Electoral Systems
DR. AFXENDIOU
AP COMPARATIVE GOVERNMENT AND
POLITICS
SACHEM NORTH HIGH SCHOOL
ELECTORAL SYSTEM  the method used to calculate the number of
elected positions in government that
individuals and parties are awarded after
elections.

How votes are translated into seats in parliament or into
acquiring the presidency
THREE TYPES OF ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
1. Plurality electoral systems
2. Majority electoral systems
3. Proportional representation
PLURALITY ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
 “First-past-the-post”
 “winner take all”
 award a seat to the individual candidate who receives
the most votes in an election
 No majority needed in order to win, only a larger
number of votes than the other candidates
 Depend on single-member districts – voters choose
one candidate on their ballot
 POSITIVE - Lead to very stable political systems that
are dominated by two dominant political parties
PLURALITY ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
 NEGATIVE – candidate does not represent the
interests of all or even of most of the voters as most
of them may have voted for the other candidates.
 Examples of plurality electoral system:


House and Senate elections in the US
House of Commons elections in the UK
MAJORITY ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
 “second ballot systems”
 attempt to provide for a greater degree of
representativeness by requiring that candidates
achieve a majority of votes in order to win.
 Majority = 50%-plus-one-vote
 If no candidate gets a majority of votes, then a second
round of voting is held. In the second round of voting,
only a select number of candidates from the first round
are allowed to participate. In some countries, such as
Russia, the top two vote-getters in the first round move
on to the second round.
 Depend on single-member districts – voters choose one
candidate on their ballot
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION (“PR”)
 attempt to make the percentage of seats awarded to
candidates reflect as closely as possible the percentage of
votes that they received in the election
 Depend on multi-member districts
 These electoral systems have many variations to achieve
their goal of representation
 most straightforward version of PR is to award a party
the same percentage of seats in parliament as it gets
votes at the polls. So, if a party won 40% of the vote it
would receive 40% of the seats.



What do you do if a party got .25% of the votes?
What if they got 16.5% of the vote?
How many seats do these unclear percentages get?
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION (“PR”)
 Problems solved by the Party List System and the
Single Transferable Vote (STV) system
 Party List System:



voters vote for parties rather than for individual candidates
CLOSED PARTY LIST SYSTEM - the parties themselves
determine who will fill the seats that they have been allocated;
voters vote only for a particular party, and then it is up to the
party to decide which party members will actually serve as
representatives.
OPEN PARTY LIST SYSTEM - voters are given some
degree of choice among individual candidates, in addition to
voting for entire parties.
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION (“PR”)
 Party List System:
 After the votes are counted a variety of formulas are used to
figure out how many seats each party gets
 VOTE THRESHOLD - an arbitrary percentage of the vote set
by law that parties have to pass before they can be considered
in the allocation of seats. Any party that does not reach the
threshold is excluded from the calculation of seats. For
example, Russian parties need a 7% of the vote to be eligible
for seats. The higher the threshold the fewer parties
represented in the legislative body.
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION (“PR”)
 Single transferable vote (STV)
 yields an even more proportional result than party list systems
 System developed by British politician Thomas Hare in the
1800s
 voters vote for individuals, not for parties (as in the party list
system). BUT individual voters rank candidates according to
their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, . . ., nth choices. Rather than simply voting
for a single candidate, voters have the opportunity to express a
range of preferences for several candidates on the ballot.
 Mathematical formulas are then used to figure out the seat
allocations
Sources
Charles King, “Electoral Systems,” 2000, Georgetown
University,
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/kingch/Electo
ral_Systems.htm
Jack Bielasiak, “Electoral Systems and Political
Parties,” Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.