily worsening relations between the legislature elected in 1999 and many academic, media and civil society actors also meant that support for SMD systems by the latter became steadily less persuasive. It became evident that a plurality system would almost certainly fail to reflect the diversity of Indonesia, that introducing an acceptable districting process for the 2004 election would take time and involve considerable difficulty, and that plurality systems were not likely to favour the election of women. The 2004 Electoral System The new constitutional requirements agreed in 2002 state that the participants in elections to the lower chamber of the legislature (the National Assembly) are political parties, thus limiting the available options for the electoral system in the new electoral law. The government’s draft election law provided for a PR system using multi-member districts, responding to the pressure for greater accountability by proposing open lists and the dividing up of larger provinces. This basic form was finally adopted, with multi-member districts of a magnitude of between three and 12 seats to be drawn up by the Election Commission. Subsequent debate led to multi-member districts whose magnitude is towards the higher end of this range. The restricted open-list system finally agreed requires voters to vote for one party and, if they wish, one candidate from that party. However, this will only result in the election of a particular candidate out of the order in which names appear on the party list if that candidate gains more than a full Hare Quota of individual votes—which made its likely effect minimal, as proved to be the case in practice in the 2004 elections to the legislature. As a result of the creation of the regional chamber, some parties argued the case for ‘one person, one vote, one value’ (OPOVOV) for the legislature, with the same population for every seat, while others backed the retention of a representational bias in favour of the Outer Islands. The final compromise is a complex formula basing the number of seats for each province on a minimum of 325,000 population per seat in small provinces and a maximum of 425,000 population per seat in large ones, with a minimum of three seats per province. The central party leaderships showed little inclination to relax their hold on their parties. The larger parties toughened the requirements for parties to participate in both the 2004 and subsequent elections. The effective prohibition of regional parties has been strengthened. The issues of open or closed list, OPOVOV, the balance between Java and the Outer Islands, and party participation were all negotiated between the parties when the final deal was struck. A broadly-based campaign did, however, lead to the adoption of a ‘maybe-quota’ for gender representation: parties are required to ‘bear in their hearts’ the desirability of including at least 30 per cent women candidates on their lists. While there is no enforcement provision, this proved an important tool to encourage more women candidates, and 12 per cent of the members of the 2004 legislature are women-a significant improvement on 1999. The 2004 legislative election results reflected both change and continuity. The same five parties that polled more than 3 per cent in 1999 did so again, and were joined by two more. Seventeen parties were represented altogether. Elections to the Regional Chamber: SNTV Springs a Surprise The constitution provides that candidates for the new regional chamber (the Regional Representatives’ Council) should be individuals, not parties. Four members are to be elected per province. The draft law proposed the Block Vote system, clearly designed to advantage parties with support outside Java where provinces are smaller. SNTV was proposed as an alternative by the party that was strongest in Java, and was agreed as part of the final deal. The first election to the regional chamber took place in 2004 and demonstrated a known weakness of SNTV: with an average of 30 candidates contesting the four seats in each province, many candidates were elected with less than 10 per cent of the vote. However, strong campaigns by women candidates meant that an unexpected 21 per cent of the members of the new chamber are women—a level unprecedented in a freely elected body in Indonesia. Direct Presidential Elections The president and vice-president are now directly elected, with candidates pairing up to form tickets. A two-round majority run-off system is used, with the aim of ensuring that the successful candidates have sufficient support across a large and diverse country. For a ticket to be elected on the first round, it must not only poll an absolute majority of votes cast but also meet a distribution requirement of 20 per cent of the vote in at least half the provinces. While a majority winner will almost certainly achieve this, the requirement prevents a ticket whose support is solid in Java and minimal elsewhere from winning an election in the first round. In the first direct presidential election in 2004, five tickets contested the first round in July, with none polling over 35 per cent; in the second round in September, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gained victory with 61 per cent of the votes. The Political Reality: Negotiating a Deal The 1999 electoral system agreement had to be acceptable both to the parties of the New Order, which still held the levers of power, and to the new parties outside on the street. The constitutional review that followed the 1999 election also required agreement across the political spectrum. The 2004 election law is yet another deal, similar in principle to that of 1999, but with important differences of detail. Each time, there were a limited number of practical solutions given the inherited traditions and the political background and positions of the actors. However, there are positive signs for democracy in the new Indonesian institutional framework: it is fortunate that some long-term vision existed alongside the inevitable perceptions of short-term political advantage among the parties and individuals who shaped the changes. The Irish lower house of Parliament, Dáil Éireann, is elected by the STV system—proportional representation by means of the Single Transferable Vote. This relatively unusual system owes its origins to the circumstances of the Republic of Ireland’s achievement of independence in 1922. The departing rulers, the British, wanted some form of PR in order to protect the Protestant minority, while the new state’s political elite favoured PR in principle. With neither having much awareness of PR list systems, STV was adopted by agreement as the electoral system and has remained the electoral system ever since. The Dáil is of central importance in the Irish political system. It elects the government, which needs to retain majority support in the Dáil in order to survive. Much less important is the presidency, although, unusually for a parliamentary system, the president is directly elected. Elections for the presidency take place under the Alternative Vote (AV) system. The 166 members of the Dáil are elected from around 40 constituencies, each returning three, four or five members. Voting is straightforward: voters merely indicate their favoured candidate (by writing ‘1’ beside that candidate’s name on the ballot paper), and can go on to indicate their second and third choices and so on in the same way. Voters can rank candidates not only within but also across parties. Although most vote along party lines, it is not necessary to do so, and some vote along geographical lines, that is, they give their highest preferences, regardless of party, to the candidates from their own local area. The counting process, especially the distribution of ‘surplus’ votes, looks complicated to the uninitiated, but it is worth emphasizing that the voters do not have to be familiar with all the details; they need only to know how to cast their vote and to be satisfied that the counting process is ‘fair’ and transparent. The electoral system is entrenched in the constitution and consequently cannot be changed without a referendum. On two occasions (1959 and 1968) the largest party, Fianna Fáil, instigated a referendum to replace STV by the British FPTP system, using the argument each time that any kind of PR was likely to create a problem of unstable coalition government. The proposed change was rejected by the voters on each occasion, by margins of 52 per cent to 48 per cent in 1959, and 61 per cent to 39 per cent in 1968. On the basis of the criterion of stable government, anyone evaluating the record of STV in the Republic of Ireland would not, in fact, see its performance as a problem. Since the mid-1940s, governments (both coalition and single-party) have lasted three, four or five years, the only exception being a short-lived period of instability in the early 1980s. The voters, through their ranking of candidates of different parties, are able to indicate their wishes regarding potential coalition partners for their preferred party. STV has generally delivered highly proportional outcomes, with Fianna Fáil receiving only a modest ‘bonus’ (around 48 per cent of the seats for 45 per cent of the votes at elections over the period 1945–92). However, the small size of the electoral districts (four seats per constituency on average) creates the potential for the largest party to reap a benefit if it can attract second- and third-preference votes from supporters of other parties. In 2002 the least proportional results ever, Fianna Fáil won 41 per cent of the votes and 49 per cent of the seats. The system continues to allow representation to small parties and to independents, 13 of whom were elected in 2002. While many PR systems enable small parties to win seats in the Parliament, STV seems to give an unusual opportunity to independent candidates to do the same because of its essentially candidate-centred rather than party-centred nature. Much of the praise and criticism of STV in the Republic of Ireland hinges on the same factor, namely the power it gives to voters to choose among candidates of the same party. This creates intense intra-party competition, especially among candidates of Fianna Fáil, which nominates between two and four candidates in each constituency. Statistics show that more incumbent Fianna Fáil MPs lose their seat to a running-mate than to a candidate of another party. Critics argue that, as a result, incumbents become over-active at constituency level in order to curry favour with the voters and do not spend enough time on politics at national level, for example, on scrutinizing the government or discussing legislation in committees. They argue that this has an adverse effect on the calibre of Irish parliamentarians (in that individuals who could make a contribution at national level are discouraged by the likely casework load they would have to discharge if elected) and that it leads to short-termism and undue regard for localism in government thinking. They suggest that internal party competition for votes may lead to divided, incohesive political parties. The defenders of the system, in contrast, see voters’ opportunity to choose among candidates of their party as a virtue. They argue that it allows the voters to replace incumbents by more able and more active newcomers and that, at a time of decreasing interest in conventional politics, this gives MPs a strong incentive to keep in close contact with the voters and thus fulfil the role of linking citizens to the political system. They maintain that there is no evidence that Irish MPs are of lower calibre than those elsewhere and that the Republic of Ireland’s recent record of impressive economic growth shows that there cannot be too much wrong with the behaviour of governments. They also point out that the Irish political parties are extremely cohesive and disciplined in their behaviour in Parliament, with no factions or recognizable subgroups. In 2002 an all-party parliamentary committee considered the arguments for and against changing the system. It concluded that the public was strongly attached to STV, that a change to any other system would reduce the power of the individual voter, and that some of the alleged failings of the political system for which critics blamed STV were caused by other factors. As this conclusion indicates, there is no significant body of opinion in favour of amending or replacing the existing system. Any evaluation of STV in the Republic of Ireland needs to take account of the characteristics of the country. It is a small country in terms of both area and population, and the ratio of MPs to population (about 1 : 20,000) is relatively high by international standards. This may foster closer links between MPs and their constituents, regardless of the electoral system, than are likely in a larger country. In addition, the Republic of Ireland is a prosperous, highly educated society where the political system as a whole is well established and is universally regarded as legitimate. Irish society does not have any significant cleavages (for example, ethnic, linguistic or religious). For all these reasons we need to be careful about drawing firm conclusions about how STV would operate in other contexts. We can, though, say that there is no sign that the electorate in the Republic of Ireland would like to replace it by any other system. On March 18, 1992, on its last day before disbanding, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, changed the electoral law in Israel. This momentous institutional change was implemented in the fourteenth general election on May 29, 1996. The initiative to reform the electoral law emanated from widespread dissatisfaction over government performance. A grass-roots movement led by prominent law professors and Knesset members attributed the stalemate in Israeli politics during the 1980s primarily to coalition politics. Small parties, particularly the religious ones, gained disproportionate influence in the coalition formation process, thus weakening the discretionary authority of the Prime Minister over the formation of national public policies, and bestowing them with larger than deserved shares of public resources and symbolic commitments. The institutional change was supposed to remedy this situation. In a recent paper, Nachmias and Sened (1998) show that the institutional reform in the electoral law significantly decreased the electoral strength of the big parties and inevitably augmented the bargaining power of the religious and other small parties. From the reformers' perspective, the outcome of the electoral change was counter-intuitive. However, from a theoretical perspective, the consequences were to be expected. In the first section, I examine the electoral rule used in Israel between 1951-1992, and discuss the political reasons for the widespread dissatisfaction with this institutional arrangement. In the second section, the major attributes of the new law are described along with the unrealizable expectations that it would constitute a significant improvement over the previous law. The problems inherent in the new law are discussed from a conceptual perspective in the third section. In the last section, the general implications of the reform are addressed in the context of the search for pluralistic, democratic institutional designs. The Electoral System in Israel Before 1996 The electoral law practiced in Israel from 1951 to 1992 was one of the purest forms of proportional rule. The entire Israeli electorate was treated as a single district. The number of seats that each party in the Knesset gained was almost exactly proportional to the number of votes the party obtained in the general elections. The minimum number of votes needed to enter the parliament was one percent of the votes (since 1992, 1.5 percent), a very low threshold of entry compared to similar electoral systems. One notable effect of this pure form of proportional electoral rule was that the Israeli Knesset was always composed of a multitude of parties. In the thirteen elections held between 1949-1992, no party ever obtained a majority of the seats in the Knesset. This required the largest party in the Knesset to enter a bargaining process of coalition formation after every electoral campaign in order to form a new government. Coalition formation in multi-party systems involves a tedious bargaining process over two types of payoffs: office-related side payments and policy agreements (Laver and Schofield 1990; Sened 1996). In multi-party systems, the coalition forming party must strike a balance between office-related side payments and policy-related payoffs. Any government can pursue only one policy that rarely satisfies all the partners in the ruling coalition. The coalition forming party must win the support of its smaller partners. Side-payment are allocated to them to compensate their dissatisfaction with policies that the government as a whole decides to pursue. This dissatisfaction often leads to the breakdown of coalition governments, when the office-related side payments no longer compensate for the policy compromises of the different coalition partners (Mershon 1996; Sened 1996). The New Electoral Law Towards the end of the 1980s a grass-roots movement, the Public Committee for a Constitution for Israel was formed to advocate political and electoral reforms. The group's leadership submitted a detailed proposal for reforms, including specific recommendations pertaining to issues of individual rights; a formalized structure of checks and balances between the legislative and the executive branches of government, and a new electoral law. Despite of the publicized objection of most political scientists in Israel and a sizable number of legislators representing different parties, the Knesset, after considerable political pondering, maneuvering and delay tactics modified the original movement's proposal and changed the electoral law. The success of the movement has been attributed to its outstanding public campaign in terms of scope, resources, and visibility, reinforced by the endorsement of leaders of the two major parties. The new electoral law includes two major provisions that are supposed to strengthen the Prime Minister in the process of forming a coalition following a general election. First and foremost, the Prime Minister is elected directly by the eligible voters. Voters enter two ballots in the poll. On the first ballot, they vote for the party of their choice and on the second they vote for their most preferred candidate for Prime Minister. Under the old electoral law, following the election, the President of Israel called all the newly elected Knesset members and consulted with them before asking one of them to try to form a coalition. In practice (with a single exception), the president asked the head of the largest party to attempt forming a coalition government. Under the new law, the Prime Ministerial candidate receiving more then fifty percent of the votes is popularly and directly elected. If no candidate receives more than fifty percent of the votes, a second round is held. Blank and invalid ballots are not counted. Consequently, one of the two contenders is assured of obtaining more then fifty percent of the votes. Under this procedure, the Prime Minister may not be the head of the largest party in the Knesset. In fact, in the 1996 election Netanyahu won the election for Prime Minister while his Likud party gained 32 seats in the Knesset. Two seats less than Labor, which gained 34 seats while its head and Netanyahu's contender for the Prime Ministerial election, Shimon Peres, lost in the election for Prime Minister. To further strengthen the power of the Prime Minister and ensure the stability of coalition governments, the new law diminished considerably the potency of the long-standing parliamentary institution of vote of no confidence. Under the new law an absolute majority of Knesset members (61 members) is required to approve a vote of no confidence, compared to the old rule where a simple majority of the members present in the plenary was sufficient to pass such a vote. Most significantly, however, under the new law, if an absolute majority supports a vote of no confidence, not only is the government ruled out of power, but the Knesset is dissolved as well. This change constitutes a strong disincentive to legislators to support a vote of no confidence. To bring down a coalition government without dissolving the Knesset, a vote of no confidence must be supported by at least 80 Knesset members. Legislated Rule was not to serve the Purpose There are three reasons to expect that the institutional change will fail the major purpose for which it was legislated. The first is well- known and has been pointed out by scholars and a few prominent elected officials prior to the change. The new electoral law enables small parties to pressure the big parties to accommodate their policy preferences in three rounds: preceding the first-round of the election, again before the second-round of the election, and still again during the bargaining process for the formation of the coalition government. Under the old law, the small parties could pressure the big ones only during the coalition formation process, and solely if they were genuinely pivotal. Under the new rule, the small parties in general and the religious parties in particular, are virtually guaranteed the pivotal status in the second round. Preclusion of a second round would make them pivotal in the first round. This institutional change increases considerably the likelihood of small parties, in particular the religious, to become genuinely pivotal thus augmenting their bargaining power. The second reason to expect the new law to defeat its purpose is directly related to another well-anticipated outcome: big parties are bound to lose Knessset seats to small parties. Since the Labor Party lost its dominance status, the Israeli party system has turned into a bi-polar system in which two major parties compete, with the support of their satellite parties, over the control of parliament and hence the coalition government. Typically, the head of the largest party was given the first opportunity to form a governing coalition. The voters, fully aware of this institutional practice often voted strategically to increase the chances of the head of the big party of the Knesset block they preferred to get the first opportunity to form a coalition. Voters could be closer in their ideological persuasion or policy preferences to one of the small parties in the Knesset-block and yet cast their ballot to the biggest party in the block to increase its chances to get the first opportunity to form a governing coalition. The new electoral law eliminated the incentive to vote for the biggest party in the block. Under the new law, voters can cast a ballot for the head of the party that leads the parliamentary block they prefer, and then vote sincerely for the party of their choice. Inevitably this leads to added fragmentation in parliament inasmuch as it steers voters to cast their vote to small parties instead of one of the biggest parties. This added fragmentation intensifies the governability problems inherent in coalition governments in different ways:
In sum, there are three theoretically grounded reasons to expect the institutional change to accomplish the opposite of what it was intended to do. Instead of reducing the fragmentation in government and decreasing the bargaining power of small parties, the new electoral law is expected to increase fragmentation as well as the power of small parties, particularly the religious parties. First, the new law institutionalizes more opportunities for small parties to bargain with Prime Ministerial candidates, and then with the Prime Minister-elect. To raise their chances of wining the election, candidates will promise a variety of payoffs to small parties in return for their support in the first and the second round and during the coalition formation process. Second, the new rule reverses the incentive of voters to vote strategically for the big party in the Knesset block. Inevitably the big parties would lose Knesset seats, considerably reducing the likelihood that a major, central party would capture the parliamentary core and pursue relatively consistent policies. Moreover, the coalition forming parties would have to rely on more partners to form and maintain governing coalitions. This would increase both fragmentation in government and coalition payoffs to small parties. Finally, by jeopardizing the role of the confidence vote procedure the new law would impair both the governance capability of coalitions and the effectiveness of parliamentary oppositions. India remains by far the largest democracy in the world, with over 670 million electors in the parliamentary election of 2004. Its parliamentary government and FPTP electoral system are a legacy of British colonialism, which ended in 1947. The British introduced self-government to India in stages, and it was not until the end of colonial rule and the adoption of the Indian Constitution in November 1949 by a Constituent Assembly that universal suffrage was achieved. The Constituent Assembly, which comprised eminent jurists, lawyers, constitutional experts and political thinkers, and laboured for almost three years, debated at great length which electoral system would be best suited to India before finally choosing to retain the FPTP electoral system. Various systems of proportional representation were considered and attracted many advocates, given India’s extremely diverse and multi-ethnic society, but FPTP was chosen, mainly to avoid fragmented legislatures and to help the formation of stable governments—stability being a major consideration in a country emerging from immediate post-colonial communal bloodshed and with widespread poverty and illiteracy. Under the Indian Constitution, voters elect a 543-member Lok Sabha, or lower house, from single-member districts. By contrast, the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha or Council of States, and the corresponding upper houses of some states, are indirectly elected by members of the state legislative assemblies. There are also a president and vice-president who are indirectly elected by the members of parliament and state legislative assemblies. General elections are held once every five years, but the president may dissolve the Lok Sabha on the advice of the prime minister before its term is over, as in the recent case of 2004, or if he or she is convinced that no stable government can be formed, as in 1991. The prime minister holds office for as long as he or she can command a majority in the Lok Sabha. All the successive Congress Party governments which ruled India continuously until 1977 served for almost five years, close to the maximum allowed in the constitution. From 1977 to 1997, governments were less stable, and a number of prime ministers had to resign as a result of party splits or votes of no confidence before completing their full term. Since 1997, a period of stability seems to be emerging again, now under coalitions of parties. All these political environments have arisen from the same FPTP electoral system. The major effect of the electoral system until 1977 was to guarantee majority governments based on a minority of voter support. The FPTP electoral system initially resulted in the ruling Congress Party securing stable majorities in the Lok Sabha, usually against a fragmented opposition. This fragmentation was characterized by a rise in popularity for regional and state parties in some areas. When the opposition parties combined to form coalitions and started putting up common candidates against the Congress candidates (as was the case in the 1977 and 1989 general elections), the Congress majorities vanished. Moreover, the nature of the system meant that small changes in share of the vote often had a dramatic impact upon the number of parliamentary seats won, as the following table, relating votes for the Congress Party to the number of seats won at successive elections, illustrates. The Congress Party’s Performance in Indian General Elections: The dramatically large effect of the FPTP electoral system on the number of seats with slight changes in voting
The same disproportionality between the share of votes obtained and the share of parliamentary seats won under the Indian FPTP electoral system can be seen in the case of the other major political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which led a coalition government up to 2004. Thus the overall results of elections to the Lok Sabha have not been anywhere near proportional. Support can often be divided by setting candidates of the same caste, religion or region against each other. In this context, FPTP gives an incentive to electoral participants to encourage multiple candidacies by their opposition, and its effect can be to produce a winner who has much less than an absolute majority of the total vote. However, despite the divided nature of India’s multi-ethnic democracy, the electoral system has retained a considerable degree of support, due in part to the practice of reserving seats for socially underprivileged and historically disadvantaged groups known as scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. These communities are thinly spread all over India, and the classical operation of FPTP would have resulted in them getting a comparatively very small number of parliamentary seats. The constitution, however, reserves districts for them in proportion to their numbers in the population, thus reserving 79 seats for the 15 per cent scheduled castes population and 41 seats for the 8 per cent scheduled tribes population. In these districts, although all electors have voting rights, only a member of the scheduled caste or tribe may stand for election. This has ensured that their parliamentary representation is in line with their proportion of the population. A constitutional amendment which seeks to reserve 33 per cent of seats for women representatives at the national- and state-level legislatures has long been debated, but without any success so far, although 33 per cent of the seats have been reserved for women at the Panchayat (district) level, the third tier of government, since 1993. The depth of popular support for the integrity of the electoral system became evident in 1977 when the election of the incumbent prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was set aside by a court after Congress had won a two-thirds legislative majority in 1971. She responded by curtailing fundamental constitutional rights for two years (1975–77), an authoritarian interlude in India’s otherwise unbroken history of competitive democracy. In the 1977 elections, her government lost power through a fair poll, signalling the unwillingness of India’s voters to accept undemocratic practices. For a period of 20 years, from 1977 to 1997, the FPTP electoral system seemed to have ushered in an era of instability, principally because of the formation of coalitions without common principles and the pursuit of narrow self-interest by political parties. The non-Congress opposition parties (without the communists) took over in government in 1977 by uniting into a composite entity, the Janata Party. It split within two years. In December 1989, a successor party, the Janata Dal, came to power, supported by the communist parties and the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); this government lasted ten months. At the general election of 1996, no party was able to form a stable government. The BJP won 161 seats and the Congress 140. But the strength of the electoral system re-emerged in 1999 when a firm alliance of parties under the leadership of the BJP was able to form a government and almost complete its full term. Similarly, after the May 2004 general election, the Indian National Congress Party, along with left parties and others, formed a coalition government at the national level. In 2000, the government of India established a National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution. This commission’s consultation process considered whether various provisions relating to the electoral process in the constitution should be amended or expanded. Its report, submitted to the government in 2002, recommended against any constitutional change in the electoral field, emphasizing that such changes as were needed could be brought about by amendments in the ordinary electoral legislation and even by subordinate legislation or executive instructions. However, the National Commission also observed that, at the last three general elections at national level, an average of two-thirds of Indian MPs had been elected under FPTP without a majority of 50 per cent plus one and with a plurality only, and considered the questions this raises about the legitimacy of representation. As a consequence, and in the context of the nationwide introduction of electronic voting which then took place in 2004, the National Commission recommended that the government and the Election Commission of India conduct a careful and full examination of the introduction of a Two-Round system, with the second round conducted between the two leading candidates in each district on the day after the first round. The report of the Election Commission of India following the 2004 election did not follow up on this proposal, although it did recommend both the introduction of a ‘none of these candidates’ option on ballot paper and the abolition of the provision by which one person is able to stand in two different single-member districts. The FPTP electoral system is often said to work best in countries where there are two major political parties. In India, by contrast, the Congress Party ruled continuously at the centre from 1952 to 1977 without any viable opposition. This monopoly ended in 1977. From single-party dominance, the pattern on the political arena changed, first to one of a competition between a single party and a coalition of parties, and from there to a competition between two coalitions of political parties—a trend that continued at the 2004 general election. The BJP started its upward mobility in the Indian Parliament with a shrill Hindu agenda, but after one full term in office the imperatives of electoral politics compelled it to scale down its ultra-rightist militant stance. It had to adopt an inclusive agenda, enabling it to appeal to Muslim, tribal, backward class and other Dalit (downtrodden) voters—who were once considered to be in the exclusive domain of the Congress Party. The electoral system issue has become the focus of one of the most heated and controversial debates in Jordan since multi-party politics was re-introduced by King Hussein. The November 1989 general election was conducted in an environment where political parties were banned, as had been the case since the early 1960s, but Muslim Brotherhood and pro-monarchist independents were easy to identify. For these elections, the first competitive ones for nearly thirty years, Jordan used the Block Vote electoral system, see Block Vote, which the British had utilised in the territory in the immediate post-war period, to elect their 80-member legislature. Out of these seats, eight were reserved for Christians and another three for Circassians, see Representation of Minorities. The country was divided into 20 constituencies, returning from two to nine MPs each, but the disparity in size between constituencies returning the same number of MPs was considerable. For example, both the Fifth District of Al-Assima and the constituency of Maan returned five members to the House of Deputies, but the Al-Assima district had over twice as many registered voters. With the Block Vote system, voters had as many votes as there were seats to be filled within the district, but not all voters made use of all their votes. There was widespread belief that in the 1989 elections voters cast one or two votes for candidates with whom they had family or kinship ties, and then cast subsequent ballots for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pre-eminent Islamic political movement. Although the non-party political nature of these elections makes political analysis rather speculative, the University of Jordan has estimated that Muslim Brotherhood candidates won approximately 30 percent of the seats with less than 20 percent of the votes, independent Islamics won 16 percent of the seats, again with far fewer votes, while pro-monarchist candidates won nearly 60 percent of the total vote but only filled 40 percent of seats. These results led King Hussein to believe that the Block Vote gave advantages to Muslim Brotherhood candidates, the most organized and coherent political movement in the embryonic party system, over pro-monarchist independents. It was for this reason that a new electoral system was introduced by Royal decree for the 1993 general elections; but at the same time Hussein lifted the ban on political parties, and this led to the emergence of a formal Islamic Action Front Party. Believing (probably correctly) that most Jordanian voters felt loyalty to family and kin first and to political ideology second, Hussein decided to maintain the multi-member districts but change the law to one where voters could only choose one candidate in their district. Thus, in a somewhat accidental manner, Jordan adopted the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV), see Single Non-Transferable Vote. In the Jordanian context SNTV is called "one man, one vote", even though this terminology in other countries is primarily used to indicate the fundamental principle of equality between voters rather than a particular electoral system. In 1993, participation increased slightly from the previous election, but it remained below 50 percent of the voting-age population. The decrease in the number of votes given to individuals forced all electors to consider what was their most important allegiance, political or otherwise. However, what was notable about the Jordanian House of Representatives elected in 1993 was that it contained a much more balanced and representative mix of party representatives and independents than had been previously the case. The Islamic Action Front won 20 percent of the seats with around 17 percent of the votes, Independent pro-monarchists won 60 percent of the seats with 58 percent of the votes, and smaller groupings of independent Islamists, Leftist, Nationalist, and Fateh Movement candidates won a handful of seats with a handful of votes. These results fit in well with the general expectation that SNTV should be much better than the Block Vote in providing a parliament which is relatively proportional to the vote distribution overall - a picture seen in other countries which use or have used SNTV, such as Japan from 1948 to 1995, see Japan - Electoral Reform, and Taiwan. Nevertheless, the reduction in choice given to voters, combined with the running of a considerable number of Islamic Action Front candidates, led to frustration in a number of quarters over the electoral law changes. During the run-up to the 1997 elections there have been calls to return to the 1989 system of the Block Vote or to adopt a new proportional or mixed electoral system. However, it is likely that Jordan will remain one of only two current examples of an SNTV system (along with Vanuatu) until the end of the century. The former French colony of Mali in West Africa made a successful transition to multi-party politics in 1991, after three decades of authoritarian rule. Principal among the new democratic institutions established at the time was a 129-seat National Assembly, with 116 seats elected by the domestic electorate and 13 by Malians residing overseas. The 116 domestic seats are allocated on the basis of population (one seat per 60,000 people) among 55 constituencies (circonscriptions) corresponding to the country's 49 administrative divisions (cercles) and the six communes in Bamako, the capital. Because of population disparities, the district magnitudes range from one to six seats per constituency. While independent candidates are permitted, political parties are required to submit closed-party lists with the same number of candidates as available seats, see List PR. Voters exercise their choice through categorical ballots, so they can vote for only one independent or party list of candidates. A Two-Round majority-runoff system is used whereby, in the absence of an independent candidate or party list winning an absolute majority in the first round, only the top two finishers in the first round compete in the second round, with the winner decided by an absolute majority, see The Two-Round System. In the case of the multi-member districts, the two highest party lists from the first round compete in the second, with the winning list gaining every seat in the district. A similar Two-Round majority formula is used in the presidential election. A proportional representation formula based on the largest remainder - the Hare quota - is used in municipal elections. As in most of francophone Africa, the new democratic institutions in Mali were debated and selected in a broadly-based National Conference, which included three representatives of each of the officially-registered political parties. The electoral system that emerged out of this process was a compromise aimed both at preserving the political power of the five major parties while creating electoral opportunities for numerous smaller ones, and at balancing the contradictory imperatives of securing broad political representation and producing stable governing majorities. Thus the initial proposal for using the Two-Round System (TRS) in single-member districts was rejected, in order to diminish the influence of local notables and strengthen party control over candidates. Also rejected was a proposal from smaller parties for a PR system, because of its anticipated potential for political instability. However, the adoption of the PR formula for municipal elections accommodated the smaller parties, most of which lacked national support and was regionally or locally based. Conversely, it was thought that a Two-Round majority-runoff system for legislative elections would encourage coalitions in the second round between smaller and larger parties. The adoption of the Two-Round majority-runoff formula for presidential elections reflects the consensus in most African countries that the head of the state must be supported by a majority of the electorate. The new Malian electoral system produced a relatively fair and competitive electoral process in 1992. The first round was contested by 23 officially registered parties, including three with national political bases, Alliance pour la democratie au Mali (ADEMA), Congres national d'Initiative démocratique (CNID), and Union soudanaise-Rassemblement démocratique africaine (USRDA), and two with a limited national base but with the potential of becoming national parties, Rassemblement pour la democratie et le progres (RDP) and Parti progressiste soudanaise (PSP). The rest had regional and local bases and no prospect of entering the national government without forming a coalition with the other five. The competitiveness of the system was illustrated by the fact that only 11 out of 44 constituencies were decided in the first round, with 15 seats won by the five parties. Of the ten contending parties in the second round, six had led in at least one constituency, but the leading party list was defeated in seven of the 44 constituencies. Indeed, each of the five major parties lost second-round district elections after leading in the first round. Combined with the entry of large numbers of small parties with limited electoral support, a phenomenon that is typical of new democracies established after an extended period of authoritarian rule, Mali's new system produced the expected political impact on vote-seat disproportionality and multi-partism. Thus, the Two-Round majority formula produced a high level of disproportionality (between seats and votes), a moderate degree of electoral multi-partism (3.3 effective electoral parties), and a moderately low legislative multi-partism (2.2 effective legislative parties). The Malian electoral system has effectively balanced representation and governance, but at the same time fostered a viable parliamentary opposition. The use of closed party lists in multi-member districts, moreover, has encouraged ethnic and regional alliances among otherwise socially fragmented and politically weak groups. However, several problems remain. First, the very use of party lists weakens the constituency linkages of elected representatives. Confronted with strong pressures for constituency work, many MPs have informally divided up their constituencies into individual bailiwicks for that purpose. Second, the National Assembly possesses only a limited capacity to check executive authority, since institutionally its powers remain weak relative to the strong executive presidency. And finally, this problem is compounded by the disproportionately large percentage (66 percent) of seats won by ADEMA, the incumbent ruling party, due in part to the electoral formula and in part to population disparities among the constituencies, and especially in rural constituencies. These problems prompted opposition demands for electoral reform. This led to political negotiations between the opposition parties and ADEMA which produced agreements on three issues prior to the April 1997 legislative elections: the use of PR formulae for allocating some National Assembly seats, which was subsequently declared unconstitutional by the judiciary, a 27 percent increase in the size of the National Assembly from 116 to 147, with a reduction in single-member and a corresponding increase in multi-member constituencies, potentially giving the opposition parties a degree of electoral advantage, and the creation of a broadly representative Electoral Commission. However, the quickly created Commission was unprepared to take on the complex task of election management. The ensuing logistical and administrative problems provoked opposition demands for the annulment of the 1997 legislative elections, to which ADEMA agreed, even though early returns confirmed predictions about its victory. The fact that these changes in the electoral system were negotiated attests to the success of Mali's new democracy in managing political conflicts peacefully. It also indicates that the choice and reform of new democratic institutions are not pre-determined, but are negotiated outcomes of which future political consequences are often obscure. To what extent the recent reforms of Mali's electoral system will have the desired effect when they are implemented remains to be seen. In 1993 the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) split and lost control of the main chamber of the Japanese Diet in the general election that followed. One of the achievements of the new coalition that formed in its place was reform of the electoral system, which had been widely viewed as a source of corruption and the basis of the LDP’s long-standing dominance. Under the old electoral system (SNTV), the 511 members of the House of Representatives (the lower house) were elected from 129 districts of between one and six seats each. This system had been in use since 1947 and had produced a distinctive approach to elections among the major parties, particularly the LDP. Under this system any party that hoped to win enough seats to obtain a majority or a significant minority of seats needed to put up multiple candidates in most districts. Thus, in order to maximize their representation, parties needed to find methods of ensuring that each candidate would poll the minimum number of votes required to be elected, rather than having each candidate follow his natural instincts by attempting to maximize his vote. A candidate who received more than his ‘fair share’ of the vote could actually hurt colleagues who received fewer votes: candidate A’s ‘unnecessary votes’ could be enough to prevent candidate B of the same party from gaining a seat. The LDP dealt with this problem through particularistic policies that targeted selected groups of voters and provided them with ‘pork’ and other benefits. As the first winning party under the SNTV system, the LDP controlled the spoils of office, making it difficult for the various opposition parties to mount an effective challenge. Not surprisingly, this system contributed to corruption. Furthermore, under such a personal and particularistic system, political choice and debate based on substantive policy issues were not given due importance. By the early 1990s citizens’ anger at the system had produced great pressure for electoral reform. The LDP’s inability to agree on and pass reform legislation contributed to a split in the party that gave power to the opposition (including the LDP defectors) in 1993. The concept of a US-style two-party system and frequent alternation of parties in government had grown in popularity among politicians, scholars and the media, and had come to be seen as a ‘magic bullet’ that would solve the problems of the Japanese political system. As a result, many called for the establishment of a system of single-member districts (SMDs). However, members of the smaller parties in the new government feared that this would crowd them out of the system and thus opposed such a move. The resulting compromise created the two-tier system that is in use today. The reformed electoral system is a Parallel system consisting of two tiers—List PR and FPTP single-member districts. Each voter casts one vote in each tier. For the first election under this system, in 1996, there were 200 seats in the PR tier divided between 11 regional districts, ranging in size from seven to 33 seats, and 300 SMDs in the second tier. Efforts at rationalization led the Diet to reduce the number of PR seats to 180 prior to the second election in 2000. The 11 PR districts now range in size from six to 29 seats. In a Parallel system, there is no compensatory mechanism that adjusts the overall number of seats won by each party to better reflect the proportion of the vote actually received. The predominance of SMD seats over PR seats thus advantages larger parties that can win SMD seats. The two tiers of the Japanese electoral system are related in another, more unusual, way, however. Japan’s electoral laws allow candidates to mount dual candidacies by standing both on a PR list and for an SMD seat. While the PR tier is technically closed-list, there is also a provision that allows for some degree of voter influence over the ranking of candidates on the lists. Parties are allowed to present lists that give equal rankings to some or all of those candidates who are nominated both on a party list and for an SMD. After those who win in the SMDs are removed from consideration, the final ranking of the SMD losers on the PR list is determined by how well each polled in comparison to the winner in his or her district. This provision has a number of benefits for parties. First, it allows them to abdicate the politically challenging job of ranking candidates. Second, it encourages candidates who are ranked equally on the PR lists to campaign more vigorously to win votes in their districts. While parties do make much use of equal ranking, they also retain the option to give some candidates firm rankings. This is also useful, as a higher or ‘safe’ ranking on the PR list can be used as an incentive to convince a candidate to run in a single-member district in which there is little chance of winning. The first trial of the system came in 1996, and the results were largely seen as disappointing. In the years since the new electoral laws were passed, the LDP had re-established itself in power and the opposition parties had undergone a number of realignments. This instability led to the persistence of previous patterns, an overall win for the LDP, and little movement towards the hoped-for two-party system. The somewhat complicated nature of the system also produced dissatisfaction among the electorate, particularly regarding the phenomenon of losing SMD candidates being ‘resurrected’ in the PR tier. The results were especially counter-intuitive in cases in which the first- and third- (and occasionally fourth-) placed candidates from a single-member district won seats but the second-placed candidate (usually from the most competitive of the opposition parties) failed to win a place. It was also unclear that any significant decline in corruption and money politics had taken place. By the time of the second election under the new system, in 2000, there had been a reduction in the number of competitive candidates vying for each SMD seat. However, the move towards a two-party system again made only slight progress as the non-communist opposition was still splintered and the centrist Komeito party had switched sides and joined the LDP-led coalition. The third test of the new system took place in November 2003. In September, the small Liberal Party merged with the dominant opposition Democratic Party (DPJ). The merged party (which retained the DPJ name) gained an impressive 40 seats in an election that featured the use of party manifestos for the first time. The remaining opposition parties of significant size lost all but a few of their seats. On the government side, the LDP and the smaller of its two coalition parties also lost seats, leading to the smaller party being absorbed by the LDP. With most seats concentrated in the hands of the two leading parties, only Komeito remains as a significant small party. The LDP is still in coalition with Komeito, in part because it needs Komeito support in the upper house, but also because support from the well-organized Komeito played a large part in the victories of many of its SMD candidates. The results of the legislative election of 2003 support the idea that the effects of electoral system reform are not felt immediately and that entrenched habits and processes require time to change. These outcomes also suggest that the mixed-member system may not be likely to produce a complete consolidation into a US-style two-party system, as the existence of the PR tier allows third parties to persist. In contemporary Central Asia, elections are as much political theatre as contests for office. After the break-up of the Soviet Union in late 1991, most of the countries in the region descended into one-man rule or civil war. The semi-competitive elections held in the last months of the Soviet order gave way to elections of acclamation in the first years of independence, with political power becoming increasingly centralized in the hands of the founding presidents of the republics. For a time it appeared that Kyrgyzstan might resist the temptation of authoritarianism; however, by the mid-1990s its president had begun to limit society’s ability to hold the state and its representatives accountable. The election that brought to power the country’s first president, Askar Akaev, illustrates the role of changing rules in shaping electoral outcomes. In the late Soviet era, parliaments selected the head of state—the chair of the Supreme Soviet—in each republic. In Kyrgyzstan, the election law stipulated that if the Parliament failed to produce a winner after two rounds of voting all the candidates would be disqualified. In October 1990, this quirk in the electoral rules allowed Akaev—a little-regarded Gorbachev loyalist who was opposed to the dominant conservative forces in the Kyrgyz Communist Party—to win the next round of the parliamentary election for head of state of the Kyrgyz Republic. The following year, Kyrgyzstan, like most other Soviet republics, introduced popular direct elections for a newly-designed office of president whose powers supplanted those of the collapsing Communist Party. In October 1991, just weeks before Kyrgyzstan became an independent country, Akaev won the election for the presidency unopposed. He won the two subsequent presidential elections—in December 1995 and October 2000—by wide margins in the first round, although widespread violations were reported during both elections. The rules governing presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan are a mixture of traditional and unconventional elements. Elections are held every five years and are decided by a two-round majority run-off system: if no candidate receives an absolute majority in the first round, the two candidates with the most votes proceed to a second round, where the candidate with the most votes wins. New elections must be called if less than half the electorate turns out for either the first or the second round. Presidents may serve for no more than two terms, although the Constitutional Court in Kyrgyzstan, unlike its counterpart in the Russian Federation, made an exception for the sitting president by ruling that his first term did not count because it began before the limit of two terms was adopted in the 1993 constitution. To stand for president, a candidate must be at least 35 and not more than 65 years of age. Candidates must also satisfy several further requirements. First, they must undergo an examination by the Language Commission to ensure that they are fluent in the state language, Kyrgyz. This requirement, introduced to discourage Russians and Russified Kyrgyz from contesting the presidency, was used in the 2000 election to disqualify Akaev’s most prominent challenger, Feliks Kulov. Second, they must pay from their personal funds a deposit equal to 1,000 times the minimum monthly wage—essentially the lifetime income of a poor person. For the deposit to be returned, a candidate must receive 10 per cent of the vote, and proposals now being debated by Parliament would increase that to 15 per cent. A further barrier to entry is the requirement that a candidate receive 50,000 signatures, of which at least 3 per cent must come from each of the country’s eight territories—a provision designed to ensure that a president has adequate support in both the north and the south, whose elites have been at odds in recent years. The relative stability of the rules governing presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan contrasts with the frequent changes made in the parliamentary electoral system. Perhaps the most dramatic have been to the size and structure of the Parliament. Independent Kyrgyzstan inherited from the Soviet era a unicameral Parliament of 350 deputies who had been elected in February 1990 in single-member districts using a two-round voting system. Following constitutional changes made in 1994 by referendum—the president’s preferred means of enhancing his powers and reducing those of the Parliament—this unicameral assembly was replaced by a bicameral legislature, with 60 members in the Legislative Assembly and 45 in the Assembly of People’s Representatives. In the parliamentary elections of February 1995 and February 2000, the entire Assembly of People’s Representatives and 45 members of the Legislative Assembly were elected in 45 single-member districts using two-round voting. The remaining 15 members of the Legislative Assembly were elected by List PR using closed lists and a single nationwide district with a 5 per cent formal threshold, that is, parties must secure at least 5 per cent of the total vote nationwide to be represented in the Parliament. For the 15 PR seats, each party had the right to put forward a list of 30 persons, and in cases where candidates from the list also stood in single-member districts and won, their names were removed from the party list. The reduction of the number of deputies from 350 to 105, ostensibly designed as a cost-saving measure, facilitated presidential control of the Parliament by trebling the size of the single-member districts and thus reducing the ability of smaller parties to win seats. The presence of a handful of List PR seats in the new Parliament did little to compensate for the disadvantages that a diminutive Parliament posed for small parties. Moreover, the post-communist elections have returned parliaments whose composition differed dramatically from that of the rubber-stamp Soviet legislatures. Communist Party control of candidate nomination had worked in such a way as to create bodies in which those who had passed the approval process comprised a broad cross-section of society. In contrast, the post-communist assemblies in Kyrgyzstan were almost exclusively male and had a disproportionate number of executive officials and the newly rich. Kyrgyzstan has recently changed the rules for parliamentary elections again. Revisions to the constitution adopted by referendum in February 2003 called for the 105-member bicameral assembly to be replaced at the next parliamentary election with a unicameral legislature of 75 members. The new election law of January 2004, which has been much criticized inside and outside Kyrgyzstan, provides that the 75 deputies will be elected in single-member districts using a two-round majority run-off voting system. Further reducing the size of the Assembly and abandoning the party list seats is likely to reduce the representation of minorities yet again, increase the executive branch’s influence over the legislature and emasculate an already weak party system. It may also strengthen the political salience of the regions by giving the central party leaders less influence over the selection of candidates. Because the smaller number of seats in recent parliaments produced larger electoral districts, it has been easier for ethnic Kyrgyz to win seats than for members of ethnic minorities. Where the ethnic Kyrgyz majority is now over-represented in the Parliament, the substantial Uzbek, Russian and German minorities are all significantly under-represented. In particular, the Uzbeks hold a share of the seats which is less than half of their share of the population. In recent years, the political opposition in Kyrgyzstan has found it increasingly difficult to contest presidential and parliamentary elections. The deference of the judiciary, the Electoral Commission and the Language Commission to presidential authority has led to the selective prosecution and disqualification of electoral candidates. Moreover, presidential influence on the media has prevented the opposition from waging effective campaigns. In the 2000 presidential election, for example, President Akaev received almost ten hours of coverage on the national television channel, KTR, while his principal opponent received less than five minutes. One of the few sources of independent reporting on electoral campaigns, the foreign press, is threatened with legal sanctions if it criticizes establishment candidates. Voting irregularities are also widespread. The conduct of elections as well as the changing electoral rules has impeded the development of political competition in Kyrgyzstan. For most of the first decade of independence, elections to representative assemblies below the national level were held in single-member districts using a two-round voting system. Since 1999, however, regional and local assembly elections have been conducted in multi-member districts using SNTV. Although the governors of the country’s seven regions are still appointed by the president, the chief executives of cities, districts and villages are now selected by the members of the local assemblies. The sole exception to this pattern is the capital, Bishkek, where the mayor is directly elected. As in Georgia and Ukraine, the manipulation of electoral rules and the conduct of elections ultimately delegitimized the elections themselves, which contributed to the March 24, 2005 revolution in Kyrgyzstan that overthrew the Akaev presidency and placed the newly elected parliament and the entire system of electoral rules under review. Like other former British colonies, Sri Lanka inherited a Westminster model of parliamentary government, with universal suffrage established in 1931 and full general elections in 1947, but over time found that First Past the Post (FPTP) elections were incapable of representing minority interests, see First Past the Post (FPTP). In 1978, the decision was taken to transform Sri Lankan government from a parliamentary system into a French-style executive presidency, and a Select Committee was appointed to consider the necessary wide-ranging constitutional changes. Sri Lanka is a nation with a long history of bitter ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil communities. It was for this reason that the constitutional drafters were very conscious of the need to ensure that the new office of executive president would be filled by a national figure representative of all groups in society, and capable of encouraging consensual politics between those groups. The new president would have to represent all groups in Sri Lankan society and be seen as a figure capable of moderating between opposing interests. These objectives focussed attention on the method of election to the new office, and particularly on the means by which ethnic minorities could be included in the selection process. While the method of election for such a figure would be crucial to the fate of the office, and would require at least a majority of voters supporting the successful candidate, only once in 50 years had any political party secured a majority of the vote at a national election; indeed, most governments had been elected with considerably less than that. The party system in Sri Lanka was fragmented between two dominant Sinhalese parties and a number of small minority parties. Because much of the 1978 constitution had its philosophic origins in the French Fifth Republic model of a strong executive presidency combined with an elected legislature, the initial plans provided for a Two-Round System (TRS) of presidential elections, see Two-Round System. However, the extra cost and security issues associated with holding two separate elections within a two-week period was seen as being a major defect, particularly since Sri Lanka was in the midst of a violent civil war at the time. These considerations prompted an innovative solution to the problem: to combine the initial and run-off rounds of voting into one election via the expression of preferences. Under this system, which continues to be used, if no candidate has a majority of first preferences, all candidates other than the two leaders are eliminated, and the second preferences distributed to one or the other of the top two to ensure a majority winner; voters can number up to three preferences, which will then be distributed to one or the other of the top two candidates in the event of no candidate having an absolute majority. The system thus achieves in one election what a Two-Round System achieves in two, see Alternative Vote. In addition to ensuring that the president would be elected, whether outright or via preferences, by an absolute majority of all voters, the system has the additional feature of encouraging candidates to look beyond their own party or ethnic group for second-preference support from other groups. Sri Lanka has now conducted three national presidential elections under the supplementary vote system, in 1982, 1988, and 1994. Contrary to expectations, at each of these elections the winning candidate has achieved an absolute majority in the first round, and thus no preferences have been counted. The possibility that preferences may one day decide the result, however, does appear to have influenced the campaign strategies of Sri Lankan parties, and there is considerably more attention paid to minority groups in election campaigning for presidential elections than was formerly the case. The result of the ordinary National Assembly elections in Lesotho in May 1998 was very clear. The governing Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) won an overwhelming electoral victory, taking 79 of the 80 seats in the National Assembly. The only problem was that LCD had only received the support of slightly over 60 per cent of the electorate. The result in terms of number of seats won was yet another example of how the FPTP electoral system can lead to remarkable discrepancies between the share of the vote and the share of the seats won by political parties. A discrepancy of this kind should not come as a surprise–it had happened before–but it was followed by the losing parties, and especially the main opposition party, the Basotho National Party (BNP), crying ‘Foul’. This was also nothing new, but it was a sad surprise that the accusations about the overall correctness of the 1998 election results (which were never seriously challenged), some time after they were published, incensed the public to such a degree that they started rioting in the streets of the capital, Maseru, setting fire to and demolishing public as well as private buildings. The government called on the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to intervene, and the SADC did so, relying mainly on the armed forces of South Africa. When order was restored, an agreement was reached on 2 October 1998 (later guaranteed by the SADC) which called for the establishment of an Interim Political Authority (IPA) on which the 12 parties which had put up candidates in the elections were given two seats each, no matter how small their electoral support. The IPA’s brief was to develop a new electoral system and suggest other political and administrative measures to strengthen Lesotho’s peaceful democratic development. However, all recommendations would be submitted to the government, which would then take them to Parliament to be enacted in the ordinary way. The ideas behind the establishment of the IPA were clearly inspired by the institutions of the negotiation process in South Africa during the early part of the transition process, but it was not taken into account that the two processes were so different that the institutional solutions also had to be different. The subsequent political process in Lesotho was not an easy one, and it can be no surprise that the opposition’s overwhelming majority on the IPA—by 22 to 2 against the government of the day—was not conducive to a constructive climate of negotiation. The IPA representatives, none of whom had been able to ensure a seat for themselves in the National Assembly, were eager to suggest an electoral system which would keep the single-member constituencies and at the same time provide for a much more proportional outcome at the next elections than had been the case in 1998. The obvious solution was either an MMP or a Parallel System. A German expert on electoral systems was invited to give a presentation, after which the IPA majority opted for the MMP solution, with some seats allocated in single-member districts and others allocated from party lists on a compensatory basis. The LCD—in complete control of the legislature—decided to opt for the alternative, the Parallel System, which would give it, on top of its expected massive share of the single-member district seats, an additional number reflecting its share of the votes cast for the seats not allocated in the single-member districts. It soon transpired that the IPA was not aware of all the practical details that should be taken into consideration when deciding to go for MMP, such as the seat allocation formula, the issue of a formal electoral threshold, overhang mandates, one or two ballots, and so on. The number of seats in the two categories was also an issue, even though most IPA members seemed to agree that keeping the 80 single-member districts was a good idea and that it was only natural to have 50 compensatory seats. The basis for the latter suggestion was a little awkward: previously Lesotho had had 65 single-member districts. If it returned to that number and then added an identical number of compensatory seats (as in Germany), the National Assembly would have 130 seats altogether. However, if the size of the Assembly was to be 130, as the number of single-member districts for the time being was 80, and as it was difficult to imagine this number being changed in the immediate future, the number of compensatory seats had to be 50. The government challenged this number, among other reasons because Lesotho is a small and poor country which should only have a reasonable number of parliamentary seats. The political conflict was easy to understand. The IPA, which was tasked with suggesting institutional solutions to the political impasse, was strongly in favour of MMP with 80 single-member districts and 50 compensatory seats, while the government—in complete control of the legislature, which had to pass all the IPA’s suggestions—argued that the best solution was a Parallel system with the same 80 single-member districts and probably 40 seats to be allocated separately on the basis of (preferably) the same ballot as was used in the single-member districts, although a second ballot was also an option. The political compromise over the electoral system took some time to reach, mainly because of the level of distrust between the two sides and some hesitation about the very idea of compromise. It was eventually agreed that the electoral system should be MMP (which was the main opposition objective), while the number of seats should be 120 (80 + 40), which was very important for the government side. While the government held all the cards through its huge parliamentary majority, it was clear that some concession had to be made in order to ensure wider acceptance and thus legitimacy of the revisions. The consequent constitutional amendment required strong support not only in the National Assembly but also in the Senate (made up mainly of chiefs), which was another reason why compromise was necessary. The reason for this was that, if the two houses of Parliament could not agree on the constitutional amendment, it had to be put to a popular referendum, and this was not really possible because of disagreement over the electoral register. Eventually, the constitutional amendment was formally adopted in May 2001. Only then could the necessary changes to the electoral law be considered. The 1998 internationally guaranteed agreement had provided for early elections, to take place in May 2000. This was completely unrealistic, not least because the government and the opposition (the IPA) were not really on speaking terms, and a new Independent Electoral Commission had only been appointed in April. Agreement was then reached on delaying the election by a year, but further delays in reaching agreement about the electoral system, concerns about an adequate voter registration system and so on meant that a new general election was only possible in May 2002. The election went reasonably well. The LCD, not entirely unexpectedly, won 55 per cent of the party (PR) votes but 65 per cent of all the seats. The reason for this was that the party won 77 of the 78 single-member districts contested on election day (elections in the remaining two were postponed because of the death of candidates, but eventually the LCD also won them). The system does not have overhang mandates, so the opposition got all 40 compensatory seats. Seven of the eight opposition parties which won seats ended up being under-represented in terms of share of votes compared to share of seats. This under-representation was, however, very much smaller than it had been in 1998, and the National Assembly of Lesotho is now a fairly representative body in terms of political representativeness. Thus the main objectives of the efforts after the 1998 troubles have certainly been achieved. It is clear that the combination of (a) one party taking almost all the single-member districts, (b) only 33 per cent of the seats being compensatory seats, and (c) the absence of surplus seats may continue to cause some degree of disproportionality in future elections as well. However, this seems a small price to pay for the various improvements in the system achieved during the protracted political compromise-seeking process of 1999–2001, when it was also a concern not to have too many members of Parliament in a small and poor country. Single-Transferable Vote (STV) has been in use in Maltese elections since 1921, long before this small Mediterranean Island nation achieved independence from Britain in 1964. Although Malta subsequently became a republic and replaced the office of Governor-General (representative of the Queen) with a President, it retained the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy. The constitution mandates election of the members of the House of Representatives, Malta's unicameral parliament, "upon the principle of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote." The maximum length of a parliamentary term is five years, but the legislature may be dissolved earlier. There are no other elective offices except for local councils introduced by the 1993 Local Councils Act, whose members are elected by STV as well. For purposes of parliamentary election the country is currently divided into 13 divisions, all of which is of roughly the same population size. In contrast to Ireland, each district elects the same number of MPs (five), for a total size of parliament of 65 (ignoring any bonus seats). Each seat corresponds to approximately 4,200 registered voters. In 1996 the quota needed to secure a seat ranged from 3,245 to 3,519 votes. Candidates may simultaneously stand in two divisions. If they win seats in both, they must resign one, which is then filled through a so-called "casual election". This is not a by-election in the conventional sense; instead the winner is determined by applying STV procedures to the ballot papers credited to the vacating candidate in the general election. On the ballot, candidates are listed alphabetically within party blocs. Voters express their preferences by placing sequential numbers next to the candidates' names. There is no obligation to rank-order all of them or to stick to candidates of a single party. Indeed only a single preference (indicated by the number 1) is required for a vote to be valid. Unlike their Australian counterparts, Maltese voters do not have a whole-ticket option. Nor do the parties prepare a recommended rank-order of candidates. There are three noteworthy characteristics of Malta's experience with STV:
In 1981 the MLP won a majority of seats in parliament even though Nationalist Party candidates had received a majority of first-preference votes nation-wide. Allegedly this had occurred as a result of deliberate gerrymandering by the MLP government, although such charges are hard to prove. More importantly, however, this seemingly "perverse" result led to a major constitutional crisis when the Nationalist refused to accept the outcome of the election and walked out of Parliament, thus putting the legitimacy of the entire system in doubt. The Nationalist boycott ended when the MLP agreed to discuss constitutional reforms to prevent a recurrence of the scenario of victors being turned into losers. In 1987 the constitution was changed accordingly. Article 52, as amended, assures that the party with a majority of first-preference votes will receive as many additional seats as necessary to give it a majority in parliament, thus allowing it to form the next government. A second amendment, adopted more recently, provides for a similar adjustment for the party with the most votes (but not a majority) where more than two parties compete for votes but only two parties win seats in Parliament. In 1987 and 1996 additional seats were thus allocated to the Nationalist Party and the MLP, respectively. Because of these constitutional amendments the voters' first preference on the ballot is now not only an ordinal vote for the most-favored candidate, but also a categorical vote for a party. In addition, at least as long as the two-party system perseveres, it is an expression of a preference on which party shall form the government. A general election can thus be said to provide a clear judgment on the record of the incumbent government and a clear mandate for the victorious party. What lessons might be derived from Malta's experience with STV? Malta can be said to provide a cautionary tale. While useful generalizations can be made about the effects of electoral systems, there are sometimes unique circumstances that lead to unexpected results. As seen here, a highly proportional electoral system is also subject to failure under certain conditions. At the same time, however, Malta's handling of the ensuing crisis is cause for optimism, for it provides an apt illustration of how constitutional engineering solutions can be found to redress institutional failures when they occur, and how they can be implemented through bargaining and compromise. Leaving aside the disproportionality issue that came to a head in 1981, we must note that Malta has had a series of single-party governments and a fair amount of alternation in partisan control. The intense intra-party competition engendered by STV combined with over-nomination has not had the effect of rendering the parties ineffective as political organizations either in government or in opposition. Malta's experience in administering the allegedly complex single transferable vote system is also encouraging. Although the determination of winners is more cumbersome and time-consuming than is the case with other systems, the process is manageable. The number of counts necessary to fill all seats in a district is not a function of the number of voters/ballots, but of the number of candidates in that district, although a larger electorate (and thus larger number of ballots) will of course increase the workload. Nor do Maltese voters appear to be overly perplexed by their system. Voter participation is almost universal (more than 95 percent in recent elections) and the percentage of invalid ballots is low (rarely more than one percent). Like the Republic of Ireland, Malta is not an ethnically or religiously diverse country, and thus provides no opportunity to assess the performance of STV in terms of minority representation. It is clear, however, that under Malta's version of STV, minorities would be assured of their ability to elect candidates of their choice irrespective of the preferences of the majority as long as their members make up 17 percent of the voters in any district [Quota = votes/(5+1) +1]. Increasing the number of seats per district could lower this threshold further, although there are obvious practical limitations in terms of ballot length and complexity. It is also clear that women are in a position to elect at least two MPs in each district (or 40 percent of the seats) regardless of the voting preferences of men, although this potential voting power does not currently translate into the election of large numbers of female candidates in Malta. STV has many favorable characteristics in theory and has worked well in Ireland, Malta, and Australia in practice. What is lacking is a broader experiential base to learn from since the actual use of the system is limited to the Anglo-American world (with very few exceptions). We do not know for sure how it would perform in a variety of other settings. One thing is hardly in doubt, however: STV hands voters the most sophisticated instrument to express their preferences; it meticulously aggregates these diverse preferences and translates them into parliamentary representation. Even where parties are as strong and predominant in politics as in Malta, STV still assures that the voting public will determine the identity of all the politicians that take up seats in parliament to collectively represent the will of the people. Where such grass-roots democratic control is deemed desirable, STV would seem to be the system of choice. The flip side is that the ability of the party leadership to determine the composition of its parliamentary group is limited correspondingly. Mexico has a presidential system with strong and independent legislative, executive and judicial branches. The doctrine of the separation of powers, which did not function in practice between 1929 and 1997, when the single official party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), controlled both the executive and Congress, has been resurrected and is now the dominant feature of politics at the federal level. The president is elected by plurality vote. In the 1988 and 1994 elections, the winner won about half of the votes cast, but in the 2000 election the winner, Vicente Fox, won only 42.5 per cent of the votes. Proposals exist to amend the constitution to introduce a run-off election between the two front-runners if no candidate wins an absolute majority in the first round. Their success will depend primarily on the electoral prospects of the major parties, as well as considerations of the cost of a second round. The president is elected for a six-year term and can never be re-elected or reappointed. This prevents presidents from becoming entrenched in power, but it also diminishes their accountability because they never have to face the electorate again. Considering the ideological and symbolic roots behind the prohibition on presidential re-election (it was a focal point in the Mexican Revolution), it is unlikely that this clause will be repealed soon. The Mexican Congress is bicameral, the Chamber of Deputies elected for three-year terms and the Senate elected for six years (synchronized with the presidential term). Both chambers are elected through mixed systems, using FPTP and List PR. The Chamber of Deputies has 500 members, 300 elected by FPTP in single-member districts (SMDs) and 200 elected by List PR in five 40-member regional districts. The 300 FPTP seats are apportioned to the states in proportion to population, with the restriction that no state can have fewer than two seats. The National Electoral Institute (INE)—as a consequence of an electoral reform that took place through 2013 and 2014, it substituted the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE)—, the independent electoral authority, uses the pure Sainte-Laguë Method to allocate seats among the states. INE then creates SMDs of roughly equal population within each of the states, generally favouring municipal boundaries over achieving electoral districts with equal populations, and also divides the country into the five 40-member districts for the purpose of elections to the List PR seats. Each party nominates a candidate for each SMD and presents a rank-ordered list of 40 candidates for each of the five regional districts. Parties may form total or partial coalitions for electoral purposes, running the same candidate in some districts. If they do they must submit agreements before INE. If parties form a coalition to elect the president, then they must form a coalition for all the Chamber of Deputies and Senate contests as well. In the 2000 election, two of the three presidential candidates were backed by coalitions. In the 2003 legislative elections, there was a partial coalition between PRI and the Greens, which ran together in 97 single-member districts and separately in 203, and had separate PR lists (the parties had agreed on how to divide the votes from the 97 districts for the purposes of assigning seats to the List PR candidates, which is a possibility no longer available after the 2013 electoral reform). Voters cast a single ballot for deputies. The sum of all of the votes from the district FPTP contests is then used to calculate the number of PR seats to be allocated to each party, using the Largest Remainder Method and the Hare Quota, and there is a 3 per cent threshold based on the total national vote included in the law. The number of PR seats assigned to a party is independent of the number of FPTP districts won, with two important exceptions: no party can ever win more than 300 seats, and no party’s share of the 500 seats can be more than 8 percentage points higher than its share of the valid vote. A party must therefore win at least 42.2 per cent of the valid vote plus at least 167 districts to win 251 seats in the Lower Chamber. In 1997 and 2003, the PRI’s share of the seats was limited by the 8 per cent rule. In 2000, the 8 per cent rule did not affect either PRI or the National Action Party (PAN). Seats are assigned to party list deputies in the five 40-member regional districts, also using the Hare Quota with largest remainders. The lists are rank-ordered and closed, so that the deputies higher on the list are elected first, and voters cannot modify the order of the list. The move towards pluralism and multiparty politics in Mexico has been a slow process of evolution. Since 1979 there have been extensive reforms to the electoral formulas used to elect the Chamber of Deputies. The formula used in the 1979, 1982 and 1985 elections had 300 SMDs and 100 party list seats, which were restricted to parties that did not win more than 60 districts. The formula used in 1988 increased the number of party list seats to 200, but guaranteed that the party that won a plurality of districts would win a majority of seats, regardless of its share of the vote. A ceiling was established to the number of seats a single party could win, at 350 seats. The 1991 reforms maintained the ceiling and the majority-assuring clause, but required that the winning party win at least 30 per cent of the vote. It also created bonus seats for the winning party, so that it would not have to function with only a narrow majority in the Chamber. In return, the government ceded some control over the electoral process to a partially autonomous electoral management body (initially, IFE, the Federal Electoral Institute, but currently the National Electoral Institute, INE) and to a federal electoral court. The 1994 reforms eliminated the majority-assuring clause and created a Parallel system, in which the elections to the List PR seats were completely decoupled from the elections to the plurality seats. No party could win more than 60 per cent of the seats (300 of 500) in most circumstances. However, this led to the most disproportional result that Mexico has experienced under mixed systems, with PRI winning 60 per cent of the seats with about 50 per cent of the vote. So in 1996 the electoral law was adjusted again to set the limit to the number of seats a party could win at 300 and the maximum level of over-representation, as described above, at 8 percentage points. This electoral rule has been as stable as any since multiparty representation was established in 1964, having been since the 1997 elections. No party has won an absolute majority of seats under this rule. The 1996 reform also made INE fully autonomous and enhanced the powers of the federal electoral court. Currently there are proposals to make the Chamber of Deputies either more or less proportional, decreasing or increasing the proportion of list deputies, and decreasing or eliminating the margin of over-representation. However, since no two parties have similar goals, reforms are unlikely to come about. The Senate before 1994 had 64 members, two for each of the 31 states plus the Federal District. The senators were elected under various plurality rules. The result was that until 1988 all senators were members of the PRI. That monopoly in the Senate allowed the government to make concessions to opposition, making the Chamber of Deputies more proportional. By 1994, there were calls for the Senate to be made more widely representative as well. It was expanded to 128 members, with at least a quarter of the seats guaranteed to the opposition. For the 1997 election, a mixed system was established. Each state elects three senators, and in addition 32 are elected by PR on a single national list. In each state, a party nominates a ranked slate of two Senate candidates. Both candidates of the party that wins the most votes are elected as senators, and the first listed candidate of the party that is placed second wins the third Senate seat. Voters cannot adjust the order of the candidates. Each party also nominates a closed, ranked list of 32 candidates for the national PR list. All the votes for the Senate in each state are totalled at the national level. The formula used is a Largest Remainder Method using the Hare Quota and a 3 per cent threshold. Unlike the Chamber of Deputies, there is no linkage between the plurality and the PR seats; instead, the two systems run in parallel and the PR seats do not compensate for any disproportionality. This electoral formula would create a majority for the largest party if it wins around 40 per cent of the national vote, favourably distributed, and has a margin of three or four points over its nearest rival. Winning two-thirds of the seats in the Senate (important for constitutional reforms, electing Supreme Court justices, and internal procedural matters) requires two-thirds of the national vote. No party has won an absolute majority of Senate seats. Several proposals have been submitted in Congress to eliminate the party list senators, with arguments that a national list is not appropriate for a Chamber that represents the states. However, simply eliminating the PR list would benefit the PRI, which is placed either first or second in all but one of the states, and is thus likely to be opposed by other parties. Alternatives would have three or four senators per state, all elected by PR, most likely using the D’Hondt Formula. The 2013 electoral reform has made re-election for consecutive terms a possibility for all federal deputies and senators (and also for state legislators, mayors, and municipal councillors). Previously, legislators could be elected to the other chamber when their term expired, and they could then be re-elected to the same chamber after sitting out a term. The ‘no re-election’ reforms were implemented in 1932 to resolve problems in PRI by increasing loyalty to the central committee and reducing the power of local party bosses. At the time, the reform was sold as the natural conclusion of the ideology of no re-election from the Mexican Revolution. However, it had served to reduce the autonomy of legislators, because their career prospects after their term of office depended on the party machinery, and for many years increased the power of the president because of his control over his party’s machinery. Party discipline has thus been traditionally very high, approaching 100 per cent for the federal legislators of the PRI up to 2000. This has had profound effects on accountability and representation. Voters could neither reward good performance nor punish poor representation. All the parties use relatively closed procedures to select candidates—elite designation, closed conventions, or closed or highly controlled primaries. In general, nominating procedures have been opening up in recent years, but candidates are still highly dependent on parties. Additionally, parties control most campaign expenditures, even in district and state contests, and closed lists reduce the incentive for candidates to campaign. Mexico’s slow democratization has seen frequent electoral system change as a series of concessions by the dominant party to defuse dissent, which has resulted finally in a multiparty presidential system with very strong parties. Further change may now be less likely, as different parties have different interests and any change is seen as a zero-sum game. In any case, an Overview of the 2013-2014 electoral reform can be found as part of the information document containing the Main Aspects of the Mexican Electoral Regime. For much of the twentieth century Namibia was the "forgotten colony" of southern Africa, first occupied by the Germans in 1884, then liberated by South African and allied forces in 1915, only to be effectively recolonized by South Africa who were given trusteeship of the region by the League of Nations in 1920. Apartheid South Africa effectively superimposed her ethnically divisive and exclusionary legal structures upon Namibia (or South-West Africa as it was then known) in the post-war period right up until full independence in 1990. 1989 proved to be a year of rapid change after seventy years of internal struggle and international ambivalence, and years of foot dragging by the South African government who, ten years before in 1978 had agreed to a United Nations (UN) plan for a military withdrawal and transition to independence. For her "liberation" election of November 1989 and her second parliamentary general election held in December 1994 Namibia used the most basic form of national list Proportional Representation (PR) with the whole country constituting a single district returning 72 members of parliament, see List PR. The allotment of seats was done by the Hare method which, along with the Droop quota, is a largest remainder method but uses a slightly different quota which on average gives more proportional results. No threshold for representation was imposed so the quota became 1.39 percent of the national valid vote but with the largest remainder method the Namibia National Front (NNF) managed to win a single seat with 0.8 percent of the vote in 1989, and the Democratic Coalition of Namibia (DCN) and Monitor Action Group (MAG) won seats with 0.82 percent and 0.83 percent respectively in 1994. The adoption of list PR came primarily at the instigation of the United Nations who urged as early as 1982 that any future non-racial electoral system ensure that political parties managing to gain substantial support in the election be rewarded with "fair representation." Indeed the Namibians had their new constitution largely imposed upon them. The option of discarding the first past the post electoral system (the whites-only system operating in what was the colony of South-West Africa) and moving to a rigid list PR system was originally proposed by Pik Botha, the then South African Foreign Minister. Although the South Africans had previously, but unsuccessfully, pressed for separate voter rolls (a la Zimbabwe 1980-1985) which would have ensured that whites gain seats in the new Assembly. Botha's subsequent PR proposal was accepted in principle by the UN Secretary-General who then handed over the specific details to the South African Administrator-General and UN Special Representative. The PR system dovetailed nicely with the UN's earlier pronouncements, which stressed the need for as wide as possible representation in the forthcoming Namibian Constituent Assembly. For the first elections in 1989 the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) had expressed a preference for keeping the single member district system, no doubt reasonably expecting (as the dominant party) to be advantaged by such winner-take-all constituencies. However, when the Constituent Assembly met for the first time in November 1989, and each parliamentary party presented their draft constitution, SWAPO readily gave in on the issue of PR apparently as a concession to the minority parties for which they hoped to gain reciprocal concessions on matters of more importance. 1989 Election Results Precursing the subsequent South African general election of 1994 the first multiparty Namibian election of 1989 produced a what many international observers felt to be a "dream result" with the liberation movement (SWAPO) winning handsomely, with 57 percent of the national vote, but not winning enough seats (48) to write the new constitution alone. The opposition, led by the DTA, were in the eyes of many, suitably rejected for their tainted pasts and explicitly ethnic appeals, but they still commanded enough votes and seats to mount a serious opposition within parliament and balance out the possible excesses of SWAPO majority rule. This "positive power configuration in the Constituent Assembly conducive to real compromise" led to a new constitution, adopted in March 1990 which was widely acclaimed as one if the most democratic and enlightened constitutions to be found anywhere in the world. While SWAPO proved to be the only party capable of winning an absolute majority in the 1989 Namibian elections the wildly inconsistent distribution of their vote led some African political scientists to argue that they had dramatically failed to live up to their promise of being the "sole and authentic representative of the people of Namibia." SWAPO gained over 90 percent of the votes in the large northern electoral district (ED) of Ovamboland, which contributed nearly 60 percent of their national total. Furthermore, while country wide they did manage to out poll all other parties combined SWAPO actually won a majority in only seven, of the 23, electoral districts, with the DTA winning majorities in 15 districts. Similar regional concentrations of party support existed for the minority parties. Besides the DTA, which gleaned most of their votes from the south of the country and other farming areas in Koakoland and Hereroland, the UDF and ACN (the only other parties to win more than one parliamentary seat) drew their support from clearly defined geographical areas and ethnic groups. The UDF was strongly identified with the Damara ethnic group and as expected polled an absolute majority of the votes in Damaraland. While the ACN, a predominantly white grouping, polled nearly half its entire national vote in the EDs of Karasburg (the southern border area where many South African whites voted), and Windhoek (the capital which again played host to a disproportionate number of white voters). 1994 Election Results The 1994 elections illustrated a consolidation of SWAPO support juxtaposed against severe erosion of the opposition vote. SWAPO actually polled 23,000 votes less in 1994 than they had gained in the first parliamentary elections of 1989 but the much lower turnout (down from 682,000 to 497,000) meant that their share of the vote was pushed up nearly 20 percent, giving them 12 extra seats and more than the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to change the constitution unilaterally. The stayaway of voters who had cast ballots in 1989 came primarily at the expense of the DTA. Their 101,000 national votes were only just over half the 191,000 they had received in 1989 and translated into a loss of six parliamentary seats. Similarly the UDF lost two of its four seats (retaining only 35 percent of its 1989 vote) while Moses Katjiongua's NPF, now renamed the Democratic Coalition of Namibia (DCN), could do no more than retain its single seat. SWAPO's overwhelming victory prompted the DTA leader and presidential candidate, Mushake Muyongo, to claim that the election had shown the country to be divided along ethnic lines, and that it had become an ethnic democracy. For the 1994 elections, the Namibian boundary commission discarded the old, uneven SouthWest African electoral districts in favor of 13 new regional districts broken down into 95 smaller counting areas. SWAPO managed to make more inroads into the votes of non-Ovambo communities in 1994 than they had done in the first multiparty elections. In 1994, the DTA won absolute majorities in only two regions (Hardap and Omaheke) and pluralities in only three others (Caprivi, Otjozondjupa, and Kunene), compared with 15 of the 23 electoral districts in 1989. SWAPO's share of the vote rose substantially in Karas (from 30 to 45 percent), Okavango (50 to 80 percent), and Khomas (45 to 60 percent). The UDF failed to hold onto the predominantly Damara district of Kunene, but did score two out of their three victories in the Kunene sub-districts of Sesfontein and Khorikas. Despite the SWAPO percentage advance, and the failures of the minority parties in 1989, it seems clear that most of the changes can be attributed to DTA absenteeism rather than SWAPO winning the votes of former minority party supporters. Since 1830 the Parliament of The Netherlands has consisted of two chambers. The First Chamber has never been elected directly and is therefore not considered here. In the earliest period for which one can speak of a constitutional electoral system (1848-1887), the number of members in the Second Chamber was set at one per 45,000 inhabitants. The country was divided into districts and usually two members per district were chosen by limited suffrage. Half of the Chamber was elected every two years, so that in most districts representatives were chosen at each two-year interval. An absolute majority was necessary for election; if no candidate achieved this figure, a relative majority sufficed in the second round. In 1888 several changes in the electoral system were made. The size of the Second Chamber was set at 100. Single member districts were introduced, although multi-member districts remained in the cities. The last multi-member districts were eliminated in 1897. From that date, only the top two candidates from the first round were allowed to participate in the second round. One of the two great political questions of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in The Netherlands was the struggle for universal suffrage, the other question being the governmental support for religious schools. Both problems were resolved in the so called "Pacification of 1917", as a kind of package deal. The religious political parties obtained a constitutional guarantee of governmental financial support for religious schools. Universal suffrage, one of the main political goals of the Social Democratic Party, first only for males, female suffrage followed in 1919. Proportional representation was introduced, which primarily helped the Liberal parties, who could no longer expect to gain seats under the district system with universal suffrage. Furthermore, compulsory voting was introduced, to insure proportionality. The electoral system as introduced in 1917 has remained in effect since that time, although some details have been altered. The Netherlands still elects the Second Chamber according to the multi-member candidate list system of proportional representation. Lists of candidates are presented on the ballot. Since 1956 the name of the party or list is placed above the list. The order of the lists is according to the size of the party delegation in the Second Chamber. (For the parties having no parliamentary representation, the ordering is determined by lot). On a list a party may list up to 30 names on the ballot, or twice the number of its incumbent representatives in Parliament, with a maximum of 80. There are 19 electoral districts, but these exist more out of practical reasons and most parties will submit the lists in each of the districts (although the names on the list may vary, and there is no requirement that candidates live in the district or have any relationship with the district). All votes cast for a candidate on a party list accrue to the total for the party. For the determination of the number of seats to be appointed to a party, the electoral districts play no role; seats are apportioned proportional according to the national vote. On the ballot a black square with a white circle is placed next to each candidate on the list. The voter must fill in the circle next to one of the candidates with a red pencil (for machine ballots there is a lever for each candidate). In 1956 the number of seats in the Second Chamber was expanded from 100 to 150. The only threshold for obtaining representation in the Second Chamber is the number of valid votes cast, divided by 150, which also determines the electoral quotient (recently about 60,000 votes). Each multiple of the electoral quotient entitles a party to an additional seat. When each party has received the seats to which it is entitled in this manner, it is generally found that not all seats have been allotted. The seats that remain are distributed by the method of largest average (the so called d'Hondt method). This replaced the largest remainder system in 1933, as the largest average was felt to provide a more precise proportionality. The use of the d'Hondt method does provide an advantage to larger parties. As a partial compensation for smaller parties since 1973 it has been possible to combine lists, both within and across districts, for the determination of the number of seats received. Once the total number of seats for each party has been determined, the first name on the list is declared elected. The procedure next moves to the second name on the list, and continues until all seats have been filled. The only exception is that a candidate who receives a quarter of the electoral quotient is declared elected automatically (presuming of course that his or her party is entitled to at least one representative). The lists remain in effect between elections and are used to fill seats that have fallen empty. No by-elections are held. Roughly the same system as explained above is used for municipal, provincial and European elections. Only the First Chamber is chosen in a different way; its members are chosen by the provincial legislatures. Though commitment to proportionality is extremely strong in The Netherlands, compulsory voting was abolished in 1970. Further proposals to change the system have come as the result of criticism that there is a growing gap between voters and politicians. Committees were appointed to propose changes and the government eventually proposed a mixed system in which half of the seats would be allocated according to proportional representation and the other half according to a five district system. After considerable criticism that this would disturb proportionality and would not necessarily provide a better relationship with the electorate, the government was forced to withdraw its proposal. New Zealand used to be regarded as a prime example of a country with an FPTP electoral system. However, after two referendums in the early 1990s, New Zealand adopted a mixed member proportional (MMP) voting system in a unicameral Parliament with 120 members. Until the end of 2004, three general elections had been held using the new system. Why did New Zealand change its electoral system? What led the country to do something that was extremely unusual for any long-established democracy, especially one with an Anglo-Saxon heritage? For a start, the FPTP system produced highly distorted results in 1978 and 1981. On both occasions the National Party retained office with an absolute majority of the seats in the House of Representatives despite winning fewer votes throughout the country as a whole than the opposition Labour Party. In addition, both elections saw the country’s then third party, Social Credit, win a sizeable share of the votes for very little return (16 per cent of the votes in 1978 and 21 per cent in 1981 won it only one seat and two seats, respectively, in a Parliament that then had 92 seats). The disquiet engendered by these results led the Labour government elected in mid-1984 to establish a Royal Commission on the Electoral System. Its 1986 report, Towards a Better Democracy, recommended the adoption of a voting system similar to Germany’s. The commission argued strongly that, on the basis of the ten criteria it had established for judging voting systems, MMP was ‘to be preferred to all other systems’. Neither of New Zealand’s major parties favoured the proposal and the matter might have died had the National Party’s 1990 election manifesto not promised a referendum on the topic. In an initial referendum, held in 1992, nearly 85 per cent of voters opted ‘for a change to the voting system’; 14 months later, the new electoral system was adopted after a second referendum in which 54 per cent favoured MMP (while 46 per cent voted to retain FPTP). As in Germany, in parliamentary elections in New Zealand the electors have two votes—one for a political party (called the party vote in New Zealand) in a nationwide constituency, and one for a candidate in a single-member district. Whereas representatives for single-member districts (called electorates in New Zealand) are elected by FPTP, the overall share of the seats in Parliament allocated to political parties stems directly from and is in proportion to the number of party votes they receive. If a party wins 25 per cent of the party votes, it will be entitled to (roughly) a quarter of all the seats in the 120-member Parliament, that is, about 30 seats. If a party that is entitled to a total of 30 seats has already won 23 electorate seats, then it will be given another seven seats drawn from the rank-ordered candidates on its party list who have not already been elected in a single-member district. Likewise, if a party entitled to 30 seats has won only 11 single-member district seats, then it will acquire another 19 MPs from its party list. There are two thresholds for MMP in New Zealand. To win a share of the seats in Parliament based on the party votes, a party must either win at least 5 per cent of all the party votes cast in a general election or win at least one single-member district seat. In the 1996 general election, five parties crossed the 5 per cent threshold and one won a single-member district seat but did not clear the 5 per cent threshold. Three years later, five parties again cleared the 5 per cent threshold. Two other parties failed to do so but won single-member district seats, which qualified one of them for an additional four seats in Parliament (it had won 4.3 per cent of the party votes cast in the election). In the 2002 general election, six parties cleared the 5 per cent party vote hurdle, and a seventh party won a single-member district seat that enabled it to bring one other person into Parliament from the party’s list. These figures point to one major change caused by the introduction of MMP. Established, at least in part, to ensure ‘fairness between political parties’, the new voting system has seen the index of disproportionality plummet from an average of 11 per cent for the 17 FPTP elections held between 1946 and 1993, to an average of 3 per cent for the first three MMP elections. Every FPTP election in New Zealand from 1935 until 1993 saw one of the country’s two larger parties—Labour or National—gain an absolute majority in the House of Representatives. One consequence of MMP has been that, in the three elections to date, no single party has won more than half the seats in Parliament. In 1996, the largest party won 44 out of the 120 seats; in 1999 the largest party won 49 seats; and in 2002 the largest party won 52 seats. Not surprisingly, then, New Zealand has changed from being a country accustomed to single-party majority governments to being a country governed by coalitions. After the first MMP election, two parties formed a coalition government that commanded a small majority (61 out of 120 seats) in Parliament. Since that coalition disintegrated in August 1998, New Zealand has had minority coalition governments that have had to rely on either formal or informal supporting arrangements (negotiated with other parties or, on occasion, with individual MPs) to ensure that their legislative programmes have been able to win majorities in Parliament. One of the other criteria used by the Royal Commission on the Electoral System was ‘effective government’. The commission noted that electoral systems should ‘allow governments ... to meet their responsibilities. Governments should have the ability to act decisively when that is appropriate’. In this regard it should be stressed that MMP governments in New Zealand have had little trouble governing: all have had their budgets passed without any real difficulty, and none has faced the likelihood of defeat in a parliamentary vote of no confidence. At the same time, New Zealand parliaments have fulfilled another of the royal commission’s criteria by also becoming more effective. Governments can no longer rely on (indeed, they seldom have) majorities on parliamentary committees, and there is a far greater degree of consultation—of give and take—between government and opposition parties in MMP parliaments. The Royal Commission on the Electoral System also envisaged that under MMP the Parliament would represent the Maori (New Zealand’s indigenous Polynesian minority) and other special-interest groups such as women, Asians and Pacific Islanders more effectively. This has happened. In the last FPTP Parliament, Maori accounted for 7 per cent of the MPs. They now constitute 16 per cent of the members of the legislature. The proportion of female MPs has risen from 21 per cent in 1993 to an average of 29 per cent in the first three MMP parliaments. During the period 1993–2002, the proportion of Pacific Island MPs went up from 1 per cent to 3 per cent, and the number of Asian MPs rose from 0 to 2 per cent. Discarding a long-established voting system is never an easy process politically, nor is it likely to appeal to entrenched interests or to most incumbent politicians. Leading electoral systems scholars have warned that major electoral reforms should not be undertaken lightly. Nevertheless, there is growing evidence that the parliamentarians of New Zealand and the public alike are learning to live with (if not necessarily love) proportional representation. The reforms adopted in New Zealand in the early 1990s and instituted in 1996 seem likely to last for a considerable time. The South Pacific country of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has used two different electoral systems—the Alternative Vote (AV) from 1964 to 1975, when it was an Australian territory, and FPTP from 1975 to 2002. It has since reverted to the alternative vote again. Its experience is interesting for a number of reasons. First, PNG is one of the few developing countries with an unbroken record of continuous competitive elections and numerous peaceful changes of government. Second, the change from one electoral system to another has had a series of unexpected consequences which illustrate the different effects apparently similar electoral systems can have. Third, PNG is one of the few countries to have adopted, abandoned, and then re-adopted a particular electoral system. Papua New Guinea inherited the AV system from Australia and used it for three elections in 1964, 1968 and 1972. Unlike Australia, however, PNG is a highly ethnically fragmented society, with over 850 separate languages and several thousand competing clan and tribal groups. Its experience lends support to the claims that AV can promote inter-ethnic accommodation and moderation in deeply divided societies by allowing voters to express not just their first choice of candidate but also their second and later choices. Because of the nature of PNG society, under AV most voters invariably gave their first preference to their own clan or ‘home’ candidate. In many seats, however, this was not enough for any single candidate to gain a majority of votes; they needed the second preferences of other groups as well. In order to gain a majority, candidates had to ‘sell’ themselves as a good ‘second-best’ choice to other clan groups—which meant, in general, someone who would be attentive to the interests of all groups, not just their own. It also meant that those candidates who formed alliances and cooperated with each other would often be more successful than candidates who attempted to win the seat from their own voter base alone. This gave many candidates an incentive to act in an accommodating manner to other clans. The mechanics of the system also ensured that the winning candidate would have the support of an absolute majority of voters. In a substantial number of cases, the winning candidate was not the one who had the biggest ‘bloc’ of supporters but rather the one who could successfully build support across several groups. Thinking that it would be a simpler system which would have similar effects to AV, Papua New Guinea changed to an FPTP electoral system at independence in 1975. However, the different incentives provided by the new FPTP system led to quite different results from those expected. Because candidates no longer needed an absolute majority of votes cast in order to be successful—just more votes than any other group—the candidate from the largest clan would often win the seat outright. There was no incentive to cooperate with anyone else. Electoral violence increased because it was in some candidates’ interests to stop opponents’ supporters from voting rather than to campaign for their second preferences as they had done under AV. Also, because there were so many clans all trying to win the seat, candidates learned that they could be successful with very limited support. At the 2002 elections, over half of the MPs in the Parliament were elected with less than 20 per cent of the vote. Several candidates who won seats gained only 5 per cent. In an electoral cycle increasingly dominated by concerns about corruption, power and money politics, this led to a range of negative campaign tactics, such as encouraging rival candidates to stand in order to ‘split’ a dominant clan’s voter base. This increased pressure for the reintroduction of AV. In 2003, the PNG Parliament re-adopted what it called ‘limited’ preferential voting for all future elections. Voters will be required to mark a minimum of three preferences. The Papua New Guinea case illustrates just how dependent much of the accepted wisdom regarding electoral systems is on the structure of the society concerned. Despite having an FPTP electoral system, PNG had a very fluid party system, based on individuals rather than ideologies. All governments under FPTP were weak coalitions, which sometimes changed on the floor of the Parliament as well as at elections. The single-member system of representation resulted in high levels of turnover of politicians from one election to the next, as members could not both be in Port Moresby at sessions of the Parliament and be continually visible in their districts. Accordingly, a strong sense of accountability on the part of many local members to their electorate developed: without it their chances of re-election would be slim. This matches a strong sense on the part of the electorate that the function of their member is to deliver direct benefits to the community, building on Melanesian tradition that a ‘big man’ ensures that his community shares in his wealth and good fortune. As one member has memorably put it, ‘When people elect me to Parliament, they think I own the Bank of Papua New Guinea.’ Under the AV system, this sense of accountability tended to be spread across a number of groups, thus helping to manage inter-ethnic conflicts. However, this was itself a reflection of the extreme fragmentation of the country’s society. The June 1989 elections in Poland played pivotal role in the collapse of communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe. These elections came about as a result of negotiations between Polish Communists and the Solidarity-led opposition, finalised by the so-called Roundtable Accord in April 1989. The Accord set up a unique (and designed for a singular use only) system of "compartmentalised" elections, with 65 percent of the 460 seats in the Sejm allocated in advance to the Communists and their allies, and the remaining 35 percent subjected to an open contest. In addition, the upper chamber of parliament, the Senate, was re-established, with 100 seats to be filled in a free, unrestricted election - the first fully free and fair election in Eastern Europe in more than 40 years. In the elections, held on June 4 and June 18, 1989, Solidarity won all but one of the seats it contested. The communists acquired their allocated seats in the Sejm, but none in the Senate. The outcome of this election reflected the high level of political polarisation in Poland throughout the 1980's. The Sejm The parliament, elected in 1989 to a four-year term, as early as 1990 became obsolete. Being still dominated by the people of the old regime, with apparently slim chances for reelection, it did not go without hesitation, but eventually the date of new elections was set for October 27, 1991. After a long debate, the new electoral law for the elections to the Sejm was adopted by that House on June 28, 1991. Participants of this debate had their overt and covert agendas, and often changed their positions. In general, the post-communist majority in the Sejm, together with some post-Solidarity groupings was in favour of proportional representation, while others (President Walesa and the major post-Solidarity parties) advocated various mixed electoral systems. The rule of the thumb was the stronger the party and the more popular its leaders, the less likely it was to opt for a pure Proportional Representation (PR). Eventually, the considerations stemming from the uncertainty of the election outcome prevailed in deputies' minds, and for the Sejm election a PR system was adopted. In the system adopted in 1991, the country was divided to 37 districts, with from seven to 17 seats in each, determined according to population. To register its list in a district, a party had to collect at least 5,000 signatures of voters resident in the given district. Seats in the districts were allocated to the parties through the Hare-Niemeyer method, with no threshold. Out of the total 460 seats, 69 were awarded (through the modified Sainte-Lagu method) on a nation-wide base to each of those parties, which: (a) registered a national list (for which a party had to register its list in at least five districts by collecting 5,000 voters' signatures in each), and (b) surpassed the threshold of five percent nationally and/or managed to have their candidates elected in at least five districts. These thresholds were waived as far as the representation of ethnic minorities was concerned. Voters in each district were to show their preference by selecting one party list and placing a check beside the name of the candidate for whom they wished to vote. The political dichotomy of the 1989 election (Solidarity vs. the old regime), in 1991 was replaced by a highly fragmented polity, with more than 100 parties and quasi-parties contesting both the Senate and the Sejm elections. The elections resulted in a highly fragmented parliament, with the strongest party in the Sejm controlling a mere 13.5 percent of the seats, and no majority coalition of fewer than five parties possible. Altogether, 18 parties and groupings mustered at least two seats each, and additional 11 one seat each. The actual number of actors in the Sejm was in fact lower, due to mergers and coalitions. This parliament in two years managed to generate three Prime Ministers, two governments, and its own early departure, after accepting a motion of non-confidence in Hanna Suchocka government in May 1993. President Walesa, having a choice between dismissing the government or dissolving the parliament chose the latter. Among the last bills approved by the departing Sejm were amendments to the electoral law. The amendments adopted by the outgoing parliament were designed to limit fragmentation by eliminating weaker parties from the Sejm. Specifically, three devices were put in place: (1) a threshold of five percent for parties and eight percent for coalitions, nation-wide (also the threshold for national list was raised from five percent to seven percent); (2) an increase in the number of districts, from 37 to 52, expanding district magnitude to three to 17 seats; (3) implementation of the D'Hondt formula, advantageous to stronger parties, for allocation of all seats. Support for these amendments among the parties correlated in an obvious (positive) manner with their strength in the outgoing Sejm. For some of the parties that supported the amendments this decision was self-destructive, as only one coalition and five parties surpassed in the Sejm elections the prescribed thresholds. Thus the electoral reform gave the expected results: the stronger parties were awarded additional seats, the weakest were altogether eliminated from the Sejm. While the fragmentation of the parliament has been overcome, it has been achieved on the expense of serious distortions of proportionality. The ruling leftist coalition that emerged after the election received together only 36 percent of the votes but commanded a majority of 66 percent of the seats. With 34 percent of the votes "wasted" for the parties not represented in the Sejm (mostly from the right side of the political spectrum), the parliament elected in 1993 was perceived as not fully legitimate: it represented (since the turnout was at the 52.1 percent level) only 34 percent of the eligible voters. Thus one potential (and between 1991 and 1993 actual) dysfunction of the democratic order, unstable governments generated by a fragmented parliament, has been replaced in 1993 by another one: a stable government without sufficient legitimacy. This potential deficiency has been removed in the wake of the most recent, September 21, 1997 elections, conducted according to the same as in 1993 rules. While only five parties and coalitions cleared the thresholds this time, they represented 87.8 percent of all valid votes (with the turnout of 47.93 percent). More importantly, the political balance returned to the Sejm, since several parties of the fragmented right united this time under the Electoral Action Solidarity (AWS) umbrella and won plurality of votes, to form a right-of-centre government with the liberal-democratic Freedom Union. However, the competition of the two major coalitions, the post-communist SLD on the left, and the AWS on the right, led to the weakened support for the centrist parties, and to the re-polarisation of the polity along ideological lines. The Senate Since 1989, the voting districts in the Senate elections have been based on geography, with two senators elected in each of 47 out of the 49 Poland's provinces. Only the two most populous provinces have been given three senatorial seats each. Senators are elected by a candidate-centred bloc vote, see Block Vote. In 1989, a majority was needed to win a seat (with a run-off two weeks after the first round). For the subsequent (1991, 1993, 1997) Senate elections the run-off round was abolished (plurality vote replaced majority vote). Interestingly, the level of fragmentation, and - with only minor deviations - the political composition of the Senate have been since 1991 parallel to the party composition of the Sejm. Presidential and Local Elections Since 1990, President of the Republic of Poland is elected by a popular vote. If in the first round none of the candidates gains majority, a run-off among two top candidates takes place two weeks later. In the 1995 election, which featured a tight race between the incumbent Lech Walesa and the eventual winner Aleksander Kwasniewski, this arrangement contributed to the re-polarisation of the political spectrum. In local elections two systems are used in a parallel way: First Past The Post (FPTP) in rural communities and in cities below 40,000 inhabitants, and a party-list PR in cities with more than 40,000 inhabitants. The Declaration of Principles or Oslo Agreement, reached in late 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), contained a provision for an elected Palestinian Council to be established. The implementation of the Oslo Agreement required the negotiation of a further detailed agreement, the Interim Agreement. This was completed in Taba in September 1995 and included detailed provisions for holding elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council and, separately, for the head of its Executive Authority. The president (Raees) of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Legislative Council were then elected on 20 January 1996. Preparations for the elections began in 1994 in parallel with the negotiations for the Interim Agreement. The election law and the conduct of the elections were entirely the responsibility of the Palestinians, although some details of the election arrangements were required to be consistent with the provisions of the Interim Agreement. The final version of the law and the major regulations were put in place only in late 1995. The political context of the election strongly influenced the available options for the electoral system. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Yasser Arafat would be elected president, and for the presidential election a single-round FPTP system was adopted with little discussion. The assumption was borne out in practice when Arafat received over 80 per cent of the vote against one other candidate. The choice of system for the Legislative Council elections was much less straightforward. First, agreement within the Palestinian community on accepting and participating in the Interim Agreement process was not unanimous. The emerging Palestinian Authority conducted lengthy discussions backstage with members of Hamas and other Islamic movements which included the question of their participation in elections. Second, the political party system was embryonic. Fatah had the character of a national liberation movement, a political form for which a continuing need was perceived because of the need for unity in moving into ‘final status’ negotiations with Israel (which were not successful). Some other small parties had formed, but many potential candidates were considering standing independently of Fatah. Third, there were some precedents to hand: local elections had been held in Gaza in the 1940s, using Egyptian procedures, and in West Bank cities and towns in the 1970s, using Jordanian procedures inherited from traditions under the British Mandate. There was pressure in particular to follow Jordanian practice. The choice of a candidate-based electoral system therefore emerged in response to three pressures: the wish to provide a channel for informal candidacies of persons linked to movements which formally rejected the process; the desire of a number of prominent figures to stand as independents; and the recollection of historic elections. The importance placed on simplicity, transparency, speed of counting and confidence in the results also led to a decision in favour of counting at the polling station, thus eliminating preferential systems such as the Alternative Vote (AV) or the Single Transferable Vote (STV) as options. The perception of where natural boundaries existed on the ground thus led to the choice of the Block Vote (BV), with districts which varied in magnitude from 12 in Gaza City down to one in the small towns of Jericho, Salfit and Tubas. A further discussion centred on the representation of minorities, in particular the Christian community (which accounted for some 10 per cent of the electorate) and the Samaritans (a concentrated community of a few hundred people near Nablus). Six reserved seats were created within the Block Vote system for Christians in the four districts with the highest concentration of Christians (two each in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and one each in Ramallah and Gaza City) and one reserved seat was created for Samaritans in Nablus. Christian candidates had the option to declare themselves as Christian. If the Block Vote count showed that there were not sufficient declared Christian candidates among those in the top positions, the candidate with the lowest vote of those who would otherwise have been elected would be replaced by the declared Christian candidate with the next—highest vote—as indeed happened in all four districts. This meant that there were representatives on the Legislative Council elected with fewer votes than some other candidates who were not elected. While there was some debate on this, it was accepted as legitimate in the context of wide representation and in the aftermath of a successful election. In practice, the BV electoral system achieved much of what was expected of it. Eighty-seven candidates were nominated in Gaza City, but voters coped well with a ballot paper about a metre long. While few candidates associated with those who rejected the peace process stood, at least one member was elected who might be considered as a bridge to those movements. Candidates on Fatah slates gained an advantage, but voters made clear distinctions between more and less popular individuals. Leading independent figures were elected, as were representatives from minorities. Small towns with a fiercely independent identity gained their own representative. The president and the Legislative Council took office in 1996 with a wide degree of legitimacy within the Palestinian community. The legislative electoral system, which was first decreed by President Boris Yeltsin in September/October 1993, along with the presidential election system, were included within the first post-Soviet Russian constitution, which was narrowly ratified by the voters in December 1993. The Federal Assembly, the legislature of the Russian governmental system, is bicameral. The Duma (the popular assembly) is elected every four years. The Federation Council (the Upper House) consists of one executive and one legislative representative chosen from each of the 89 regions of Russia according to the laws of each region. The Russian electoral system can be characterized as a classic example of a parallel electoral system, see Parallel Systems. Both party-list Proportional Representation (PR) and First Past the Post (FPTP) voting are used for choosing deputies in the Duma, but there is no adjustment of the party-list representatives to reflect disparities in the overall seat-vote share, as there is in Germany and New Zealand, see Germany: The Original Mixed Member Proportional System and New Zealand: A Westminster Democracy Switches to PR. The total number of deputies is 450, with exactly half selected by PR and half chosen in single-member plurality constituencies. The PR system operates in effect as one constituency, since the votes for political parties are tallied across the entire country. Nevertheless, parties compete regionally on closed lists, in accord with the June 1995 law adopted by the Federal Assembly. A nominee for a national party list of 12 members may also seek election from an FPTP single-member district in the region. Consequently, this can result in another seat for a political party, which wins on the PR ballot. Upon achieving the threshold of at least five percent of the PR votes, seats are distributed according to the largest remainder formula, see The Threshold. In theory, this is supposed to benefit smaller parties, but it does not appear to have had that effect in Russia. In the 1995 parliamentary elections, only four political parties crossed the five percent threshold, which would make them eligible to be allocated seats from the PR lists. These parties garnered only 50.5 percent of the popular vote and received double the number of seats which would have been distributed had it been a strictly proportional system. Women of Russia, one of the 18 parties which failed to gain party list seats, was a slim 2.3 percent lower in votes than the Yobloco Party, which obtained, by contrast, 31 party list seats. Anomalies also occurred in the single-member constituencies, some of which were won with percentage votes as low as 20 percent when several of the 43 parties competed. Consequently the proportion of wasted votes was very high in the 1995 parliamentary elections. The development of Russia's new electoral system was characterized by compromises among parliamentarians, the Russian president, and the legacy of past practice. At first Boris Yeltsin decreed that one-third of the Duma would be elected by party-list PR, and the remainder elected from single-member districts as in the former Soviet Union. However, a number of pro-democracy groups in the previous parliament favoured List PR, seeing an advantage for their mostly Moscow-based organizations. After apparently being persuaded that well-organized communist parties would benefit from single-member districts, Yeltsin adopted an evenly-split plurality-PR system in October 1993. At the same time there was substantial agreement on the method of electing the President and the Federation Council, but in 1995 the election of Federation Council members was decentralised so that elections would be held according to each region's electoral laws. The five percent threshold, intended to inhibit the proliferation of parties, has not worked in Russia and has led to gross disproportionality in the second Duma, elected in 1995. A number of groups have suggested the complete removal of the threshold, as in Iceland, or a smaller minimum percentage, such as the 0.67 percent threshold in the Netherlands, or the four percent in Sweden. Another change would be a move to a fully compensatory MMP system, as is used in Germany. The seats distributed to parties would then reflect the people's PR vote within each region, thus enhancing overall proportionality and strengthening the political party system as a whole. Candidates for the presidency in 1991 were required to obtain 100,000 signatures, with only seven percent from the same region, for nomination. In 1995, this number was increased to one million signatures. The presidential system specifies that if no candidate wins an absolute majority in the first election round, a second is held between the two leading contenders, and the winner is required to win 50 percent or more votes for election. Four years is the term of office, and there is a two-term limitation. Presidential elections are held in different years from parliamentary elections. One problem with the two-round absolute majority presidential election procedure is that it discourages the formation of party coalitions, unlike one-round plurality elections in which parties tend to form in two blocs, see Electing a President - Two Round-Systems. Holding the presidential election at the same time as the Duma's would further reduce party-splintering and ensure greater accountability by the president and Duma. Senegal is one of only a handful of countries in Africa that have undergone a genuine democratic transfer of power as a result of the defeat of a sitting president. At the presidential level the electoral system is a two-round majority run-off system very similar to that used for elections for the president of France. Parties have incentives to put up candidates in the first round, and voters can freely vote for the candidate they really prefer while saving their ‘strategic’ vote for the second round. In 2000 the opposition parties denied President Abdou Diouf a first-round victory and, by previous agreement, united behind the leading opposition candidate, Abdoulaye Wade, to defeat the long-reigning Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS) leader in the second round. For the legislature, the electoral system was changed from a pure PR system by national list in 1978 to a mixed, Parallel system since 1983. Since then it has been modified numerous times. Most of the changes have been designed to provide for democratic legitimacy by ensuring that the system remains open to some opposition representation while maintaining the ruling party’s majority of seats. Like many mixed systems, Senegal’s relies on a national list for a part of the seats. Unlike most other Parallel systems, the plurality seats, rather than being decided in single-member electoral districts, are decided on the basis of Party Block Vote (PBV) in mostly multi-member electoral districts. The PR seats (roughly half of the total) are allocated from the votes cast for the national list of each party, using a Largest Remainder Method with the Hare formula. The other seats are allocated by plurality vote in multi-member electoral districts in the 30 departments of the country, with between one and five seats each. The smaller parties and the opposition have always argued for a greater number of seats to be allocated from the national list, while the ruling party has always favoured a balance—ensuring that its domination of the plurality seats plus a proportion of the Parallel seats would enable it to retain power. For the 1998 election the ruling PS once again altered the distribution of seats, adding 20 new plurality seats. The PS won 18 of these and was easily able to maintain control of the legislature, despite the fact that it had only won a bare majority of the vote nationally (50.3 per cent). President Wade, when he was leader of the opposition, argued for greater proportionality in the system and less reliance on the PBV seats, which heavily favour the party in power. For the 2001 elections, Wade, who had bitterly attacked the machinations by the PS, was in a position to alter this inequitable formula. Once in control of the presidency and with power to modify the electoral system, Wade could install a system designed either to be more representative of the voters’ wishes or to maximize the opportunities for his coalition (the SOPI Coalition, led by the Democratic Party of Senegal (PDS)). Coupled with the greater resources now available to his party, including the full weight of the presidency, this made the highly inequitable system he had previously attacked seem suddenly attractive. The PS and the Alliance of Forces of Progress (AFP), the only other large parties, also felt that they could profit from an emphasis on the plurality PBV side of the seat distribution by potentially winning a plurality in several districts. They too chose to argue for increased weight for the plurality side of the election. The smaller parties pushed for pure proportionality based on a national list system or some compromise that would provide greater opportunities for a better seat-to-vote distribution. The ruling PDS opted for reducing the size of the National Assembly from 140 to 120 and moving from a 70 : 70 plurality : proportional distribution to 65 plurality and 55 national list PR seats. The PDS calculated that as the new party in power it could win a plurality in many departments, thus increasing its share of seats relative to its voter support. These calculations proved correct. Although the SOPI coalition received just under half of the votes (49.6 per cent), it won 89 of the 120 seats (74.2 per cent) in 2001. The former ruling party, the PS, finished second in terms of share of the vote, with 17.4 per cent, but garnered only ten seats, all in the proportional national list. In third place in the voting, the AFP of Moustapha Niasse (with 16.1 per cent of the vote), passed the PS in number of seats with 11, two of which it won on the plurality side by finishing first in one department. The Union for Democratic Renewal (URD), with 3.7 per cent of the vote, garnered three seats, one of which was a plurality seat in a single-member district in the small department which is the home of its leader. The African Party for Democracy and Socialism/Jef (AJ/PADS), with just over 4 per cent of the vote, won only two seats, both on the national list. Five additional parties were given one seat each on the national list by virtue of having the largest remainders, even though they did not achieve a full quota in votes. The remaining 15 parties which presented lists were excluded from the seat allocation. The disproportionality in the 2001 election greatly exceeded even the high rates Senegal had experienced under PS rule. In the 1993 elections, 70 seats were allocated by the proportional formula on a national list and 50 in department-level districts using PBV; in 1998, seats were allocated 70 : 70 between the two electoral formulae, and disproportionality rose slightly. It rose sharply in the 2001 elections, the results of which were less proportional than the results of most elections in FPTP systems. As a consequence the legitimacy of the legislature is compromised. The SOPI coalition, which came to power in 2001 on the basis of arguments for democratic reform, has taken a major step backwards with its manipulation of the electoral system to its own advantage. In Senegal, the objective of the then hegemonic ruling party in opting for a Parallel system was to ensure fragmentation of the opposition by discouraging coordination among parties, minimizing strategic voting and thereby providing an advantage to the largest party. The party furthered this objective by employing a ballot that offers a single choice that covers both the proportional and the plurality vote. Since the allocation of the proportional seats depends on the total number of votes a party or coalition receives, Senegal’s opposition parties have an incentive to present candidates in as many plurality districts as possible. The fact that all votes cast at the district level are added together for the allocation of the proportional seats reduces any advantages of coordination between parties across constituencies, and provides incentives for sincere rather than strategic voting. Thus, the ruling party was able to ensure wins for itself in most plurality districts. A Parallel mixed system is also used at the local (rural council) and municipal levels. To ensure an overwhelming majority for the winning party on every council, half of the seats are allocated in a single bloc for the whole municipality using the Party Block Vote. The other half of the seats are allocated by List PR using the whole rural community or municipality as one district. Senegal illustrates the way in which short-term political advantage can be the overriding factor in debates about electoral system change. An opposition that clamoured for change became a government which defended a status quo which suddenly looked beneficial. The potential down side of this is that, if the electoral pendulum swings back to the PS, the heavier emphasis on the PBV part of the Parallel system is almost certain to ensure that this will be reflected in a more than proportional gain of seats for the opposition, leaving the forces in the SOPI coalition back where they were before 2001. Alternatively, this approach can be seen as moving towards a two-large-party system, in which the two beneficiaries ensure that any potential third political force has a huge task to break in. In 1997 Thailand adopted a new constitution which brought about sweeping changes to its political and electoral landscape. Reforms included the creation of an autonomous Electoral Commission to oversee and administer elections, new rules governing the relationship between the members of Parliament and the Cabinet, and the creation of an elected Senate—the first ever in Thailand. The constitution also replaced the Block Vote (BV) electoral system that had been in place for most of Thailand’s electoral history with a Parallel system made up of FPTP and List PR elements. Prior to the 1997 reforms Thailand used the BV system to elect the House of Representatives. The Senate was entirely appointed. The country’s electoral districts were broken down into one-, two- and three-seat districts, with most districts having more than one seat. Seats were allocated by province in proportion to population. Voters cast their votes for candidates rather than parties, and were allowed to vote for as many candidates as there were seats in a district. They could not cast all their votes for a single candidate but could split their votes between candidates from different parties. They could also partially abstain by not casting all their available votes. Parties were required to field a full team of candidates for any district they wished to contest (for example, three candidates in a three-seat district). Seats were awarded to the one, two or three candidates who got the most votes on the basis of the plurality rule. The BV system in Thailand had at least two major implications for the party system. These multi-seat districts had tended to produce multiple parties in each district, which in turn had contributed to the presence of a large number of parties in the House. The average effective number of national parties between 1975 and 1996 was more than six. Not surprisingly, no party ever commanded a majority, making large, multiparty coalition governments necessary. These coalition governments were generally indecisive and short-lived. Reformers hoped that by changing the electoral system they could bring about a reduction in the number of parties and a reduction in government inaction and instability. Second, the system pitted candidates from the same party against one another in the same district. Although each party nominated a team of candidates, they often tended to campaign against each other rather than trying to get voters to support all of the party team with all of their votes. This intra-party competition undermined the value of party labels to candidates and voters and contributed to making the parties factionalized and incohesive. One reflection of this was the rampant party-switching prior to every election, with attendant allegations of money politics. Intra-party competition, the weakness of party labels and the relatively small districts also encouraged politicians to cultivate and respond to relatively narrow constituencies. During election campaigns vote-buying helped candidates build personal constituencies. In office politicians focused on providing ‘pork’ and particularistic goods and services to their constituencies, often to the neglect of broader policy concerns and thus to the coherence and consistency of government policy. The drafters of the 1997 constitution hoped that through electoral reform they could encourage the development of party cohesion and meaningful party labels, and bolster the incentives of candidates and politicians to respond to broad, national constituencies. In 1996 the House of Representatives, responding to long-simmering demands from within civil society for political reform, organized a Constitutional Drafting Assembly (CDA). A year later, after a widespread popular consultation and in the midst of a severe economic crisis that quickly escalated into a political crisis, the CDA submitted and the House approved a new constitution. The cornerstones of this new constitution were an elected Senate and an overhauled system for electing the House of Representatives. Gone is the Block Vote system for the House. Following a growing trend, the drafters of the constitution established a Parallel electoral system in Thailand. Four hundred single-member districts replaced Thailand’s multi-member districts. In these districts voters cast a single vote for their preferred candidate. The 1997 constitution also created a second tier of 100 seats elected from a single nationwide district by PR. A party must reach a threshold of at least 5 per cent of the party list votes in order to be eligible for seats in this tier. Each party is required to submit a list of candidates for voters to consider, and voters cast two votes, one for a district representative and one for a party list. Candidates must choose between running in a district and running on the party list. The two tiers are not linked: a party’s seats in one tier are not in any way dependent on the number of seats it has in the other tier. The 1997 constitution also provided for an elected Senate, the first in Thailand’s history. Two hundred senators are elected using the SNTV system. The electoral districts range from one to 18 seats in size. The Thai version of SNTV also has an added twist. Constitutional reformers wanted to create a Senate that would remain above the messy partisan fray. As a result, senators are constitutionally prohibited from belonging to a political party and are not allowed to campaign for election. What were the results of these constitutional reforms? As discussed above, one of the drafters’ chief goals was to reduce the number of parties in Thailand—hence the move to single-member districts and the 5 per cent electoral threshold in the party list tier. It appears that this goal has largely been achieved. In the 2001 election for the House of Representatives, the effective number of parties in the legislature fell dramatically from an average of 6.2 before 1997 to 3.1, reflecting both a decline in the number of parties contesting each single-member district and better coordination of parties between districts. For the first time since 1957 a single party, the newly formed Thai Rak Thai party, nearly captured a majority of the seats. It later gained a majority after a smaller party disbanded and joined its ranks. The drafters also hoped that adding a national party list tier and doing away with intra-party competition would encourage voters and candidates to focus more on party policy positions regarding national issues. This in fact began to occur in the 2001 election. For the first time in recent Thai electoral history, political parties, led chiefly by the Thai Rak Thai party, put significant effort into developing coordinated party-centred electoral strategies. Parties began to differentiate themselves in terms of their policy platforms and in some cases made those differences an important campaign issue. However, there are reasons to be somewhat cautious in assessing the emerging changes in the Thai party system. First, the shift towards party-centred strategies was primarily confined to the campaign for party list seats, while contests in the 400 single-member districts generally remained candidate-centred affairs. This is certainly no surprise given the electoral system: single-member districts still generate incentives to cultivate personal support networks (although it appears somewhat less than under the Block Vote system). Second, the new electoral system has brought about a dramatic reduction in the average number of votes needed to win a seat. This is the combined effect of adding more seats to the legislature and switching from Block Vote to single-member districts. This weakens the incentives to abandon personal strategies: the smaller the number of votes required to be elected, the more likely it is that individual candidates will employ personal strategies. Finally, the presence of a non-partisan Senate, elected by SNTV, undermines somewhat the attempt to create a more party-oriented electorate. Obviously, any assessment of the consequences of the 1997 reforms must still be tempered. With only limited data available, it is not possible to determine whether the outcomes of the 2001 and 2005 elections represent new trends or are a reflection of the ‘one-off ’ personality of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the leader of Thai Rak Thai. Nonetheless the 2001 and 2005 House elections already mark Thailand as an interesting case study of the consequences (sometimes unintended) of electoral system reform. Ukraine's first elections as an independent state were held under a majoritarian Two-Round System (TRS), see Two-Round System. The collapse of the Soviet system in the early 1990s had precipitated the creation of numerous new parties seeking to establish their democratic credentials and lead Ukraine through economic and political reform. But geographical variations in Ukraine's economic and ethnic structure, coupled with a history of territorial division, led to the formation of different parties in different parts of the country. The result was a situation in which there were many small parties with support bases defined either along regional and ethnic lines, or along those of economic wealth. When Ukraine held parliamentary elections in 1994, most of the parties were ill organized and had only a vague idea of how many supporters they had. One reason for this is that, although Ukrainians on the whole valued democratic politics, there was also a strong popular aversion to organized political activism, given the country's experience of one-party rule under communism. The weakness of the parties at the outset of multi-party competition meant that electoral institutions were especially important in shaping the young party system. According to the electoral law that governed the 1994 contest, one deputy was elected from each constituency, and a run-off was held between the two candidates who received the highest number of votes if no candidate gained an absolute majority in the first round. Many commentators at the time saw the Two-Round System as an ideal means of limiting the number of parties in parliament while at the same time giving small parties a greater chance of being elected than they would have under a First Past the Post system (FPTP). Another perceived advantage of the system was that it would encourage the formation of tactical agreements between like-minded parties in the second round, to maximize the overall representation of their combined interests. But the results of the elections demonstrated a number of flaws in this reasoning. Firstly, the geographical heterogeneity of partisan support led to the election of many deputies with narrow regional concerns, often associated with the interests of a specific ethnic group or economic sector. When the parliament assembled, it contained deputies from no fewer than 14 parties, a far larger number than that envisaged by the proponents of the majoritarian electoral law. Moreover, the tendency of majoritarian systems to exaggerate the seat share of large parties meant that although the re-vamped Communists gained only 13 percent of the vote, they won 23 percent of the seats and were thus considerably over-represented relative to their true electoral support. This "seat bonus" effect did not operate for the smaller newly formed parties, who mostly received fewer seats than their popular vote may have indicated. Secondly, the elections did little to consolidate the party system; most parties were reluctant to strike second-round deals amongst themselves, because they over-estimated their electoral strength and believed that they would perform best on their own. And thirdly, the preservation of single-member districts allowed many local officials and well-known local figures to win seats without having to associate themselves with an organized party. As a consequence, half of the deputies elected were independents. The large number of parties in parliament and the relatively small proportion of party-affiliated deputies generated a considerable amount of fluidity in the structure of parliamentary factions. This has led to unpredictable outcomes. It has weakened democratic accountability, and it has lowered the parliament's esteem in the eyes of many voters. A further problem with the Ukrainian electoral law is that it included two stipulations not found in most laws of this type: electoral participation had to exceed 50 percent for the election in a given constituency to be declared valid, and the winning candidate had to receive an absolute majority of the vote. These requirements meant that deputies were not elected at all in about a quarter of the constituencies; low turnout caused many elections to be declared invalid, and in many more cases neither of the candidates in the run-off election won over 50 percent of the vote, since many people voted against both candidates as a form of protest. The process of filling the empty seats carried on for over two years, generating considerable popular disaffection. Moreover, fluctuating numbers in the legislature added to the unpredictability of results, and several regions of the country were left severely under-represented for much of this period. Following the 1994 elections, there was a general consensus that it would be desirable to move toward a more proportional electoral system so as to reduce the number of independent deputies, stabilise the party system, and promote more predictable legislative behaviour, see PR Systems. The electoral law introduced for 1998 is a semi-proportional parallel system, by which half the deputies will be elected by FPTP in single-member districts, and half from national party lists, with a three percent threshold for representation. The most important conclusion to be drawn from the Ukrainian case is that, although proportional systems can often cause a proliferation of parliamentary parties in developed democracies, majoritarian laws also allow a large number of parties to enter parliament when parties are weakly entrenched and geographically distinct, which is the case in many new democracies. Furthermore, in Central-Eastern Europe majoritarian systems do little to help consolidate new party systems, because lack of widespread party identification encourages the election of independent candidates who can blur the balance of party strength in parliament and destabilize the legislative process. Finally, majoritarian systems give a distinct advantage to those parties that do have established organizational and support bases, such as those found in the former one-party states of Africa, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. The classical First Past the Post (FPTP), single-member district, electoral system that is so strongly associated with Great Britain did not in fact come into widespread use for Westminster elections until 1884-1885 - a full 50 years after the First Reform Act of 1832, which marked the beginnings of representative democracy in the UK. Up until 1867 most members of the British House of Commons were elected from two-member districts by the Block Vote who served to compound the seat bonuses given to the larger parties. The Second Reform Act of 1867 introduced the Limited Vote (in which electors had one fewer vote than the number of seats to be filled) for the election of 43 members of the Commons, chosen from 13 three-member districts and one four-member seat. The Third Reform Act of 1884-1885 abolished these Limited Vote seats and FPTP became established as the dominant system. Even today, and despite Westminster's reputation as the birthplace of FPTP, the system is not used throughout the United Kingdom. The Single Transferable Vote form of PR was re-introduced in Northern Ireland, after a 50 year absence, for local government elections in 1973 in an attempt to craft incentives for accommodatory behaviour between the political representatives of the Nationalist and Unionist communities, advantage the moderate and non-sectarian middle, and ensure adequate representation of the minority Catholic community.In the same year STV was used to elect the ill-fated Stormont Assembly - which had been created to give the people of Ulster a degree of self-governing power. Nearly a quarter of a century later, in May 1996, a new body charged with finding solutions to the province's troubles, the Northern Irish Peace Forum, was elected by PR in order to give rise to the most representative body possible. Ninety Forum members were elected from 18 list PR districts of five members in size, while the top 10 parties in terms of votes won across Ulster were awarded two additional seats in the assembly. Since 1979 Northern Ireland's three members of the European parliament have been elected by STV while, at the same time, Britain's 84 English, Scottish, and Welsh MEPs have been elected by FPTP. The proliferation of different electoral systems in use in the UK has meant that electoral reform, for all tiers of British government, has become an increasingly debated issue. In July 1997 the new Labour government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, announced that they would present legislation to change the electoral system for British members of the European parliament to a form of regional list PR in England, Scotland, and Wales, while leaving unaltered the PR STV system in Northern Ireland. Similarly, the proposed Scottish and Welsh assemblies, which will have a degree of autonomous law-making power devolved from the Westminster parliament, are to be elected by PR methods if they are approved by the Scottish and Welsh peoples in September 1997 referenda. Both assemblies are to have Mixed Member Proportional systems which retain FPTP seats based on the current Westminster single-member districts, but include district-based PR lists which will compensate, to some extent, for any overall disproportionality. The proposed Welsh Assembly will have 40 FPTP single-member seats and 20 list PR seats, while the proposed Scottish Assembly will have 73 FPTP seats and 56 list PR seats. No set threshold for representation has been agreed upon but the Welsh Assembly will have an effective threshold of just under five per cent for a party to win a list seat while in Scotland parties will need far fewer votes to gain representation - probably closer to 1.5 per cent of the total vote. Lastly, STV has been proposed by the Fabians (an influential Labour-affiliated policy institute) for local government elections. But it is unlikely that electoral system reform will be seriously considered for local government in this parliament's lifetime - not least because the government's agenda for constitutional reform is already so over-loaded. However, the overwhelming focus of electoral reform remains the House of Commons and at the time of writing Britain appears closer to changing her FPTP system than at any time since 1917. In that year a proposal to introduce the Alternative Vote (AV) for two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, and the Single Transferable Vote (STV) for the remaining one-third of seats, was narrowly defeated after a stalemate between the House of Lords and House of Commons. A second attempt to move to AV was rejected by parliament in 1931, and it was not until the 1970s that electoral reform muscled its way back on to the British political agenda. In 1976 the Hansard Commission on Electoral Reform, chaired by the former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Blake, recommended that a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system be used for parliamentary elections, with three-quarters of the members being elected by FPTP and one-quarter from regional PR lists. The calculation for list seat allocations would take place at the national level and these seats would compensate for any disproportionality in the overall results of the single member district seats. After four consecutive defeats for the Labour party (1979, 1983, 1987, and 1992) the previously solid Labour support for FPTP began to fracture and in 1990 the leadership set up a commission, chaired by Professor Raymond Plant, to investigate electoral system reform options. The Plant Report (1993) recommended a switch to a sibling of the Alternative Vote which they called the Supplementary Vote - the same system used to elect the Sri Lankan president. While this proposal was never officially adopted by the Labour party in opposition they did nonetheless adopt a policy that, when returned to office, they would hold a national referendum on electoral system change. This policy was given teeth in a joint agreement on constitutional reform between Labour and the Liberal Democrats (who had consistently advocated a switch to a PR) announced on the eve of the 1997 British general election. The debate over reforming the way members of the House of Commons are elected reflects the First Past the Post versus Proportional Representation debate which has underlain much of the discussion of British constitutional practice throughout this century. The criticisms of the current FPTP electoral system have been restated many times. First, FPTP in the UK has led to some highly disproportional results where minority parties received far fewer seats than their percentage vote might have indicated and has led to situations where the "losing" party, in terms of votes won, became the winning party in term of seats won and thus formed the government. The Liberal Party, then Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance, then Liberal Democrats, have been the most victimized on the first count - although over the last four elections the disparity between the third party's vote and seat share has been decreasing. In 1983 the Liberal-SDP Alliance won 25.4 percent of the vote but only 3.5 percent of the seats. In 1987 the Alliance won 22.6 percent and 3.4 percent of the seats. In 1992 the newly formed Liberal Democrats won 17.8 percent of the votes and 3.1 percent of the seats, but in 1997, utilising more sophisticated targeting techniques and benefiting from the tide of anti-Conservative feeling, the Lib Dems were able to win 6.5 percent of the seats with 16.7 percent of the popular vote. The uphill struggle that new parties face under FPTP was dramatically illustrated in the 1989 UK European elections when the UK Green Party won 15 percent of the vote but not a single seat. The second anomaly, of one party winning most votes but forming the opposition, has happened twice in the post-war period. In 1951 the Labour Party won more votes but the Conservatives won most seats and formed the government, while in February 1974 the indignity was reversed with Labour forming the government after the Conservatives had polled most votes. A second powerful criticism leveled at the British FPTP system has been its inability to adequately represent the nation along lines of gender and ethnicity. Up until 1997 fewer than ten percent of British MPs were women, although Labour's vigorous promotion of women parliamentary candidates and their subsequent landslide victory did nearly double the number of women MPs to 18.1 percent in the 1997 parliament. Ethnic minorities in Britain have been similarly under-represented. Most parliaments preceding the 1987 election were all white, and the four Black and Indian-English MPs elected in that year represented less than 0.5 percent of the total. While Black and Asian representation has increased over the last three elections their numbers in parliament remain substantially below their proportion of the UK population as a whole. Opponents of FPTP have also cited destabilizing swings in economic policy which arose from the alternation of Conservative and Labour governments between 1945-1979, but the Conservatives 18 unbroken years in office (1979-1997) and Labour's drift toward the fiscally moderate centre has tended to weaken this argument. Finally, some PR advocates have disputed the fact that FPTP creates a strong geographical link between elector and representative in the UK, arguing that many safe Conservative and Labour seats are effectively "rotten boroughs" where MPs have little incentive to make themselves accessible, and that the urban centres of the UK are now so totally dominated by Labour MPs that all other party supporters are effectively disenfranchised. In contrast FPTP in Britain is defended particular because of its single-member districts and encouragement of a "dominant two-party system". Supporters of the status quo find the single constituency member sacrosanct and argue that this relationship of accountability between a voter and their MP is the bedrock of British democracy. Opponents of PR also point to the fact that all, bar one, UK governments in the post-war period have been single party governments and predict that the coalition governments, which would most likely result from a PR system, would be destabilizing to the country as a whole. Related to the previous point is the argument that FPTP provides a barrier against the fragmentation of the party system, which might involve the break up of the major parties (for example, a split in the Conservative Party between "pro-" and "anti-" European wings). Finally, FPTP is praised for denying a platform to extremist parties such as the National Front and British National Party. Reform of Britain’s FPTP system for parliamentary elections has become increasingly likely with the formation of a Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition government in May 2010. A referendum will be put to the British electorate on May 5, 2011, asking voters to decide between FPTP and a new alternative vote system (AV, also known as instant runoff voting). Single-member districts (SMDs) are deeply rooted in American political tradition. From the founding of the United States in the eighteenth century to the present, electoral representation has been grounded on the concept of territorial units and subunits. Americans have always thought of popular sovereignty in spatial terms, beginning with the original conception of the U.S. Constitution as a compact among sovereign states and continuing within the states to the valorization of county and municipal government autonomy or "home rule." The Constitution does not specify how popular elections should be structured, and the states have experimented with a variety of single-member-district, multimember-district and at-large forms. But SMDs frequently, if episodically, have been the method of choice for elections at all levels, federal, state, and local, because they enable smaller, geographically situated communities to send their own representatives to larger legislative assemblies. Conversely, multimember districts and at-large elections have been employed when ruling majorities wanted to emphasize the corporate identity of particular jurisdictions and to suppress partisan or ethnic "factionalism." At-large voting rules such as majority-vote requirements, anti-single-shot laws and numbered places were used to maximize the power of ethnic majorities to control all the seats in their legislative bodies. Historically blacks have been the primary targets of vote-submergence devices in the U.S. The United States is the only modern democracy founded on the institution of slavery, and blacks are entrenched in its Constitution and political institutions as an internal national "other." Slaves were non-persons, and even free blacks were non-citizens. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, blacks in the South were systematically terrorized during elections and, around the turn of the century, disfranchised altogether. The all-white Democratic Party primary became the only election that mattered, and it turned the "solid South" into a region of one-party states. International pressures of the Cold War and the NAACP's litigation campaign against legalized racial segregation eventually succeeded in striking down laws which denied blacks the vote and barred them from primary elections. Thereafter, many majority-white jurisdictions, in and out of the South, resorted to at-large and multimember election schemes to minimize black electoral influence. The U.S. Supreme Court responded to the post-World War II reexamination of American nationality by elevating the constitutional importance of the individual. In 1963 and 1964 the Court reversed its longstanding refusal to get involved in redistricting controversies and granted relief to white urban voters complaining about the refusal of state legislatures, dominated by underpopulated rural districts, to redistrict themselves. The Supreme Court relied on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to announce the rule of one person, one vote, defining the individual citizen as the basic unit of electoral politics. However, by making the under-weighting of a person's vote justifiable, the Court opened the door to claims that voting strength could be diluted by non-mathematical means, in particular by electoral structures which allowed a bloc-voting white majority to deny a black citizen any opportunity to choose a representative in the state or local legislature. The Supreme Court responded by instructing lower courts to prefer SMDs when they ordered redistricting of malapportioned legislative bodies, and in 1973 it declared unconstitutional Texas' use of multimember legislative districts, specifically because they denied black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. All these electoral reforms were wrought by judicial reinterpretation of the Constitution. Meanwhile, in 1965, prodded by the confrontational mass politics of the Civil Rights Movement, Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which enabled most blacks in the South to vote for the first time. The conditions that would warrant judicial relief from minority vote dilution became the subject of intense and increasingly complicated litigation, both with respect to at-large or multimember-district elections and with respect to allegedly gerrymandered SMDs. In 1980 the Supreme Court held that racial minorities must prove that a challenged election structure was designed or maintained intentionally to dilute their voting strength. Congress responded with the Voting Rights Act of 1982, which created a statutory entitlement to judicial relief from election structures which had the effect or "result" of diluting the voting strength of protected minorities, defined as racial groups and "persons who are American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Natives or of Spanish heritage." The 1982 Voting Rights Act, helped along by a 1986 Supreme Court decision which streamlined the proof it required, sparked widespread changes from at-large elections to SMDs, through both litigation and legislation. By the time the 1990 census rolled around, nearly every state and local redistricting authority was preoccupied with the task of drawing "minority-majority" SMDs that would comply with both the constitutional rule of population equality and the anti-vote dilution mandate of the Voting Rights Act. The new SMDs produced remarkable gains in office holding for both African Americans and Latinos. The number of black elected officials nationwide grew from 300 in 1964 to approximately 8,000 in 1993, although this figure still constituted less than two percent of all elected officials in a country where blacks account for twelve percent of the population. Since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the number of African-American members of Congress had increased from nine to thirty-eight, and majority-black SMDs were responsible for all seventeen of the African Americans elected to Congress from the eleven Southern states of the old Confederacy. After the 1994 elections, under a new redistricting plan negotiated by black political leaders, Alabama became the first and only Southern State ever to achieve black proportional representation in both houses of its Legislature. The nationalist backlash provoked by this surge in majority-black and majority-Hispanic SMDs probably was inevitable. The way SMDs are drawn necessarily defines the constituencies that are deemed to be relevant for purposes of representation in legislative assemblies, and it does so in strictly geographic terms. Seldom are redistricting choices politically irrelevant, mere administrative devices for cumulating individual voter preferences. Rather, they declare who the operative national subcommunities shall be and how much power they will enjoy in the lawmaking process. In the United States, counties, municipalities, and recognizable neighborhoods have been the traditional building blocks for redistricting, except when it was expedient to ignore their boundaries for the sake of submerging the electoral influence of African Americans and other ethnic minorities. Now it has become necessary to split up traditional political subdivisions to create districts with African-American or Latino majorities, because in the U.S. people of color have no clearly discernible "homelands." Although they frequently are clustered in ethnically identifiable neighborhoods, these residential enclaves are dispersed among more populous, predominantly white neighborhoods. The result in some cases has been very irregularly shaped, noncompact majority-black or majority-Latino districts which, although they were no more bizarre than some majority-white districts, unmistakably signaled racial or ethnic designs. The most contorted black and Latino districts quickly drew court challenges from white voters, who contended they violated a radically "colorblind" interpretation of the Constitution. In 1993, the Supreme Court issued the first of a series of decisions which established "an analytically distinct" constitutional cause of action that could be used by individual citizens who wished to challenge "racially gerrymandered" SMDs. Plaintiffs would not have to bear the heavy burden of proving that because of the challenged districts their votes were denied or abridged or that their voting strength was diluted. Instead, the Court recognized a presumptively stigmatic harm ensuing from districts which were drawn for the "predominant" purpose of race and which could not be justified as a "narrowly tailored" effort to serve a "compelling state interest." Such districts are unconstitutional, said the Court, because they presume that all members of the ethnic minority think and vote alike and share the same political interests, a message the Court fears will encourage racial "balkanization" of the electorate. This new gerrymander jurisprudence, which aims to address perceived harms to national unity rather than to the individual plaintiff, has produced court orders striking down several majority-black and majority-Latino SMDs at the Congressional, state, and local levels. The new constitutional districting rules have been created and reaffirmed by the same narrow, five-justice Court majority over the vigorous dissents of four justices, who contend that they offend both substantive justice and the proper limits of judicial review. Justice Felix Frankfurter warned about the perils of the judiciary entering the "political thicket" in his dissent from the first one-person, one-vote case in 1963. He may be vindicated by the incoherence of the Supreme Court's gerrymandering principles. Surely nothing could be less appropriate for resolution by judges than questions about how the sovereign people should define themselves in a multi-ethnic democratic republic. In its rush to prevent state legislatures from assuming that all African Americans think alike, the Court has yet to confront the converse proposition: What if African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American or Native-American citizens in a particular state or locale actually do share the same political interests and freely associate to assert them through their elected representatives, through their community institutions or through political organizations - perhaps political parties? To suggest that citizens of color are constitutionally prohibited from negotiating for their own SMDs would contravene historical, constitutionally protected notions of political freedom in the U.S. This is an entirely different question from whether members of an ethnic minority can demand that such districts be created as a matter of legal or constitutional right. But these are serious questions, which advocates of "majority-minority" SMDs themselves are only now being forced to address. There was never a consensus among them about the political limits or normative endpoint of the voting rights they pressed into remarkably successful service. Today, most advocates of SMDs designed to produce voter majorities of a particular ethnic group defend them as necessary responses to the "unfortunate" reality of ethnic divisions in the national fabric. They share with the opponents of majority-minority districts an underlying commitment to the vision of the United States as an immigrant nation, one in which newcomers and their descendants voluntarily assimilate in the established institutions of public political and social life while retaining the right to preserve their ethnic distinctiveness in strictly private institutional ways. Even private (white) ethnic associations were under pressure to disappear during the "melting pot" era of Anglo ascendancy, which extended at least through World War I. A distinct change in American identity was wrought by World War II, however, when the descendants of other European nationalities placed their stamp of ownership on the American nation and the Anglo-American political traditions they had adopted. The full implications of this national redefinition were largely submerged, as they were throughout the world, in the empires created by competing statist ideologies during the Cold War. That has all changed now, and the U.S. is not immune from the winds of ethnic nationalism that are sweeping the globe. Today, Americans of German and Irish ancestry outnumber those of English descent. They now sit in the front benches, along with Southern-European and Eastern-European Americans, including secular American Jews, where together they have become the most passionate defenders of their adopted English language and Anglo-American Constitution. Ethnically identifiable SMDs are an embarrassment to these Americans and a threat to their national vision. The right wing of the immigrant nation supports the current regime of suppressing and delegitimising SMDs that have all too obvious racial or ethnic designs, while the left wing either defends majority-minority districts as temporary integration tools or urges that they be replaced with multimember-district schemes using semi-proportional or single-transferrable-vote rules. The growing number of PR proponents also criticize SMDs because they can make it easier for incumbents to get re-elected, engendering a lack of accountability which hurts ethnic majorities and minorities alike. But PR systems are not invulnerable to the same charges often leveled at majority-minority SMDs, that they encourage ethnic polarization and threaten destabilization. Left out of this immigrant debate and its common objectives of national uniformity, however, are Americans of color, especially the descendants of African slaves. Some scholars now acknowledge that white supremacy has always been a more powerful defining characteristic of American citizenship than any of the more openly debated versions of liberal pluralism and civic republicanism. Many white Americans are simply disturbed or even frightened by black control of the political units in which they reside. For African Americans, a more inclusive immigrant nation may be neither realistic nor an acceptable remedy for centuries of caste exclusion. They may favour renegotiations of American nationhood on terms that at last acknowledge their distinctiveness and accord them full dignity and free agency. The periodic redrawing of SMDs may be one of the best ways of forcing their national demands onto the table, which could explain why a hostile Supreme Court majority has constitutionalized the issue in hopes of squelching the debate. Proportional representation systems may afford African Americans equal participation in legislative bodies, but by sidestepping the constitutive inter-ethnic dialogue redrawing SMDs requires they may actually impede the historical quest of descendants of slaves for complete freedom. PR proposals by some members of the Congressional Black Caucus have not resonated strongly in the black community. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine how the descendants of conquered indigenous peoples and of non-white immigrants might have entirely different views of which election structures best suit their personal and collective agendas in an increasingly diverse U.S. A just resolution of these conflicting, often incommensurable ethnic positions on electoral structures and their underlying national visions can be achieved only through mutual consent to compromises, which must be incomplete and provisional so long as we value the liberal ideal of individual freedom to shape and reshape one's own cultural and political identity. The negotiations required to reach agreement on such formative questions are particularly difficult to start and to sustain in the United States, because for so many Americans their national identity is invested in a sacred, written Constitution, which for all practical purposes can only be reinterpreted, not renegotiated. Not surprisingly, the greatest progress toward national consensus usually has been achieved through democratically negotiated compromises outside the constitutional context, as with the Voting Rights Act, for example. Now, with considerable encouragement from "colorblind" conservatives, some members of the Supreme Court are suggesting that what they consider to be overzealous implementation by the democratic branches of federal and state governments may call into question the constitutional validity of the Act itself. And the occasion for this constitutional confrontation will be the battle over legislative redistricting. Thus, if the American experience with SMDs as an instrument of political empowerment for ethnic minorities holds any lessons for other democracies, they would include the importance of the particular national context, of respect for its political traditions and the particular situations of subnational groups within them, of the opportunities for gaining the widest possible consensus in making decisions about election structures, and, most of all, of humility when it comes to expectations of lasting solutions. A detailed summary of the election of film star Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, in the most high-profile recall campaign seen in any democracy. The document gives an overview of the recall mechanism in California and of the campaign to oust Governor Gray Davis. A high-profile recall case involving a prominent figure has increased public exposure to the recall mechanism. In California, the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected Governor after a successful recall campaign to oust Governor Gray Davis. Gray Davis was re-elected Governor of California in November 2002. However, within less than a year he had been ousted from his post and replaced by a man previously more famous for his acting and his muscles. So how did it come to be hasta la vista for Governor Davis in such a short space of time? The recall mechanism in California History Like many other US states, Californian democracy provides for the use of the recall mechanism. Adopted into the Californian constitution in 1911, the recall mechanism is a process by which the electorate can seek the removal of elected public officials before the end of their terms of office. Prior to 2003, the recall mechanism had been used in California on numerous occasions. Several local government officials have been recalled, and four state legislators have been recalled, in 1913, 1914 and 1995 (twice). However, whilst previous state Governors have faced some level of recall attempt in the last 30 years, Governor Davis was the first Governor to face a recall election. Launching a recall initiative To launch a recall initiative, proponents are required to file a notice of intention with the California Secretary of State's Office. The notice must include a statement explaining in no more than 200 words why the proponents are seeking a recall, and must give the names, signatures and addresses of either a minimum of 10 people or the number of people required to have signed the nomination of the officer who is subject to the recall, whichever is the greatest. Proponents of the recall must be registered voters within the electoral jurisdiction of the officer they seek to recall. Within a week of the notice being filed, the officer in question is given the opportunity to make a 200 word statement in response to the initiative. Circulating the petition Once the notice has been certified by the Secretary of State, proponents are required to collect a number of signatures equivalent to 12% of the votes cast for the officer the last time the office was on the ballot. Signatures must be collected within 160 days, and the petition must be circulated in at least five Californian counties. In the 2003 recall, the recall petition was certified for circulation on 25 March 2003, giving proponents until 2 September 2003 to collect 897,158 signatures. Signatures are only deemed to be valid if they are from voters registered in the electoral jurisdiction of the officer who is the subject of the recall; similarly, only such registered voters are qualified to circulate the recall petition. Reporting and verifying petition signatures Proponents of the recall are required to file the petition with the election official in each county in which the petition is circulated. Whilst the petition is being circulated, county election officials are required to report to the Secretary of State on the progress of the petition; the first report must be submitted within 30 days of the recall being initiated, and every 30 days thereafter. The report must advise on the number of signatures collected in the most recent 30 day period, the total cumulative number of signatures collected, and the total number of valid signatures collected. County election officials are not required to begin verifying signatures for validity until 10% of the total number of signatures required have been collected. Once the verification process begins, a random sample of signatures must be checked. Where more than 500 signatures are reported at any one time, either 3% of signatures submitted or 500 signatures must be checked, whichever is the smallest. The recall election Once the Secretary of State certifies that the petition has qualified, the Lieutenant Governor is required by the California Constitution to set the date of the recall election. The election must be held in the period between 60-80 days after the date on which the Secretary of State certified that the petition qualified, unless there is a state-wide election within 180 days of that date (in which case the Lieutenant Governor has the option to hold the recall election on the same day). In California, the recall and the vote for a successor to replace the officer should the recall succeed are included on the same ballot. The officer facing recall is not entitled to stand as a candidate for re-election. Therefore, if in the first vote the incumbent officer receives the support of more than 50% of the electorate, the recall is defeated and the second vote is irrelevant. However, if a majority vote to recall the officer, the candidate who receives most votes is elected. At the 2003 recall election, there were also two state wide initiatives on the ballot. This differs from other US states and other countries, where once a petition has qualified, a separate yes/no vote on whether or not to recall the officer will be held before a vote on a successor is held. Critics of the Californian process argue that this causes confusion for voters. In addition, it also raises the possibility that if an officer is recalled, his successor could be elected with a less legitimate democratic mandate: for example, if an officer is narrowly recalled on a vote of 51% in favour, 49% against, but the winning candidate on the second vote receives the support of 37% of voters, the new Governor arguably has the support of 12% fewer voters. The 2003 recall campaign The case against Gray The campaign against Gray Davis was initially launched by an organisation called the People's Advocate, an anti-tax organisation headed by Ted Costa, the official proponent of the recall effort. The main charge against Gray was that he had mismanaged the Californian economy, creating a budget deficit of over USD 30 billion and the need for large tax increases. The efforts of the People's Advocate were supported by a number of Republican Party activists and by other California political parties such as the Libertarian Party and the American Independent Party. In May, the recall campaign was boosted when Republican Congressman Darrel Issa launched his own recall effort, Rescue California, backed by significant funding and the expertise of political strategists. Rescue California was instrumental in collecting signatures for the recall petition, organising its efforts on a professional basis and claiming to have collected around 70% of the valid signatures submitted. Opponents of the recall included labour leaders and public sector employees, and were led by an organisation called Taxpayers Against the Recall. They argued that using the initiative would set an expensive precedent, and that recall should only be used in the case of abuse of office or corruption. The announcement of the election The recall petition was certified for petition on 25 March 2003. By the middle of July, recall proponents claimed to have gathered 1.6 million signatures, well in excess of the 897,158 needed to secure the recall ballot. On July 23, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley verified that 1,356,408 of the signatures were valid. The following day, Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante announced that the recall ballot would be held on October 7. Candidates for the election One notable feature of the 2003 recall election was the large number of candidates who stood for election. Nomination procedures for a recall election are required by the constitution to be virtually the same as for a normal election to the office of Governor (except that papers have to be filed no less than 59 days before the date of the recall election). Candidates at the 2003 recall were therefore required to collect 65 nomination signatures and pay a USD 3,500 fee (or submit USD 10,000 in lieu of the fee). The low threshold for nominations meant that 135 individuals stood as replacement candidates, thus ensuring an extremely long ballot for voters to consider. The Republican and Democrat parties The most prominent of the candidates was undoubtedly Arnold Schwarzenegger, film actor and husband of a member of America's most famous political dynasty, Maria Shriver, niece of assassinated President John F Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. Following considerable speculation about whether he would join the race to succeed Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger, a Republican, used an appearance on the Tonight Show on 6 August to announce his candidacy. His entry into the race prompted other high-profile Republican candidates to drop out of the race to be Gray's successor. The Democrats faced a more difficult position in choosing whether or not to stand a replacement candidate. On the one hand, their main aim was to win the recall ballot and defeat the recall proposition. It was argued that achieving this result would be helped by the presentation of a united front, with no Democratic candidates for successor. However, an alternative argument was formulated along the lines that, should the recall succeed, it was necessary to have a Democratic candidate on the ballot as a potential successor. The debate was settled when, on August 7, Cruz Bustamante entered the race to offer a prominent Democratic candidacy. The campaign controls Different controls applied to the recall element of the campaign, and the campaign to promote replacement candidates. The issue of recall is treated by campaign finance law in California as equivalent to a ballot measure, whilst the question of a successor is treated in accordance with controls on normal candidate elections. In practice, this meant that whilst Governor Davis was not subject to any contribution limits on the amount of money he could accept in trying to defeat the recall measure, replacement candidates were subject to contribution limits of USD 21,200 and an expenditure limit of USD 10,624,000. The outcome of the recall process At the election on October 7, the measure to recall the Governor was passed by a vote of 55.4% against a no vote of 44.6%. Of the replacement candidates, Arnold Schwarzenegger achieved 48.6% of the vote (more than had supported Davis), his nearest rival Crus Bustamante achieving 31.5%. Governor Gray Davis was duly recalled, and Governor-elect Schwarzenegger sworn in on 17 November. The total cost of running the recall election, including providing voters with a state voter information guide, was estimated to be just under USD 70 million. The National Assembly parliamentary and provincial elections held in South Africa in 1994 marked the high point of a period of tumultuous change from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy in Southern Africa as a whole. At midnight on 27 April 1994 perhaps the most despised flag in Africa was lowered, heralding the end of 300 years of colonialism and four decades of apartheid. Those first multiparty democratic elections opened the stage to political movements which had been driven underground by the Pretoria regime’s policy of racial divide and rule. Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) was poised on the threshold of power; the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) was challenging it within the same community, while Mangosotho Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) hoped to build on its hegemony in the north of the province of KwaZulu-Natal. These new parties joined F. W. De Klerk’s National Party (NP), the liberal Democratic Party (DP) and the new Freedom Front (FF)—a descendant of the ‘white right’ parties of the old constitutional dispensation—in battling for the votes of millions of newly-enfranchised people. Elections were conducted under List PR with half the National Assembly (200 members) being chosen from nine provincial lists and the other half being elected from a single national list. In effect, the country used one nationwide constituency (with 400 members) for the conversion of votes into seats, and no formal threshold for representation was imposed. The Droop Quota was used to allocate seats, and surplus seats were awarded by an adaptation of the Largest Remainder Method. Early drafts of the electoral law put the threshold for parliamentary representation at 5 per cent of the national vote but, in a concession to the smaller parties, the ANC and the NP agreed in early 1994 to drop any ‘mandatory’ threshold. However, only those parties with 20 or more MPs, 5 per cent of the Assembly, were guaranteed portfolios in the first government’s cabinet of national unity. The fact that the ‘Mandela liberation-movement juggernaut’ would have won the National Assembly elections under almost any electoral system cannot diminish the importance of South Africa’s choice of a List PR system for these first elections. The PR system, as an integral part of other power-sharing mechanisms in the new constitution, was crucial to creating the atmosphere of inclusiveness and reconciliation which precipitated the decline of the worst political violence and has made post-apartheid South Africa something of a beacon of hope and stability to the rest of troubled Africa. Nevertheless, in 1990, upon Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, there was no particular reason to believe that South Africa would adopt PR. The ‘whites-only’ Parliament had always been elected by an FPTP system, while the ANC, now in a powerful bargaining position, expected to be clearly advantaged if FPTP were maintained. As only five electoral districts, out of over 700, had white majorities, the ANC, with 50–60 per cent of the popular vote, expected to win 70 per cent or 80 per cent of the parliamentary seats easily due to the vagaries of FPTP voting. But the ANC did not opt for this course because it realized that the disparities of a ‘winner-takes-all’ electoral system would be fundamentally destabilizing in the long run for minority and majority interests. List PR also avoided the politically charged and controversial question of having to draw constituency boundaries and, furthermore, it fitted in with the executive power-sharing ethos which both the ANC and the Nationalists saw as a key tenet of the interim constitution. It is probable that, even with their geographical pockets of electoral support, the Freedom Front (which won nine seats in the new National Assembly), the Democratic Party (seven seats), the Pan-Africanist Congress (five seats), and the African Christian Democratic Party (two seats) would have failed to win a single parliamentary seat if the elections had been held under a single-member district FPTP electoral system. While these parties together only had 6 per cent of the members of the new Assembly, their importance inside the structures of government far outweighs their numerical strength. A reading of the detailed results reveals, somewhat surprisingly, that in 1994 List PR may not have particularly advantaged the medium-sized NP and the IFP over and above the number of seats they would have expected to win under an FPTP system. This was primarily due to the ‘national referendum’ nature of the campaign, which led to a two-party battle between the old and the new—the ANC versus the IFP in KwaZulu-Natal province, and the ANC versus the NP in the rest of the country. Furthermore, the ethnically homogeneous nature of constituencies and the strong geographical concentrations of support in South Africa meant that the NP and the IFP would have won only slightly fewer seats under a constituency system. However, FPTP would in all likelihood have given the ANC a small ‘seat bonus’, increasing its share of the seats in the National Assembly beyond its share of the popular vote (which was 62 per cent) and beyond the two-thirds majority needed to draft the new constitution without reference to other parties. The practice of having one ballot for the National Assembly and one for the provincial parliament also proved to be an important innovation in the electoral system design. Until a few months before the election, the ANC was still insisting on a single ballot which would be counted for both the national and provincial elections. This was quite clearly a manoeuvre to advantage the larger, nationally-based parties and was only changed through the pressure of an alliance of business leaders, the Democratic Party, and international advisers. The eventual results did show that large numbers of voters had split their national and provincial ballots between two parties, and it appears as though the major beneficiaries of separating the ballots were the small Democratic Party and the Freedom Front. Both polled more than 200,000 votes in the provincial elections over and above their national result, which went a long way to explain the 490,000 drop between the NP’s national and provincial totals. The choice of electoral system has also had an impact upon the composition of the Parliament along the lines of ethnicity and gender. The South African National Assembly sworn into office in May 1994 contained over 80 former members of the whites-only parliament, but that was where the similarities between the old and the new ended. In direct contrast to South Africa’s troubled history, black sat with white, communist with conservative, Zulu with Xhosa, and Muslim with Christian. To a significant extent the diversity of the new National Assembly was a product of the use of List PR. The national, and unalterable, candidate lists allowed parties to present ethnically heterogeneous groups of candidates which, it was hoped, would have cross-cutting appeal. The resulting National Assembly was 52 per cent black (including Xhosa-, Zulu-, Sotho-, Venda-, Tswana-, Pedi-, Swazi-, Shangaan- and Ndebele-speaking), 32 per cent white (English- and Afrikaans-speaking), 8 per cent Indian, and 7 per cent Coloured—this compared to an electorate which was estimated to be 73 per cent black, 15 per cent white, 9 per cent Coloured, and 3 per cent Indian. Women made up 27 per cent of MPs. In 1999 the proportion of black MPs rose to 58 per cent and that of Coloured MPs rose to 10 per cent, while whites made up 26 per cent and Indians 5 per cent. In 2004 the black proportion (65 per cent) came closer to their population share, while whites made up 22 per cent. Numbers of Coloured and Indian MPs held roughly steady. The proportion of women MPs rose to 30 per cent in 1999 and to 33 per cent in 2004. There is a widespread belief in South Africa that if FPTP had been introduced there would have been far fewer women, Indians and whites, with more black and male MPs. Finally, more polarized forms of representation would be expected under FPTP, with whites (of different parties) representing majority white constituencies, Xhosas representing Xhosas, Zulus representing Zulus, and so on. While problems with lack of district accountability and of remoteness are perceived effects of the present South African List PR system, it has meant that citizens have a variety of MPs to approach when the need arises. Nevertheless, there is a continuing debate in South Africa about how to increase democratic accountability and the representativeness of the MPs. It was widely accepted that the first non-racial election was more of a referendum about which parties should draw up the new constitution. But subsequent elections have been about constituting a representative Parliament, and many political actors and voters argue that the electoral system needs to be altered to take this into account. Today, all the major political parties still support the principle of PR. Without greatly increasing the difficulty of the ballot, voters could be allowed to choose between candidates as well as parties, without the PR character of the Parliament being affected in any way. One option is to elect MPs in smaller multi-member constituencies in order to develop a stronger geographical tie between electors and their representatives. At the moment the regional lists represent areas so large that any form of local advocacy is entirely lost. A second option is to adopt the MMP system, with half the members elected from single-member districts while the other half come from compensatory PR lists. Both these options were considered by a 12-member Task Team, led by Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, a former leader of the Democratic Party, and briefed to consider reform options in 2002. This Task Team had an inbuilt ANC- Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) majority, and was appointed by the president to review the electoral system in the light of complaints that the List PR system did not include adequate geographical representation. It ultimately recommended that South Africa should retain its List PR system but change it to a two-tier system, splitting the country into 69 constituencies electing between three and seven MPs, and keeping 100 seats as ‘compensatory’ national seats. However, the ANC government rejected this reform for the 2004 general election.
South African closed List PR ballot paper. By Megan Ritchie and Lauren Sauer I. IntroductionIn the Maldives, as in all countries around the world, women’s interest and ability to participate in the political process is impacted by a combination of legal, political, social, economic and cultural factors. An understanding of how each of these factors independently affects participation within the specific country context, as well as the aggregate effect of these combined factors, is critical to developing targeted strategies to increase women’s engagement in the political process. IFES undertook a study to determine what specific obstacles exist to women being elected representatives and to develop recommendations appropriate for the Maldivian context. The study was conducted in two phases. During the first phase conducted in December 2013, IFES reviewed the Maldives legal and policy commitments to gender equality and examined the number of women represented in government, how many women ran as candidates and women’s participation in political parties. IFES also analyzed survey reports from international and domestic organizations and program activity reports to ensure lessons learned were captured. The second phase of the assessment took place from May – June 2014, during which IFES conducted field interviews and focus group discussions with government agencies [1], political parties, women candidates, civil society organizations (CSOs) and other implementing partners. IFES presented preliminary findings and recommendations to study participants for their input and finalization. II. ContextIFES first conducted a desk-study review of the Maldives’ protection of women’s political rights in the legal and regulatory framework, including commitments to international conventions, current legislation and government units devoted to these policies. Additionally, IFES looked into how women were currently represented in government and within political parties, as well as how often they ran for office. Commitment to Protection of Women’s Political Rights in the Legal and Regulatory Framework The Maldives became a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) in 1993 and the CEDAW Optional Protocol in 2006. Initially, the Maldives ratified CEDAW with a reservation to Articles 7(a), which provides women the right to vote in all elections and to be eligible for election to all publicly elected bodies, but withdrew this reservation in March 2010 after the Constitution adopted in 2008 removed a previous barrier to women holding the position of Head of State. [2] It has been reported that the Maldives has fallen behind in fulfilling its obligations to CEDAW, which advocates have attributed to state institutions lacking an interest and technical capacity to fulfill their obligations as well as a lack of political will to initiate change. [3] Similarly while the Maldives has made a commitment to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, the country is reportedly falling short of meeting MDG number three to promote gender equality and empower women. [4] The Maldives is a member state of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). [5] The OIC Plan of Action for the Advancement of Women was adopted in 2008 and is a comprehensive strategic plan aimed at improving the situation of women in political, economic, cultural and social spheres. [6] The current Constitution of the Maldives, adopted in 2008, contains a commitment to gender equality. Article 17 states that the law will not discriminate on the basis of gender, and legitimizes temporary special measures (TSM) to redress any inequalities. Attempts to introduce TSM to date have not been successful despite the legal framework protection to do so, suggesting that the requisite political will to bring about structural changes to increase women’s representation was absent. However, some legislative progress has been made -- as of July 2014, the Gender and Equality Law was in its second draft, with a plan to be finalized, put forward for public consultations and be submitted to Parliament by the end of 2014. As of June 2014, the government unit devoted to gender policy was in the process of developing a five-year gender strategic plan which focused on economic and political empowerment of women. While this was under development, a 100 day “road map” was functioning as the government’s interim national action plan. Several action items have been accomplished to date, including starting awareness programs on gender sensitization in schools, increasing women’s representation in diplomatic missions and ministries, and obtaining approval from the President for the formation of a Women Entrepreneurs Council. Participation of Women in Politics and Government Most of the islands and cities in the Maldives have a Women’s Development Committee (WDC), which works under the local council. WDC members are elected and serve three-year terms. Since 1982, WDCs have been active on many islands and provided a platform for women to participate in the development of their communities. However, despite having their mandate outlined in Article 35 of the Decentralization Act which gave them legal standing that had previously been absent following decentralization in 2010, an absence of funding has crippled many WDCs. Women’s Participation in Political Parties Although the percentages of women contesting elected office are extremely low, anecdotal evidence suggests that women have played a major role in political party activities at the grassroots level, organizing and attending campaign rallies and conducting door-to-door outreach in significant numbers. However, this has not translated into leadership roles within political parties, even in the women’s wings. IFES met with the five main political parties to learn how their party structure incorporates women. All parties either have a women’s wing or are amending their charters to institute women’s wings in 2014. Some interviewees suggested that despite the existence of women’s wings in political parties, women continue to be underrepresented in decision-making across political parties. At the leadership level, political parties designate one to three slots for women representatives on the party’s council, and some of the political parties allocate seats for women at the deputy leadership level. III. FindingsBased on findings from IFES’ desk study research, areas of inquiry were identified for in-depth interviews with government agencies, [9] political parties, women candidates, CSOs and other implementing partners to identify the main barriers affecting women’s political participation. Findings from both IFES’ desk-study research of survey reports and interviews conducted are summarized below. Area of Inquiry 1: Power and Decision Making Research and interviews showed that one of the barriers inhibiting women from successfully contesting for national elections is their lack of financial resources. All interviewees stressed how important it is for a woman candidate to have family support in running for office; this is often, but not always, linked to financial backing from her family. Female candidates in the major parties tend to come from political families and receive significant financial backing from their families – it would be difficult, if not impossible, for women to run a successful campaign without this financial support. Women in the Maldives, according to the Gender Gap Index, have lower employment rates than men and on average earn half as much as men. [10] Therefore, women lack the personal financial resources to fund their campaigns. Campaigns have become extremely expensive in the Maldives, largely due to vote buying. Interviewees reported that many male candidates spend between USD 460,000 and USD 860,000. Very few female candidates were reported to have spent such large sums of money.
Area of Inquiry 2: Knowledge, Beliefs, Perceptions and Gender Roles
Other surveys showed that some women were not supportive of other women taking elected leadership roles. UNDP’s Women in Public Life 2011 focus group discussions showed mixed views on women running for political office. While some male and female respondents said that they would support women entering the political arena (predominately in the southern atolls), many urban men and women expressed traditional views of women’s roles in the family, demonstrating that they would likely not vote for a female candidate. [14] TM’s Democracy at the Crossroads survey results showed that 70% of women believe that women make worse leaders than men while only 60% of men responded to have felt this way. UNDP’s Women in Public Life study found that women lack confidence in their ability to function in a leadership position. Female participants perceived “courage and willingness to carry responsibility” as important qualities for a successful politician, and many of these participants felt that women might not have these qualities. [15] Those consulted during IFES’ in-country interviews said that women’s lack of confidence in general, specifically in public speaking, affects their interest in running for office. Despite public and self-perceptions noted above, it is encouraging that TM’s survey finds “support for gender equality in the Maldives is significantly higher among the young and better educated than it is among older generations (those over 35 years of age).” [16]
Area of Inquiry 3: Access Those consulted spoke of the disparity between the public space available to men and women. Several examples were given to illustrate this point. Previously, the Maldives had separate mosques available for men and women; however, in 2009, the Islamic Affairs Ministry decided to close the women’s mosques due to budget limitations. As discussed in UNDP’s Women in Public Life study, this conveys “a very public message that women have no right (or need) for public space…[and] suggests institutional decision-making processes that discriminate against women.” [17] In addition, the Maldives has a culture of men congregating at ‘hotas,’ or traditional men’s cafes. Men use this space for socializing and holding political and business discussions. Interviewees noted this is where men interested in running for office learn about the needs of their constituents and secure financial resources for their campaigns. Women do not have similar spaces in which to increase their social capital. Unless women have family connections to people of political influence and economic means, it is often very difficult for women to become involved in politics, particularly at the national level. However, there are some examples of women in the Maldives overcoming this barrier. Interviewees discussed how eight women candidates who ran in the 2014 parliamentary election were able to form their own network for mutual support and to seek funding. Another success story was shared of women who attended a campaign school held by a Maldivian NGO and maintained contact throughout local level elections while running for local council seats in order to support each other. One of the biggest hurdles to women’s active political participation, as well as to employment, is the lack of access to childcare. In the Asian Development Bank’s 2007 Strategy and Program Assessment, household management and childcare were seen as the sole responsibility of women in the Maldives with estimates that “less than 4% of men contribute to household tasks and childcare.” [18] Currently there are no government-funded childcare facilities, and private childcare facilities are expensive and not always available. While the government is currently in the process of formulating guidelines and standards for childcare facilities, the absence of this public service makes it exceedingly difficult for women to be employed after they have children and to take on leadership roles in political campaigns. This is exacerbated by the rise of nuclear families. Area of Inquiry 4: Legal and Human Rights Although there is legislation in place to support TSM, three bills proposing TSM for women have failed to date in parliament, two on reserved seats for women in parliament and one on reserved seats for women on Island Councils. Male and female MPs argue that quotas aren’t needed because five women MPs have been elected. In addition, male MPs are resistant to TSM because some of them could lose their seats, depending on how the quota bill is designed; this shows a need for increased education regarding the different options for TSM. There are, as of yet, unrealized opportunities to engage political parties as catalysts for this change, as there has been almost no discussion about voluntary reservations of seats for women on party lists and other potential measures to increase women’s leadership within political parties. IV. RecommendationsIFES’ recommendations were formulated in consultation with interviewees and reflect past and current initiatives that should be supported and expanded, as well as new ideas introduced by stakeholders and stemming from IFES’ experience in women’s political empowerment programing. Recommendation 1: Political Parties Promote Greater Participation of Women in Politics Interviewees overwhelmingly stated that political parties were the key to increase women’s political participation in the short term. As such, it is important that political parties at the highest level disseminate messages on the inclusion of women at all levels within the party, including as candidates, and raise awareness of women’s empowerment opportunities. Since the findings indicated a reluctance of women at the island level to become politically active outside of campaign rallies, political party members, including male champions and female politicians, should reach out at the island level (face-to-face) to recruit politically active women into political party leadership at the local and regional levels and encourage women to run for island councils. Since the findings showed a lack of confidence and public speaking skills among potential women candidates, political parties should conduct workshops on how to campaign and perform public speaking, as well as on the roles and responsibilities of government officials and government operations for politically active women at the island and national levels. We also recommend that political parties increase public speaking skill-building opportunities for young women by encouraging the youth and women’s wings of political parties to conduct public speaking workshops and encouraging young women to speak up at meetings and rallies. Another major finding was the absence of networking opportunities for women. To improve this, we recommend that political parties conduct an orientation program for women participating in internship, mentorship and training programs to create a network of up-and-coming women who are interested in seeking political office. Networking meetings could take place quarterly to share what they learn and solidify the network. Recommendation 2: Increase Women’s Participation at the Local Level Increasing women’s political participation at the local level was a key theme that emerged throughout IFES’ interviews. A key area for action is increasing women’s exposure to how government works so that they are prepared to run for political office and be effective leaders. Since the findings showed the reluctance of women to participate in political party leadership, we recommend advocating for affirmative action policies on decision-making bodies at the island level, so that women gain experience in decision-making roles at the local level. Another way to help women gain experience in governance is to create internship opportunities with island council members. WDCs should be a natural pipeline for women’s political participation at the local level; however they are not functioning that way. We recommend conducting a study to identify why active members of WDCs do not run for political office, which will inform outreach activities to WDCs and island councils to promote women running for office. One of the key challenges to WDCs’ functioning effectively is the lack of funding. We encourage supporting the Gender Ministry’s efforts to unfreeze WDCs bank accounts, advocate for funding WDCs, and encourage them to be politically active and take up their mandate to voice women’s concerns to the island councils. In order to address the challenge of WDCs that do not fully understand their mandate, we recommend having active WDC members visit dormant WDCs to work with them to explore how they can become more politically active. Recommendation 3: Structural Reform Although political will was not present to work on TSM, many interviewees still felt it was important not to give up on the issue because of its importance in leveling the playing field. The goal is to achieve not only “equality of opportunity,” but “equality of results,” i.e. more women in political leadership positions. To accomplish this, we recommend advocacy efforts to educate influential stakeholders on TSM, including MPs, the media and the public. Materials should be developed to provide information on different ways of introducing TSM. Political parties should also be educated on options for voluntary reserved positions for women. A suggestion that emerged from study participants was to change the legal framework to have the eligibility to vote in local council elections be residence-based instead of constituency-based. This may have the effect of increasing the number of women on local councils, since female residents exceed male residents on the islands. Improved regulation of campaign spending will decrease the role of money in politics and benefit women, who have less access to campaign funding. To address this issue we recommend raising awareness about political finance and promoting affirmative action policies among political parties to give additional funding to female candidates. Discussions are currently taking place regarding how state funding is allocated to political parties, providing an opportunity to amend the Political Parties Act to allocate additional funding to political parties who field female candidates. Recommendation 4: Change Perceptions and Attitudes Based on findings of pervasive attitudes amongst Maldivians regarding gender equality, there is a need for community dialogues and gender sensitization programs to change perceptions that women are not equal to men. We recommend that public awareness campaigns, designed to reach a mass audience, be developed which: (1) publicize success stories of female leaders in politics, business and other professions; (2) show women being able to balance family and public life and show men sharing housework and childcare duties; and (3) highlight women’s contributions to Maldivian society. As noted in the findings, stereotyped understandings of men’s and women’s roles begin at an early age in schools. In order to address this issue, we recommend that gender sensitization take place in schools. Civil society can coordinate with the Ministry of Education to revise gender messaging in the school curriculum, support the Ministry of Gender in conducting gender awareness and sensitization programs for students and teachers, including bringing in male and female role models in a wide variety of occupations that break down gender stereotypes, and work with the Maldivian National University’s Faculty of Education to bring gender sensitization into the school teachers’ curriculum. We further recommend gender sensitization training for those in positions of influence. This could include gender sensitization training as part of orientation for MPs and for political party councils (both male and female members) and for journalists to reduce objectification of female candidates in the media and to support coverage that highlights the need for increasing women’s political participation. In order to fully understand negative perceptions of women’s political participation, we also recommend supplementing existing quantitative data with qualitative studies examining prevailing attitudes that marginalize women in public life. This study should include community dialogues on identified barriers to women’s political participation. Almost all of our interviewees were distressed at the increasing dominance of conservative Islamic views. To address this issue, we recommend promoting other scholarly views about women in politics according to the Qur’an. For example, HRCM, Ministry of Gender and Ministry of Islamic Affairs could work together to develop Friday sermons on women in public life, and experienced religious scholars from abroad could come in to discuss the role of women in politics under Islam. [1] Government agency meetings included Human Rights Commission Maldives, Attorney General, Elections Commission, Family Protection Authority, Ministry of Health and Gender. [2] Hope for Women, Maldives NGO Shadow Report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (2012), p 4 and 6. [3] Ibid. [4] This is to be assessed through the ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education; share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector; and proportion of seats held by women in national parliament. The target is to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education at all levels by 2015. UNDP assessed in June 2013 that the Maldives had still not met this goal. [5] OIC website, http://www.oic-oci.org/oicv2/page/?p_id=52&p_ref=26&lan=en, accessed 3 March 2014. [6] Ibid. [7] Inter-Parliamentary Union, “Women In National Parliaments,” http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm [8] Statistics from Judicial Service Commission, http://jsc.gov.mv/jlist/,Dec. 2013. There was a historic appointment of the first two female judges to the judiciary in 2007. However, there is still no female representation on either the Supreme Court of the Criminal Court benches, each consisting of seven justices. [9] Government agency meetings included Human Rights Commission Maldives, Attorney General, Elections Commission, Family Protection Authority, Ministry of Health and Gender. [10] Global Gender Gap Index, World Economic Forum, 2014, p 64-66. [11] Ibid, p 31. Note that the survey asked questions regarding supporting women’s right to equality in seven areas: family matters, courts, inheritance, custody, divorce, work and politics. [12] HRCM, The “Rights Side of Life” Second Baseline Survey (2012), p 44. [13] Rasheeda Mohamed Didi, “The Role of Males and Females in Text Books”, published by Hope for Women. [14] Women in Public Life in the Maldives: Situational Analysis, UNDP, 2011, p 23-26. [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid, p 27. [17] Ibid, p 31. [18] Asian Development Bank, Maldives: Gender and Development Assessment (2007), p 1. by Velko Miloev Introduction The opportunity to support individual candidates on an open party list within the proportional representation system is widely considered to be a major democratic achievement in both Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, ‘preferential voting’ has led to some undesired consequences in each of these countries, both of which this paper will consider in turn. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter, BaH or Bosnia for short), open lists have been used successfully since 2000, but key political actors have advocated for a return to closed lists for several years. Following a new wave of allegations of extensive abuse of the preference system in the 2014 elections, the issue is likely to continue to fuel the ongoing debate surrounding electoral reform. In Bulgaria, like in BaH, public support for open lists is linked to the widespread disillusionment with political elites. However, unlike in BaH, where open lists were initially easily introduced when post-war elections were still internationally administered, in Bulgaria it took years of pressure from civil society until open lists were finally regulated in a manner that gave voters a practical opportunity to reorder candidates in 2014. The results led to renewed calls on behalf of some parties to reconsider their use. In BaH, a voter may mark as many individual candidates as there are names on the selected party list without providing a preference order. Possibly the most serious problem encountered on Election Days is the addition of fake preferences by corrupt poll workers during the count. In essence, candidates organize the stealing of votes within a party list. In Bulgaria, the ballot paper includes the numbers and names of all political entities along with boxes with digits to tick the list number of one preferred candidate if a voter chooses to do so. In 2014, many voters made a politically meaningful use of this option, although various landslide victories of hardly known candidates lucky to have the same number on their party list as the ballot number of the party itself marred the 2014 elections. This case study will examine a number of issues including legal framework and ballot design, the roles of political parties and civil society in the electoral debate, campaign techniques, and voter education. The Bosnian case – a democratic achievement marred by fraud? Legal framework and history of the open lists Bosnia and Herzegovina currently uses a proportional representation (PR) system with open party lists for the lower houses of the national parliament and the parliaments of the two semi-autonomous entities, the cantonal assemblies, and the municipal councils’ elections.[1] A voter may mark an unlimited number of candidates within a selected list. All of their names appear on the ballot paper, which makes it relatively large (up to A2 size), but not necessarily difficult to manage. Mandates are allocated in multi-member electoral districts first by ‘political subjects’ (parties, coalitions, independent candidates) using the Sainte-Laguë formula. Then, within each winning list, seats are assigned to candidates starting with those with the highest number of preferences as long as they constitute not less than 5 percent of all valid votes for the party.[2]
The Bosnian public has warmly welcomed the concept of the open list since its introduction. In 1999 this author, as project manager at one of the BaH offices of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, had the chance to supervise locally hired IFES trainers supporting a country-wide OSCE led public information campaign on BaH’s new Electoral Law. Face-to-face community activities clearly confirmed that the concept of voting for individuals was well understood and appreciated. Comments from citizens indicated growing dissatisfaction with political parties’ underperformance and lack of accountability quite early in the beginning of Bosnia’s democratization process after the 1992-1996 war. The open lists were first tested in local elections in April 2000 and, subsequently, in the general elections in the autumn of the same year.[3] While the author of this study was unable to find any statistical data on the implementation of the open lists in the country, a quick review of the electoral results in 2000 highlighted the success of the open lists – approximately 20 percent of the new municipal councilors would not have been elected without preferences. Ten years later, Bosnian civil society had to defend this system, while at various points over the last 5 years at least four major political parties have advocated closing the lists.[4] The pros and cons, real or fake arguments for closing the lists A public statement by the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) made in January 2010 stated the following reasons for abandoning the open lists:[5] - Securing representation of all constituent peoples and the others in all BaH parliaments;[6] - Securing the representation of women and youth; - Equal territorial representation in multi-member electoral districts; - Satisfactory qualification levels of elected representatives; - Preventing electoral fraud through adding [fake] preferences by the polling station committees (PSCs). ‘Eliminating electoral engineering’ and ‘better minority gender representation’ were again arguments presented in an SNSD-SDP agreement on legislative action from 2012.[7] Open and closed lists were debated in the run up to the 2010 and 2014 general elections, and the issue has also been on the agenda of the official working groups tasked with proposing changes in the Electoral Law.[8] As of this writing, the candidates’ lists in BaH are still open for several reasons, including the general inability of Bosnian political players to reach parliamentary consensus on any reform (including electoral reform) and pressure from civil society groups like NGOs and the media. Civil society qualified the eventual closing of the lists as “another step towards ‘partocracy’ and decision making limited to closed centers of power,” which would lead to “further limitation of citizens’ influence over political developments.”[9] Other observers or party representatives noted that closing the lists would be a step backwards from a democratic achievement and would negatively impact voter turnout.[10] Indeed, most of the ‘closing’ arguments appear, to a certain extent, to be falsified and designed only to hide the parties’ desire to restore control over who will be elected as MP. While gender representation is indeed an issue in Bosnia’s parliaments, it does not appear to lie in the center of the electoral debate. As in other countries that combine gender quotas and open lists, there is conflict between these two positive aspirations. Amendments to the Electoral Law before the 2014 elections raised the quota for the ‘less represented gender’ from 25 to 40 percent, with female names equally distributed from top to bottom on each candidates’ list. Ultimately only 19 percent of seats in the state and entity legislatures were won by women as a consequence of voters’ preferences.[11] But parties have never asked citizens whether they would be willing to sacrifice the open lists for the sake of greater female representation. In addition, the attention given to minorities does not appear to be genuine. Bosnia’s electoral legal framework still contains ethnicity based constitutional limitations of both active and passive suffrage rights, particularly affecting those who do not identify themselves with one of the three constituent peoples. These limitations contradict a number of binding documents or recommendations of the OSCE, the PACE, the EU, and a 2009 decision of the European Court for Human Rights. As the OSCE/ODIHR observation mission noted in its final report on the 2014 elections, “it is regrettable that this is the second election held in violation of the Sejdić-Finci judgment of the ECtHR.”[12] Other ‘closing arguments’ are also far from convincing. Seeking better territorial representation is somewhat irrelevant in the case of relatively small electoral units in BaH, and voters using preferences would certainly consider candidates who are likely to come and talk to their constituency after being elected. It also unlikely that voters are eager to spoil the ‘qualification levels’ of MPs by backing the least qualified candidates. All these arguments considered, the allegations of manipulating the open list in various elections since 2008 appear credible. The abuse of the open lists – a specific BaH problem The addition of fake preferences to individual candidates by members of a polling station committee (PSC) is probably the most worrying Election Day violation in Bosnia. This fraudulent behavior requires complicity among both PSC members and those present during the count.[13] Such complicity is reportedly not difficult to establish since the fake preferences mean stealing votes from within a list rather than from parties. Hence, a PSC member charged to count the individual votes on the stack of ballots for the party which nominated him as a poll worker may simply add X’s next to certain candidates’ names. PSCs in Bosnia are appointed exclusively on the basis of party nominations through a lottery. For example, once party A gets entitled to certain positions at certain polling stations, it may offer these to party B, which would nominate its loyal supporters (formally on behalf of party A). This can be a trade-off for cash, or A and B might “exchange” poll workers’ positions in areas where each of them has a stronger political interest to win. This practice complements parties illegally paying poll workers and intimidating or bribing observers. On paper, a PSC’s composition appears to be in complete compliance with the rule that none of the political contestants may be represented with more than one member, but in reality a given PSC might be in full control of one or two political parties. A consensual crime is difficult to observe and prove independently, and the Central Election Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CEC BaH) does not publish election results at the polling station level that are detailed enough to allow a thorough analysis. Thus, reports about modifying preference votes are mostly anecdotal. There are some clearer indications of fraud, such as when a candidate that is neither a resident nor popular in a certain area wins hundreds of preference votes at a certain polling station and zero preference votes at another polling station in the same community. It is also highly suspicious when a candidate receives preferences tallying close to the total number of votes for their party. Finally, many marginal political subjects, particularly independent candidates and some ‘phantom’ parties, receive almost no votes. Observers believe that they registered for the elections solely to become entitled to positions in the PSCs that they would subsequently trade off. For the first time in a decade, the general elections in October 2014 saw a large domestic non-partisan observation effort. A coalition of seven NGOs named “Pod lupom” (“under the magnifying glass”) covered roughly 25 percent of all polling stations based on a random sample throughout the whole country.[14] Only 0.6 percent of the coalition observers reported witnessing fake preferences added during the count. This can be seen as evidence that independent observers can deter fraud. In the same time, in a number of official and informal interviews conducted by this author during late autumn 2014 in Sarajevo with members of the electoral administration and high ranking party representatives, the abuse of the open lists was indicated again as a widespread problem at polling stations unattended by non-partisan observers or at least an issue of major concern. Some interlocutors proposed the closure of the lists. Saving the open lists – possible solutions Many stakeholders from the electoral administration and civil society insist on replacing the current political model for appointments to PSCs with a mixed political-professional model. This implies that the chairperson and some members are selected by the municipal electoral commissions from among public workers.[15] In addition, Bosnians could use open lists throughout Europe and the rest of the world as examples, paying particular attention to the number of preferences each voter is allowed as well as the design of the ballot.[16] Limiting a voter’s preference to two or three candidates would likely fall within the realistic scope of choice that an average voter may wish to have and would make any other additional marks on the ballot paper easier to detect. If only one personal vote within a party list is allowed, any additional marks will make the ballot valid for the list only. Using a stamp as a ballot marking tool will make fraudulent activities easier to control as pens and pencils are – contrary to the rules in BaH – usually available on the counting table. A simpler ballot design without candidates’ names would allow PSC members and observers to more efficiently control each other during the count and would also resolve other technical issues Bosnia has with printing, packing, and controlling the ballot papers during the process. Such a ballot would only contain boxes to mark the list number(s) of the preferred candidate(s). Figure SEQ Figure 2 Fragment from a ballot paper used for the 2013 municipal council elections on Kosovo. Note that the boxes with the list numbers of the candidates start from #2 - no preference marked automatically counts for the #1 on the list. Furthermore, a write-in ballot (e.g., with just two boxes to enter digits) would be very unusual in Bosnia but would almost fully eliminate the options for changing the voter’s preference. More importantly, it is hoped that continued and widened presence of domestic non-partisan observers will further limit various types of fraud committed at polling stations. More detailed results published by the CEC would enable observers to use statistical tools to detect any signs of fraud, including suspicious deviations in numbers of preferences for candidates. By mid-September 2015, the usual inter-agency working group for amending the legislation will be just about to start its work. It remains to be seen what new proposals will be put on the table. Much depends on the willingness of politicians to accept the recommendations from civil society, electoral administration, and the international community. The electoral reform in Bulgaria - citizens vs. the political establishment History of the debate over the open lists Bulgarians voted with open lists for the first time in the European Parliament (EP) elections in May 2007, just a few months after the country became a member of the European Union. For a candidate to move up the list, they needed to receive a number of preferences that equated at least 15 percent of all valid votes for the party. Few people believed that this process could work and indeed, it did not. Since then, the size of the threshold required for preferences to take effect has been a key issue in the electoral debate. Moreover, since 2007, the laws provide for only one optional preference. In 2011, the then ruling centrist GERB party[17] passed the first ever Bulgarian Electoral Code, which replaced the four laws that previously regulated different types of elections. The threshold for the preferences to count was nine percent for the National Assembly and six percent for the EP elections. However, before the national elections in 2013, GERB and a majority of MPs agreed to delete the words ‘preferential voting’ from the Electoral Code. Apparently, the politicians feared the unpredictable impact of the implementation of open lists for the first time in unequally-sized electoral districts[18] and were concerned about ‘brother-against-brother wars’ between candidates of the same party. But there was also a key technical issue – the MPs did not know how to design the ballot. The assumption at the time was that all candidates’ names must be printed on an open list ballot paper. With some 20-30 parties and coalitions normally running in national elections, the ballot would have become uncommonly large compared to what Bulgarians were used to. Thus, the code envisaged that there would be separate ballots for each party placed in ‘modular boxes’ inside the polling booths. An electronic device would issue just one ballot once the voter pressed the button for the selected party.[19] It turned out that the drafters of the code did not know how to design and produce these devices.[20] Civil society organizations and some politicians tried to defend the open lists but lost this round of the debate.[21] Following the 2013 elections, a new parliamentary majority formed around the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) opted for drafting a new Electoral Code. In an effort to demonstrate better responsiveness to the citizens’ requests, they formed a Public Council to the Interim Parliamentary Committee for developing the code. An official report, summarizing the various proposals, highlighted that NGOs as well as high-ranking independent experts almost unanimously backed open lists in all PR elections with low or zero thresholds.[22] A smaller number insisted that it should be mandatory for voters to mark several preferences (each of which would have equal weight as is the case in Bosnia). The most common phrase in this report, also evident in the Bulgarian electoral debates over the last few years, was ‘majoritarian element.’ Technically speaking, a ‘majoritarian element’ involves introducing a mixed electoral system with a certain number of MPs elected from open lists and others elected in a plurality or majority voting system in single-member constituencies. The general political context in Bulgaria shares some attributes with the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Bulgaria there are concerns that parties are accumulating too much power and use it to facilitate non-transparent political deals in support of various economic interests. Such concerns explain why citizens desire selecting their representatives through open lists. The political establishment, on the other hand, prefers to choose their own disciplined members of parliament. One striking instance of unprincipled, ad hoc parliamentary majorities making decisions against the prevailing public opinion took place in 2015, when the parties in the National assembly cancelled the planned referendum on the introduction of a mixed proportional-plurality/majority electoral system. This cancellation happened despite the fact that two of the parties had previously helped to collect the 500,000 signatures needed to initiate the referendum.[23] Looking back at 2013, the debate over the threshold for the open lists also clearly showed the parties’ desire to retain control over the people’s future representatives. Parties are legitimately concerned about the fact that with a very low threshold, small organized groups would be able to change the majority of voters’ will.[24] Nonetheless, they rejected the possible solution of making preference voting mandatory, and some insisted on a 20 percent threshold despite the failure of a 15 percent threshold in Bulgaria. The strongest opponent of the open lists, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), requested a 50 percent threshold.[25] The new Electoral Code was passed in February 2014 and kept the PR system in place with open lists and one optional preference. It provides that for preferences to become effective, a candidate must receive at least 7 percent of all valid votes for the list in an election to the National assembly, 5 percent in elections to the EP, and 7 percent from the municipal electoral quota in elections for local councils.[26] This was a significant disappointment for many who wanted a ‘majoritarian element’ and lower thresholds.[27] A further disappointment was the rule that if no preference had been marked on the ballot, it would count as one for the top candidate.[28] The Sudoku ballot paper and its consequences Despite these dissatisfactions with the legal provisions, the preferences worked in subsequent elections. Civil society had succeeded not only in achieving non-excessive thresholds, but also in introducing a new ballot design. At the Public Council, the Head of the Parliamentary committee demonstrated a patchwork of ballots from previous elections (with all candidates’ names) pasted on an A1 size sheet in an effort to demonstrate that the open list ballot paper would be unmanageable. A member then proceeded to pass to the Council a sample ballot paper from a Kosovo election, which this author had observed (see Figure 2). The design was accepted with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism. Figure 3 - The initial generic design of the ballot for the 2014 Bulgarian election to the European Parliament. The section on the right – the boxes for marking individual candidates with respective list numbers - became known as ‘Sudoku.’ Subsequently, the DPS proposed that the squares should be replaced with circles so that parties opposing the open lists could more easily instruct their supporters to not bother with preferences. According to different exit polls and observers’ reports, between 26 and 42 percent of Bulgarian voters marked a preference in the May 2014 EP elections. Four out of the 17 Bulgarian MEPs were elected as a result of these individual votes.[29] This included a case of particular political importance for the newly established centrist coalition, named the Reformist Block, in which the second candidate on the list defeated the top candidate and won the only RB seat. Even more astonishing was the case of the BSP, which as a party had the ballot number 15. The then hardly known young candidate with the list number 15 received 34,124 preferences while the party’s leader, placed on top of the list, only received 28,039. This became known as the ‘15/15 effect.’ Such results happened again at the National assembly elections in October of the same year (as 9/9, 11/11, 18/18 etc.). A number of factors contributed to this undesired phenomenon. First, the party campaigns frequently emphasize the list number of the party. This can lead to much confusion, particularly among rural, less educated segments of the electorate. Second, most candidates fell well short of campaigning for their preferences, while the voter education efforts of the CEC were limited and inadequate. A 38 second long, poorly produced video proved unable to familiarize the public with the new ballot design, and even well-informed observers struggled to find the official sample ballot, well hidden among hundreds of bylaws and attachments on the CEC website. Indeed, even civil society did very little to educate citizens about the new rules. Still a success story, but an uncertain future remains A study published by the Bulgarian NGO IPED used results protocols from multi-member districts to show that in October 2014, 35 percent of voters marked a preference, with these voters unevenly distributed among parties and regions. Twenty out of 240 members of the National assembly were elected because of preferential voting.[30] Even a quick, random review of official results reveals many cases in which low ranked candidates with list numbers the same as the party ballot number received a surprising number of individual votes. According to IPED, the ‘15/15 effect’ accounts for 12.3 percent of all preference votes. Several winning candidates declined their seats, admitting they were undeserved. Still, in 2014, the open list worked for the first time in the country despite five and seven percent thresholds, low expectations, and political opposition.[31] Some public statements indicated that parties were taken by surprise by the impact of the open lists. Some unclear and unsubstantiated allegations that preferences led to large numbers of invalid votes suggest the use of the ‘15/15’ phenomena as an excuse to try to close the lists.[32] The history of electoral reform in Bulgaria has seen examples of how making amendments to legislation in order to meet public demands on one issue can be used to reverse achievements on another. Civil society should remain on high alert and fight to hold onto previously won accomplishments in official formats for debates. Furthermore, CSOs could take the responsibility to implement CEC sponsored voter education programs. A more aggressive approach to attracting citizens with high quality research and proposals will only aid in bringing about electoral reform.
[2] Ibid, Articles 5.14, 5.15, 9,5, 9.8.
[3] Held still under the Rules and Regulations of the internationally chaired Provisional Electoral Commission.
[4] The scope of the online research carried out for this case study is from January 2010 – before the general elections the same year, until September 2015. The parties in question are: the Party for Democratic Action (SDA), the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the Croat Democratic Union of BiH (HDZ BiH), the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD).
[5] http://sda.ba/arhiva/arhiva.php?id=680 (local language)
[6] According to the BaH Constitution, constituent peoples are the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Croats and the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). Citizens, who do not identify themselves as one of the above, are referred to as ‘Others’.
[13] Until 2014 there were only large numbers of party agents accredited, but very few non-partisan observers.
[14] The author of this study served as EU election observation expert to the Coalition from June 2014 to March 2015.
[17] Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria - GERB
[18] For the elections to the EP Bulgarian is one multi-member constituency.
[19] Separate ballot papers for each party had been used in previous elections – simply put on a table inside the polling booth, but there were concerns about the lack of control over these ballots.
[20] http://openparliament.net/position/view-119 (Bulgarian language)
[23] The referendum was officially proposed by the President of the Republic following waves of street protests and other civic activities in 2013-2014 with a number of social and political demands. The question on the eventual introduction of mandatory voting was also rejected in parliament, thus only the question on ‘distant’ (electronic) voting remained on the referendum ballot for 25 October 2015.
[24] If few voters use preferences, implicitly supporting the order of candidates as presented by the party, a small active group could give their candidate decisive advantage.
[25] DPS is largely representing Bulgarian ethnic Turks. It is known as a party with strong grassroots structures and disciplined electorate with lower than the average educational level.
[26] Electoral Code as adopted on 21 February 2014. Articles 246, 261, 298, 353, 371, 386, 427. Not available in English.
[27] The 2015 Venice Commission report on PR systems and open/closed lists describes the Bulgarian thresholds as ‘moderate’. Ibid.
[28] Except in elections to the EP.
[31] In 2014 BSP, the second largest party, issued a circular to its field structures prohibiting campaigning for preferences - http://www.capital.bg/politika_i_ikonomika/. Nevertheless, 42 percent of its voters marked one according to IPED data.
[32] In 2015 the CEC abandoned the envisaged audit of invalid ballots despite earlier positive discussions at the Public Council to the CEC. |
What term is used to describe the phenomenon when voters adjust their long term allegiance?
Pos Terkait
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