Advantages of PBV
PBV is simple to use, encourages strong parties and allows for parties to put up mixed slates of candidates in order to facilitate minority representation. It can be used to help to ensure balanced ethnic representation, as it enables parties to present ethnically diverse lists of candidates for election—and may indeed be designed to require them to do so.
Disadvantages of PBV
However, the Party Block Vote also suffers from most of the disadvantages of FPTP, and may indeed produce highly disproportional results where one party wins almost all of the seats with a simple majority of the votes. In Djibouti’s 1997 election, the ruling Union for the Presidential Majority coalition won every seat, leaving the two opposition parties without any representation in the legislature. Some electoral amendments were introduced by the government of Djibouti in 2012, through which some seats in parliament were allotted proportionally and the rest of them under the same PBV system. This change showed more equitable outcomes to other parties in the 2013 election.
