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The Problem: since 1974, more than 80 countries have held multiparty elections as an essential event of their transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule.
Despite the importance of early elections, political leaders in countries holding these elections have rarely considered the impact of alternative forms of electoral systems--the method by which the votes of the electorate are translated into seats in the national legislature and other legislative bodies.
The result is that several emerging democracies have chosen electoral systems that are now regarded by political leaders or citizens as inappropriate for their countries. This reduces the prospects for the consolidation of democracy. How might such countries design a better electoral system—one that will endure? How might other countries avoid this problem?
The Solution: Our approach is to model and display the likely impact of several different forms of electoral systems so that political leaders can reach a consensus on what system is the “best acceptable” electoral system for their country.
Our approach uses geographic information systems (GIS) for the display and management of geographic information and a mathematical model from operations research to compute the boundaries of electoral districts according to specified criteria. These two modeling methodologies are combined to create a spatial decision support system (SDSS).
Political leaders can design “the best acceptable” electoral system by using the SDSS to quickly consider and compare the impact of any district based system that they can imagine.
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South Africans waiting to vote in the country's first
universal suffrage, multiracial election outside a polling station in
Soweto.
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Copyright © 2001 by Joel D. Barkan, Paul Densham and Gerard Rushton |
