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Voting schemes are methods of combining individual preferences to arrive at the aggregate preferences of the group. The study of the effects of different voting schemes is called social choice theory. Perhaps the seminal work in the modern study of voting schemes is Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (1951). In that work, Arrow lays out five attributes that ought to exist in any fair and just voting scheme, then goes on to say that no scheme can simultaneously incorporate all five attributes.
Arrow’s impossibility theorem implies that there is no one best voting scheme. To that end, democracies have experimented with a number of different voting schemes. The question of which voting scheme to use is not merely trivia, because the type of voting scheme that is adopted almost certainly has effects on electoral outcomes. For example, consider the following election with three candidates, one hundred voters, and three types of voters:
- There are thirty-five type-one voters who prefer candidate A most, then candidate B, then candidate C.
- There are thirty-three type-two voters who prefer candidate C most, then candidate B, then candidate A.
- There are thirty-two type-three voters who prefer candidate B most, then candidate C, then candidate A.
It is easy to see that the election above is not decisive under majority voting, since no candidate garners a majority of votes. Two very popular voting schemes are plurality rule, whereby the candidate who receives the most votes wins, and majority rule with runoff, whereby the top two vote-getters in the first election compete in a second election to determine the winner. Under plurality rule, which is used in countries such as Great Britain and Canada, candidate A would win with 35 percent of the vote. Under majority rule with runoff, which is used in countries such as France and Brazil, candidates A and C would go to the runoff election, where candidate C would win with 65 percent of the vote (since all type-three voters would join with type-two voters in supporting candidate C).
One important determinant of the voting scheme is the country’s type of regime. Democracies can differ on a number of variables. For example, in unitary systems, the country is governed in a single unit, often the parliament, which elects a prime minister to serve as an executive. Great Britain, Israel, and Chile are examples of unitary states. At the same time, other countries are federal systems, whereby governing authority is held in different locations. Often, states or provinces share governing authority with a national government. Examples of federations include the United States, Russia, and Brazil. Smaller countries often tend to be unitary systems, whereas larger ones are more likely to be federations, although there are exceptions. For example, Switzerland is a relatively small country, but has a federal system.
Many unitary countries use proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, although Great Britain and other Westminster systems are notable exceptions. In PR systems, parties receive representation in the nation’s legislature that is proportionate to the percentage of votes the party received in the last election. In these systems, parties prepare lists of candidates. In open-list systems, such as those of Chile and Sweden, voters can choose individual candidates from the parties’ lists. In contrast, voters in closed-list systems, such as that of Israel, select only the party, and the choice of the candidates is left up to party leaders. PR systems tend to have very disciplined parties within their legislatures, meaning that party members virtually always vote the same way on legislative proposals. This is because parties control the lists, and can therefore punish rogue representatives by keeping them off the lists.
On the other hand, many federal systems and some unitary systems use winner-take-all elections, whereby one candidate wins an election to represent the people living in a particular geographic area. This is how elections work in, for example, the United States and Great Britain. According to Duverger’s law (1963), systems that use winner-take-all elections, sometimes called first-past-the-post elections, tend to have only two parties. This is because such systems provide no incentive for coming in second place. In winner-take-all systems, a candidate who receives 45 percent of the vote wins nothing, whereas such a candidate would receive about 45 percent of the legislative seats in a PR system. For this reason, politicians are better off coalescing into two parties prior to an election in winner-take-all systems, but do not face that same incentive in PR systems. As a result, PR systems tend to have many small parties, whereas winner-take-all systems tend to have only two.
Furthermore, political activists often advocate for implementing new voting schemes because the voting scheme selected has such a strong effect on the political landscape of a democracy. For example, we saw above that voting schemes affect the number of parties in an electoral system. Other systems are advocated because they could increase the amount of representation minority groups receive. For example, cumulative voting is a voting scheme in which voters elect several representatives, and have the same number of votes as there are empty seats to fill. Voters may opt to use those votes to vote for different candidates, or they may cumulate their votes onto one candidate whom they most prefer. In this way, advocates argue, members of minority groups can cumulate their votes onto one candidate, thereby increasing the chances that their one candidate will win. At the same time, advocates of approval voting argue that their system encourages voters to accurately report their true preferences, rather than misstating them in an effort to gain some strategic advantage. In this type of system, voters deem each candidate either “approved” or “not approved,” and the candidate with the most “approved” votes wins. Furthermore, advocates of single transferable voting often called instant runoff voting, argue that their system discourages negative campaigning and provides incentives for sincere voting. In this system, voters provide a ranking of candidates from most to least favored. Counting votes entails adding up all of the most-favored votes and dropping the candidates with the lowest number of votes. Then, the votes of all those who ranked the dropped candidate first transfer to their next-most-preferred candidate, and the process continues until a winner is determined.
Bibliography:
- Arrow, Kenneth. [1951] 1963. Social Choice and Individual Values. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Duverger, Maurice. 1963. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. 2nd English ed. Trans. Barbara North and Robert North. New York: Wiley.
- Riker, William H. 1982. Liberalism against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
- Saari, Donald G. 2001. Decisions and Elections: Explaining the Unexpected. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
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