Plurality Vote

PLURALITY IS THE most widespread winner-take-all (or majoritarian) electoral formula. The working of plurality is straightforward: the candidate (or, in some cases, the candidates) who receives the most votes wins the election. Plurality is typically used in single-member districts, and in most cases is employed for legislative elections. Among the advantages of plurality are more direct links between voters and their representatives, more decisive elections, and enhanced governmental accountability. Important drawbacks of plurality are the under-representation of minorities and third parties, disproportional results, and the fact that a party or a candidate can win an election with fewer votes than the opposing party or candidate.

Advocates of plurality argue that in countries such as the United States or Britain, which use single-member district plurality elections for their national legislatures, the system provides more democratic accountability than in countries using proportional representation. However, the logic behind this claim is different in each of the two cases. In the United States, where representatives are more responsive toward their constituents, elections provide citizens with an opportunity to judge individually the performance of each incumbent.

In Britain, plurality elections, combined with a parliamentary system, lead to a two-party system and single-party governments. In this case, voters see legislative elections less as an opportunity to make a judgment about the performance of their representative, and more as a chance to choose the government. Accordingly, a [Page 503]vote for a Labour or a Conservative candidate is mostly the expression of the voter's wish to ensure a majority for one party or the other, and, by doing so, to see their preferred party forming the government.

In parliamentary systems using proportional representation, the governmental majority is typically backed by a majority of popular votes. In parliamentary systems using single-member district plurality, this is seldom the case. In Britain, for example, the last time a party won a majority of votes was in 1935. However, proponents of plurality argue that the efficiency of single-party government is worth the cost of having a government backed by only a plurality of voters. Nonetheless, critics point out that even this is by no means assured, that is, the party that wins the most seats is not always the party that wins the most votes. In Britain, this happened in 1951 and then again in 1974. In New Zealand, this happened in both the 1978 and the 1981 parliamentary elections, the Labour Party won more votes than the incumbent National Party. However, the National Party won a majority of seats on both occasions. Such occurrences raise questions, not only about the fairness of this kind of electoral system, but also about the claims that plurality ensures governmental accountability.

A similar phenomenon, a candidate with less than a plurality of votes winning the election, occurred four times in the history of presidential elections in the United States: in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000. However, the election of the U.S. president is indirect, via the Electoral College, and a counter-argument is that the institutional framework of the United States did not assign any particular significance to the popular vote; rather, it was designed in such a way as to ensure that the candidate winning enough support across a number of states would be able to translate this into a majority of votes in the Electoral College.

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