today we're going to talk about elections electoral systems the rules by which parties and candidates compete in elections how they compete for our vote how we vote and most importantly how our vote is translated into seats in a legislature or a victory or a loss for the candidates robustly competitive elections are essential to a vital democracy so this is this is a pretty important topic now when we think of elections we you often think we tend to think that the elections in our own society are the natural way of organizing things perhaps the best or only way of course that's not true and you start realizing that once you look around and see that other countries do it in very different ways so let's compare and this is the power of political science you collect knowledge from in our case a good chunk of the world across the the transatlantic ocean and then we collect that and then we sit back and compare and use the acquired knowledge we have to make more informed assessments of what we think is good and what can be improved in our system as well as that from in others very good and you know the electoral system is uh so vital in terms of the overall character of the political system so when i think about uh britain and the uh and the united states um their electoral system is very distinct from that of of the continental european um countries in in general and there are two basic um systems of of electoral transformation of votes into seats into into office and the first is called the plurality electoral system it's the first past the post the candidate that gets at least one more vote than any other candidate in that constituency gets elected it doesn't matter what percentage of the vote um you get it's like a horse race the first horse that is the the horse that uh that wins the race and it's good it's the system we know best because it's our home system it's also the the system that dominates in most of the anglo-saxon democracies including britain australia um india as well canada yes exactly and the occasional european country like france yes and then the alternative system is called pr proportional representation it does uh really what the name suggests is proportional and that is a political party receives exactly the share of seats that it gets in the popular vote so if a if a party is supported by 10 or 20 of the electorate in the election it will then get in the legislature 10 or 20 percent of the um of the seats and where does that um take place well in most of the continental uh european um countries so i think these are such disparate such logically different systems that you as an american you might have regarded your own system as commonsensical as normal as something you don't really consider very very much but i think after this lecture you'll really have a very different view about your system because um comparison really shows you just how unusual things are that you had previously perhaps taken for for granted so we're going to take you on a a journey where we're going to try to think through logically the implications of these different electoral system and let's start with the one that we know best the first pastor post or plurality system so think along with us um now the plurality electoral system is we think it's normal but actually it's very strange and what i'm going to do is i'm going to ask you a question which will reveal how kind of unusual it is and it's an arithmetical question and the question is as follows uh what is the smallest think about the smallest possible share of the vote that a party needs to get in a plurality electoral system to win a constituency if there are three parties contesting the the election now in the united states there are only two parties but sometimes there are three parties the green party is going to be contesting in some constituencies now this is a logical question what's the smallest share of the vote that a candidate could win if there are three parties three candidates contesting the election i'm going to give you a few moments to consider that and and then we'll come up with the answer as little as 34 percent of the vote so a party could actually win a candidate could win in a constituency if it received 34 percent of the vote and the other two candidates received 33 percent each that's the logic of the system doesn't often happen but you see how the system operates in terms of its core core logic now there's one i want to extend this question and let's think about the legislature let's imagine that say the legislature had 100 seats so what is the smallest possible share of the vote that a party needs in a plurality system to have a majority in the legislature to get 51 of those 100 seats a majority in the legislature if there are three parties contesting the election i'll give you a few moments and and see if you can come up with the right answer the answer is 17 of the vote it's 17 low if you've got 17 of the votes i mean perhaps you should be in another course or a graduate course many professors would not actually have um given that precisely it's around 17 of the votes um but you would have to it's an arithmetic um question so you'd have to actually apportion the votes for the other two parties in exactly the same exactly the correct way to arrive at that and here is a uh here's how it works so let's go through this and um and and figure out how this how this works so where would you want you know you could think about where the vote should be if you're just getting 17 well in 51 seats those are the seats you want to win those are the seats where if you win those seats you're getting a majority of the legislature and what you what do you need in each one of those seats well there are three parties if if if the red party gets 34 in the first seat and the blue party gets 33 and the gray party gets 33 you win that seat and the same thing would apply in the second constituency in the third the fourth all the way up to 51. so you're getting 34 percent of the vote in 51 seats which is around 17 a little bit over 17 of the vote in the seats that you lose in the 49 you don't get any support you get zero you don't need to the other two parties can split that and in the example here the blue party is getting 51 the great party is getting 49 so the blue party wins every single one of those 49 seats so think about the overall distribution here it really is actually you might say it's crazy but this is the the fundamental logic of the system and what we're going to do is show you how this actually works in particular elections in the elections that we're familiar with that is in the united states and uh and and in the uk so what do we have we have the red party that's just getting over 17 34 of the vote in 51 seats that's 17 of the overall vote in 51 seats we have the blue party which is getting 33 percent in 51 seats nothing gets nothing for that and 51 percent in the 49 so it's getting 49 seats and think about the poor grey party what's the gray party getting well it's getting no seats it has not a single representative but it did get 49 of the vote in 49 seats that's about 25 percent of the vote a little less and it gets 33 of the vote in 51 seats i haven't figured out right now what the total vote for the great party is but it's a very bad deal because it is actually receiving around 20 25 of the vote and it gets no representation um at all so let's go through the answer um and this is a series of logical uh statements that summarizes the argument so far so in a plurality system a party needs to have a bear plurality of the vote to win a seat that's the logic of the plurality electoral system if three parties are competing as we saw before 34 percent of the vote will win you that seat if the other two parties get precisely 33 or roughly 33 percent each so logically all the party needs to do to get a majority in a legislature is to win 51 of the seats that's obvious and so the answer given that this distribution of the vote is 34 percent of the vote in 51 of the seats that is slightly more than 17 of the vote it's an artificial example but what it does do it it illustrates the logic of a plurality electoral system and here now let's take a look at a particular example let's take the british general election the last one in december of 2019 and what do we see here well the left-hand column is the proportion of the votes that each of the major parties received in the united kingdom so the conservative party got just over 40 43.6 percent of the seats it got a majority got 56.2 percent of the seats so its seats were um located in constituencies where it could pip the post where it could actually become first the labor party 32 percent of the votes just over and 40 percent of the seats it has areas in in britain particularly in the midlands and the north in the cities particularly and around london where it is the majority party even though it really gets more than 50 percent of the votes in any of those constituencies and then look at the liberal democrats that's the third party 7.4 percent of the votes very few seats 1.8 percent of the seats imagine that you got 7.4 percent of the votes across the country you wouldn't get any seats 7.4 percent will never win you a seat so there were a few places where the liberal democrats did actually have a plurality of the of the vote mainly in the edges of the united kingdom in the western and parts of the north but look at the scottish nationalists three percent of the votes 5.4 percent of the seats so it gets less than half of the vote of the liberal democrats about 40 percent and it gets more than double the seats why and let me just kind of stop there for a minute and let you think about the answer to that and i'll come back and see if you can figure out why the scottish nationalist on the basis of a smaller share of the vote got a greater share of representation in um the house of commons well the answer is that the scottish nationalists all their votes were concentrated in scotland and so they were able to pass the post first to get a plurality of the vote in more constituencies than did the liberal democrats there's a principle here and it's worth remarking on and the principle is that in a plurality electoral system the territorial distribution of the vote is absolutely crucial and you see that also in the next party the democratic unionists of um of ireland 0.9 less than one percent of the votes you'd think well are they ever going to get any representation yet they have around nine seats in the house of commons one point five percent of the seats and the same thing applies supplied kimura that is the welsh nationalist party they have a half a percent of the votes and they actually do slightly better than that in terms of the percentage of the seats now let's take a look at the united states and here on the screen is the electoral college votes of hillary clinton and donald trump in the last presidential um election in this country what's going on here think about the logic of the system here so hillary clinton has slightly less than three million more votes than donald trump in the united states as a whole and yet she lost the election donald trump had 304 electors and hillary clinton just 227. now the answer probably you know in retrospect it's going to be obvious to you it's the electoral college it's a set of constituencies jurisdictions in the united states states in which the vote is collected so hillary clinton did you know wonderfully in california but every extra vote that she received in california made no difference at all to her electoral college score her vote the number of electors that she could summon and donald trump just won several states in the midwest several of these bad so-called battleground states went to donald trump by small margins of the um of the vote so it's the it's the location it's the territorial location of the vote that is so important in a plurality electoral system and the electoral college is capable of transforming a minority of the vote a losing election in some in some sense to a majority in the um electoral college and the same thing happened in the previous in the election of of uh algo and george bush of 2000 not the previous election but a couple of elections back well while gore received a majority of the plurality of the vote overall in the united states 48 4.4 percent he received less electives and um if you speak to your parents they may remember that a florida was so so decisive which was turned on just a handful just a few 100 um votes where it wasn't quite possible to see exactly how people voted this was the chad's you know issue were people marking this correctly could the uh could people detect exactly what people's intentions um were and so it hung on on a uh on a thread but uh george bush won the election and albert gore just like clinton accepted the accepted the outcome because they conceived of these as the rules of the game and uh they they accepted the legitimacy of the result but you'll see something interesting in this particular slide and that is i'm ralph nader ralph nader got 2.7 percent of the vote he didn't get any electors but what was the effect of ralph nader well ralph nader picked up votes that would otherwise have gone to to gore ralph nader was an environmental green candidate gore was an environmentally conscious candidate far more so than george bush so essentially ralph nader what he did is he by pulling votes away from bush from sorry from gore um he gave the election to george bush that's often the role of a third party in u.s elections there is a different way of organizing elections and it's called proportional representation where the proportion of the votes are fairly truthfully translates in the proportion of seats in a legislature so here you see the results for germany the last elections took place in september 2017 and when you compare the the column on the left and and the one on the right so the left you have the percentage of votes and then in the seats you see that there there are few discrepancies that essentially the 30.29 of the vote for the city the christian democratic party we um in which is a major party in germany translated in 34.7 of the seat so there's a bit of a kind of additional bonus particularly for the larger parties you see that as well with the social democrats the second party there but it's by and large roughly similar there is some difference though and that comes out of the very particular nature of the german uh application of proportional representation and so the key difference there is that you get a for a party to get into the in the in the legislature it needs to gain at least five percent of the vote nationwide so any party that gets less just doesn't count just put aside and the votes that that that were given to that party are redistributed to other parties you could say how do you redistribute these votes well this is because of a second peculiar feature of the german system in germany when you cast your vote you don't cast one vote you cast actually two votes for the legislature your first vote is something we are quite familiar with is the constituency vote you vote for a candidate in your constituency is actually a first-past-the-first post element in the electoral system in germany the second vote you cast for a party and that that kind of percentage of the and that second vote is then added up nationally to calculate how what percentage of of uh what percentage of seats the party is going to get in the national election so you see that perhaps clearly when you look at the ballot and again from 2017 on the left you see names of candidates and underneath their party affiliation that's your first vote so you you choose one of these candidates but then on the right hand side you can cast the second vote and here you cast a vote for a party not for a candidate so what that allows you to do if you so decide as a voter is some split ticket voting you might actually vote say for a social democratic candidate uh on the left but then vote for say the christian democrat democratic party on the right so what is going to determine the overall percentage of votes in the legislature is the second vote that's the pr element however any person who gets the plurality of the vote on the first vote is going to go automatically in the parliament so they have to adjust so it's an adjustment kind of mechanism you see half of the seats are determined by a plurality and then the second half are organized such that the overall distribution of the seats is given by the second vote by your vote for a political party so they have to simply adjust the the who who gets in on the second overall by virtue of the second vote so it's the second vote that kind of that really matters yeah and the first vote that is kind of a symbolic representation where you can actually have somebody who represents you as an individual by virtue of plurality in particular constituencies not the country as a whole now pr system does have a major drawback if you have a fairly pure pr system proportional representation you may end up with loads of political parties in a legislature you see here that the representation in the dutch parliament there are it represented in the parliament 13 political parties each dot each color represents a different party and that is because there's 150 seats in the parliament um you so a party can actually get elected it's a pure electoral system there's only one constituency it's the entire netherlands so a party can get elected can get a seat if he gets point six percent of the vote so this is what you get and and as a result of that what you might see in a pr system uh perhaps more extreme parties because they can get elected and get into the legislature it can make coalition negotiations quite a bear it took the dutch government 209 days to get its um the the the exactly 75 seats together so a majority just the majority in the parliament to get the government up and running four political parties had to combine and negotiate for such a time so that is something to consider it is certainly is and it means that you know whatever the um the drawbacks of a plurality electoral system you can't turn around and say look pr is the a superior way of of going about it each one of these systems has advantages and uh and drawbacks um what we'd like to do now though is to turn to a particular drawback or potential drawback of a plurality um electoral system and what you see on the screen here is a um a summary of gerrymandering which is a way of organizing districts such that your followers your political party gets the bulk of representation and we've seen that the territorial um articulation the territorial distribution of votes is so important in terms of whether a party gets more than its share or less than its share of seats relation in relation to its share of the votes well this can be done intentionally it can be done as a as a strategy and here on the slide are four tactics which summarize this strategy that's cracking spreading voters of a type among many districts so they cannot capture a single eg urban area split among split up among suburban areas um the idea is that if you spread your opponents such that they never quite achieve a plurality in any one constituency then those votes are essentially wasted packing concentrating as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts so cracking and packing go together you pack your opponent voters in one district and then spread the rest among the remaining districts and so they gain that one pack district but not uh the numerous cracked districts and then hijacking withdrawing two districts so that you force the two incumbents of the same political party to run against each other in the same district and then finally kidnapping moving areas where an elected official has significant support to another district so that person has to create a new constituency new coalition to seek to win that district in the in the future and this is a simple a representation of um how this how packing and cracking can work here we have just simply four districts and one of them is packed so the green voters have been packed into district 1 and district 1 then returns a a green representative to the legislature but wow it's 180 votes out of 200 total he didn't need that many votes to to do that and that allows the remaining green voters to be cracked to be spread across the remaining districts so that the yellow party the yellow voters gain the bulk of representation in this case three seats against the green um one um seats and here is a as a picture of north carolina and the constituencies and what you see in the bottom left is the old circumstance of constituencies that was there in 2016 and these are the congressional districts and when you look closely at that insert in the in the bottom left of that of this slide you can see evidence of gerrymandering whenever you see districts that are shaped in like a gerrymand like a salamander like some strange um animal as you see in this uh as you see in this uh um this photograph um you see um evidence of gerrymandering and what you see in the upper right is the um the current setup and you see some evidence of gerrymandering because it's very clear that the counters which are marked in with the black jurisdictional boundaries have been split up in ways that would facilitate a majority for the ruling party that set the constituency boundaries in north carolina the republican party and so in the old system of 2016 the the democrats had roughly the same number of votes proportion of the vote that the republicans and the republicans received ten members in um in the house in congress and the democrats received three so it was ten to three on the basis of that particular pattern of constituency the design of constituencies and in the upper right it will it is now narrowed because the north carolina supreme court and the supreme court of the us compelled the these districts to be redrawn in a slightly fairer way and it would be on the basis of the vote of 2016 it would be just eight republicans vis-a-vis five democrats we said we were going to think comparatively so let's turn to another plurality system uh britain and there the drawing of the boundaries we now know is critical a critical element there is done differently it's done by a boundary commission boundary commission of england bce which is non-partisan in composition in fact it's composed of judges civil servants who then set every so often at regular intervals d boundaries or redraw if necessary the boundaries of the of the electoral orchestra constituencies and you see there on the screen the the key characteristics i mean let me just point out some one thing that's absolutely important in in the boundaries consideration is to keep as much as possible the local government government boundaries um as they are so it wouldn't be possible in the in the uk for example to split up a county uh over several electoral districts um and then on top of that they would there's is a roughly the same number of voters in each of the of the districts and and essentially try to maintain as much as possible equivalence shape of the jurisdiction so you couldn't easily get salamanders in in the uk system but the key difference with the u.s system or at least most u.s states is that the the the drawing of the boundaries is a non-partisan process all right um let's um let's ask some let's post some basic questions that summarize the logics of these two um electoral systems and first of all and um let me ask you yes um why are there two and only two major political parties in the united states well the key answer is because the united states has a plurality system and so this is a first-past-the-post system sometimes also called winner takes up so that really discourages minor parties to run yes if you if you're running as a minor party you could hurt one of the major parties and the strange thing is which part did you do you hurt the party that you'd otherwise prefer yeah that you would have voted for if there would be no third party yeah so there is one exception where in a plurality system you may get third parties quite easily and gary has talked about and in the context of the uk there is where there is a distinctive community that is territorially concentrated that lives in its own separate area its own separate world then it could make sense for a third party to run independently from the major yes but not in a presidential election because it's you know it's going to take all for the country as a whole so that really does suppress which is not to say that there have been a lot of third parties in america they've been um actually more than a thousand third parties that have run in america um but if you were thinking about you know how would you develop if you don't like a if you're not a democrat imagine that you're not a democrat you're not a republican let's say you are agreed what would you do well you'd operate in the primary system so the primary system you can you can operate with any party labeled in the primary system because the primaries are open and so in in the past socialists we talked about the socialists um last time why is there no socialist party in the united states well the socialists always insisted on running as a third party they always insisted and they didn't want to have anything to do with the major parties they didn't take a political science course they didn't take a political science course they were so ideologically pure that they self-defeated um except for one there were some so if you said look i'm not i'm just not gonna go with this i'm gonna break from the socialist party a person called townsend did this following world war one and what did he do he ran as a republican in south dakota and won and south dakota had a whole series of socialists under the republican party label they nationalized the mills they did lots of things that socialists wanted them to do but the socialist party didn't accept it they were they wanted to be ideologically pure and in the us system ideological purity comes at the cost of effectiveness and you have to um before the um actually the the gore um um bush election that i just showed you a little while ago um i'd written the book wise demo socialism america had co-authored this um which was about how the socialists had failed and i was asked on national public radio to give one of these editorials about the greens and in that editorial i turned around and said look the greens are gonna hurt the candidate that they wouldn't otherwise most want to win gore and i gave that right before the election and what happened in florida the greens took away the votes that would have allowed gore to win the election now there is a green party um in contesting battleground states in the united states in the coming election and so let's see if the greens then are able to deliver trump the election by virtue of taking votes away from from biden now what are then the consequences of a party split in each of these systems what do you think the consequences of a party split are in pr doesn't matter if you can overcome the barrier which in germany is five percent in other countries it can be lower in some countries there is no barrier um in the netherlands there is no barrier so you in the netherlands you actually can get a seat in the in the national parliament with 0.6 of the vote nationwide yes that's the minimum you need to get so as long as you have point six so imagine that there's a party of ten percent and it splits into two five percent each well each one of those parties will get five percent of the of the seats there's no there's no loss so if you remember in the last two lectures the point of departure was that in europe there are a lot of political parties well there is a two letter explanation for that p r proportional representation where you can split have small parties you don't lose under plurality suicide imagine a party that had 60 support and the other party had just 40 percent but the party of 60 splits into two parties of 30 percent well both of those parties would lose the party or 40 would then gain representation they'd win the presidency and you see this actually at work while we speak in this election in the republican party where there is a minority of republican leaders who are discontented with the main line of the current republican party and they're not running as an independent partner of course the democrats would love them to because it would give the democrats the um the election and within the democratic party um sanders is determined not to split to the party to try to deliver his support in the primaries to uh to biden precisely because it's a plurality of electoral system so one question would be imagine the united states uh with pr yeah that we switched to pr what parties would emerge well i mean let me ask you what parties do you think would emerge in the united states if we had i think if we would have a kind of mainstream center-right republican party you'd get a party around president trump which would be which would be a town party yes which would be a tan party in the in the language that we talked about the european language you would get probably a center-left democratic party then but you also get i think a radical letter oh you would you would sanders would have his own um party yeah there would be a party would be a socialist party you'd actually get something that wouldn't be so different from the situation in the european parliament it would actually be that you get a libertarian party i mean you'd get a lot of different parties in the united states because the same kind of ideological tensions are present in our society than they are in europe yeah it's just that the electoral system forces us voters but particularly the party the politicians to think and act differently if you want to be effective um well i think we've answered this question already what about minor partners what is the fate of minor parties under plurality or under um pr well in plurality system they're marginalized they can be spoilers right they can just actually help the side they are they least like because they typically tend to bite into the support base of the major party that is closer to their agenda so why did democrats in in the history of new york politics try to support an alternative republican party to have two candidates why did republicans support a labour party alongside the democratic party because they wanted to split the opposition the strongest supporter of let's imagine that some like bernie sanders would want to create another party where would he get his support from say financially from a republican donor the same thing would operate um changing the party names who would say look i'd like to support this party because it would split the opposition that's the logic there's one exception that you mentioned to the to minor parties under plurality and that is you can operate under plurality if you have concentrated support like the scottish nationalists or like the welsh nationalists or like the democratic unionists or in canada like the quebec separatists yes if you can win if you've got your support territorially concentrated then you can actually get representation even if you have a minority in the country as a whole yeah and then you're actually very difficult to dislodge indeed yes so under the pr system it's quite different right um in terms of minor parties yes you're not hurt you've got to reach the threshold in germany you've got to get to that five percent otherwise you have wasted your vote um but that aside it doesn't hurt now how does coalition building work that in each of these systems so this is kind of extending the logic of the electoral system to government how governments offer essentially that's why we use the vote right in order to vote parties or candidates in power so they can governors yes how does coalition building work well you can see how it works under p look in you to get a government you've got to have a majority in the legislature under pr are you going to get majorities for one party in the legislature rarely if at all almost never happens because the parties you get more smaller parties so what they have to do is they've got to create coalitions in the legislature so that so you get the election you get a variety of parties and then the greens turn around and say well let's create a coalition with the socialists social democrats and maybe we'll include the liberals of some other party or the conservatives or will turn around say well let's see what we can do in terms of creating a coalition you've got they try to get a majority in the legislature to support the parliament there is an interesting role there potentially often for minor parties for the smaller parties because they can often deliver the critical additional votes to get over the 50 percent yeah and there is a phrase that is often used when in europe coalition negotiations are ongoing the king makers it's the ones that actually can make the difference yes and they tend to be smaller parties yes you've got to get over that 50 to get a majority in the legislature to run the government plurality it's a different logic you've got to create your coalition prior to the election you've got to create one coalition particularly in the united states at the presidential level so what the parties are trying to do is a combination of two things one they're trying to reach out to voters who might be switches they may be unidentified and two they've got to get their own constituency out on election day or perhaps if we're lucky uh mailing prior to election day and they've got to create a sufficient proportion of voters that they can win enough electoral college votes to get succeed into the presidency so the negotiations in a plurality system are most within the parties the negotiations in a pr system and mostly between the parties well that's the last word of this lecture i hope you've enjoyed it and um and next time we're going to uh to have a discussion of some of the virtues and vices and there are virtues and vices on both sides of these systems