Comparative Politics: Understanding Electoral Systems

[00:00:01]hi I'm Patrick welcome back to compared politics we'll talk about electoral systems today and which is a super interesting topic I think but also a really important one in terms of its impact on the on policies so it's normally forgotten even though I would argue that if you put me in charge of drawing the district boundaries in the UK and also with selecting the specific electoral system I think I could construct you almost any composition of the parliament out of almost any distribution of the vote just based on those two variables it almost doesn't matter how you vote I could I think I could construct you a parliament in which the one party wins the other party wins or a third party wins after all so electoral systems are really important and much more impactful than people normally think so let's think about them just for a second today now the first thing that of course we need to get out of the way is that there's different types of Elections that's not a great surprise we of course could have presidential elections of parliamentary ones we could have general elections versus by-elections imagine for example a parliament having to fill a seat of someone that has died that would be a by-election then and of course we could have elections of varying levels of significance sometimes you elect people at the local level for example a mayor or a local Council sometimes you might elect people to the European Parliament which is a transnational parliamentary body and of course the status and the perception of these elections can vary widely between elections and also this can influence the behavior of Voters there's for example an interesting phenomenon called second order elections where sometimes the way that people for example vote in European elections actually mirrors how they would have voted in their national elections so sometimes for example they could punish the conservative party because they don't like what the conservative party at the national level has done and therefore they punish the conservatives running for the European Parliament even though those two camps have very little to do with each other so we're not really talking today about different types of Elections though as interesting as that would be we are talking about different electoral systems ways in which we translate votes into offices if you look at the world you see that the world roughly sort of divides itself into three parts there is a yellow part which uses majoritarian systems oftentimes also called uh plural plurality systems or first pass the post systems and in these systems normally the only thing that matters is whether you have more votes than the second place candidate or party if you have more than any other one then you win so it's a very easy system and it does weirdly if you look at the map here or maybe not so weirdly overlap with the British Empire so you see most of North America here you see India large parts of Africa and Australia all use some very variety of the majoritarian system and of course this is because Britain has a colonial power during the times of the British Empire export its own political system to its colonies then you see on the other hand the Blue World here the world covered in blue which is most of Latin America which is parts of Africa large parts of Europe and even some Central Asian countries which use proportional representation PR systems and they normally tend to work on the principle that the share of votes that you get also determines the share of seats that you get so if your party received 10 of all votes in the election then we would also expect your party to then occupy 10 of all seats in Parliament and then we have a world in green which is a mixture of the previous two systems so these systems tend to either be a little bit more majoritarian than proportional or a little more proportional than maturitarian but they tend to be a mix of aspects of the other two systems because they are trying to fix certain faults normally in either of these two extremes of the spectrum in terms of the number of countries the majority of countries in the world are still using maturity systems followed by PR systems and then mixed systems but you also see that there has been a bit of a development over the past 30 years where you've seen a reduction in the number of countries running majority hearing systems and a significant increase in both PR and mixed systems around the world uh so much so that nowadays PR is really only slightly behind uh majoritarian systems in the number of countries that have uh adopted it literal system what is an electoral system well Gallaher defines it as a set of rules that structure how votes are cast at elections and how these votes are then converted into offices so we have a set number of offices say seats in Parliament or the Office of the President and of course you don't have as many seats in Parliament for example as voters not every voter can have a seat in Parliament so you need to have some form of translation electoral systems are essentially a translation system between this is the number of votes that we have this is the number of seats and how do we allocate between those two now obviously there's huge amounts of variation in electoral systems we saw this already in the preceding map and there are specific points in which electoral systems tend to vary from each other there is for example varying amounts of electoral regulations so who can actually vote and not only who can vote but also who can run for office for example women receive the right to vote a couple of years in most systems before they actually were allowed to run for uh office which of course is deeply unfair but that's how these systems were at the time there could be differences in electoral formulas so we'll talk about that in Greater detail how votes are counted and how votes are then translated into seats districts could be of different magnitudes so a specific geographic area could only send one person to Parliament like it is in the UK or you have systems that allow multiple people from an area or a district to then become members of parliament and lastly maybe the least interesting way but one that is nonetheless studied a variation is ballast structures how do voters actually Express their choice do you make One X or several and if so how what effects do those things have now if you look at just the regulations type of variation between electoral systems we can broadly say that in the past 200 years that almost all electoral systems have expanded the franchise and let more and more people vote you have a map for example at the bottom right here that shows you when women were allowed to vote you see the first country in the world that did this was in 1893 New Zealand followed by much of Europe and North America but then you see large parts of the world actually only extended the franchise to women rather late sometimes in the late uh 20th century maybe the most famous case is Switzerland that took until um 1971 to let women vote I would venture that you probably have grandparents that are older than uh the right to vote for women in Switzerland uh you could of course have different voting ages so we've sort of agreed that 18 is a correct is the correct age to vote around the world but some countries are doing this at 16 if you want to vote in the Scottish Parliament elections you can also vote at 16. some countries have made voting compulsory such as Australia or Belgium if you don't turn up to vote as a registered voter you actually get fined uh most other countries are leaving it up to you whether or not you want to vote there are often regulations in terms of how parties and candidates can be funded if you are someone like Mark Mike Bloomberg in the US you can just drop a cool billion on running for office even though that sometimes doesn't work out still but most other countries do tend to limit the amount of money you can spend on getting elected either as a party or as a candidate you could have differences in incumbency rules how many times can you run can you only run a limited number of times for example or can you basically re-elect it as long as people give you the vote and then we have another uh interesting variation in the threshold rules so in proportional systems for example does any party receiving any share of the vote get into Parliament that'd probably be pretty difficult because there's always parties like you know the monster raving Looney party gets like 12 votes in a specific district and should we normally allocate them a seat in Parliament or not so most proportional systems tend to have that threshold set at between three and five percent that you as a party need of reach of the overall vote in order to be allocated at least one seat in Parliament now there's a number of interesting variations in electoral systems and I'm just going to talk about three of them uh for a second the first is District magnitude I already talked about this some systems see each district only represented by a single member of parliament this is the case of course in the UK but also in Canada so one geographic area is only represented by one person others are there other other countries have set this up differently in Germany for example you can have certain cities areas regions send multiple people to Parliament so it's not just the winner of a district that gets sent to Parliament but it might be multiple people from multiple parties some other countries such as New Zealand have even whole country districts so again multiple people are being sent to Parliament obviously but there's no distinct districts that correspond to specific Geographic areas North Carolina's Infamous Leafy Sea Dragon on the left hand side I'm going to talk about in another slide because we'll talk about gerrymandering really quick but District magnitude also of course can vary with District shape so districts are not always just nice uh you know rectangles overlaid over the map normally they follow certain Geographic boundaries and in the U.S these districts sometimes can have really weird shapes and this has large effects on electoral outcomes some of them are so illogically drawn that for example in North Carolina there's a nice District that has reminded people in its shape of a leafy sea dragon an adorable undersea creature whose appendages kind of look like seaweed a little bit look up some videos very relaxing and this can of course have an effect because in majoritarian systems it matters who wins a district if you're not the winner you basically don't matter as a candidate because nothing happens with your votes now the other two things that can vary between systems are ballot structure for example some countries have closed lists so you just cast your vote for a party and then that party determines who of its members in a proportional system gets sent to Parliament some other countries have open lists so you could say a vote for the conservatives but within the conservative party I vote for candidates Miller Smith and Jones and not for the other ones because those are the people I want to see in Parliament or you could even have preferential voting across parties so if you're in Ireland for example you can say I want the following candidate from the green party to be in Parliament in the following candidate from the conservatives be in Parliament which of course empowers you much more as a voter than if you could just vote for a closed party list where you have no influence over who is top and bottom of that list then electoral formulas of course can vary like are we only looking at simple pluralities so do you just have need to have one more vote than the second place person or do you have to achieve some form of absolute or qualified majority and are the proportionalities that we're looking for in proportional systems for example partial or pure these are not the most interesting bits of variation so I'm just going to skip them this is actually the second time I'm recording this entire lecture because the first time around I went to an hour and 30 minutes and I couldn't bear your tiny faces looking at the length of the lecture and then thinking oh God I need to listen to this at 1.5 speed again so that's why I kept it a little bit shorter this time okay speaking of gerrymandering gerrymandering happens when you have a differently drawn District boundaries and that can then generate different electoral results imagine a area that has 50 people in it 50 voters and you want to divide this area of 50 voters up in five districts you know that out of those 50 voters 30 vote blue and 20 vote red now if you wanted to achieve perfect representation the way you draw the district is basically vertically down here in this first in the second picture and if you drew them this way then out of the five districts you would have three districts that have all the blue voters in it and two districts with all the red voters and then you have uh three uh blue seats and two red seats which means blue overall wins now that'd be one way of representing all the voters arguably so even though of course blue got three districts and red got only two that still means that at least the red voters are represented in some way now if you uh adjusted this differently and you made horizontal districts here these would be nice and compact so geographically these might look very nice but in each of these districts you now have six to four vote share for the Blues versus the Reds so in this case even though there are 40 there are 20 red voters in these in all these districts put together the win none of the districts and you have five districts that only represent uh Blues Blue voters and so five districts resume overall blue uh wins this election again and the red votes basically just go away now you could also have and this is where gerrymandering comes in you could also if for example you were the red party and you had some nefarious purposes in mind then you would create districts in which you crammed the maximum amount of blue voters into just two districts here on the left-hand side again you need to have 10 voters per District right so you create two districts that has nine blue voters in it and only one red voter which means that you essentially give up on these districts you accept that blue is going to win these two districts because what it allows you to do is it allows you to cram all your red voters in three other districts here into these three on the left hand side which are shaped really weirdly but which allow you to maximize the number of your voters that are in this District and if you shape your districts like that what ends up happening is that you as red have three districts where you have six to four votes for red and only two districts in which you have nine to one votes for blue and that means blue only wins those two but you as red win three districts which means you overall win even though your voters are only 40 of the voting population so look at these pictures again and that should give you a better idea of why gerrymandering is a problem so in other words how you draw District boundaries without touching anything else about the electoral system can change the Electoral result from the one party winning to the other so that's why it's important okay we talked about uh the electoral system typology already on the map but let's take this apart a little bit more we have on the one side majoritarian systems majoritarian systems tend to work on the winner wins takes all principle so that means if you have more votes than the second place candidate you win that a seat or office you can take the shape of a simple plurality for example such as in Canada the UK or the US so just first pass the post if you're you have one more vote than the next place person you win it can also be alternative vote this happens for example in Australia and Papua New Guinea where you have a way of indicating your uh favorite candidate but then also your second third fourth favorite candidate and if your favorite candidate actually doesn't Garner a majority of votes then we count what your second place preference is so it allows for a little bit uh a little a couple of fewer wasted votes because of your preferred candidate doesn't actually get the nod it doesn't get the majority of all votes then at least we can look at your second third and fourth preference this is sometimes also called a runoff vote because much like in the two ballot system underneath it it allows it to eliminate certain candidates that haven't gotten the most votes but still take into account the preferences of those that voted for those candidates because the voters that voted for The Limited candidates can still see their second third fourth and so on preference taken into account when it comes to counting the rest this is a very candidate-focused system it matters a lot who the candidate is and whether that candidate can win because after all the second place is as good as nothing because only The Winner Takes the prize you have then proportional systems on the other side of the spectrum and they can work in a variety of different ways normally they work on a list system so this is what's used in places like Brazil Israel or Sweden where you can vote for party lists so you essentially say I want to give my vote to everyone who's on the list of the conservative party for example and the district magnitudes can vary of course so how many people each district sends to Parliament can vary uh but there is an attempt at least at translating the share of the votes that you get into the share of seats in Parliament that your party receives it can also take the shape of a single transferable vote uh famously practiced in Ireland for example or in some Scottish local government elections uh where you have voting in multi-member wards and where you again much like in the case of the alternative vote but this time in a proportional system can indicate who your most favorite uh second favorite third favorite and so on candidate is and your vote is then uh it can then be given to the next candidate for example in line once your first one has already received a seat so proportional systems generally work on your share of the votes translates into your share of the seats and then you have mixed system on the right hand side which normally tend to combine elements of majoritarian and proportional systems and then we have mixed member majoritarian and mixed member proportional and that really only means there is some mixed system mixed systems that are closer to the majoritarian end and some systems that are closer to the proportional end in both of those types of mixed systems though normally what happens is that you have more than one vote as a voter so for example you have one vote for for your candidate for your local candidate and you have a second vote that you can give to a party in mixed member majoritarian systems these are then calculated differently we basically do a first pass the post of candidate and a first pass the post of party and then we assign certain numbers of the overall seats in Parliament to eat each of these outcomes this is the case for example in Russia or in Thailand these are also called parallel systems and we have mixed number of proportionals such as in my home country of Germany for example also practiced here in Scotland Venezuela or New Zealand lesota we're going to talk about in one of the coming slides where you tend to also give two votes one for a candidate and one for a party and then normally what's done is the candidate seats the candidates are seated first and then additional seats are used to compensate for disproportionalities from this Winner Takes all first pass the post system that assigns District seats we're going to talk about that in Greater detail on one of the later slides uh so the mixed systems tend to try to fix faults in the other two systems but that also means that they're still the smallest category if you look around the world we see that list proportional representation is used by the majority of countries followed by first pass the post although like you've seen on the second slide in the world map this number has been shifting a little bit we also see that because India uses first past the post and also places like the US and Canada we see that most voters around the world actually cast their vote on the first pass the post because India already has 1.3 million people and like a billion voters so uh of course the uh skew the results in that way so let's think about the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two systems and then let's look at some of the mixed systems in which of these faults they try to fix if you take a majoritarian system it has certain clear advantages it has pretty clear choices for voters and because it's a simple system you want to vote for the winner you only have one vote you want to give that to the person that you want to win the seat there's no other calculations you need to make no grid strategizing you give your vote to the man or woman that you want to represent yourself that you want to represent you it's pretty transparent um you don't need to educate your voters all that much it's an easy system to understand it also generates uh majority governments so normally this results in pretty clear election results you know because you really only have these tend to have two parties these systems majoritarian parties party a party B you see this in the UK for the most part in the US to a larger degree and this also means that you tend to have stable governments because it's clear that one party tends to win a majority of the seats and that party can then also run the government with a majority of parliamentary seats behind them and you tend to have a coherent opposition for the same reason it's a just a fairly simple dichotomous binary kind of black and white type system it encourages parties to be broadly based because what you really want is you want to have the best possible chance of winning out right you're not interested in catering to the fringes of the particular spectrum because that reduces your chances of winning uh against all other candidates so extremist parties tend to be less well represented in a system like that simply because there's not enough votes at the extremes that you would have more votes than anyone else on the political Spectrum and there is a good degree of geographic accountability because you always know who represents you if you're from area X you know that there's one person in Parliament that represents your area of course though this system is deeply unfair or can lead to deeply unfair results imagine an election for example which you have 10 parties running and the party with the largest vote share just gets 11 of the vote in every single district and the other nine parties each get like another nine percent right so if each of the other nine parties get another nine percent then the 11 party would win in every single district and fill every single seat in Parliament because after all they do have more votes than the second place party but 89 of the votes were not cast for them this is of course a deeply unfair result and that might be a reason why we might reject majoritarian systems as a viable electoral systems so as David Butler has expressed this in majoritarian system seats count votes do not because after all a large number of votes are actually essentially discarded they don't matter because they weren't cast for a winning candidate and then nothing happens with them because they are not allocated seats so the outcome that we see sometimes in majoritarian systems is the party with the most votes isn't necessarily getting the most seats imagine for example a party that is only strong in a couple of urban districts with a lot of Voters so they get a ton of votes from those districts but those might only be 10 out of 100 districts and then the farmer's party basically picks up one seed in each of the rural districts which represent far fewer people but it still will achieve a majority in Parliament the Canon at the candidate level this this goes the same way so if you look at Donald Trump's 2016 election famously of course he won the Electoral College vote and the presidency but he actually lost the popular vote so a majority of people actually voted against him and for the alternative candidate in that election so you essentially have wasting votes in my example of the 10 parties running you would have the 11 of the votes that were cast for the main party those would count for something the 89 of the rest of the vote really wouldn't count for much because after all they aren't translated into seats we see empirically speaking that there's lower turnout and there's far fewer uh minorities and women represented in these systems mostly because parties feel that they are not viable candidates there is a certain Drive in Metro Terran systems to run the most inoffensive candidate essentially because after all only the winner counts by the way this is not meaning to say that Minority or women candidates would be offensive just that parties are trying to select candidates that have the broadest possible appeal without looking to represent minorities or women it strongly disadventures third parties right there's no real long-term third party in the UK Parliament yes the Liberals have been in but then they've been out for long stretches of the past and there's never been any significant representation by things like green parties that play a larger role in other European countries there's the possibility of regional fiefdoms could imagine a place like Scotland where you have a regional party that only caters to people in that region and that actually therefore achieves majorities but only in that region the SNP is not trying to run for example in Cornwall the rest of the UK doesn't matter to the snps elections and this might not always be a good thing you could end up with a parliament for example with parties that only have their own Geographic areas in mind will only want to cater to those populations rather than the wider population of the country and of course electoral boundaries I was talking about the gerrymandering are playing large role let's pick an actual real-life example of a majoritarian system with a couple of twists on it so let's look at Singapore for a second Singapore is a country in which voting is compulsory so you do have to vote and until the late 1980s it used to work on the first past the post and single member constituency system so it's very much a Westminster type system the parliament um has three types of members the first are regular members of parliament these are elected in the first past the post system and these fill 89 seats this works exactly like in the UK you have districts uh that elect exactly one member that then takes their seat in Parliament but the Singaporean uh system also assigns nine seats to what's called non-constituency MPS these are essentially looking at Singapore as a whole the best performing losers so the best performing opposition candidates also get represented some representation in Parliament you can see already that it's only 10 percent of the seats of the regular MPS but still there is some representation for those that don't win in a winner takes all system and then there's another category which is really interesting in which I don't know from any other Parliament around the world which are nominated members of parliament so the president of Singapore can simply say person X you should be in Parliament sometimes these are you know figures of public life these might be artists or writers or actors or religious leaders or whatever that basically just gets sent to Parliament by the president to for example represents certain constituencies that might not otherwise find representation but there's a further Twist on this Westminster style system through something called group representation constituencies so if you look at the map at the bottom here this is the 2020 electoral map of Singapore because that's when the last uh parliamentary election was last year in August I believe what you can see here is in blue are single member constituencies so you see these work exactly like they would in the UK you have a constituency an area that sends one member to Parliament but you see that a majority of the geographic area of Singapore actually has multi-member constituencies so that area for example the yellow and the red area each sends four or five members to Parliament not just one so essentially how this works is you as a voter have a party block vote you can go into that this in one of those districts you can cast your vote and say yes I want to give my vote to the conservative party or let's pick an actual party the progress Singapore party I want to give my vote to the progress Singapore party and the progress Singapore party then if the win if they get more votes than any other party again this is first pass to post if they get more votes than any other party their block of for example five people get sent to Parliament all these five people get sent to Parliament and interestingly enough every party that wants to send one of those blocks one of those groups of members to Parliament also has to make sure that within that group there is some minority representation such as the representation of the Malayan Indian population in Singapore so a kind of a Twist where a part of your country actually a large part if you look at the geography actually has multi-member Wards rather than just single member constituencies there are still a number of unresolved problems in the system because you can't get rid of all the problems with majoritarian with a majoritarian electoral system there's still a great deal of disproportionality um the non-constituency MPS actually can't vote on the most important issues things like the budget and gerrymandering is rampant these this map where the multi-member group constituencies are located gets redrawn for every election and this is a highly political process and of course just like you would gerrymandering in the U.S you are trying to pack the lots of your supporters into any given constituency now when I see this proportionality is still a problem these were the outcomes of the last election in 2020 and by the way the seed total is not right I'm not sure why it says 100 there and what you see there is the classic outcome of a majoritarian system the people's Action Party gets 61 of the vote and it receives 83 seats in Parliament the Workers Party the second place party has 11 of the vote in 10 seats in Parliament and every other party that ran has no representation in Parliament if you take all these other parties together they are actually over a quarter of the electorate there's the actual electorate because remember voting is compulsory so 27 of all voters cast their vote for a party and they have zero percent representation in Parliament so a classic drawback of materitarian systems now do proportional systems do this better are they better at any of these things now first we could point out as an advantage of course that they are fairer in terms of translating voucher into sea chair because the winner doesn't win all the winner just wins a share namely the share that they received so generally speaking in a proportional system your share of the vote is also translated into a share of the seat which also means that there is a larger part of the electorate that is involved in choosing the government and not just those that voted for the winner there's few wasted votes really the only time that your vote is wasted is if you vote for a party that doesn't make it into Parliament but as long as you vote for one of the major parties that has no problems reaching the five three percent or something threshold then your vote will count because your party will be represented in Parliament minority parties have a better chance to get in and so do atypical candidates I use atypical in the broadest possible sense here that doesn't mean women are atypical of course it just means that lots of candidates with profiles that tend to not succeed in maturitarian systems succeed in proportional ones because you're fine for example saying I just want to get six percent of the vote or ten percent of the vote for my slice of the electorate and you will still get elected there is more Choice arguably you don't only have to vote for a winner of one of the two main parties you can vote for a larger spectrum of parties and it encourages parties to develop a wide-ranging appeal because that means that the increase the increase their vote share um it does lead to Greater continuity and stability of policy not necessarily of government but because there's a higher chance that parties will continue to be represented in Parliament even if they represent minority interests you oftentimes have you know certain policies being actually driven forward over a longer period of time in the UK for example you sometimes have the greens in with like three seats some year and then the next year they're not in there and that leads to a large degree of variation in the policies disadvantages of this is first and foremost party fragmentation lots of theories don't like proportional representation because it leads to many parties being represented in Parliament imagine a system where the threshold is three percent you could technically have 30 plus parties in Parliament each with like 3.5 percent of the vote share that would of course lead to a state that's almost completely ungovernable because you would end up having to form Coalition governments from like 15 parties or something to reach a 50 plus one percent threshold to actually pass your legislation an interesting effect that you sometimes see in PR systems is that it can give undue influence to minor parties imagine your largest party is 47 of the seats in Parliament but to reach a majority it needs a tiny Coalition partner with four percent and then suddenly that tiny Coalition party can call all the shots because after all without that little Coalition partner the big party couldn't pass any legislation that is of course not what a PR system is designed to do because it was much more influenced to such a small share of the seats the links between voters and representatives is less clear because sometimes you know you can send multiple people from your district and you're not entirely sure who's responsible necessarily if things go wrong in your area because PR systems normally work on the terms of lists these lists are determined by party Elites and that can then lead to lots of like internal Politics as to who gets to the top or the bottom of the list which can actually reproduce a lot of the negative effects you see in majoritarian systems so for example we still see that party leads are predominantly male predominantly white for example predominantly you know heterosexual and not of other gender identities and that then leads to can lead to fairly homogeneous party lists that are actually not representative of the population and of course it's a slightly more difficult system you know you have to work with percentages and thresholds and small parties in large parties is a little less simple than just a straight up Metro terrain system then again we might sometimes need PR systems by the way I am aware that picking India as an example here is difficult but I'm going to tell you what I mean by that sometimes you might just have a situation where a majoritarian system cannot possibly replicate or mirror the diversity of Voters so you know in places like Bosnia for example where you see the outcomes of the last Municipal elections in 2020 what you had I think 20 something parties winning um municipalities here in the majoritarian system this would really only narrow down to two parties and of course all that diversity all those voters that clearly have a preference for another party would go away that can only be properly represented in a PR system and I would argue even in a case like India India of course is the first past the post system but it too has a very large number of parties in the case of India though that's mostly due to Geographic boundaries so you have certain parties that achieve majorities in certain Geographic areas nonetheless if I showed you a map of India with this distribution you would probably think that a proportional system would be far better at mirroring this diversity in the populace than a majoritarian system would be now a real life example of a professional system is sweet Sweden is a proportional system with an open list system so you can see the list of people that your party wants to send to Parliament and you can indicate some preferences on those lists the Swedish Parliament has 310 constituency seats and then 39 adjustment seats so the constituency seats are basically elected members from the district and then the adjustment seats are used to adjust for any non-proportionality be in the translation between votes and seats now while the parties select the candidates that are on the party lists the voters can then indicate either just the preference for a party and accept the ordering of the people on that party list or they can actually themselves rank uh the candidates of that party and they will then um that will then be taken into account for the further accounting uh the uh seed allocation happens with the Webster assembly goo method which essentially is a is a is an algorithm that is iterative so you first look at who received the most votes they get the first seat and then those uh the the the the difference in the seats is then taken away and then you look at who got the second number of votes and they received the next seat and then you look at the third most votes and they get the next seat and so on um the threshold for parliamentary elections is four percent so if you score less than four percent you will not be represented as a party and it is considered to be one of the most proportional systems worldwide and I'm going to show that with a graph on the next slide there are some unresolved systems voting secrecy is a bit of an issue if you have any swedes on the course maybe you can fact check me on this but the interesting part is that here in the in a Swedish Swedish election you pick up the party ballot outside of the voting booth so if someone looked closely they would see that for example you only pick up the the party ballot for the moderates and you go in the voting booth but at this point of course it's no secret who you're going to vote for because you only have the moderate party ballot with you that's just a bit of an idiosyncrasy of the Swedish system the bigger structural issue is that party fragmentation is happening the largest party at the last election really only received 28 of the vote so you always have Coalition governments that sometimes can be really difficult to form and may take several months to actually put into practice now you see here a quick graph that just shows you the vote share that a party received and the seat share that they ended up with and you see the difference between the two numbers is very slim the different Square just means it takes into account minus and plus values in the same way and what you can see here is simply that the Swedish system is very good at allocating exactly the share of seats to a party based on exactly how the share of the votes that it got as a matter of fact if you did this differently if you had a majoritarian system in Sweden the results would be vastly different so if you imagine for a second that this Swedish system the Swedish Parliament as of today is the proportion system on the left here has a representation of a number of parties of course all across the the party spectrum and the largest party only has 28 of the seats now if at the last election Sweden had had a majoritarian system you would see how Parliament looked on the right you see the social Democrats would have almost three quarters of all seats in Parliament and the only other party represented would be the moderates with all other parties not being represented and therefore the votes for those parties also being wasted so thinking about how a proportional system would look like if it were majoritarian it's often a good exercise in thinking about whether you prefer the one result over the other if you want to do this a slightly a slightly more professional you can check out the subreddit imaginary elections which I didn't know was a thing but there's people that have all kinds of great ideas about how elections could look like if they adopted different electoral systems this wild graph here is for example someone going to quite some lengths to think about how the U.S Congress would look like if the U.S had a proportional system versus a majoritarian one I find it fascinating like the all the little parties that they made there and who the party leaders would be and it would be of course quite interesting to see such a variety of political Spectrum positions in the political Spectrum being represented versus the at the moment very milk toast two parties which are basically the same on many issues anyway that we see in the Congress today now other systems tend to take the disadvantages of either uh the majoritarian or the proportional system and they try to fix them in some way so this doesn't always work but it certainly is an attempt at it one of the most widely attempted fixes of both of the proportional and the majoritarian system is the mixed member proportional electoral system so what happens in a mixed member proportional system is you first give the voter one vote for a district candidate and then you also give the voter a party vote and what happens is you first seat all the candidates that have achieved victory in a first pass the post system so just like in the UK you would you look at okay who got the most number of votes and that person then gets a seat but then once you're done with seeding all the candidates that won their District you look at whether any party has received a larger number of secondary votes party votes then it has received the share of the seats already so for example you could have a party like in this uh like in this bullet point here that gets 30 of all secondary party votes but its candidates were only able to win 20 of all districts then in a mixed member proportional system they would get basically 10 additional seats in Parliament to make up the difference and bring them up to that 30 overall that they uh get data that they got of all the votes there's also a couple of other ways to address certain drawbacks such as a single non-transferable vote for example so you can only cast one vote but a district has more than one seat to fill this is the Singaporean system of course and you could then have multiple candidates filling the multiple seats in that District rather than just the winner taking it all and just the winner taking the one seed that is up for grabs the board account system is an interesting one because it relates to the way in which voter preferences are aggregated and we'll talk about this in Greater detail when we talk about nauru a real life example of a mixed system is Lesotho Lesotho for those that don't know is a small African nation it's landlocked so it's a tiny country that is fully surrounded by South Africa so South Africa is all around it and Lesotho is in the middle of it it is a constitutional monarchy but the king is largely ceremonial so the real the the thing that is most importantly elected is its Parliament its National Assembly now this worked on a first pass the post's bog standard Westminster system until the late 1990s but then there was a series of election clashes and they finally decided to try to fix the um conflict between government and opposition by giving an interim Authority the the power to Institute a new electoral system and they then created Africa's first mixed member uh proportional system uh that was modeled on Germany they invited the German expert and apparently the German expert was so persuasive that they couldn't help themselves but adopt the German system so what ended up being is they have 120 seats in Parliament and out of those 120 seats 80 seats are allocated to single member districts so there's 80 districts in Lesotho and those run on first pass the post to whoever wins the district whoever gets the most votes in the district gets to seat uh gets to get that seat uh in Parliament those are 80 and then the remaining 40 seats are used to compensate parties that have received a share of the vote but that have not been able to actually win as many districts District seats as they should so this is easily Illustrated if you look on the left hand side here the Democratic congress party right got 25 of the overall vote 25 a quarter of 120 seats so in a perfect PR system they should have gotten 30 seats right because 25 of 120 is 30. the only one 26 constituencies 26 District seats so under this mixed system they get an additional bonus for seats in Parliament to bring them up to those 30 percent that um a corresponds to their voucher so since this has happened this has led to Greater participation greater representation in Parliament so more parties are represented the ruling party is enjoying less of a majority in most elections and that generally has led to more peaceful elections in a more stable political process especially if you compare this to The Wider region of sub-Saharan Africa now there's still a little bit a couple of wonky bits about the system so for example voters actually only cast one vote not two as it would be the case in Germany you only cast your vote for your candidate and that vote for the candidate is also counted as a vote for the candidate's party but you can't actually split your vote so that also means that for example if you want to support the movement for economic change party that only got five percent of the vote you have to vote for a non-viable candidate so you have to vote for the candidate of the movement for economic change even though you know they're not going to win their District seat but you want them to receive your your vote so that they get in over the party seats and of course that also means on the other side that parties have to run non-viable candidates because that's the only way that they can get votes um so there's still a couple of things that need to be worked out but generally that is an example of a mixed system that is trying to fix some of the um faults with a majoritarian system now I was I promised you to talk a tiny bit about nauru nauru is interesting because they are the only country in the world that uses the board account system to elect its members of parliament nauru is a tiny island nation in the Pacific that is actually a map of the entirety of nauru and you can kind of tell the size of nauru by looking at this air strip here that is basically half of the entire width of the island so it's a very tiny island nation and they're using the board account system which is also called a positional voting system what happens essentially is that you assign a number to each candidate that stands for election and the higher the number the more you like that candidate the board account system then adds the rank points that each candidate gets and then declares someone the winner based on these rank points that interesting thing about this board account system is that it tends to elect not the people that the most voters like but it tends to elect the people that the least voters hate if that makes any sense so let's take this example here let's imagine an action in nauru with three candidates ABC and five voters one through five you see in a first pass the post system three of the voters have given their highest preference the three to candidate a and in the first basketball system candidate a would now be elected to a seat in Parliament because after all they got the most threes um the candidate B only got two threes in candidates he actually got no no threes so three out of five that would mean in a first pass both system candidate a would likely have gotten the seat in Parliament but if you take a close look you will see that candidate a is really liked by three voters but really intensely disliked by two other voters they gave him a one candidate B on the other hand only got two threes from two voters over here but three other voters felt sort of lukewarm about them they certainly didn't hate them they didn't feel they were the best candidate but they didn't hate them so they got a number of twos and only two threes a board account system now counts these rank points up for each candidate and then declares the person the winner that scored that most points by the way this is all highly simplified but it illustrates the principle a border account system would then count for candidate a three plus three plus one plus one plus three which is eleven but candidate B who fewer people hated gets two plus two plus three plus three plus two is twelve so the board account system the way in which we count up the preferences of the voters has now led to an entirely different candidate being selected remember what I told you all the way in the title page if you give put me in charge of the electoral system I can get almost anyone elected I can create almost any composition of parliament that's an example of this purely dependent on an algorithm means that one person gets to represent you or the other person gets to represent you now um speaking from a comparative politics lens now I only want to touch on a couple of things that might be interesting for our course specifically now from a comparative politics lens electoral systems can be used as a dependent variable so we can consider the electoral system the outcome of a process so how did we end up with specific electoral systems in one place over the other we already saw that lots of countries in the former British Empire now the Commonwealth have adopted the British system but what determines for example the uh the way that proportional systems are spread out over the world is this a factor of just size are certain countries um more likely a bigger country is better for majority hearing systems is to diversity or to political culture we don't know um what's important to remember though is as people Norris points out that electoral systems are actually rarely designed and often the outcome of a rather messy process so even in places like Lesotho who did sort of restart their process they didn't quite start from scratch they did use some of the things that were there before more commonly though electoral systems are used as an independent variable so we're using electoral systems to explain certain outcomes so what we see for example empirically speaking is that majoritarian electoral systems tend to generate two-party systems so because it's a winner take all system that tends to lead itself to really only A or B party a or party B winning and that then leads to a two-party system while PR systems normally have multi-party competition we also see other effects such as majoritarian systems having underrepresentative groups such as women or minorities or for example we can look at outcomes and different outcomes between PR systems and mediterrane systems where we would expect PR systems to generate more societal consensus because after all a larger amount of the voters will be involved in determining the government which also means that they should more see more buy into certain policies so we can use electoral systems in a variety of ways as an independent variable and lots of them might already be interesting to you uh other ones you might only discover on this slide so I want to show you two specific insights though from comparative politics that are quite interesting because they answer questions you might have had about politics in general so diverges law is the first one of these insights that has come out of comparative politics of electoral systems and it answers the question of why would you ever vote for a loser and the answer of course in a majoritarian system is well you never would majoritarian systems don't reward voters for voting for a losing candidate losing candidate in this case meaning not the highest scoring candidate because after all Winner Takes all means if you don't vote for the winner your vote is lost so in a majority test majoritarian system you will always vote for the most effective candidate or party so that means you ignore third parties because that means you just throw your vote away and that also means that in Metro hearing systems voters are strategic and they shouldn't see non-viable parties as worthy of their votes this does indeed seem to be the case in places like the us or Japan or Italy all of which are majoritarian systems and here is an example from the US in 2006 where you do see that the vote share of third parties that would be the vertical axis is very low I believe this one dot is basically Bernie Sanders all by himself because he's an independent candidate but you see that the majority of Voters will give their votes to either one of the two parties Republicans Or democrats at the bottom axis here and no other third parties get any significant amount of the vote share now mind you though diverges law is not perfect and it has been pointed out in the past decades that if you look at places like India which are first past the post systems they actually don't generate such strategic voting by voters and they don't generate a strict two-party system here for example in India in 2007 you do see that third parties gained a a significant amount of the votes in certain districts this is all the blue dots up here rather than voters only choosing one of the two majority parties down here at the green or the orange and this in India at least is largely due to geography you have Geographic parties that like I talked about in the advantages and disadvantages slide they have Regional fiefdoms basically where they cater to that region specifically and that is where voters are supporting them the other really interesting um Insight that comes from comparative politics is What's called the median voter theorem you might have asked yourself hey why do the Electoral manifestos the programs of the major parties often sound so samey why are they so similar why are they so non-distinct from each other and the reason for that is that comparative politics has taught us that in majoritarian systems outcomes tend to reflect the preferences of the median voter in a major terrain system all parties have a preference to cater to the bulk of Voters in the middle because the edges of the spectrum are not viable to win in first past the post systems as a little illustration if you have a pressing political issue of the day such as the optimal number of dogs that we should own you could assume that most voters are normally distributed on this along this Dimension you have some weirdos like me that you know where the optimal number of dogs is basically unlimited that if around you and you have some outright weirdos on the other side that just don't want dogs at all and that are for zero dogs basically but you know what the majority of Voters probably going to end up somewhere in the middle that are thinking you know you know if we have to get a dog we might as well get one or two or something now if you had two parties in this system the no dogs party in the all dogs party in this majoritarian system they would each receive a certain amount of the vote share the no dogs party would cater to all those that won very few dogs on the one side of the political spectrum and the all dogs party caters to those that want a lot of dogs and they would receive this share of the vote that corresponds to at this point here but what they would and you can also see for example that the no dogs party's voucher of course goes down as voters preferences go up in terms of the number of dogs and the same works for the all dogs party on the other side now both of those parties though could take a hard look at the distribution of Voters and they could both come to the same conclusion namely the no dogs party sees that there's actually a huge chunk of Voters to the right of its actual position its Manifesto position that uh would be willing to vote for it if it only moved its position a little bit more to the middle the all dogs party is thinking the same and what effectively happens is both parties try to win the largest chunk of Voters but because the largest chunk of Voters on almost any issue is in the middle the end of both catering to the middle which means that the manifesters of both the no dogs party will list two dogs as the optimal number and the all dogs party will also list as two dogs and will also list two dogs as the optimal number of dogs so you really end up with two parties that at least the name should be vastly different but because they both have an incentive to cater to the middle because that's where the majority of votes are and in the majoritarian system that's all you care about in a proportional system they would be perfectly happy to remain at the edges of the spectrum because the no dogs party would just still in a proportional system get a proportional number of seats in Parliament based on all those voters that are on that side of the spectrum and the all dogs party would get all the voters on the other side of the spectrum and then you could have a sumdogs party in the middle of the spectrum that would cut those seats so that's why all parties sound very much the same in majoritarian systems because they all have to cater to the middle because it only matters that you win the majority of Voters now in summary electoral systems are an integral part of any political system if you look at any political system around the world you have to consider the electoral system in terms of the outcomes that it produces they can also be dependent variables of course and we can look at the history and how we ended up with that specific system but the majority of times these electoral systems are used as independent or intervening variables it lends itself quite well to large in studies because we have a lot of information about electoral systems over a long period of time with very good databases at idea for example if you go back a couple of slides idea.it.int int is an organization that collects data on electoral systems around the world but we have to remember that we can't really explain everything about political outcomes just with the electoral system that would just be a little bit too easy and a little too convenient and we do need strong theories and hypotheses that tie electoral systems specifically to electoral outcomes so electoral systems I find that super interesting if you are from the UK take a closer look at how the UK's political system works if you're not from the UK have another look at how your own political system how you own the electoral system works and bring your insights to our next live stream and we'll discuss a little bit about the impacts that those can have and the actual meanings on the ground now for the next couple of lectures I'll leave you in the capable hands of my colleague Dr pontus odd mom who will talk about other aspects of democracy of democratic systems such as populist parties and political participation in general so until then I'll see you