POG 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Plurality Voting System, Neville Newell, Instant-Runoff Voting
22 Aug 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
POG240
Lecture 9
06/11/18
Elections and electoral system
Before we start
- Canada has single-member plurality- first past the post
- BC is having a referendum to change the electoral system- third referendum thus far
- Referendum question- two questions- 1. Do you want to keep first past the post or do you
want some form of proportional representative system, 2. Here are three systems rank
them based on what you prefer
- If more than 50% wins, that will be the system
Alternative vote: Richmond, NSW 1990
- Australia
- Ballot with all these names, rank them by who you like 1st, 2nd and 3rd best
- System that tries to generate majority winner
- Goes through many rounds
- If there is not a majority first round, the person will lowest votes gets thrown out and
those votes get spread out
- How other candidates are ranked are taken and redistributed till there is a majority vote
- If it was single member plurality- Charles Blunt would win because he won more than
others but it was still not majority
- When Baile is taken off ballot and redistributed, there still is not majority
Dudley Legget is then taken off and his votes are redistributed, the votes are low that it
still does not generate majority
- Ian Patternson taken off and redistributed, still no winner
- Redistributed till there is a majority and goes through many rounds and in the end Neville
Newell won
- People say great we got a majority winner, but we had to go many rounds to get a
majority winner- illustrates how different electoral systems have different effects
- Electoral systems people value different things, some value geographical representation,
some value majority, some value proportion, and some value plurality
- Different electoral system would have led to completely different results
- AV supposed to pick majority winner but in this case the person that won, 75% did not
want him
All influenced by and related to the distribution of political power
- Everything we spoke about before and after, have to deal with the distribution of power
Politics of representation
- How voters/citizens are represented by their governments
- In democracies now, represented by MPs, Political Parties, Interest groups,
- Political parties reflect the values of people who voted for them, there are some political
will that get reflected through elections and people are represented
- Politicians compete for our support, we either give it or we don’t, and they either win or
they don’t depending on if we give them our support
Electoral systems as exchange rate mechanism
- Votes do not count for equal amounts in different electoral systems
- Votes in FPTP are not equivalent to the number of seats as opposed to representative
proportional system
- The variations create different incentives for politicians
- Politicians want to get elected, and so there are incentives for how they behave, what
kind of parties they form, when they enter the race or not are all effected by the electoral
system
- The electoral system gives voters different choices
Electoral systems
- Divide these into broad categories
- Majoritarian- value creating majority winners
- Proportional systems- value creating a distribution of seats that effect proportionally the
distribution of opinion
- More likely to be proportional, less likely to be majoritarian
- More majoritarian = less proportional
- Electoral formula- math of how votes turn to seats
Electoral formula
- District magnitude- how many seats are elected from a particular district
- DM in Federal elections in Canada is one because we have a single member system
- In other systems, multi-member systems exist
- May have electoral thresholds- percentage of votes party or candidate needs in order to
get a seat
- Reason for having electoral threshold is that at some point you need a certain number of
votes to get a seat and some systems want to avoid having a massive legislature made up
of multiple small parties because it makes it difficult to get policies passed
- Proportional representation- 10% of vote gets 10% of seats,
- Higher the threshold, lower the proportional representation
Differentiating electoral systems
- Subdivide them into groups
- Majority
- Plurality
- PR list systems
- STV systems (form of proportional representative system)
- Mixed system
Majority systems
- Fundamental principle- candidate needs 50% of votes to win seats
- If there are more than two candidates, need to deal with maybe having less than majority
Document Summary
Canada has single-member plurality- first past the post. Bc is having a referendum to change the electoral system- third referendum thus far. Do you want to keep first past the post or do you want some form of proportional representative system, 2. Here are three systems rank them based on what you prefer. If more than 50% wins, that will be the system. Ballot with all these names, rank them by who you like 1st, 2nd and 3rd best. System that tries to generate majority winner. If there is not a majority first round, the person will lowest votes gets thrown out and those votes get spread out. How other candidates are ranked are taken and redistributed till there is a majority vote. If it was single member plurality- charles blunt would win because he won more than others but it was still not majority. When baile is taken off ballot and redistributed, there still is not majority.
