Criteria for Design

When designing an electoral system, it is best to start with a list of criteria which sum up what you want to achieve, what you want to avoid and, in a broad sense, what you want your legislature and executive government to look like. The criteria which follow cover many areas, but the list is not exhaustive, and the reader may add a host of equally valid items. It is also true that some of the criteria outlined overlap and may appear contradictory. This is because they often are contradictory: it is the nature of institutional design that trade-offs have to be made between a number of competing desires and objectives. These files focus primarily on criteria for the systems and not on the design process itself. The design process is covered in more depth in the sections Process of Change and Advice for Electoral Systems Designers.

For example, one may want to provide the opportunity for independent candidates to be elected, and at the same time to encourage the growth of strong political parties. Or electoral system designers may think it wise to craft a system which gives voters a wide degree of choice between candidates and parties, but this may make for a complicated ballot paper which causes difficulties for less-educated voters. The trick in choosing (or reforming) an electoral system is to prioritize the criteria that are most important and then assess which electoral system, or combination of systems, best maximizes the attainment of these objectives.

Sub-sections of this chapter:

• Providing Representation
• Making Elections Accessible and Meaningful
• Providing Incentives for Conciliation
• Facilitating Stable and Efficient Government
• Holding the Government Accountable
• Holding Individual Representatives Accountable
• Encouraging Political Parties
• Promoting Legislative Opposition and Oversight
• Making the Election Process Workable and Sustainable
• Taking into Account 'International Standards'
• Criteria for Design: Conclusions

Providing Representation

Representation may take at least four forms.

First, geographical representation implies that each region, be it a town or a city, a province or an electoral district, has members of the legislature whom it chooses and who are ultimately accountable to their area.

Second, the ideological divisions within society may be represented in the legislature, whether through representatives from political parties or independent representatives or a combination of both.

Third, a legislature may be representative of the party-political situation that exists within the country even if political parties do not have an ideological base. If half the voters vote for one political party but that party wins no, or hardly any, seats in the legislature, then that system cannot be said to adequately represent the will of the people.

Fourth, the concept of descriptive representation considers that the legislature should be to some degree a ‘mirror of the nation’ which should look, feel, think and act in a way which reflects the people as a whole. An adequately descriptive legislature would include both men and women, the young and the old, the wealthy and the poor, and reflect the different religious affiliations, linguistic communities and ethnic groups within a society.

Making Elections Accessible and Meaningful

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.

Providing Incentives for Conciliation

Electoral systems can be seen not only as ways to constitute governing bodies but also as mechanisms for conflict management within a society. Some systems, in some circumstances, will encourage parties to make inclusive appeals for electoral support outside their own core vote base; for instance, even if a party draws its support primarily from black voters, a particular electoral system may give it the incentive to appeal also to white, or other, voters. Thus, the party’s policy platform would come less divisive and exclusionary, and more unifying and inclusive. Similar electoral system incentives might make parties less ethnically, regionally, linguistically or ideologically exclusive. Examples of how different electoral systems have worked as tools of conflict management are given throughout this text.

On the other side of the coin, electoral systems can encourage voters to look outside their own group and think of voting for parties which traditionally have represented a different group. Such voting behaviour breeds accommodation and community building. Systems which give the voter more than one vote or allow the voter to order candidates preferentially provide the space for voters to cut across preconceived social boundaries. At the 1998 Good Friday agreement election in Northern Ireland, for instance, vote transfers under the STV system benefited ‘pro-peace’ parties while still providing broadly proportional outcomes. At the 2003 election, however, a shift in first-preference votes towards hard-line parties tended to outweigh such effects.

Facilitating Stable and Efficient Government

The prospects for a stable and efficient government are not determined by the electoral system alone, but the results a system produces can contribute to stability in a number of important respects.

The key questions are

• whether voters perceive the system to be fair,
• whether government can efficiently enact legislation and govern, and
• whether the system avoids discriminating against particular parties or interest groups.

The perception of whether results are fair or not varies widely from country to country. Twice in the United Kingdom (UK) (in 1951 and 1974) the party winning the most votes in the country as a whole won fewer seats than its opponents, but this was considered more a quirk of a basically sound system than an outright unfairness which should be reversed. Conversely, similar results in New Zealand in 1978 and 1981, in which the National Party retained office despite winning fewer votes than the Labour opposition, are credited as starting the reform movement which led to a change of electoral system.

The question whether the government of the day can enact legislation efficiently is partly linked to whether it can assemble a working majority in the legislature, and this in turn is linked to the electoral system. As a general rule of thumb, plurality/majority electoral systems are more likely to produce legislatures where one party can outvote the combined opposition, while PR systems are more likely to give rise to coalition governments. Nevertheless, it has to be remembered that PR systems can also produce single-party majorities, and plurality/majority systems can leave no one party with a working majority. Much depends on the structure of the party system and the nature of the society itself.

Finally, the system should, as far as possible, act in an electorally neutral manner towards all parties and candidates; it should not openly discriminate against any political grouping. The perception that electoral politics in a democracy is an uneven playing field is a sign that the political order is weak and that instability may not be far around the corner. A dramatic example of this was the 1998 election in Lesotho, in which the Lesotho Congress for Democracy won every seat in the legislature with only 60 per cent of the votes under an FPTP system. The public unrest that followed, culminating in a request for military intervention in the country by the Southern African Development Community, demonstrated that such a result was not merely unfair but also dangerous, and the electoral system was consequently changed for future elections.

Holding the Government Accountable

Accountability is one of the bedrocks of representative government. Its absence may indeed lead to long-term instability. An accountable political system is one in which the government is responsible to the voters to the highest degree possible. Voters should be able to influence the shape of the government, either by altering the coalition of parties in power or by throwing out of office a single party which has failed to deliver. Suitably designed electoral systems facilitate this objective.

The conventional wisdom in this area may be simplistic. Traditionally, plurality/majority systems like FPTP were seen as leading to single parties taking office, while PR systems were associated with multiparty coalitions. While the broad logic of this association remains valid, there have been sufficient examples in recent years of FPTP elections leading to multiparty cabinets (e.g. in India) or of PR elections leading to the election of a strong single-party government (e.g. in South Africa) to raise doubts about the automatic assumption that one kind of electoral system will lead to particular governance outcomes. But clearly, electoral systems do have a major impact on broader issues of governance, for both presidential and parliamentary systems.

Holding Individual Representatives Accountable

Accountability at the individual level is the ability of the electorate to effectively check on those who, once elected, betray the promises they made during the campaign or demonstrate incompetence or idleness in office and ‘throw the rascals out’. Some systems emphasize the role of locally popular candidates, rather than on candidates nominated by a strong central party. Plurality/majority systems have traditionally been seen as maximizing the ability of voters to throw out unsatisfactory individual representatives. Again, this sometimes remains valid. However, the connection becomes tenuous where voters identify primarily with parties rather than candidates, as in the UK. At the same time, open and free list systems and STV are designed to allow voters to exercise candidate choice in the context of a proportional system.

Encouraging Political Parties

The weight of evidence from both established and new democracies suggests that longer-term democratic consolidation—that is, the extent to which a democratic regime is insulated from domestic challenges to the stability of the political order—requires the growth and maintenance of strong and effective political parties, and thus the electoral system should encourage this rather than promote party fragmentation.

To do this, electoral systems can be framed specifically to exclude parties with a small or minimal level of support. The development of the role of parties as a vehicle for individual political leaders is another trend which can be facilitated or retarded by electoral system design decisions. Most experts also agree that the electoral system should encourage the development of parties which are based on broad political values and ideologies as well as specific policy programmes, rather than narrow ethnic, racial or regional concerns. As well as lessening the threat of societal conflict, parties which are based on these broad ‘crosscutting cleavages’ are more likely to reflect national opinion than those which are based predominantly on sectarian or regional concerns.

Promoting Legislative Opposition and Oversight

Effective governance relies not only on those in power but, almost as much, on those who oppose and oversee them. The electoral system should help ensure the presence of a viable opposition grouping which can critically assess legislation, question the performance of the executive, safeguard minority rights, and represent its constituents effectively.

Opposition groupings should have enough representatives to be effective (assuming that their performance at the ballot box warrants it) and in a parliamentary system should be able to present a realistic alternative to the current government. Obviously the strength of the opposition depends on many other factors besides the choice of electoral system, but if the system itself makes the opposition impotent, democratic governance is inherently weakened.

A major reason for the change to an MMP electoral system in New Zealand, for example, was the systematic under-representation of smaller opposition parties under FPTP. At the same time, the electoral system should hinder the development of a ‘winner takes all’ attitude which leaves rulers blind to other views and the needs and desires of opposition voters, and sees both elections and government itself as zero-sum contests.

In a presidential system, the president needs the reliable support of a substantial group of legislators: however, the role of others in opposing and scrutinizing government legislative proposals is equally important. The separation of powers between legislature and executive effectively gives the task of executive oversight to all legislators, not only the opposition members. This makes it important to give particular thought to the elements of the electoral system which concern the relative importance of political parties and candidates, alongside the relationship between parties and their elected members.

Making the Election Process Workable and Sustainable

Elections do not take place on the pages of academic books but in the real world, and for this reason the choice of any electoral system is, to some degree, dependent on the cost and administrative capacities of the country involved. Although donor countries often provide substantial financial support for the first, and even the second, election in a country in transition to democracy, this is unlikely to be available in the long term even if it were desirable.

A sustainable political framework takes into account the resources of a country both in terms of the availability of people with the skills to be election administrators and in terms of the financial demands on the national budget.

For example, a poor country may not be able to afford the multiple elections required under a Two-Round System or be able easily to administer a complicated preferential vote count.

However, simplicity in the short term may not always make for cost effectiveness in the longer run. An electoral system may be cheap and easy to administer but it may not answer the pressing needs of a country—and when an electoral system is at odds with a country’s needs the results can be disastrous.

Alternatively, a system which appears at the outset to be a little more expensive to administer and more complex to understand may in the long run help to ensure the stability of the country and the positive direction of democratic consolidation.

Taking into Account 'International Standards'

Finally, the design of electoral systems today takes place in the context of a number of international covenants, treaties and other kinds of legal instruments affecting political issues.

While there is no single complete set of universally agreed international standards for elections, there is consensus that such standards include:

• the principles of free, fair and periodic elections that guarantee universal adult suffrage,
• the secrecy of the ballot and freedom from coercion, and
• a commitment to the principle of one person, one vote.

 

Moreover, while there is no legal stipulation that a particular kind of electoral system is preferable to another, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of issues that are affected by electoral systems, such as the fair representation of all citizens, the equality of women and men, the rights of minorities, special considerations for the disabled, and so on.

These are formalized in international legal instruments such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in the various conventions and commitments concerning democratic elections made by regional organizations such as the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Organization of American States (OAS), Council of Europe (COE) and the Commonwealth.

Criteria for Design - Conclusions

The ten outlined criteria are at times in conflict with each other or even mutually exclusive. The designers of an electoral system must therefore go through a careful process of prioritizing which criteria are most important to the particular political context before moving on to assess which system will do the best job.

A useful way forward is first to list the things which must be avoided at all costs, such as political catastrophes which could lead to the breakdown of democracy. For example, an ethnically divided country might want above all to avoid excluding minority ethnic groups from representation in order to promote the legitimacy of the electoral process and avoid the perception that the electoral system was unfair.

In contrast, while these issues might still be important to it, a fledgling democracy elsewhere might have different priorities—perhaps to ensure that a government can enact legislation efficiently without fear of gridlock, or that voters are able to remove discredited leaders if they so wish.

Establishing the priorities among such competing criteria can only be the domain of the domestic actors involved in the institutional design process.