Elections are all well and good, but they may mean little to people if it is difficult to vote or if at the end of the day their perception that their vote makes no difference to the way the country is governed. The ease of voting is determined by factors such as how complex the ballot paper is, how easy it is for the voter to get to a polling place, how up-to-date the electoral register is, and how confident the voter is that his or her ballot will be secret.
Electoral participation—at least as a free choice—is also thought to increase when the outcome of elections, either at a national level or in the voter’s particular district, is likely to make a significant difference to the future direction of government. If you know that your preferred candidate has no chance of winning a seat in your particular district, what is the incentive to vote? In some electoral systems, the wasted votes (i.e. valid votes for losing candidates, as distinct from spoiled or invalid ballot papers, which are excluded from the count) can amount to a substantial proportion of the total national vote.
Lastly, the actual power of the body being elected helps determine whether its election has any meaning. Hollow elections in authoritarian systems which offer no genuine choice, where legislatures have little real influence on the formation of governments or on government policy, are far less important than elections to legislatures which actually have the power to determine central elements in people’s everyday lives.
Even within democratic systems, the choice of electoral system can influence the legitimacy of institutions. For example, the Australian Senate between 1919 and 1946 was elected by a highly disproportional electoral system (the Alternative Vote in multimember districts), which produced lopsided and unrepresentative results. This tended to undermine the actual legitimacy of the Senate itself in the eyes of both electors and politicians and, some observers argued, also undermined public support for the institutions of federal government in general. After the system was altered to a fairer proportional system (the Single Transferable Vote) in 1948, the Senate began to be perceived as more credible and representative, and thus respect for it and its relative importance in decision making increased.
