Majoritarian means an electoral system that requires the successful candidate to have majority of the votes.
It is also defined as "governed by or believing in decision by a majority.”
Some take that to mean that "majority" simply means the larger number.
But I think if you look up majority, it will say "more than half," not just a larger number.
The term plurality means "a larger number" but also it means "not a majority."
Majority is a larger number, true, but further it is a number that is more than all the rest put together.
In elections, without a majority you don't know if the leading person is in fact the preferred choice of most voters.
in a two-sided contest the larger number is always a majority, but in three- or more cornered contest, the larger number may not be majority. it may only be plurality.
As my analysis says there are three layers to elections;
a voters' vote
the district contest
the chamber.
in the chamber:
Parliament is majoritarian because you must have more than half of the members to pass a bill. it is yes or no question so is two-sided contest.
that majority either way could be one party or a combination of two or more parties.
in the District:
I would not describe FPTP as majoritarian, as I use the term, because winners in many cases do not have majority - they have plurality.
Plurality, as a dictionary tells me, is more than any one else but is not a majority.
Run-off elections
a runoff contest is intended to be majoritarian, in most cases.
But it only guarantees majority result if it reduces candidates to just two.
and even then there is possibility of failure to get majority (majority based on votes cast originally) -
if fewer people show up to vote in the second vote than the number who voted in the first vote or if some ballots in STV are plumped, just marked for one candidate, it is possible that a person will have majority of the votes in the second count, but not have as many as more than half of the votes originally cast.
Variety of Run-off elections
political parties in Canada use sequential runoff to establish leader. the lowest dropped each time until someone has majority.
other places -- for the second vote they immediately drop the number of candidate down to two - just the two leading candidates from the first round go to the second.
other places: they drop the number to three for second vote.
Switzerland's old-time three-round runoff method
Switzerland used a three-round runoff method pre-1918.
if no majority in first count, drop lowest candidate
if no majority in second count, drop one more.
in the third round plurality was all that was required to win.
the idea of Swiss system was to establish majority but if it was not accomplished in two tries, then Swiss gave up on that goal and just accepted plurality.
so there is variety of ways even for runoff.
Instant-runoff voting (Alternative voting), the political party leadership method using mail-in ballots, works the same as the "one at a time elimination" "majority at that time" method above.
the difference is just the voters pre-set their back-up preferences and don't have to go back to vote again. That difference means when they make their choices, they don't know how the other voters will vote. they don't know who will be dropped off for the second round, etc.
one method: more flexibility to voters but they have to vote two diff. days
the other method: voters don't know as much but they don't have to vote two diff. days
which one is better depends on your judgement call.
multi-member districts
yes, any form of PR needs MM districts or some form of pooling of votes that elect multi-members.
MM district does not by itself make PR -
MM with Block Voting does not necessarily make for PR.
each voter has as many votes as the number of seats and if voter cannot give more than one vote for a candidate and if a party runs as many candidates as the number of seats, it is possible for a single group to take all the seats in the district. un-mixed rep is not proportional (unless that group has massive majority of votes)
But
if a voter has multiple votes and party(ies) run full slates but voter can lump his or her votes on to a single candidate (Cumulative Voting), you may have proportional result
if voter has multiple votes and votes are not lump-able, but no party runs full slate, the result may be proportional, certainly there will be mixed rep, which is likely to be more proportional than one-party sweep..
if each voter has only one vote (SNTV or STV) and votes are not lump-able, you will have mixed, semi-proportional/proportional result. it does not matter if party(ies) run full slate or not.
Government
Trudeau today leads the government of the day. He does not have majority of seats in the HofC. but he does have control of the cabinet. He depends on CSA or ad-hoc support from majority of MPs to stay in power and since 2021 has had it.
Some might say there are two problems with majoritarian parliament:
1. Frequently no party elects a majority to the House of Commons.
True enough -- often there is no one-party majority but there is just one cabinet.
Under parliamentary custom, one party has all the executive power while other parties have none.
yes, there can be only one cabinet and one party can control it. That is parliament - and that is why who we put in HofC is based on democratic principle. We do give power to the few but those few in cabinet are controlled by the slightly-larger few in the wider chamber. (it is unfortunate that who we put in the HofC is not based on democratic practice.)
The party with cabinet power but not majority of seats in the HofC must appeal to others for majority support for bills or budgets to pass
Placating the MPs needed for majority support usually means (indirectly) placating the voters behind them. it is just unfortunate that in our history since 1940 (or even earlier or maybe never), the majority of MPs were not elected by a majority of voters (except for 1958 and 1984).
(in 1958 and 1984 the party that took majority of seats took majority of votes but those MPs themselves (the elected candidates) might not have received a majority of votes cast. something to think about. Under PR they themselves would have to take majority of votes to take majority of seats. or very close to it anyway.)
Some see a problem caused by forcing cabinet to work to get support from majority of MPs. But I think that is actually what parliament is all about, at least in principle -- legislators' control over executive power.
Even without any reform, cabinet can have more than one party (coalition government), or as we have done many times over last hundred-plus years, to govern (hold cabinet), a party must have support from other parties and those parties can demand a coalition or a CSA or just play along (or not and bring down the government).
Any political party with a plurality but not a majority of seats could form a coalition with one or more parties to give the coalition cabinet the support of a majority in the House of Commons.
Any party that is not part of a coalition that has a majority of the seats would have no executive power.
Some see this as a problem. I don't.
Some say "The second problem with our majoritarian parliament is that a single political party rarely receives a majority of the total votes cast.
(PR does not address no party getting majority of votes. PR is not some kind of IRV. More on this below)
It is said that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals will share executive power with a smaller party to get a Parliamentary majority.
just cause it has not happened (much) does not mean it never will.
Ontario has had coalition government - United Farmers and Labour, 1919-1922.
Alberta has had coalition government of a sort - Alex Ross, Labour MLA, was Minister of Labour in the first UFA government.
it has happened.
it is leap of imagination to consider that we/the politicians in power will ever change our electoral system but it does happen --
provincial governments have changed their electoral systems perhaps 15 times - not just district revisions or extension of franchise but actual voting method and/or seat allocation procedures.
FPTP, Block Voting, Limited Voting, STV, STV/IRV, IRV,
FPTP in MM district, IRV in MM district,
have all been used in provincial elections somewhere. And now only FPTP is used so that shows change can happen.
And approx. 108 countries now use PR to elect all or some of their national politicians. At one point, none did. So that is change.
Leadership of a major party, I hope, will consider the benefits of rational democratic-based representation over near-random elections and rancor and accident.
each party now suffers from regional under-representation and problems that that causes.
each party in the past was denied fair rep by lob-sided elections, which were described as landslide victories although dis-proportional results.
in 2019 Conservatives denied minority government (which might have fallen anyway)
in 1944 CCF in Alberta was denied 25 percent of the seats.
one-party sweeps of whole legislatures (good for no one)
and so much more in the past and that will occur under FPTP in future,
versus steady vote-based rep.
People look at Israel and think PR does not work.
But note that Israel, which has used PR since 1947, has had fewer elections than Canada since 1948.
Likely Canada had about the same number of elections in early 1960s or late 1970s (two in less than a year) that Israel is having lately
Every country -- under any system -- goes through problems, as Pilon pointed out in recent Webinair. (see my blog on it.)
In recent discussion with a person unschooled in topic of PR, he said he expected a series of minority governments to help the push for PR. Actually, as FPTP encourages false-majority government, such a series of stalemated governments is likely to cause pro-FPTP feeling.
But neither can we expect PR if FPTP is producing majority governments based on majority of the votes. (no fear of that.)
Likely change to PR needs a series of dis-proportional elections, seesaw changes without apparent cause, policy lurch and voter disgust.
Many countries adopt PR after independence, as part of nation-building or following revolution, civil war, war invasion/conquest. None of which Canada has experienced or suffered from. We are about the only country in the entire world that has not had those things (barring two U.S. invasions that did not get far into our land, although taking and burning our capital).
Just because we don't have those things -- actually, perhaps because we haven't had those things - we can still aspire to a more rational, reasonable "good government and public order" "human rights" approach to our elections. and such is PR.
Some might say Canada' major parties do not want PR because it means power sharing, and because it means each would never have cabinet power by itself.
They think under PR, the probability of one party winning a parliamentary majority from about fifty percent to close to zero percent.
Actually they over-estimate Liberal or Conservative chance of majority government under FPTP - it is not A or B, 50-50, Ins and outs, Instead, recently, it is more like two in seven elections are majority governments even under FPTP.
with such happening anyway, politicians might think why not go to PR? Under PR, we would know that we will get exactly (more or less) the seats we deserve.
slightly less often majority government (almost never versus infrequently) but with rationality added.
Some think changing parliament to a multiparty consensual cabinet and dropping the majoritarian rule would be easier than changing elections to PR.
They think a deeper reform - changing government itself - is easier than a wider but smaller reform - PR of election of members.
Under PR, much of the MPs would be the same and government would operate same manner as before (although differently in nature)
under a multiparty consensual cabinet, MPs would be the same but government would operate differently.
I don't think that is an easier reform
It is said that the PR cause has not convinced a large percentage of the membership of the major political parties, who think that the current electoral system is democratic enough.
As PR advocate Dennis Pilon said in recent webinair, most people don't vote for the local candidates, they vote for policy bundles /parties.
A voter likes a certain party and thinks it should be in government.
Will they like having their party have a little bit of the main action, and never all of it instead? I doubt.
if people think the system is democratic enough, they just don't know enough about it.
politics is a process.
if system works well enough, it works well enough, but when it doesn't, people know it. behind every vote not used to elect someone is a frustrated voter - although they might not feel it.
Perhaps the major parties don't have to be convinced - perhaps they will take less and less of the vote as the system gets discredited. and less and less of the seats and be replaced if they don't wake up. About every province has had "third party" government -- Alberta had them for 54 years.
FPTP is two-edged sword - a major party may take government by accident without majority of the vote, but also a third party might do the same.
if you technically only need 9 percent of the vote (51 percent times 18 percent) to take majority government, think how unstable even major party must feel.
especially if they know only 32 percent of the vote could take minority government or if they know that technically about 6 percent of the vote arranged just right (18 p.c. times 34 percent) could take minority government.
They likely don't like that wild card situation either.
108 countries saw the problem and did address it to a more or less degree.
we can do the same.
looking at ourselves in the past,
Winnipeg - we see it took a combination of conscientious and knowledgeable individuals, historical events - labour unrest and fear of worse) and luck.
looking at Alberta 1921, we see it took a combination of conscientious and knowledgeable individuals, election of a government that promised PR, and was able to bring it in at district level in cities where the government suffered no adverse effect (and very small benefit). (perhaps our present regionalized elections results have put us in the same sort of situation or perhaps not. and anyways partial PR is not our main goal - we want it all but a foot in the the door would be at least something.)
Looking at Switzerland, we see it took a long process, several dis-p. elections (1890 election is said to be horrendous (although it seems no worse than most Can. elections)), then 10-year campaign, then three referendums over a span of 19 years, ferment of WWI, and -- presto just like that -- PR.
looking at other countries, we see a combination of conscientious and knowledgeable individuals, historical events - dis-p. elections, or a blank slate/the start of a new nation) and luck.
I don't think I've seen multiparty consensual government being used in any country to ease the path to reform.
We could still get PR the old-fashioned way --
if we had more-conscientious and more-knowledgeable individuals, more-dis-p. elections, and/or more luck.
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