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Majoritarian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A majoritarian electoral system is one which is based on single-member constituencies. The term is used particularly in the famous studies of Arend Lijphart.
It is more or less synonymous with a plurality voting system.
Only one member can win each constituency, which therefore means the number of votes won nationally does not equal the number of seats in the parliament. For instance, a party which wins 51% of the vote in all constituencies will win 100% of seats, but only 51% of votes.
In the simplest majoritarian system, "first past the post", the winner does not even need a majority in a constituency. This can be demonstrated in a hypothetical constituency election result:
| Labour 35% |
| Conservative 33 % |
| Liberal Democrat 30 % |
| Other Parties 2 % |
In this case, Labour will take the seat and no other party will gain anything from this constituency.
The effect of a majoritarian system is that the larger parties gain a disproportionately large share of the vote, while smaller parties are left with a disproportionately small share of the vote. For example, the 2005 UK General election results were as follows:
| Seats This table indicates those parties with over one seat, mainland only |
Seats % | Votes % | Votes | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour Party | 356 | 55.2 | 35.3 | 9,562,122 | |
| Conservative Party | 198 | 30.7 | 32.3 | 8,772,598 | |
| Liberal Democrats | 62 | 9.6 | 22.1 | 5,981,874 | |
| Scottish National Party | 6 | 0.9 | 1.5 | 412,267 | |
| Plaid Cymru | 3 | 0.5 | 0.6 | 174,838 | |
| 646 | 27,110,727 | ||||
It can be seen that Labour took a majority of seats, 55%, with only 35% of the vote. The largest two parties took 67.5% of votes and 86% of seats. Meanwhile, the smaller Liberal Democrat party took a fifth of votes but only about a tenth of the seats in parliament, and no other party not on this chart took more than one mainland seat.
The majoritarian system is praised for producing stable majorities in parliament, but is criticised for representing only the largest parties and under-representing more minority opinions. It is considered best in countries where the ostensibly fairer proportionally representative system would produce a fragmented parliament, but which are not so unstable that an under-representation of minorities and opinion fragmentation will cause violence or disorder.