POL 2 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Electoral District, Party System
Document Summary
Rules of the electoral system impact the number of political parties that gain seats in the national legislature. Mechanical effect: rules that govern who can win. Rules that make it hard to win limit the number of parties seen in the national legislature, and rules that make it easy to win vice versa. Voters: voters understand what happens in elections and will likely abandon a party if it repeatedly loses. Candidates: famous candidates are unlikely to be associated with a losing party. Unites states elections of the house of representatives. United kingdom elections to the house of commons. Directly vote for candidates which makes it possible for independents to. Yield a relatively close ratio of the number of votes a party gets and the number of seats it gains in a national legislature. One example of majoritarian systems: single member district plurality (smdp) Us house of representatives and british house of commons.
