Electoral Systems

Electoral systems are the sets of rules that determine how votes are cast and counted and how they are translated into seats or offices, with major families including plurality or first-past-the-post, majority run-off, proportional representation, and mixed systems. Maurice Duverger argued that plurality systems favor two-party competition while proportional systems encourage multipartism, a claim later elaborated by Giovanni Sartori and Gary Cox. Arend Lijphart compared majoritarian and consensus democracies and found that proportional systems tend to produce broader representation and higher turnout, while Giovanni Sartori favored systems encouraging stable governments. Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset showed how systems and party cleavages interact, and Pippa Norris examined how institutional design affects participation and minority representation. Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem highlighted that no ranking system can satisfy all fairness criteria, and Michel Balinski and H. Peyton Young studied apportionment. Debates concern fairness, accountability, stability, and the gap between votes and seats, as in disputes over gerrymandering and electoral reform. Electoral systems remain central to research on democracy, party systems, representation, political inequality, and institutional design.