Indirect Elections Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In an indirect election, the voters do not choose a candidate directly for office but instead choose electors who then decide whom to elect for the constituency. Indirect elections are relatively common, with perhaps the most well-known example of an indirect election involving the U.S. electoral college, which selects the president and the vice president. Other countries that elect officials via indirect elections include Germany, Italy, Greece, France, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Ireland, and the Czech Republic. Some Eastern societies such as India and Pakistan select legislative officials or presidents through an indirect procedure as well. Indirect elections may have implications for democratic representation that are magnified depending on the post that is being elected.

In Europe, presidents, who typically function as heads of state, are often indirectly elected. For example, the president of the Italian Republic (Presidente della Repubblica Italiana) is elected by the joint vote of its lower and upper legislative bodies: the Chamber of Deputies (Camera dei Deputati) and the senate of the republic (Senato della Repubblica). The members of the German parliament (Bundestag) and an equal number of representatives from the federal states form the Federal Convention (Bundesversammlung) to elect the German president (Bundespräsident). Greece, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic also elect their heads of state indirectly but use only the elected parliamentary body to do so. In France, one chamber of Parliament (Sénat) is elected by an electoral college for a five-year term. The majority of the senators are selected by state(Département-) elected representatives, and a small proportion by the elected assembly of the French living abroad who form the Assemblée des Français de l’étranger. Finally, the Republic of Ireland’s senate (Éireann Seanad) is indirectly selected by various electoral bodies.

One of the most notable examples of an indirect election occurs in the United States, where the electoral college is used to elect the president. The Framers of the American Constitution wanted to ensure that the federal states would have an equal influence over the election result and simultaneously guarantee that the elected president would be chosen by sophisticated delegates and not the uninformed masses. With the electoral college, each state selects delegates equal to the number of members serving in the House of Representatives and the Senate for that particular state. The party affiliation of these delegates is determined by the winner of the popular vote in every state separately. Although, in theory, these delegates can cast their votes for the presidential candidate of their choosing, the precedent is that they vote for the candidate they have pledged to their constituents to vote for. The electoral college has been the focus of several criticisms, the first being that the presidential campaigns tend to focus on people voting in battleground or swing states. Another is that not all votes cast have an equal influence over the result. A final criticism is that the president can be elected without winning the popular vote, as evident in the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore (similar to the results in 1824, 1876, and 1888). Debate about the potential reform of the U.S. electoral college has been evident in the past, yet all reform proposals have been denied by the U.S. Congress.

Obviously, not all indirect elections are designed to serve the same cause. The majority of indirectly elected officials do not exercise substantive powers. With the noticeable exception of the American president, the post of head of state has typical and often ceremonial jurisdictions. The same holds for indirectly elected parliamentary chambers such as those in France or Ireland, as their roles are supposedly advisory and lack significant judicial or executive authority. National governments in Europe that do exercise significant power are being held accountable through direct elections.

Bibliography:

Bennett, R.W. Taming the Electoral College. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Blair, D. “Electoral College Reform and the Distribution of Voting Power.” Public Choice 34, no. 2 (1979): 201–215.
Dahl, R. A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.
Goux, D., and D. Hopkins. “The Empirical Implications of Electoral College Reform.” American Politics Quarterly 36 (2008): 857–879.
Grofman, B., and S. Feld. “Thinking about the Political Impacts of the Electoral College.” Public Choice 123 (2005): 1–18.

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