Elections make afundamental contribution to democratic governance: in modern democracies theyallow citizens to choose their representatives.
They differ on the kind ofsystem used and on the institutions they are electing office seekers to. Thisessay will start by examining different views on the relationship betweenelections and democracy, drawing a line between direct and indirect forms ofdemocracy. Secondly, it will focus on representative democracies and it willanalyse the main functions of elections in such contexts, offering also acommentary on two different interpretations of these functions. There will be adeeper analysis of one specific function, that is representation, to which willfollow an overview of the two main categories of electoral systems. Finally,the essay will attempt to identify the option which gives the most democraticresults, expressing a preference for the mixed-member proportional system asthe best formula.Elections are oftenregarded as the symbol of democracy by thinkers who portray it as an”institutional arrangement”, such as Schumpeter (1967: 173). However, other scholars – such as Reeveand Ware (1992:71) – arguethat there is only a contingent connection between elections and democracy,since the existence of the former does not prove the presence of a democraticpolitical system.
- Thesis Statement
- Structure and Outline
- Voice and Grammar
- Conclusion
Evidence of this can be found in two examples: on one handdirect democracies do not need a voting system or an apparatus of elections, onthe other elections may occur in political systems which have a doubtfuldemocratic character – research shows that since 1946 there have been almost asmany elections under dictatorship as there have been under democracy (Golder 2005: 120).The alternative toSchumpeter’s view is to think of democracy in terms of “a set of ideals whichvalue popular rule, political equality, political participation and so on” (Reeve and Ware 1992: 73). Among these idealsthere are some of the most important rights provided to citizens in democraticstates, such as freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom ofassociation, from which flows the right to vote, understood as the right toparticipate in the decision-making process.
This may occur in a direct orindirect way. Due to the impracticality of the use of a system of direct participation, in whichcontinuous popular participation would be required, most democracies are indirect and needelections of decision-makers as a substitute for voting on most decisions (Reeve and Ware 1992: 165).Elections, therefore, allow to extend democracy from small groups to muchlarger bodies.In the context of liberaldemocracies, elections may follow different rules, but they generally have incommon universal suffrage, secret ballot and electoral competition (Heywood 2013: 205). There are two differentinterpretations of their functions. The first emphasises the ‘bottom-up’ function of elections, such aspolitical recruitment, representation, choice of government and so on.According to this view, elections force parties to listen to the electorate andto develop policies that are likely to attract a majority of the electorate;they are therefore a means of communication between voters and parties andgovernment. The second, more radical, interpretation portrays elections as adevice for “expanding the power and authority of the governing elite” (Harrop and Miller 1987:245).
Supporters of this ‘top-down’ view believe that elections give an illusion ofchoice and encourage people to obey the state without fundamentally limitingits autonomy. In reality, elections are a ‘two-way street’: elites and theelectorate mutually influence one another.One of the main functionsof elections in democratic countries is the recruitment of politicians, whichthen leads to the making of governments. This latter function, however, isseldom fulfilled in a direct, ‘bottom-up’ way: as both Harrop and Miller (1987: 249) and Heywood (2013: 205) underline, the politicalexecutive is directly elected only in states such as Venezuela and France,whereas in more common parliamentary systems the electorate can only choose theassembly in a direct way.
In countries where no single party has a clearparliamentary majority – usually due to the employment of proportionalrepresentation which, as it will be discussed further on in the text, contributesto the creation of multi-party systems – post-election deals play a key role inthe formation of governments, meaning that governments can change without theneed for an election, as it happened in Italy where, since the last elections(2013), three governments have been changed.A ‘bottom-up’ function offair elections, strictly related to the concept of indirect democracy, isproviding representation. There are different schools of thought when it comesto the meaning of this concept. The ‘resemblance model’ is perhaps the one thattakes it more literally than any else, as it claims that only people comingfrom a particular group can fully identify with its interests. This model,however, is incompatible with free elections, as Harrop and Miller explain (1987: 245). The way the electorate isguaranteed representation in democratic electoral systems is throughrepresentatives acting effectively on its behalf rather than mirroring it.The variations ofproportionality in ensuring this representation – i.
e. how proportionally votesare converted into seats – are the key parameter that allows to group electoralsystems into two broad categories. The first one consists of majoritariansystems, in which the candidate or party with the largest number of votes winsthe election and the majority of seats; the second one includes proportionalsystems, in which seats are awarded in proportion to the number of votes cast.European electoral systemswere traditionally based on majoritarian principles (Harrop and Miller 1987:45). Thiskind of system increases the chances of a single party gaining a majority andbeing able to govern, producing a clear-cut situation in parliaments byexaggerating the winning party’s lead.
In fact, in countries like the UnitedKingdom – which uses a single-member plurality system (SMP) – even though noparty since 1945 ever won more than 50% of the votes (Kimber 2017), the party that issupported by a plurality of votes normally wins more than 50% of the seats. Forthis reason, majoritarian systems are usually thought to have the capacity todeliver strong and stable government, to the detriment of their representativefunctions: popular preferences are – to a greater or lesser extent – distorted.Representative functionsare better taken into account in proportional electoral systems: proportionalrepresentation increases citizens’ perception that their vote matters in anelection, since it allows smaller parties with an evenly spread vote to winseats. These multi-party systems enhance the likelihood that factions willstrive to distinguish themselves ideologically, presenting to voters moreoptions to choose from (Banducci and Karp 2009: 109). Conversely, electoral systems that do not leave room forparliamentary representation of small parties invest on the logics of the’wasted vote’ to favour the creation of two-party systems: citizens are drivento change their original preference for smaller parties that have very limitedchance of success and choose to support larger parties in order not to ‘waste’their vote (Chryssogonosand Stratilatis 2012: 24, Reeve and Ware 1992: 147, Wolff 2003: 13).Due to the aforementionedmulti-party nature, proportional electoral systems are more likely to producecoalition governments, generally considered to be weaker and more unstablecompared to the ‘strength and stability’ of majoritarian systems (Banducci and Karp 2009:127, Heywood 2013: 210, Jeffery 1998: 242, Reeve and Ware 1992: 162).
Several examples – suchas Italy’s long list of short-lived governments – are often cited in support ofthis argument, however in other cases, like Germany, coalition governments havetypically been effective and stable. This suggests that high or low degrees ofproportionality do not necessarily imply the strength or weakness of agovernment, but rather it is more important the political tradition withinwhich the government operates. Even countries employing majoritarian systemsmight be harmed by the so called ‘adversary politics’, that can cause damageswhen transitioning from the government by a ‘strong’ big political party toanother with opposite views (Jeffery 1998: 243).
Moreover, it should be noted that parliament functionalityshould not be reduced to concern for governmental stability: the duties that aparliament is expected to perform do not always presuppose one-partymajorities.No electoral system can besaid to be best for all functions in all contexts, this is because suchfunctions are often barely compatible with each other. The choice of a specificset of rules results from a balancing process which depends on each country’s political,social and cultural circumstances. The same applies to the choice of the mostdemocratic electoral system: representative government is undemocratic in itsnature when considering the etymological meaning of democracy as ‘populargovernment’. It could be argued that representative government has anoligarchic dimension, and therefore no electoral system can give trulydemocratic results.
However, in their being representative, today’s governmentscombine both undemocratic and democratic features (Manin 1997: 236): the degree ofindependence enjoyed by elected representatives distances representation frompopular rule – however indirect – but is counterbalanced by freedom of publicopinion. Analogously, the presence of elections on a regular basis compensatesthe fact that representatives – by virtue of said independence – are not boundby promises made to voters, and holds them accountable to those they represent.In spite of the inegalitarian character of elections (individuals running forpublic office do not have equal resources and this inevitably favours elites)theoretically all citizens have equal power to designate and dismiss theirrulers (Manin1997: 238).The democratic quality of the results given by a given political system couldbe measured according to the extent to which that power is granted and ensured.From this it follows that those systems which guarantee that the preferences ofall citizens – including minorities – are mirrored as equally as possible canbe considered more democratic than others which move proportionalrepresentation to the background. Nevertheless, it should be considered that noelectoral system will ever give perfectly democratic results in this regard,not even the most proportional, since there will always be a part of thepopulation that did not participate in the vote, and even those votes that werecast might be the result of misinformation, uncertainty or ‘tactical voting’ (cf. Wolff 2003: 13), just to give someexamples.
Having established this,it could be argued that there is no real need for electoral systems to give themost democratic results, as long as such results allow both governability and afair share of representativeness of those that voted. These two key featuresare combined in recent forms of more complicated system that, for this reason, havebeen named ‘mixed’. The electoral system preferred the most by specialists ismixed-member proportional (MMP) (Bowler, Farrell and Pettitt 2005: 7), because it is able tocombine the virtues of both majoritarian and proportional systems, requiringelectors to cast two votes: one for a constituency MP and one for a party. The formerwill be given a proportion of seats (usually 50%) allocated using asingle-member plurality system, and the second vote will follow a party-listsystem that ‘corrects’ the distortions of SMP. It is not a system that allowsperfect proportionality, but it tries to consider and actualize the aforementioneddemocratic features of representative democracy.