POLI 211 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Adam Przeworski, Leader Of The House Of Commons, Pragmatism
17 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
February 13th, 2018
Lecture 10: Party Systems- NDP
Introduction
●Voter’s Choices → Electoral Rules → Legislative Seats
↓ ↓
Over what? Organized how?
↖ Political Parties↗
●Single party states are looked down upon
Political Parties: Key to democratic development
●Adam Przeworski: “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections”
●Quality of a democracy is linked to the development of competitive party systems
●How do party systems chance?
○Change in electoral rules
○Change in underlying bases of party support
■Need to understand the voter
■Cleavage structures
●Central questions for parties:
○What do we stand for?
○Do we want to win?
●Proportional systems increase the number of parties, non-proportional system do not
●Duopoly: two strong systems
●In Quebec Canada there is a key cleavage/divide (16:00)
●In Canada, there exists class politics. An upper class may vote differently from a middle
class.
●In America race politics exists
●Tradeoff: “Do you want to win, or do you want to have a soul”
Theories about how voters make decisions
●Spatial Theory of Voting
○The person in the middle of the spectrum is the one candidates are most
concerned about
○There is no incentive to deviate once the candidate is in the middle. Being in the
middle means that you have a 50/50 percent chance of winning. This is also a
theory not reality
Document Summary
Voter"s choices (cid:314) electoral rules (cid:314) legislative seats (cid:315) (cid:315) Single party states are looked down upon. Adam przeworski: democracy is a system in which parties lose elections . Quality of a democracy is linked to the development of competitive party systems. Change in underlying bases of party support. Proportional systems increase the number of parties, non-proportional system do not. In quebec canada there is a key cleavage/divide (16:00) An upper class may vote differently from a middle class. Tradeoff: do you want to win, or do you want to have a soul . The person in the middle of the spectrum is the one candidates are most concerned about. There is no incentive to deviate once the candidate is in the middle. Being in the middle means that you have a 50/50 percent chance of winning. Voters care about dimension, they will most likely vote for the person closest to them.
