Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, February 21, 2011

Plurality and majority elections

If you'd like a reading to lead into a discussion of plurality and majority electoral systems, this one from The Wall Street Journal is good. It was written by Joshua Tucker, an Associate Professor of Politics at New York University and one of The Monkey Cage bloggers. Applying the concepts to other countries (including the USA) should not be difficult. Add in some information about the proposed "Alternative Vote" in the UK and about proportional representation, used in the Russian DUMA, and you have a good little unit. (See: Q&A: Alternative Vote referendum and State Duma adopting proportional vote)

Why Egypt Needs a Two-Round Presidential Election

In the coming months, it appears Egypt will be rewriting its constitutional laws, which will include rules for conducting elections. If Egypt retains a presidential system of government, then the rules for electing the Egyptian president will be of paramount importance. Outside of the United States—which uses a convoluted indirect system of electing its president—most countries with presidential systems employ one of the following two direct ways of electing their president:

In a plurality election, a single round of voting is held, and the candidate with the most votes at the end of that round is declared the winner of the election.

In a majoritarian election, a first round of voting is held. If a candidate passes a pre-arranged threshold (we’ll call this X% of the vote) in the first round, then he or she is declared the winner of the election. If no candidate gets more than X% of the vote, then a second round of voting is held at a later date. However, participation in this second round is limited to only the candidates that performed the best in the first round. The exact number of candidates allowed to advance to the second round is set by law. As majoritarian elections often feature two rounds, they are commonly referred to as “two-round presidential elections.”...
[I]f it turns out that… the Muslim Brotherhood has the largest support of any political force in the country but a majority of the country does not want a Muslim Brotherhood president—then a one-round presidential election will not ultimately reflect the preferences of the Egyptian people. A two-round election, however, would.

Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed.

The Fourth Edition of What You Need to Know is available at Amazon.com or from the publisher (where shipping is always free).

Labels: concepts, elections