POLS 071 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Open List, Closed List

• School: University of Vermont
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLS 071
• Professor: Peter A.Von Doepp

Document Summary

Electoral systems are rules that translate votes into decisions about who gets to hold office: apply to presidential and legislative offices. Single-member district systems (smd), also called majority enhancing systems and majoritarian systems: the country is divided into legislative districts and candidates within the districts run against each other for single legislative seats. Winner-take-all seats, whoever gets a plurality of the votes wins. Proportional representation: the country is divided into multi-member districts and seats are allocated to parties based on the percentage of votes the party gets. Some countries use a mix of single member districts and proportional representation, called mixed systems: a designated number of seats will be based off of single member voting practices, and another set off of proportional representation practices. Minimum thresholds are used in proportional representation systems, keeping parties that don"t reach a certain percent of votes from receiving representation: extreme versus moderate proportional representation.