a week later, in which only candidates gaining more than 12.5% in the first
ballot, less any voluntary withdrawals, participate. Another modification of the
simple plurality is thealternative vote, where voters indicate not only their
first choice among candidates, but also their subsequent choices in numeric
order. When no candidate achieves a majority of first preferences, the second
preferences of the weaker candidates are reallocated until an overall majority is
obtained.
The alternative approach to elections is to attempt to achieveproportional
representationof voter preferences in the elected body. There is a wide
variety of such systems. The three most common are theparty list system,
thesingle transferable voteand theadditional member. There are many
elements to the argument on voting systems. One major concern is the idea of
fairness. In the 2001 British general election, for example, the Liberal Demo-
crats gained 18.3% of the national vote, but only won 52 seats, 7.9% of the
total, in the House of Commons; a proportionate or ‘fair’ result would have
given them 121 seats (indeed, this represented the Liberal Democrats’ best
performance in terms of seats for some years, in part as a result oftactical
voting. In 1992 they won just 20 seats, with only a slightly smaller share of the
total votes cast). Another concern is that non-proportional systems ‘waste’
many votes. Not only does someone who votes for a candidate not receiving a
plurality in their constituency fail to gain any representation for their vote, but
also someone who votes for a winning candidate with a massive majority (in
the USA and the United Kingdom up to 60% of seats can be regarded as ‘safe’
in this sense) might think of their vote as wasted. If those perceiving of their
intended votes as likely to be wasted either decide to cast them for a candidate
on whom they might not be wasted, or not to vote at all, then the genuine
democratic intent of the electorate is distorted. It is difficult to deny that some
form of proportional representation would be fairer to parties and candidates
than the plurality system. However, it is often claimed that proportional
representation may lead to unstable and shifting coalitiongovernment.
Though coalitionsare more likely in proportional systems, it is neither
inevitable that they will occur, nor that they will be weak and unstable. West
Germany, and now Germany, has had a form of proportional representation
since 1947, and has always been ruled by a coalition, but the coalitions have
been as stable as those produced by most simple plurality systems. Furthermore
votes can still be ‘wasted’ in a multi-party system with near perfect
proportionality if the political culture makes the admission of one party to a
coalition impossible. Between the 1960s and 1980s the Italian communist party
regularly gained about one-third of total votes cast, but was never admitted to
government, while most coalitions contained some parties with support of 5%
or lower. A stronger argument against the coalition governments often
produced under proportional representation is that the compromise and
Voting Systems