More Can Be Less: Hyper Plurality of Candidates, the Rationality of Electoral Choice, and Need for Electoral Reform in India

More can be Less: Hyper Plurality of Candidates, the Rationality of Electoral Choice and Need for Electoral Reform in India

A large number of candidates have become a regular feature of Indian elections. Given the regulatory concerns the problem has evoked, the paper reviews the process of candidate entry in select developed countries. The review reveals the presence of diverse approaches, ruling out the necessity for extreme options like debarring fringe candidates – a course suggested by several Indian expert grou...

Electoral Reform in Bermuda

One of the inheritances of British colonialism in many parts of the world is an electoral system based on that used to elect members of the UK House of Commons, albeit with many slight variations on the basic model of single-member constituencies allocated to the candidates with a plurality of the votes cast. One such country with that inheritance was Bermuda, which intends to shift its system ...

Minor Parties in Plurality Electoral Systems

Present research on minor party performance consists largely of singlecountry studies or pooled studies including a raft of widely varying electoral systems. This study examines the topic from a cross-national perspective, but is limited to democratic polities with single-member districts and first-past-the-post rules. An original dataset is compiled including 217 elections drawn from 37 countr...

Social cleavages, electoral reform and party choice: Israel’s ‘natural’ experiment

This paper examines party preferences in Israel from 1993 to 1999. This period provides a unique ‘natural’ experiment in that the middle was marked by a change from a single-ballot party list to a two-ballot system that included direct election of the Prime Minister. The paper has two goals: (1) to explore the patterns of social cleavage voting in Israel during this period; and (2) to determine...

Plurality-Majority Electoral Systems: A Review