Plurality Systems In a plurality system, the candidate with most votes is elected.
Absolute Majority Systems In an absolute majority system, a candidate will need
more than half the votes.
If only one person is to be elected nationwide, such as in presidential elections, the
system is necessarily majoritarian, but even then a plurality or an absolute majority
or even higher supermajorities may be required.
The French President is elected with an absolute majority of votes, and if no candidate
achieves this in the first round then a run-off between the two strongest candidates
determines the winner.
The German President is elected (by an electoral college rather than by the people) by
absolute majority, but if after two rounds no-one musters an absolute majority, then in the
third round a plurality suffices.
The US president is elected by an absolute majority of members of the Electoral
College, and if no-one reaches that threshold then the fallback procedure is a special
election by the House of Representatives.Benefits Generally, a major benefit of the majoritarian systems is the link between
members of parliament and the constituency where they are elected. This is thought
to give citizens access to their representatives and makes them directly accountable
to the district.
Also, it is mostly majoritarian systems that have the tendency to lead to a clear
and workable majority after elections (because of voting behavior that favors two
big parties, who alternate in size). That enables a distinct government and majority
in parliament and allows for effective governing.
8.3.3.3 Proportional Representation
The other main model for election systems is proportional representation (PR),
whereby the share of seats in the assembly is proportional to the share of the votes.
Thus, roughly speaking, 20 % of votes will translate into 20 % of seats for a political
party. In a purely list-based system, political parties then go on to fill their seats with
candidates from the lists that they had established before the elections.
Benefit Generally, the benefit of a PR system is sought in the representation of
many political sentiments in society; the idea of parliament here is to mirror the
composition of the population in parliament.
Downside The downside, however, is that the parliament may be fragmented into
too many political parties, which may make the formation of stable government
coalitions more difficult. The imposition of a threshold will limit the fragmentation
of the parliament, as only parties obtaining a minimum share of the vote (such as
5 %) are entitled to seats, yet this is at the cost of the parliamentary representation,
as it leaves a share of the voting population unrepresented.
8 Constitutional Law 187