2. Outline
I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
II. Electoral systems and party systems
III. Turnout: decline and variation
IV. Preferences: what makes people vote the way they do?
V. EP elections
VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or dangerous panacea?
3. Outline
I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
II. Electoral systems and party systems
III. Turnout: decline and variation
IV. Preferences: what makes people vote the way they do?
V. EP elections
VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or dangerous panacea?
4. I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
Europe’s electoral systems can basically be split into two main
groups: plurality/majority, on the one hand, and
proportional, on the other.
Plurality/majority systems
use single-member
constituencies or districts,
with the candidate who gets
a majority (more than half
the votes cast) or a plurality
(more votes than any other
candidate) getting elected.
Proportional systems – often
known collectively as PR or
proportional representation
systems – make use of
multimember constituencies
or districts so that the seats a
party gets in the legislature
more accurately reflects its
share of the vote.
5. Plurality and majority systems
- ‘plurality system’ - often called ‘first-past-the-post’ (FPP), is one in
which the candidate who gets the most votes is elected. It is the system
employed in the UK.
- ‘majority system’ is slightly different. It requires that the winning
candidate get over half the votes, with the most common way of
ensuring such an outcome being a second, ‘runoff’, election between
the top two candidates.
6. Plurality and majority systems
- by far the majority of European countries use electoral systems that
attempt to ensure that the share of seats a party has in parliament
more or less reflects the share of the vote it received at the election.
- we should understand the basic differences between PR systems. They
can be conveniently be divided following (Lijphart, 1999) into three:
- List PR systems
- Mixed systems
- STV systems
7. List
PR
systems
- involve voters voting in
multimember constituencies or
districts for lists of candidates
provided by political parties or
alliances of political parties.
When the votes are counted,
each list is awarded seats in
proportion to the votes cast for
it.
8. Mixed
systems
- give voters two votes. They use
one to vote for a candidate in their
local constituency or district. They
use the other to vote for a list in a
multimember constituency (often
covering a particular region). The list
is ‘compensatory’: it is used to
ensure that, whatever the results of
the constituency contests, the
overall result of the election is more
or less proportional.
9. STV
(single
transferable
vote)
systems
- Voters in multimember
constituencies or districts, are
presented not with lists but with
names of individual candidates
(along with their party affiliations)
which they are then invited to rank
order. Candidates receiving a certain
quota of first preference votes are
deemed elected, after which any of
their votes over and above the quota
are transferred (as if they were first
preferences) in proportion to that
candidate’s voters’ second choices.
10.
11. PR’s subtleties and sophistications
The first two are features that impact on the
proportionality of PR systems; namely ‘thresholds’ and ‘district
magnitude’. The third is the mathematical formula adopted to
working out the allocation of seats.
12. 1.
threshold
- a percentage figure of the vote
that a party (or electoral alliance) has to
score before it is awarded a share of seats
in parliament or, if a higher tier exists, a
share of those seats. Thresholds exist in
almost every country that employs PR,
normally because of a desire to limit
fragmentation (i.e. a large number of
parties in parliament) for fear that this
would threaten stable government – and,
of course, the position of existing parties!
13. 2.
district
magnitude
- The number of MPs allocated to
each constituency – known in the jargon
as district magnitude – can make a
significant difference to the
proportionality of a PR system, especially
where there is no second tier of seats to
correct any disproportionality at the
regional level. Basically, the lower the
‘district magnitude’ (i.e. the lower the
number of MPs allocated to each
constituency), the lower the
proportionality of the overall result.
14. 3.
mathemati
cal
formula
- the electoral system can
be made to work to the
marginal advantage of larger or
smaller parties according to the
mathematical formula used to
allocate seats to parties in PR
systems.
15. Outline
I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
II. Electoral systems and party systems
III. Turnout: decline and variation
IV. Preferences: what makes people vote the way they do?
V. EP elections
VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or dangerous panacea?
16. II. Electoral systems and party
systems
- It is easy in political and other social sciences to mistake
correlation (some kind of relationship between two factors) for
causation (suggesting that one causes the other).
- Doing so would lead us to think that, because countries with
proportional electoral systems tend to have multi-party systems,
the latter must be the result of the former or that two-party
systems are explained by FPP – views sometimes associated with
Maurice Duverger, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of comparative
politics.There are two problems with such reasoning.
17. Outline
I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
II. Electoral systems and party systems
III. Turnout: decline and variation
IV. Preferences: what makes people vote the way they do?
V. EP elections
VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or dangerous panacea?
18. III. Turnout: decline and variation
- Recent elections throughout the democratic world have
given cause for concern among pundits and politicians because
the number of those eligible to vote who actually do so
appears to be dropping.
21. Outline
I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
II. Electoral systems and party systems
III. Turnout: decline and variation
IV. Preferences: what makes people vote the way they do?
V. EP elections
VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or dangerous panacea?
22. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
- It is, if you like, the Holy Grail of that branch of political
science called ‘psephology’ (a term for the scientific study of
elections invented in the 1950s and based on the Greek word
for the pebbles that were used by the ancients for casting their
ballots). The reason is that there are so many possible factors
that go into such a decision that it is impossible to control for
all of them – certainly at the individual level.
23. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Decades of research in this area has traditionally
accorded particular significance to three things:
- class;
- religion and;
-‘party identification’ (the extent to which someone feels
‘close to’ a particular party).
24. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Party ID
The idea of party identification (often referred to simply
as party ID) is often associated with the ‘Michigan model’ of
voting. This model held that the majority of people were
socialized into feeling closer to one party rather than another.
25. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Party ID
Those who study voting in Europe, however, have always been
rather more skeptical on the grounds that a voter’s primary
identification might be to a social class or religious
denomination or region and only then, in indirect fashion, to
one of what might be a number of parties claiming to best
serve its interests.
26. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Party ID
For many analysts, though, much of the work that uses it
fails to provide a convincingly clear-cut answer to the question,
‘has there been a Europe-wide decline in party ID over time?’
27. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Party ID
The debate over the decline or otherwise of party
identification may simply take time to resolve. If cumulative
research does indeed go on to show a downward trend, this
will only leave us with another challenge.
28. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Party ID
Two possible challenges spring immediately to mind.
1. That it is linked to public dissatisfaction beginning in
the 1970s with the relatively unimpressive performance of
their countries’ economies.
2. Links it to the increased educational capacity of most
electors and the greater access they have to information
supplied by the media rather than by parties
29. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The ‘end of class voting’ and the rise of values?
As Chapter 1 suggested, class has not disappeared, either
as a useful categorization or as an identity.
Perhaps we should ask first whether class is as important in
some countries as it is in others, and then whether there is
evidence that it has declined as an influence over time.
30. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The ‘end of class voting’ and the rise of values?
31. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The ‘end of class voting’ and the rise of values?
As Chapter 1 suggested, class has not disappeared, either
as a useful categorization or as an identity.
Perhaps we should ask first whether class is as important in
some countries as it is in others, and then whether there is
evidence that it has declined as an influence over time.
32. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The ‘end of class voting’ and the rise of values?
we are still left with the task of explaining why class is now
a less reliable predictor of vote.
33. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The ‘end of class voting’ and the rise of values?
34. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Religion: another death announced prematurely?
Researchers argue, however, is that
(a) religion impacts most on the voting behaviour of those
who attend regularly, and
(b) even many non-attenders still consider themselves to
be believers/members of churches and that this continues to
have at least some influence on their vote.
35. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Religion: another death announced prematurely?
But (as we saw in Chapter 1), fewer and fewer people are
going to church regularly (if at all) nowadays. And the extent to
which religious belief predicts one’s political stance does appear
to be weakening over time, even if it remains a better predictor
than other characteristics, including class.
36. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Religion: another death announced prematurely?
Accordingly, mainstream centre-right parties all over Europe
have been attempting to reduce any reliance they may have had
on religious voters – and not without success, even where they
continue to call themselvesChristian Democrats.
37. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
Ethnicity: not much evidence
The fact that Catholics in England tend to vote Labour, can be
explained by the fact that Catholicism was the religion of
(poorer) Irish immigrants. But this begs questions about whether
the relationship in question is actually to do with religion or with
ethnicity.
38. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The rise of ‘issue voting’, ‘judgmental voting’ and volatile
voting
- Possibly the ‘individuation’ of European society touched
on in Chapter 1 has eroded collective identities of any sort at
such a pace that cleavages old or new do not matter so much
any more. People, as we suggest in Chapter 5, are thinking for
themselves rather than letting their background do their
thinking for them.
- Issues and images may have become much more
important, possibly because of changes in media coverage of
politics.
39. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The rise of ‘issue voting’, ‘judgmental voting’ and volatile
voting
Judgmental voting’ – based on a one-off assessment of
parties’ policies and reputations, as well as guesses about their
ability to deliver what they promise.
This would certainly seem to fit with the rise in volatility
(the extent to which people switch their vote from one election
to another)
40. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The rise of ‘issue voting’, ‘judgmental voting’ and volatile
voting
Research suggests that aggregate figures disguise,
first, the extent of switching that goes on between one
election and the next at the individual (or ‘micro’) level and;
secondly, the extent to which such switching has risen from
the late 1960s/early 1970s onwards.
41. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The rise of ‘issue voting’, ‘judgmental voting’ and volatile
voting
42. IV. Preferences: what makes people
vote the way they do?
The rise of ‘issue voting’, ‘judgmental voting’ and volatile
voting
- It also fits with figures from the same surveys which seem
to indicate that voters are increasingly leaving their decision
about which way to vote until nearer polling day.
- Europe’s voters, taking their cues from the parties, begin
to vote on the basis of the content and the credibility of the
more specific offers being made to them – in other words, they
vote ever more instrumentally than ideologically.
43. Outline
I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
II. Electoral systems and party systems
III. Turnout: decline and variation
IV. Preferences: what makes people vote the way they do?
V. EP elections
VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or dangerous panacea?
44. V. EP elections
- Notwithstanding the increasing power of the EP in the
EU’s law-making system, turnout at the elections has dropped
across the continent in recent years.
46. IV. EP elections
- European elections are what political scientists call ‘second-
order’ contests. Like local and regional elections, they are often used
by voters to send a message (often one of dissatisfaction conveyed
by voting for small and/or opposition parties) to the national
government of the day.
- This second-order status can give rise to coordination
problems. Because EP elections are largely national contests and
because of the tendency (particularly pronounced when national
elections are a long way off) to punish incumbents, there are always
likely to be ‘mismatches’ between member state governments (and
maybe the commissioners they nominate) and the EP.
47. IV. EP elections
- the latter play an important part in the domestic politics
of member states.
- Or the effect of that vote is maybe to allow a new entrant
onto the political scene who then stays around for good.
48. Outline
I. Europe’s myriad electoral systems
II. Electoral systems and party systems
III. Turnout: decline and variation
IV. Preferences: what makes people vote the way they do?
V. EP elections
VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or dangerous panacea?
49. VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or
dangerous panacea?
- Representative democracy is not the only form
of democracy in Europe: all of the continent’s
Germany and the Netherlands, also have experience
democracy at the national level – most famously in
Switzerland.
Representative democracy is the election of
candidates to parliament where they then form
and pass legislation on the people’s behalf. By direct
we mean the holding of referendums in order to
and/or constitutional changes.
50. VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or
dangerous panacea?
- At the more fundamentalist or populist end of
the spectrum lie claims that referendums have the
save democracy from parties that are portrayed as
the people and a distortion of, or even as parasites
democracy.
- In the middle are claims, firstly, that
encourage participation and informed voting on
that would otherwise be subsumed in the packages
on offer at elections and, secondly, that parliaments
laws if they know they risk being overturned.
51. VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or
dangerous panacea?
- At the minimalist or pragmatic end of the
spectrum lies the argument that they provide, first, a
safeguard, particularly on constitutional issues that
political ‘rules of the game’ and, secondly, that they
particular issues paralysing the system.
- In western Europe, the most widely used type is
referendum and most referendums (of whatever type)
have been used in order to decide questions that are
difficult (perhaps because they involve moral
things as abortion or divorce) or too crucial (normally
touch on the constitution or on matters of sovereignty)
52. VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or
dangerous panacea?
- Some (the Baltic states and Slovenia) used
referendums to declare themselves independent
- However, two states – Switzerland and Italy –
citizens themselves to call a vote on a particular
requiring only that they gather sufficient signatures
that such a vote would be worthwhile holding.
53. VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or
dangerous panacea?
- In Italy (where referendums can only repeal
an existing law and where 500,000 signatures or
councils’ support must be obtained first of all) they
least 50 per cent of the country to actually turn up
the repeal option has to gain majority support
do.
- The same has happened in Lithuania, which
record for the most referendums in Central and
- Advocates of referendums can point to
Denmark and Switzerland that they actually help
54. VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or
dangerous panacea?
- This raises another common criticism of
referendums; namely, that governments more often
pull the strings, holding them only if and when they
can win.
- Yet referendums vary rarely resolve an issue if
deep-seated divisions within a society.
- going on the evidence, referendums are not a
bullet’ that can revivify ailing democracies.
55. VI. Direct democracy: useful tool or
dangerous panacea?
- Instead the evidence suggests that, used
sparingly, referendums can help democracy function
efficiently and, in some cases, provide a valuable
politicians that getting elected every four or five
give them license to ignore voters’ views,
of fundamental concern.
- The argument that ‘special interests’ can
referendums can in part be dismissed by noting that
with equal force to parliamentary elections.
After reading bullet 1: with the exception of elections in Northern Ireland and elections to the Welsh Assembly, and the Scottish and European Parliaments.
After reading second bullet: This method is employed in presidential but not parliamentary contests in Austria, Finland, and Portugal. France, like the UK, conducts its legislative elections in hundreds of single-member constituencies (also known by electoral systems experts as ‘districts’ or sometimes as ‘electorates’).
But French candidates who win a plurality but not a majority in the first round of voting must fight a second round a week later against all of his or her opponents who won 12.5 per cent or more in the first round. In the second round, the winner is the candidate who wins the most votes (i.e. a plurality), although often (because many second-round contests turn into two-horse races) he or she will actually win a full-blown majority.
Although the advocates of PR emphasize its ‘fairness’ when compared to FPP systems, most are aware that what are all too easily dismissed as dull, technical differences between proportional systems are actually crucially important in determining which parties are likely to do well, or at least better than their competitors.
In the Netherlands, there is only one national constituency, which guarantees a proportional result overall. In other countries, however, regional variations could produce an overall result that is disproportionate. While some (like Spain) are prepared to live with such an outcome, others are not.
Its ability to do this, however, is to some extent dependent on how many seats in parliament are constituency seats and how many are party or list seats.
The same thing happens to the second preference votes on the ballots of the weakest candidate. The transfer process continues until all the seats allocated to the constituency are filled by candidates reaching the quota.
Intro: The subtleties and sophistications mentioned above are myriad, but only two or three of them are worth focusing on here.
Thresholds vary between a low of 0.67 per cent in the Netherlands and a high of 5 per cent in the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany, where avoiding a return to the extreme multipartism of the interwar years was uppermost in the minds of those who designed its electoral system.
Basically, the higher the threshold, the higher the hurdle and the harder it is for small parties to make it into parliament.
This arithmetical relationship results from the fact that, as some of us may remember from primary school, dividing a relatively small number by a relatively large number entails a greater likelihood of a remainder. Proportionality is therefore pretty easy to achieve in the Netherlands where the whole country is treated as one constituency with 150 MPs. But it is much less likely in Spain. There, in addition to having strong regional differences, the country is split into fiftytwo constituencies with an average of seven MPs per constituency.
First, it does not quite fit contemporary and historical reality. For instance, the most solid two-party system in Europe is in Malta, but Malta uses STV.
Secondly, treating the electoral system as the prime cause of party systems would be to place too great a weight on institutional factors and too little weight on the social factors that also help to shape things. Obviously the electoral system plays a role, but it is not necessarily a determining one. If plurality systems really did create two-party politics and PR multiparty politics, how would we explain either the virtual duopoly that exists in Malta, which operates STV, or the range of parties on offer to French voters under their plurality system? Giovanni Sartori (whose work on party systems we referred to in Chapter 5) has persuasively argued (Sartori, 1997) that a plurality system cannot in and of itself produce a two-party system. This is because the existence of the latter also depends on limited polarization and on the absence of geographically concentrated minorities that are unwilling to be represented by either of two big parties (and therefore elect MPs from regionalist parties instead).
In fact, as political scientists like Mark Franklin (2002) argue, the decline is not as large as is often thought. Franklin also suggests we need to start taking the levels achieved in the 1950s as an unusual high point rather than as a norm from which we have now sadly departed
More interesting and significant, perhaps, than an apparent decline in turnout are the variations in turnout between European countries. We know that the richer and/or more educated and/or more interested in politics a person is, the more likely he or she is to vote. But none of this really matters as much as the fact that he or she is from, say, Sweden (where turnout is generally high – 80 per cent in 2002) or from Poland (where it is much lower – 46 per cent in 2001)
Intro: These cultural differences in voting behavior between states are often more noticeable than they are explicable. Likewise, explaining why people vote the way they do has always been much harder than we would like.
After reading bullet 1: This does not mean, however, that we cannot make educated guesses based on aggregate data
Although this did not necessarily mean they would always vote for it – judgements about economic conditions or particular issues or candidates could play a part as well – normally they would.
They have also been doubtful that respondents to surveys are able to disentangle their current political preference from any longterm identification they may or may not have.
Bullet 1: This was transferred to the parties, which seemed to be incapable of doing much to make things better and which more recently have had their reputations badly damaged by scandals, financial and otherwise.
Bullet 2: Taken together, these mean that people have less need to rely on instinct and loyalty and instead can make the kind of consumerist, individual choice they are increasingly used to in other areas of life.
After reading question 1; On the first question, there is reasonably broad agreement that class voting varies considerably across countries (see Table 6.6).
After reading question 1; On the first question, there is reasonably broad agreement that class voting varies considerably across countries (see Table 6.6).
After reading question 2: The second question – the decline (or not) of the influence of class on voting – is rather more controversial.
What is at issue is the extent to which people vote in a certain way because they belong to (or at least can be labelled as) a certain class. Most research suggests that overall there has been a significant decline in such class voting from the late 1960s and early 1970s, though one that is more pronounced in some countries than others.
This is not an easy one, and explanations so far are deductive (based on theoretical speculation which may or may not fit data from a process that is still unfolding over time) rather than inductive (emerging from a clear body of evidence). These (largely sociological) explanations are summarized in Box 6.4
This influence may be direct, in that they vote for, say, a Christian Democratic party. Or it may be indirect, in the sense that it encourages them to support a certain party because of the stances it takes on issues on which their opinions are in part shaped by their religious convictions.
The same goes for the fact that Britain’s non-white population continues to vote overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it because they are non-Christian? Or is it because they are non-white and therefore suffer disproportionately from discrimination, are more likely to be in lower-paid occupations, and less likely to favour a party (the Conservatives) that has been perceived as tougher on immigration.
In fact, European electorates may be even more volatile than the headline figures suggest.
For instance, in 1960 only 7 per cent of those surveyed by the Swedish election study said that they had changed their vote from four years previously; in 1998 the figure was 31 per cent – an increase seemingly replicated in other European countries where the question was asked
To use the Swedish example again, only 18 per cent made up their minds during the campaign in 1964; thirty-four years later, in 1998, the figure was 57 per cent. This may of course have been particularly high in the latter year because many social democrats defected (temporarily) to the Left Party in protest at the government’s welfare squeeze (which may also explain the high level of volatility in that year).
Intro: It is easy – but increasingly misleading – to apply, as do many media commentators, adjectives such as ‘pointless’ and ‘illusory’ to elections for the EP, which take place every five years. Their criticisms are understandable.
First Bullet: This means that EP elections seem unlikely, at least for now, to contribute much to the creation of a European identity among the citizens of the member states. Whether, though, this is because those citizens are irretrievably nationally focused or whether they are encouraged to be so by parties who are neither ready nor willing to supranationalize their appeals or their focus, is a moot point.
Second bullet: These mismatches, given a legislative process relying on ‘co-decision’ between the EP and the Council of Ministers (representing national governments), could make European law-making more conflictual, especially if the EP begins – as it seems to be doing – to vote more on left–right (or at least party-bloc) lines. Whether this will mean that at least some national governments will be faced with more European legislation of which they do not approve, however, is another moot point.
First bullet: Both parties and voters use them (and their results) as signals and portents, which may then affect their subsequent behaviour. A party may finally realize, for instance, that it has to dump its underperforming leader, while a protest vote allows voters to register their dislike of the direction in which a particular party is travelling and/or provides an opportunity for catharsis, after which they return to the fold by the next general election.
After second bullet: direct democracy is sometimes put forward as an alternative, or a cure, for the supposedly moribund state of party-driven politics in Europe.
direct democracy is sometimes put forward as an alternative, or a cure, for the supposedly moribund state of party-driven politics in Europe.
Ad hoc/optional (called on a particular issue and may or may not be declared binding).
After bullet 2: The relative ease with which this can be done, however, is balanced in both countries by safeguards designed to reduce the risk to minority rights by requiring that any vote be passed by a ‘double majority’.
After bullet 1: After a golden period in the early 1990s when voters used referendums practically to oblige politicians to overhaul the electoral system, Italian referendums have failed to attract sufficient people to turn out and vote, rendering them an expensive waste of time.
After bullet 1: the accusation is not borne out by the record, which suggests that over three-quarters of referendums held in Europe between 1945 and 1997 were not within their control. It also shows that just over a third did not turn out to be supportive of the government’s stance on the issue in hand
After bullet 2: More recently, the British government’s ability to garner referendum backing for the Northern Ireland peace process in 1998 may well have helped prevent things slipping back into chaos, but it has not as yet enabled it to bring a lasting settlement appreciably closer. Meanwhile, the recent history of referendums in the Republic of Ireland, shows that those on the losing side of the argument (whether they be citizens or the government) do not necessarily give up; instead they go for another referendum: this happened on abortion in the 1990s
Second bullet: indeed, one could argue that it is much easier for a wealthy interest group to ‘buy’ a small group of legislators than it is for them to ‘purchase’ the votes of millions of citizens.
