Elections

The Institutional Setting: The Scope and Procedures of Electoral Democracy

The impact of elections on democratic governance depends on institutional arrangements that shape the public's political behavior and the resulting political processes. Most fundamentally, elections must conform to fundamental democratic values. From the viewpoint of the elite groups competing for governmental power, the electoral process needs to be open and competitive and no group should be discriminated against regarding its access to the electoral game. As a civic right, free, universal, equal, and secret suffrage aims to ensure that individual voters have an effective choice between competing groups of leaders and policy proposals, so that each voice has the same weight and that voters are not subject to external pressures when casting their ballots. The institutionalization of democratic elections was a long, contested process, starting in colonial America in the seventeenth century and ending in the 1990s, when elections became competitive in once-communist countries. Between the beginning and the end of the process, barriers to universal franchise were successively removed and the group of enfranchised people grew considerably. Today, democratic elections are held in more than 150 nations of the world.

Different from the basic requirements of electoral democracy, other institutional characteristics of elections vary from one nation to another. Depending on the allocation of legislative and executive power to different layers of the state, democratic elections are only held at the national and local levels of the political system (unitary system) or, additionally, at the state level (federal systems). In parliamentary systems, at least the members of first chamber of the national parliament are recruited by popular vote, and in some nations, this applies also to the second chamber (if existing). In all presidential and some parliamentary systems, the head of the executive is elected directly or indirectly. Israel has the only parliamentary system where the prime minister is directly selected by the electorate instead of by the parliament. Further differences refer to the election of state governors or prime ministers, local mayors, and other executive officers. In the United States, popular elections serve as a basis for recruiting a large number of state and local leaders. In other nations, members of local and national parliaments are the only political leaders owing their positions to popular vote. The electoral terms also differ a great deal. Finally, regarding the way votes are transferred into seats in parliament, we can roughly differentiate between two main types of electoral rules: Proportional systems, where the seats in the legislature are allocated more or less closely [Page 264]according to the share of the votes received by the competing parties versus majority systems working according to the principle the winner takes all.

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