Untitled Document

Alternative Forms of Electoral Systems

Basic Forms of Electoral Systems

Approximately 120 of the world’s 192 countries are now electoral democracies in so far as they elect the members of their national legislatures by some form of competitive electoral system. A much smaller number of these countries can be classified as liberal or consolidated democracies—countries whose political systems function on the basis of democratic principles and which have institutionalized democratic practice.

The number of alternative forms of electoral systems is almost infinite, and far more than the number actually used. Nearly all systems (i.e. over 95 percent) can be grouped into one of the following five categories.

Single Member District (SMD) or “First Past the Post” (FPTP) systems where:

The territory of a country is divided into some number of territorial units or electoral districts or constituencies each of which elects one member to serve in the national legislature.
Candidates must receive a plurality or majority of the vote to win election. SMD systems are also often referred to as “first past the post” (FPTP) systems, because the candidate who wins the seat in the legislature from a single member district is the one who obtains the highest total vote.
A variation of the single member district system used in France and some former French colonies is the two round system in which only the top two candidates or candidates who receive some minimum percentage (but not a majority) of the vote in a first round of elections, contest a second round to determine who is elected from the district.

Multi-Member District (MMD) systems where the territory of a country is divided into some number of electoral districts each of which elects more than one member to the legislature. Voters in MMD systems cast either one vote or more than one vote but less then the number of seats to be elected from the district.

List Proportional Representation or “PR” systems where:

Each party presents a list of candidates to the electorate, and voters vote for the party list of their choice rather than individual candidates
Parties win a proportion of seats in the legislature that closely approximates their proportional share of the national vote.
Winning candidates from each party are selected from their party’s list in the order of their ranking on the list until the number of seats allocated to the party is filled.

List PR systems elect members of the legislature from a single national constituency, or from a series of multi-member regional constituencies. More than 20 countries apply PR to a combination of national and regional constituencies, and are therefore referred to as “two tier” list PR systems.

Parallel systems and other forms of semi-PR. In these systems, half or some portion of the seats in the legislature are elected from single member districts, and half or some portion of seats are allocated to each party on the basis of list proportional representation.

Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) systems where half or some portion of the seats in the legislature are elected from single member districts, and half are allocated on a compensatory basis to in sure that each party receives the same proportion of seats as its proportion of the total vote.

* * *

Each of these basic types of electoral systems can be used at the sub-national level to elect members of regional, provincial or state legislatures and at the local level.

For the most comprehensive description of the different types of electoral systems now used worldwide, readers should consult The International IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design edited by Andrew Reynolds and Ben Reilly (1997) listed in the bibliography below.