Electoral Reform Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Electoral Reform Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Electoral reform is the change of some element of an electoral system, including suffrage rights, the size or number of seats in the assembly, the magnitude or number of seats in the districts, the formula to allocate seats or make a winner, and the ballot form permitting or restricting the voters’ choice of parties and candidates. In the long term, major electoral reforms have expanded suffrage rights, replaced indirect elections with direct elections by majority rule, and done the latter with mixed systems and proportional representation rules.

Traditional electoral systems based on plurality or relative majority rule in multisite districts were used in traditional compact communities in late medieval and early modern times. They are still used in a significant number of local government elections in which it can be presumed that citizens share some clearly identified, broad common interest. However, single-seat districts were diffused during processes of building or reforming large-scale parliaments in large states with more heterogeneous societies and accompanying the broadening of suffrage rights. Specifically, single-seat districts were widely introduced in Scotland and Wales, and in lower proportions in England, during the eighteenth century, and they became a general norm for the British House of Commons by the end of the nineteenth century. They were also introduced in the U.S. state of Vermont by the late eighteenth century and gradually expanded to the rest of the country, especially for the election of the House of Representatives, by the mid-nineteenth century. In Canada, France, and India, single-seat districts also became the only formula for all of the seats in the lower chamber of Parliament during the second half of the twentieth century.

The creation of new parties trying to politicize new issues and the emergence of new political demands in newly complex societies may make results with majority rule dissatisfactory for both voters and candidates. Proportional representation rules were invented with the aim of including varied minorities in the assembly and facilitate the formation of an effective political majority to legislate and rule. To establish fair representation of political parties, each party may be given a portion of seats corresponding to its votes. In a number of countries, the introduction of proportional representation rules in the early twentieth century ran in parallel with the expansion of suffrage rights and the subsequent demands from different social, political, and ethnic groups for representation, as in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and other west European countries.

In general, political parties tend to choose electoral rules with the expectation that they will give them some advantage to promote their aims. Specifically, they tend to follow the so-called micro-mega rule, by which the large prefer the small and the small prefer the large .A few large parties tend to prefer small assemblies, small district magnitudes (the smallest being one), and rules based on small quotas of votes for allocating seats (the smallest being simple plurality, which does not require any specific threshold) to exclude others from competition. Likewise, multiple small parties tend to prefer large assemblies, large district magnitudes, and large quotas (like those of proportional representation), which are able to include them within.

Since the nineteenth century, there have been eighty-two major reforms of the assembly electoral system in forty-one countries with more than one million inhabitants. More than 80 percent of these reforms have been in the direction of more inclusive formulas. Single-seat districts have been supported in countries with a single dominant party; two parties frequently alternating in power, typically a conservative and a liberal party (or a Republican and a Democrat, as in the United States); or in more recent times, a conservative and a socialist party (as in Britain). Nowadays, they are used for assembly elections basically in a number of old democratic regimes in former British or French colonies. In contrast, multiseat districts and proportional representation are usually favored in multiparty systems both by traditional incumbents, such as conservatives or liberals, under threat of losing their dominant position and by minority but growing opposition parties, as was historically the case with socialist, Christian, ethnic, and other parties. Today proportional representation rules are used in most democratic regimes across the world.

Bibliography:

Benoit, Kenneth. “Models of Electoral System Change.” Electoral Studies 23, no. 3 (2004): 363–389.
Boix, Carles. “Setting the Rules of the Game:The Choice of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies.” American Political Science Review 93, no. 3 (1999): 609–624.
Colomer, Josep M. “It’s Parties That Choose Electoral Systems (or Duverger’s Laws Upside Down).” Political Studies 53, no. 1 (2005): 1–21.
Colomer, Josep M., ed. Handbook of Electoral System Choice. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004.
Dummett, Michael A. E. Principles of Electoral Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gallagher, Michael, and Paul Mitchell, eds. The Politics of Electoral Systems. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Lijphart, Arend, and Bernard Grofman, eds. Choosing an Electoral System: Issues and Alternatives. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Negretto, Gabriel L. “Choosing How to Choose Presidents.” Journal of Politics 68, no. 2 (2006): 421–433.