Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Explore 1.5M+ audiobooks & ebooks free for days

    Only $12.99 CAD/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    First Past The Post Voting: Exploring Electoral Efficiency and Representation
    First Past The Post Voting: Exploring Electoral Efficiency and Representation
    First Past The Post Voting: Exploring Electoral Efficiency and Representation
    Ebook406 pages4 hoursPolitical Science

    First Past The Post Voting: Exploring Electoral Efficiency and Representation

    By Fouad Sabry

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Unlock insights into electoral systems with "First Past The Post Voting," an essential title in the "Political Science" series. This book explores the First Past The Post (FPTP) system, highlighting its effects on democracy, representation, and governance. It’s ideal for those eager to understand the complexities of electoral processes beyond basic knowledge.


    1-First-past-the-post voting-Explore the foundations and mechanics of the FPTP system, tracing its impact on elections.


    2-Plurality voting-Understand how plurality voting works with FPTP to influence political results.


    3-Two-round system-Learn about the two-round system’s influence on representational fairness in FPTP.


    4-Duverger's law-Examine how Duverger's law leads to a two-party structure under FPTP.


    5-Additional member system-Explore the hybrid nature of the Additional Member System and its link to FPTP.


    6-Electoral reform-Engage with debates about reforming FPTP, assessing proposed changes.


    7-Electoral system-Place FPTP in a global context, comparing it with other electoral systems.


    8-Elections in Canada-Discover the role of FPTP in shaping Canadian political landscapes.


    9-Politics of British Columbia-Investigate the influence of FPTP on British Columbia’s unique politics.


    10-Electoral system of Scotland-Analyze Scotland’s use of FPTP and its regional variations.


    11-Proportional representation-Contrast FPTP with proportional representation systems in terms of electoral fairness.


    12-Single transferable vote-Learn how the Single Transferable Vote system differs from FPTP.


    13-Single non-transferable vote-Understand the dynamics of the Single Non-Transferable Vote system.


    14-Mixed-member proportional representation-Examine the workings of Mixed-Member Proportional Representation alongside FPTP.


    15-Parallel voting-Explore Parallel Voting’s interactions with FPTP and its electoral outcomes.


    16-Plurality block voting-Study the effects of Plurality Block Voting and its comparison to FPTP.


    17-Majoritarian representation-Understand Majoritarian Representation and its relationship to FPTP.


    18-Dual-member proportional representation-Discover Dual-Member Proportional Representation as an alternative to FPTP.


    19-Mixed electoral system-Investigate Mixed Electoral Systems and their connection to FPTP.


    20-Italian electoral law of 2017-Learn about the Italian Electoral Law of 2017 and its impact on FPTP.


    21-Mixed-member majoritarian representation-Explore the Mixed-Member Majoritarian system’s influence on FPTP.


    "First Past The Post Voting" offers a deep dive into electoral systems, crucial for students, professionals, and enthusiasts. Empower yourself with knowledge that makes a difference.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOne Billion Knowledgeable
    Release dateSep 6, 2024
    First Past The Post Voting: Exploring Electoral Efficiency and Representation

    Other titles in First Past The Post Voting Series (30)

    View More
    View More

    Read more from Fouad Sabry

    Related to First Past The Post Voting

    Titles in the series (100)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Geopolitics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related categories

    Reviews for First Past The Post Voting

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      First Past The Post Voting - Fouad Sabry

      Chapter 1: First-past-the-post voting

      Single-winner, plurality voting (FPTP or FPP)

      The House of Commons of England (and its successors Great Britain and the United Kingdom) has been elected using the First Past the Post (FPTP) method since the Middle Ages. The United States, Canada, and India, among other former British possessions, also made use of it. About a third of the world's nations, mostly in the English-speaking world, utilize it as the principal method of assigning seats for parliamentary elections, and many more use it to directly elect executive posts. For legislative elections, a nation that employs FPTP divides the country up into constituencies, with each constituency electing one representative to the legislature.

      Although FPTP is simple and has been around for a long time, it does have some significant flaws. Because it is a winner-take-all system, it frequently leads to unjust outcomes, especially when choosing lawmakers, because different political parties do not get representation proportionate to their share of the public vote. Smaller parties without a geographically focused base are often disadvantaged by this system, which often benefits the biggest party and those with substantial regional support. Due to these and other issues, such as FPTP's susceptibility to gerrymandering, the huge number of wasted votes, and the possibility of a majority reversal, proponents of electoral reform are often quite critical of FPTP (i.e., the party winning the most votes getting fewer seats than the second largest party and losing the election). Former British colonies such as Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand were among the numerous nations that abandoned FPTP in favor of other election systems during the 20th century.

      Some nations use both FPTP and PR in a parallel voting system, with PR contributing to rather than offsetting FPTP's inherent disproportionality. In some cases, it is used as part of a system designed to counteract another, such as in mixed-member proportional representation or mixed single vote. While some nations utilize PR to pick their legislatures, others use FPTP to choose their leader.

      There is only one victor in a first-past-the-post election, and voters may choose just one candidate on the ballot. The candidate with the most votes, or plurality, is declared the victor. Each district or constituency in the country votes for a representative in the legislature using the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system.

      v

      t

      e

      Tennessee and its four major cities: Memphis in the south-west; Nashville in the centre, Chattanooga in the south, and Knoxville in the east

      Let's say the state of Tennessee is holding a vote to determine where the state capital should be located. Tennessee's population is heavily concentrated in and around its four largest cities. Consider this hypothetical situation in which the whole voting population is concentrated in only four locations, all of which are within commuting distance of the nation's capital.

      Those vying for the position of capital include:

      Memphis is the most populous city in the state, with 42% of the vote, yet it is quite isolated from the rest of the population centers.

      Nashville, located roughly in the middle of the state, has 26% of the voters.

      With just 17% of the vote, Knoxville is the clear winner.

      Chattanooga, where just 15% of eligible voters cast ballots

      This is how the voters' choices would break down:

      In FPTP, voters are only permitted to indicate their first-choice candidates on the ballot. This would result with Memphis receiving 42% of the vote, Nashville 26%, Knoxville 17%, and Chattanooga 15%. In a first-past-the-post (FPTP) election, Memphis would come out on top even though it would be strongly opposed by the electorate. The current capital of Tennessee is Nashville, but quick runoff voting would result in Knoxville being chosen as the state capital.

      Mathematically determined voting method criteria explain desired qualities of a voting technique and are used to grade voting systems by academics. Results such as Arrow's impossibility theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem indicate that it is impossible for any ranked preference technique to satisfy all of the conditions.

      When using FPTP to choose a single winner, the following conditions are met or not met::

      When using FPTP to elect legislatures in particular, the following requirements are met or missed::

      The metaphor of first-past-the-post originates in British horse racing, where a post is placed at the end of the track to indicate the winner (though there is no specific percentage finish line required to win in this voting system, only being furthest ahead in the race).

      In contrast to majority voting, which requires support from over half of eligible voters, first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting only requires support from a simple majority of voters. With FPTP, the winner is the candidate who receives the most votes regardless of whether or not they get a majority of the vote. To distinguish a plurality from a (typical) majority, the phrase relative majority is sometimes employed. For example, Candidate A won the election with a 5000 vote majority, which might imply that A received 5000 more votes than B, or it could mean that A received 5000 votes in total and so won the election by a margin of 5%.

      Despite being a kind of plurality voting, first-past-the-post (FPTP) is classified as a majoritarian system since it is not majority voting (like a two-round system is). Given that the definition of majoritarian representation (one of the three main kinds of electoral systems, alongside proportional representation and mixed systems) is the winner (of an electoral district) gaining all the seats, all single-winner systems (such as FPTP) are majoritarian.

      Single-member electoral districts are the norm in FPTP systems. The multiple non-transferable vote (MNTV), also known as plurality block voting, is a form of plurality voting in which each voter casts as many ballots as there are open seats, and the candidates with the most votes are elected.

      The single non-transferable vote method is used when there are many seats to be filled but each voter only has one vote (SNTV). The single transferable vote method is used in cases when there are several seats to be filled but voters only have one vote apiece that is both preferential and transferable (STV). The first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system is often used during the second round of a multi-round election (runoff voting). In the first round, contestants compete to see who will go on to the second and final round. As there are often only two remaining candidates in the runoff, one will typically get a majority of the votes. It is, therefore, a true majority rule.

      The most noticeable result of FPTP is that the number of seats a party has in a legislature has little to do with the number of votes it received but rather with the distribution of those votes throughout the country. This has been a point of contention, with many believing that it is essential for an electoral system to fairly reflect the opinions of voters. Overrepresenting bigger parties (providing a majority of parliamentary/legislative seats to a party that did not obtain a majority of the votes) and underrepresenting smaller parties leads to false majorities when FPTP is used. Only three times since 1921 has one party won a majority of the votes cast in Canada, allowing it to create a majority government: in 1940, 1958, and 1984. Nineteen out of the twenty-four general elections held in the United Kingdom since 1922 have resulted in a majority government led by a single party. The winning party did not get a majority of the vote anywhere in the UK in all but two of these elections (1931 and 1935).

      In extreme situations, this may cause a party to win the popular vote yet fail to win a majority of seats in the legislature. This is known as a election inversion or majority reversal. Even if a majority vote is still required to approve a measure in a legislature with more than two main parties, the minority party (one with many less members than half the assembly) might have the biggest block in the house and be put in a dominant position.

      As a result of first-past-the-post voting, a smaller party that is more ideologically close to a bigger party may lose votes and seats to the latter, giving the latter an electoral advantage. An example of this is the charge that left-leaning Ralph Nader was a spoiler for the Democrats in the 2000 United States presidential election because he received more votes from Al Gore's base than his opponent. Make Votes Matter, a political pressure organization, claims that FPTP encourages major parties to appeal to the same groups of voters with identical agendas. This has the unintended consequence of reducing political variety in a nation by encouraging the more powerful parties to adopt a common platform.

      In political science, the concept of Duverger's law states that, over time, first-past-the-post districts would develop into two-party systems. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist, explains:

      The majority rule mentality in the US is largely due to the voting system for Congress. The first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is used to choose which candidates in single-member districts will represent those districts in Congress. No one from the losing side gets a vote. Duverger's Law states that in a first-past-the-post election, there will be a limited number of prominent parties, maybe only two. First-past-the-post voting systems are unfair to smaller parties.

      — from Sachs's The Price of Civilization, 2011

      With the exception of the United States, however, most nations that use first-past-the-post elections have multi-party legislatures (although with two parties bigger than the rest). The British human rights activist Peter Tatchell, among others, has suggested that proportional representation would have averted Britain's participation in the Iraq War due to FPTP's political consequences on the country.

      The first-past-the-post system promotes tactical voting more so than other systems. To avoid what they see as a wasted vote, voters may choose the candidate who they believe has a higher chance of winning instead of their favourite choice. When there are just two candidates in an election, FPTP results in less wasted votes. Large numbers of people are more prone to squander votes and elect minority governments if there are several parties on the ballot, as is the case in Canadian elections. Only two of the previous seven federal Canadian elections (in 2011 and 2015) resulted in single-party majority administrations, despite the fact that Canada employs FPTP. The winning party in none of these situations won a majority of the vote.

      As an extreme variant of the argument, all votes for anybody other than the runner-up are votes for the winner may be used to describe this stance. The state of Florida was decisive in this election, with Bush defeating Gore by a margin of only 537 votes (0.009 percent) to Gore's 97488 (1.635 percent) in the Sunshine State.

      Independentista voters have always favored Populares politicians in Puerto Rico. Even though the Estadistas have the most votes on the island, certain Popular triumphs may be attributed to the green exterior, red inside phenomena. This is so well known among Puerto Ricans that Independentistas who vote for the Populares are often referred to as melons after the fruit (in reference to the party colors).

      Voters' predictions of the top two finishers may greatly skew the outcome:

      It's possible that some voters' votes will be influenced by their expectations of how others would vote; Since many voters trust the media's predictions about the potential frontrunners, the media is granted considerable influence. Voters who don't trust the media nonetheless know that many others do, so it's safe to assume that the most visible politicians also have the greatest support; Even if the majority of voters back a new candidate with no prior history in office, they may still use tactical voting to exclude them from consideration as a frontrunner; Votes against the approach might win out over votes for it. In the United Kingdom (and only in the Great Britain region), for instance, entire campaigns have been organized with the goal of voting against the Conservative Party by voting Labour, Liberal Democrat in England and Wales, and since 2015 the SNP in Scotland, depending on which is seen as the best placed to win in each locality. It's hard to put an objective number on that kind of behavior.

      Proponents of alternative voting systems in single-member districts say that they would lessen the importance of strategic voting and the impact of spoiler votes. Instant runoff voting is one kind of preferential voting system; others include the more traditional two-round runoff system and the more experimental approval voting and Condorcet approaches. Votes cast for unsuccessful candidates or for a successful one in excess of the threshold needed for victory are considered wasted votes. Seventy percent of votes were wasted in the 2005 UK general election, as 52% went to unsuccessful candidates and 18% were cast in excess. This means that the votes of the majority could not matter at all. One possible explanation for the lower voter participation tends to occur in nations with FPTP than elsewhere is the winner-take-all nature of this voting method.

      Larger parties and those with more geographically concentrated support tend to do better under a system based on plurality voting over several distinct districts, while smaller parties with more equally distributed support tend to do worse. This strategy is effective since it helps them win numerous seats while minimizing the number of votes wasted in other places. While it is more common for a single party to hold a majority of legislative seats under FPTP than under a proportional system—due to the fact that voting patterns are similar in roughly two-thirds of the districts—under FPTP it is extremely unusual to elect a majority government that actually has the support of a majority of voters. A FPTP election may be more readily rigged since it allows for more wasted votes. In gerrymandering, districts are redrawn so that one party has a small number of districts where it has an overwhelming majority of votes (due to policy, demographics, or other reasons) and many districts where it is at a smaller disadvantage. This is done intentionally to increase the number of seats won by one party.

      According to the British Electoral Reform Society (ERS), this arrangement is helpful to regional parties. Small parties throughout the UK may still perform extremely well with a geographical basis.

      Since FPTP's winner-take-all structure exaggerates the link between party support and geography, it produces skewed patterns of representation.

      In the United Kingdom, for instance, the Conservative Party represents the majority of rural and southern English seats, whereas the Labour Party represents the majority of urban and northern English seats. This trend conceals the substantial support for the opposition party. It's not uncommon for parties to have a dearth of elected officials in key regions, fueling already strong regionalist sentiments. In some regions, party supporters (who may still be a minority) are under-represented.

      With just 68% of the vote in the 2019 Canadian federal election, the Conservatives swept to victory in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Due to a lack of diversity in leadership, the Conservative Party seems to have more support than it really has.

      The party-list voting system, in particular, may produce similarly invulnerable leaders to electoral pressure (especially when using a closed-list).

      Along with block voting, first-past-the-post (FPTP) is one of the simplest election systems. During its first iteration in the Middle Ages, England's House of Commons was an assembly made up of representatives from the gentry of the Kingdom's counties and towns (MPs). These two representatives were chosen by a system of block voting, unlike the by-elections that took place in the meantime. All House of Commons seats were reduced to electing a single member of parliament (MP) via first-past-the-post (FPTP) starting in the 19th century and ending with the Representation of the People Act of 1948.

      The United States won independence from Britain in the late 18th century, and now its president is chosen by a body called the Electoral College. It was never the goal of the states to utilize first-past-the-post (FPTP) for the presidency, but by the middle of the 19th century, that's exactly what had happened. In any case, FPTP was used for both state legislative and popular elections for the United States Senate, and for direct elections to the United States House of Representatives. FPTP has always been used in Canada for elections to both the House of Commons and provincial legislatures.

      Both the Condorcet and Borda count procedures, first developed by Ramon Llull in 1299 and reimagined by the Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda, respectively, in the 18th century, are examples of non-plurality voting systems. Several independent intellectuals in the late 18th century advocated proportional representation methods to elect legislatures, prompting further serious inquiry into electoral systems. In instance, Thomas Wright Hill devised the single transferable vote in 1819, and his son Rowland utilized it for the first time in a public election in 1840 for the Adelaide City Council in Australia. In 1855, Denmark became the first country to employ STV, and by the end of the 19th century, the technology had undergone many iterations.

      In 1884, the Proportional Representation Society launched their campaign in England. From 1918 until their elimination in 1950, university seats in the British House of Commons were elected using STV.

      There are active movements to change from first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems to proportional representation in several nations. Both nations' legislatures are controlled by big parties that have an incentive to fight efforts to change the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting system that elected them with a minority of the vote.

      Angola

      Angola

      Bosnia and Herzegovina

      Bosnia and Herzegovina (one for each main ethnic group)

      Cameroon

      Cameroon

      Democratic Republic of the Congo

      Democratic Republic of the Congo

      Equatorial Guinea

      Equatorial Guinea

      The Gambia

      The Gambia

      Honduras

      Honduras

      Iceland

      Iceland

      Kiribati

      Kiribati

      Malawi

      Malawi

      Mexico

      Mexico

      Nicaragua

      Nicaragua

      State of Palestine

      Palestine

      Panama

      Panama

      Paraguay

      Paraguay

      Philippines

      Philippines

      Rwanda

      Rwanda

      Singapore

      Singapore

      South Korea

      South Korea

      Taiwan

      Republic of China (Taiwan) (from 1996 constitutional amendment)

      Tanzania

      Tanzania

      Venezuela

      Venezuela

      The list below details the current national legislatures that use the first-past-the-post voting

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1