How many winners are there in a single member district

Multi Member Plurality electoral systems, are only slightly more complicated to administer. Top candidates who get more votes than any other candidate are declared the winner. In the following example, there are two members to elect, and the top two candidates are declared elected. SMP elections can led to a significant distortion between the percentage of votes and the percentage of seats a party wins across a whole province or country.

This arises because of the geographic distribution of votes. In the following two hypothetical elections, each party wins the same amount votes, but they are distributed differently across the province. Nevertheless, while it is true that in almost all multiethnic societies there are indeed correlations between voting behavior and ethnicity, the causation is far more complex.

More often than not ethnicity has become a proxy for other things, a semiartificial construct which has its roots in community but has been twisted out of all recognition. Malawi acts as a counterfactual to the primordial ethnicity thesis and offers an example of how political affiliations play out differently when incentive structures are altered.

Alliance for Democracy led by Chakufwa Chihana. But voting patterns depended more upon region than ethnicity. If ethnic conflict is not predetermined, or is more often a proxy for other interests, then incentives can be laid for other cleavages to emerge as ethnic divides becomes less salient. In South Africa, for example, the rules of the game encouraged parties to appeal across ethnic boundaries.

As Price notes, South Africa has been remarkably free of ethnic conflict in the postapartheid period, bearing in mind its history of repressive racial laws.

In a postelection survey, Robert Mattes of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa found only 3 percent of voters claimed to have based their political affiliations on ethnic identity. A second variable in terms of the nature of any given conflict and its susceptibility to electoral engineering is simply the intensity and depth of hostility between the competing groups. It is worth remembering that, although academic and international attention is naturally drawn to extreme cases, most ethnic conflicts do not degenerate into all-out civil war Fearon and Laitin, While few societies are entirely free from multiethnic antagonism, most are able to manage to maintain a degree of mutual accommodation sufficient to avoid state collapse.

There are numerous examples of quite deeply divided states in which the various groups maintain frosty but essentially civil relations between one another despite a considerable degree of mutual antipathy—such as the relations between Malays, Chinese, and Indians in Malaysia. There are other cases e.

But even in Sri Lanka, the electoral system for presidential elections allows Tamils and other minorities to indicate who their least-disliked Sinhalese candidate is—a system which has seen the election of ethnic moderates to the position of president at every election to date Reilly, b.

Contrast this with a case like Bosnia, where relations between ethnic groups are so deeply hostile that it is almost inconceivable that electors of one group would be prepared to vote for others under any circumstances. There, the transitional elections were contested overwhelmingly by ethnically based parties, with minimal contact between competing parties, and with any accommodation between groups having to take place after the election—in negotiations between ethnic elites representing the various groups—rather than before.

The problem with such an approach is that it assumes that elites themselves are willing to behave moderately to their opponents, when much of the evidence from places like Bosnia tends directly to contradict such an assumption. We will return to this problem, which bedevils elite-centered strategies for conflict management, later in this paper. Electoral system design is not merely contingent upon the basis and intensity of social cleavages but also, to some extent, upon the nature of the dispute, which is manifested from cultural differences.

Other types of disputes often dovetail with ethnic ones, however. If the issue that divides groups is resource based, for example, then the way in which the national parliament is elected has particular importance as disputes are managed through central government allocation of resources to various regions and peoples. In this case, an electoral system which facilitated a broadly inclusive parliament might be more successful than one which exaggerated majoritarian tendencies or ethnic, regional, or other cleavages.

This requirement would still hold true if the dispute was primarily cultural i. The range of mechanisms available to conflicting parties is thus likely to include questions of parliamentary rules, power-sharing arrangements, language policies, and various forms of devolution and autonomy see Harris and Reilly, Lastly, disputes over territory often require innovative institutional arrangements which go well beyond the positive spins that electoral systems can create. In Spain and Canada, asymmetrical arrangements for, respectively, the Basque and Quebec regions, have been used to try and dampen calls for secession, while federalism has been promoted as an institution of conflict management in countries as diverse as Germany, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland.

All of these arrangements have a direct impact upon the choice of an appropriate electoral system. A final consideration when looking at different electoral options concerns the spatial distribution of ethnic groups, and particularly their relative size, number, and degree of geographic concentration or dispersion.

For one thing, it is often the case that the geographic distribution of conflicting groups is also related to the intensity of conflict between them. The frequent intergroup contact facilitated by geographical intermixture. Intermixed groups are thus less likely to be in a state of all-out civil war than those that are territorially separated from one another. Furthermore, intermixing gives rise to different ethnic agendas and desires. Territorial claims and self-determination rallying cries are more difficult to invoke when groups are widely dispersed and intermixed with each other.

In such situations, group mobilization around issues such as civil or group rights and economic access is likely to be more prevalent. Another scenario is where the distribution of ethnic groups is such that some types of electoral system are naturally precluded. This is a function not of group size so much as the geographic concentration or dispersion of different communities.

Any electoral strategy for conflict management needs to be tailored to the realities of political geography. Territorial prescriptions for federalism or other types of devolution of power will usually be a prominent concern, as will issues of group autonomy.

African minorities, for example, have been found to be more highly concentrated in single contiguous geographical areas than minorities in other regions, which means that many electoral constituencies and informal local power bases will be controlled by a single ethnopolitical group Scarritt, Contrast this with the highly intermixed patterns of ethnic settlement found as a result of colonial settlement or labor importation and the vast Chinese and Indian diasporas found in some Asia-Pacific e.

Here, ethnic identities are often mitigated by other cross-cutting cleavages, and. This situation requires a very different set of electoral procedures.

A final type of social structure involves extreme ethnic multiplicity, typically based upon the presence of many small, competing tribal groups—an unusual composition in Western states, but common in some areas of central Africa and the South Pacific—which typically requires strong local representation to function effectively. In the extreme case of Papua New Guinea, for example, there are several thousand competing clan groups speaking over distinct languages see Reilly, a.

Any attempt at proportional representation in such a case would be almost impossible, as it would require a parliament of several thousand members and, because parties are either weak or nonexistent in almost all such cases, the usual party-based systems of proportional representation would be particularly inappropriate.

This dramatically curtails the range of options available to electoral engineers. Institutional prescriptions for electoral engineering also need to be mindful of the different political dynamics that distinguish transitional democracies from established ones.

Transitional democracies, particularly those moving from a deep-rooted conflict situation, typically have a greater need for inclusiveness and a lower threshold for the robust rhetoric of adversarial politics than their established counterparts. Similarly, the stable political environments of most Western countries, where two or three main parties can often reasonably expect regular periods in office via alternation of power or shifting governing coalitions, are very different from the type of zero-sum politics which so often characterizes divided societies.

Democracy, under these circumstances, can quickly become a situation of permanent inclusion and exclusion, a zero-sum game, with frightening results. Electoral laws also affect the size and development of political parties. At least since Duverger, the conventional wisdom among electoral scholars has been that majoritarian electoral rules encourage the formation of a two-party system and, by extension, one-party government ,.

While there remains general agreement that majority systems tend to restrict the range of legislative representation and PR systems encourage it, the conventional wisdom of a causal relationship between an electoral system and a party system is increasingly looking out of date.

In recent years, first-past-the-post FPTP has facilitated the fragmentation of the party system in established democracies such as Canada and India, while PR has seen the election of what look likely to be dominant single-party regimes in Namibia, South Africa, and elsewhere. Just as electoral systems affect the formation of party systems, so party systems themselves have a major impact upon the shape of electoral laws. It is one of the basic precepts of political science that politicians and parties will make choices about institutions such as electoral systems that they think will benefit themselves.

Different types of party systems will thus tend to produce different electoral system choices. The best-known example of this is the adoption of PR in continental Europe in the early s. The expansion of the franchise and the rise of powerful new social forces, such as the labor movement, prompted the adoption of systems of PR which would both reflect and restrain these changes in society Rokkan, Thus, threatened incumbent regimes in Ukraine and Chile adopted systems which they thought would maximize their electoral prospects: a two-round runoff system which overrepresents the former communists in the Ukraine Birch, , and a unusual form of PR in two-member districts which was calculated to overrepresent the second-place party in Chile Barczak, Retention of the existing FPTP system would almost undoubtedly have seen the overrepresentation of the ANC, as the most popular party, but it would also have led to problems of minority exclusion and uncertainty.

Lastly, the efficacy of electoral system design needs to be seen in juxtaposition to the broader constitutional framework of the state. This paper concentrates on elections that constitute legislatures.

The importance of electoral system engineering is heightened in centralized, unicameral parliamentary systems, and is maximized when the legislature is then constitutionally obliged to produce an oversized executive cabinet of national unity drawn from all significant parties that gain parliamentary representation. Similarly, the efficacy of electoral system design is incrementally diminished as power is eroded away from the parliament.

Thus, constitutional structures which diffuse and separate powers will distract attention from elections to the legislature and will require the constitutional designer to focus on the interrelationships between executives and legislatures, between upper and lower houses of parliament, and between national and regional and local governments.

This is not to diminish the importance of electoral systems for these other institutions for example, presidencies or federal legislatures ; rather, it highlights the fact that constitutional engineering becomes increasingly complex as power is devolved away from the center. Similarly, greater centralization of power in the hands of one figure, such as a president, raises the electoral stakes.

There are countless electoral system variations, but essentially they can be split into 11 main systems which fall into three broad families. The most common way to look at electoral systems is to group them by how closely they translate national votes won into parliamentary seats won; that is, how proportional they are. To do this, one needs to look at both the vote-seat relationship and the level of wasted votes. These comprise three plurality systems—first past the post, the block vote, and the party block vote—and two majority systems, the alternative vote and the two-round system.

Contests are held in single-member districts, and the winner is the candidate with the most votes, but not necessarily an absolute majority of the votes.

FPTP is supported primarily on the grounds of simplicity, and its tendency to produce representatives beholden to defined geographic areas.

Countries that use this system include the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Canada, and most countries that were once part of the British Empire. Voters have as many votes as there are seats to be filled, and the highest-polling candidates fill the positions regardless of the percentage of the vote they actually achieve. This system is used in some parts of Asia and the Middle East.

The Party Block Vote PBV operates in multimember districts and requires voters to choose between party lists of candidates rather than individuals. The party which wins the most votes takes all the seats in the district, and its entire list of candidates is duly elected. Variations on this system can be used to balance ethnic representation, as is the case in Singapore discussed in more detail later. The system thus enables voters to express their preferences between candidates, rather than simply their first choice.

If no candidate has over 50 percent of first preferences, lower-order preference votes are transferred until a majority winner emerges. This system is used in Australia and some other South Pacific countries. The first round is the same as a normal FPTP election.

If a candidate receives an absolute majority of the vote, then he or she is elected outright, with no need for a second ballot. If, however, no candidate has received an absolute majority, then a second round of voting is conducted, and the winner of this round is declared elected. This system is widely used in France, former French colonies, and some parts of the former Soviet Union. Semi-PR systems are those which inherently translate votes cast into seats won in a way that falls somewhere in between the proportionality of PR systems and the majoritarianism of plurality-majority systems.

The three semi-PR electoral systems used for legislative elections are the single nontransferable vote SNTV , parallel or mixed systems, and the limited vote LV. In SNTV Systems, each elector has one vote, but there are several seats in the district to be filled, and the candidates with the highest number of votes fill these positions.

This means that in a four-member district, for example, one would on average need only just over 20 percent of the vote to be elected. Parallel Systems use both PR lists and single-member districts running side by side hence the term parallel. Part of the parliament is elected by proportional representation, part by some type of plurality or majority method. Parallel systems have been widely adopted by new democracies in the s, perhaps because, on the face of it, they appear to combine the benefits of PR lists with single-member district representation.

In its Spanish and U. For example, if a major party wins 40 percent of the votes, it should also win around 40 percent of the seats, and a minor party with 10 percent of the votes should similarly gain 10 percent of the seats. For many new democracies, particularly those that face deep divisions, the inclusion of all significant groups in the parliament can be an important condition for democratic consolidation.

Outcomes based on consensus building and power sharing usually include a PR system. Criticisms of PR are twofold: that it gives rise to coalition governments, with disadvantages such as party system fragmentation and government instability, and that PR produces a weak linkage between a rep-. And since voters are expected to vote for parties rather than individuals or groups of individuals, it is a difficult system to operate in societies that have embryonic or loose party structures.

Most forms of list PR are held in large, multimember districts that maximize proportionality. List PR requires each party to present a list of candidates to the electorate. Electors vote for a party rather than a candidate, and parties receive seats in proportion to their overall share of the national vote.

Winning candidates are taken from the lists in order of their respective positions. This system is widely used in continental Europe, Latin America, and southern Africa.

A proportion of the parliament roughly half in the cases of Germany, New Zealand, Bolivia, and Venezuela is elected by plurality-majority methods, usually from single-member districts, while the remainder is constituted by PR lists. The PR seats are used to compensate for any disproportionality produced by the district seat results. Single-member districts also ensure that voters have some geographical representation.

The Single Transferable Vote STV uses multimember districts, where voters rank candidates in order of preference on the ballot paper in the same manner as AV. Any candidate who has more first preferences than the quota is immediately elected. If no one has achieved the quota, the candidate with the lowest number of first preferences is eliminated, and their second preferences are redistributed among remaining candidates.

And the surplus votes of elected candidates i. This system is well established in Ireland and Malta. Although the choice of electoral system is one of the most important institutional decisions for any democracy, it is relatively unusual in historical terms for electoral systems to be consciously and deliberately chosen. Often, the choice of electoral system is essentially accidental: the result of an unusual combination of circumstances, of a passing trend, or of a quirk of history.

The impacts of colonialism and the effects of influen-. Yet in almost all cases, a particular electoral system choice has a profound effect on the future political life of the country concerned. Electoral systems, once chosen, tend to remain fairly constant, as political interests quickly congeal around and respond to the incentives for election presented by the system.

If it is rare that electoral systems are deliberately chosen, it is rarer still that they are carefully designed for the particular historical and social conditions present in a given country.

This is particularly the case for new democracies. Any new democracy must choose or inherit an electoral system to elect its parliament. But such decisions are often taken within one of two circumstances. Either political actors lack basic knowledge and information, and the choices and consequences of different electoral systems are not fully recognized or, conversely, political actors do have knowledge of electoral system consequences and thus promote designs which they perceive will maximize their own advantage see Taagepera, The way in which an electoral system is chosen can thus be as important and enlightening as the choice itself.

There are four ways in which most electoral systems are adopted: via colonial inheritance, through conscious design, by external imposition, and by accident.

We will now deal with each of these processes in turn. Inheriting an electoral system from colonial times is perhaps the most common way through which democratizing societies come to use a particular system. For example, out of 53 former British colonies and members of the Commonwealth of Nations, a full 37 or 70 percent use classic first-past-the-post systems inherited from Westminster.

Eleven of the 27 Francophone territories use the French two-round system, while the majority of the remaining 16 countries use list PR, a system used by the French on and off since for parliamentary elections, and widely for municipal elections. Fifteen out of the 17 Spanish-speaking countries and territories use PR as does Spain , while Guatemala and Ecuador use list PR as part of their parallel systems.

Finally, all six Lusophone countries use list PR, as in Portugal. This pattern even extends to the former Soviet Republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States CIS : eight of these states use the two-round system in some form see Reynolds and Reilly, Colonial inheritance of an electoral system is perhaps the least likely. And even where the colonizer sought to stamp much of its political ethos on the occupied land, it rarely succeeded in obliterating indigenous power relations and traditional modes of political discourse.

It is therefore not surprising that the colonial inheritance of Westminster systems has been cited as an impediment to stability in a number of developing countries, for example, in the Caribbean Lewis, , Nigeria see Diamond, , and Laitin, , and Malawi see Reynolds, The deliberate design of electoral systems to achieve certain preconceived outcomes is not a new phenomenon, although its incidence has waxed and waned over this century.

It did exactly that Reilly, b. At Irish independence in , both the indigenous political elite and the departing British favored the single transferable vote due to its inherent fairness and protection of Protestant and Unionist minorities Gallagher, The adoption of list PR systems in continental Europe occurred first in the most culturally diverse societies, such as Belgium and Switzerland, as a means of ensuring balanced interethnic representation Rokkan, All of these cases represented examples of conscious institutional engineering utilizing what were, at the time, new electoral systems in fledgling and divided democracies.

The short second wave of democratization in the decolonization decades after the second world war also saw the electoral system used as a lever for influencing the future politics of new democracies.

Most of the second wave, however, featured less in the way of deliberate design and more in the way of colonial transfer. Thus, ethnically plural states in Africa and fragile independent nations in Asia inherited British first-past-. In recent years, transitions to democracy in Hungary, Bolivia, South Africa, Korea, Taiwan, Fiji, and elsewhere have all been accompanied by extensive discussion and debate about the merits of particular electoral system designs.

A parallel process has taken place in established democracies, with Italy, Japan, and New Zealand all changing their electoral systems in the s. In most cases, these choices are based on negotiations between political elites, but in some countries e.

A small number of electoral systems were more consciously designed and imposed on nation states by external powers. Two of the most vivid examples of this phenomenon occurred in West Germany after the second world war, and in Namibia in the late s. In postwar Germany, both the departing British forces and the German parties were anxious to introduce a system which would avoid the damaging party proliferation and destabilization of the Weimar years, 15 and to incorporate the Anglo tradition of constituency representation because of unease with the — closed-list electoral system, which denied voters a choice between candidates as well as parties Farrell, — During , elections in the French and American zones of occupation were held under the previous Weimar electoral system.

But in the British zone a compromise was adopted which allowed electors to vote for constituency members with a number of list PR seats reserved to compensate for any disproportionality that arose from the districts. Thus, the mixed-member proportional MMP system, which has since been emulated by a number of other countries, was born. The imposition of a 5 percent national threshold for party list representation helped focus the party system around three major groupings after the Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and Free Democrats , although in all 12 parties gained representation in those first postwar national elections.

The rationale for a national list PR system in Namibia came initially from the United Nations, which urged as early as that any future nonracial electoral system ensure that political parties managing to gain substantial support in the election be rewarded with fair representation. The option of discarding the incumbent first-past-the-post electoral system the whites-only system operating in what was the colony of South West Africa and moving to PR was proposed by Pik Botha, then South African foreign minister.

But this advice remained unheeded, and the option of a threshold for representation one of the chief mechanisms for reducing the number of parties in a list PR system was never put forward by the UN or made an issue by any of the political parties. However, when the Constituent Assembly met for the first time in November , and each parliamentary party presented its draft constitution, SWAPO gave in on the issue of PR—apparently as a concession to the minority parties for which they hoped to gain reciprocal concessions on matters of more importance.

Often, choices are made through a kaleidoscope of accidents and miscommunications leading to a multitude of unintended consequences. Accidental choices are not necessarily poor ones; in fact, sometimes they can be surprisingly appropriate. One example of this was the highly ethnically fragmented democracy of Papua New Guinea, which inherited the alternative vote see below from its colonial master, Australia, for its first three elections in the s and s.

Because this system required voters to list candidates preferentially on the ballot paper, elections encouraged a spectrum of alliances and vote trading between competing candidates and different communal groups, with candidates attempting to win not just first preferences but second and third preference votes as.

This led to cooperative campaigning tactics, moderate positions, and the early development of political parties. When this system was changed, political behavior became more exclusionary and less accommodatory, and the nascent party system quickly unraveled Reilly, a. With the benefit of hindsight, Papua New Guinea thus appears to have been the fortuitous recipient of a possibly uniquely appropriate electoral system for its social structure. Most accidental or evolutionary choices are, however, more likely to lead to less fortuitous unintended consequences— particularly for the actors who designed them.

For example, when Jordan reformed its electoral system in , on the personal initiative of King Hussein, it had the effect of increasing minority representation but also facilitating the election of Islamic fundamentalists to the legislature Reynolds and Elklit, The comparative experience suggests that four specific systems are particularly suitable for divided societies.

These are usually recommended as part of overall constitutional engineering packages, in which the electoral system is one element. Some constitutional engineering packages emphasize inclusiveness and proportionality; others emphasize moderation and accommodation. The four major choices in this regard are 1 consociationalism based, in part, on list proportional representation ; 2 centripetalism based, in part, on the vote-pooling potential of the alternative vote ; 3 integrative consensualis m based, in part, on the single transferable vote , and 4 a construct not previously mentioned, which we call explicitism, which explicitly recognizes communal groups and gives them institutional representation, which in theory can be based on almost any electoral system, but in practice is usually based on the block vote e.

One of the most discussed prescriptions for plural segmented societies remains that of consociationalism, a term first used by Althusius and. Consociationalism entails a power-sharing agreement within government, brokered between clearly defined segments of society which may be joined by citizenship but divided by ethnicity, religion, and language.

Examples of consociational societies include Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland. Cyprus and Lebanon are cited as countries which had, but no longer have, a consociational ethos Lijphart, The mechanics of consociationalism can be distilled into four basic elements which must be present to make the constitution worthy of the consociational name.

They are: 1 executive power sharing among the representatives of all significant groups a grand coalition in the cabinet ; 2 a high degree of internal autonomy for groups that wish to have it constitutionally entrenched segmental autonomy ; 3 proportional representation through list PR and proportional allocation of civil service positions and public funds proportionality ; and 4 a minority veto on the most vital issues a mutual veto for parties in the executive Lijphart, These arrangements encourage government to become an inclu-sive multiethnic coalition, in contrast to the adversarial nature of a Westminster winner-take-all democracy.

Consociationalism rests on the premise that in bitterly divided societies the stakes are too high for politics to be conducted as a zero-sum game. Also, the risks of governmental collapse and state instability are too great for parties to view the executive branch of government as a prize to be won or lost.

The fact that grand coalitions exist in Westminster democracies at times of particular crisis further supports the consociational claim.

Consociationalism is particularly reliant on a PR electoral system to provide a broadly representative legislature upon which the other tenets of minority security can be based.

Lijphart clearly expresses a preference for using party list forms of PR rather than STV, or by implication open-list PR systems and mixed systems which give the voter multiple votes.

In many respects, the strongest arguments for PR derive from the way in which the system avoids the anomalous results of plurality-majority systems and facilitates a more representative legislature. For many new democracies, particularly those which face deep societal divisions,. Failing to ensure that both minorities and majorities have a stake in these nascent political systems can have catastrophic consequences. Recent transitional elections in Chile , Namibia , Nicaragua , Cambodia , South Africa , Mozambique , and Bosnia all used a form of regional or national list PR for their founding elections, and some scholars have identified the choice of a proportional rather than a majoritarian system as being a key component of their successful transitions to democracy Lijphart, ; Reynolds, By bringing minorities into the process and fairly representing all significant political parties in the new legislature, regardless of the extent or distribution of their support base, PR has been seen as being an integral element of creating an inclusive and legitimate postauthoritarian regime.

While large-scale PR appears to be an effective instrument for smoothing the path of democratic transition, it may be less effective at promoting democratic consolidation. Developing countries in particular which have made the transition to democracy under list PR rules have increasingly found that the large, multimember districts required to achieve proportional results also create considerable difficulties in terms of political accountability and responsiveness between elected politicians and voters.

Democratic consolidation requires the establishment of a meaningful relationship between the citizen and the state, and many new democracies—particularly those in agrarian societies Barkan, —have much higher demands for constituency service at the local level than they do for representation of all shades of ideological opinion in the legislature.

It is therefore increasingly being argued in South Africa, Indonesia, Cambodia, and elsewhere that the choice of a permanent electoral system should.

While this does not preclude all PR systems—there are a number of ways of combining single-member districts with proportional outcomes—it does rule out the national list PR systems often favored by consociationalists. But there are other critiques of list PR in divided societies that center on the ease with which ethnic leaders can be elected exclusively by members of their own group, thus replicating rather than breaking down social divisions in the legislature.

The experience of list PR in post-Dayton Bosnia is a good example of how proportionality alone will not encourage accommodation. In Bosnia, groups are represented in parliament in proportion to their numbers in the community as a whole, but because parties can rely exclusively on the votes of members of their own community for their electoral success, there is little incentive for them to behave accommodatively on ethnic issues.

In fact, the incentives work in the other direction. More generally, consociationalism rests on several key assumptions that may not always be viable in divided societies. The most important of these is the assumption that ethnic leaders will be more moderate on key sectarian issues than their supporters. While this may hold true in some cases, it appears to be untrue as a generalized proposition about the relationship between ethnic elites and policy positions on ethnic issues.

In fact, some studies have argued the opposite: leaderships of ethnic parties are often the ones who have the most to gain by maintaining ethnocentric politics.

The lack of a mechanism to encourage accommodation means that consociational prescriptions rely, sometimes unwisely, on enlightened political leadership and preparedness to compromise to achieve accommodatory outcomes. This requires a clear definition of groups and group rights, which has led to the criticism that consociationalism may well perpetuate divisions rather than alleviate them. Consociationalism is probably best seen as a stop-gap measure, the lesser of two evils which keeps the lid on the pressure cooker of a divided society that is about to blow and perhaps manages to turn down the heat just a little.

Perhaps the most powerful criticism is that, by entrenching segments and defining all politics in those divisive terms, one actually postpones or even obstructs the breakdown of segmental barriers. The way in which power sharing requires geographically concentrated groups who have autonomy, not only in regional affairs, may ultimately increase the segmental divides.

The tension remains: How does one recognize segmental groups, while at the same time attempt to diminish their importance? An even greater danger exists of imposing ethnically aware consociational structures on societies where political segments are not clearly or primarily defined along the lines of ethnicity.

The great value of consociationalism is that it offers powerful conflict-resolving solutions to those divided societies which show no hope of generating such interethnic political accommodation. It is the solution when all else fails. But if consociational structures are entrenched in plural societies which do show potential for the withering away of ethnic voting, then the very institutions designed to alleviate tensions may merely entrench the perception that all politics must be ethnic politics.

Consociationalism provides few incentives for political entrepreneurs to appeal for support beyond their own ethnic bases. Centripetalism focuses on the electoral system as the chief agent of interethnic accommodation because of the incentives for election that such systems provide.

The most reliable way of achieving this aim, according to proponents of the centripetal approach, is to offer sufficient electoral incentives for campaigning politicians to court voter support from other groups. In deeply divided societies, this can be very difficult to achieve. Under conditions of purely ascriptive ethnic identity and hostility, for example, almost nothing will convince a member of one ethnic group to cast his or her vote for a member of a rival group.

However, some electoral systems such as the alternative vote AV permit or even require voters to declare not only their first choice of candidate on a ballot, but also their second, third, and subsequent choices amongst all candidates standing. This feature presents candidates who wish to maximize their electoral prospects with a strong incentive to try and attract the second preferences of voters from other groups the assumption being that the first choice of voters will usually be a candidate from their own group.

An alternative strategy is for major parties contesting FPTP elections in heterogeneous districts to nominate members of different ethnic groups as their chosen candidates in different districts. In Malaysia, for example, Chinese voters will help elect Muslim candidates in some seats, while Muslims will help elect Chinese in others. The argument for the integrative effects of AV is premised on the assumption that politicians are rational actors who will do what needs to be done to gain election.

The optimal scenario is a case where no candidate can be assured of an outright majority of support, so that the role of second and later preferences becomes crucial to attracting an overall majority. To attract such second-order support, candidates need to. There is a long history of both these types of behavior in Australian elections, the only established democracy to use AV.

In cases of deeply divided societies, however, policy-based cleavages are usually considerably less salient than ethnic or linguistic identities. Second, single member plurality elections are prone to the spoiler dynamic. Generally, parties will limit the number of candidates running to avoid this scenario, leaving voters with minimal choice. These dynamics essentially mean that in the vast majority of single member plurality elections, voters have no effective choice, but to ratify the candidate of the majority party in their district.

Single member majority systems are identical to single-member plurality systems, except that they use two round runoffs or instant runoff voting to ensure that the winner of an election has the support of the majority of voters. While this eliminates the spoiler problem, it does nothing to stop the negative effects of gerrymandering or the limitations inherent in making geography the primary districting critera.