Elections Chapter 11

ELECTIONS

BY: KRISNA MENDOZA

      There are many purposes of election. Elections originated with democratic governments, which means that they came along at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The mayor purposes of election are: Participation to choose rulers, Mobilizing people to remain part of the political system and building support for the system.

    Elections as a means of selecting leaders and policies, elections are meant to do more than bolster support for the regime. Elections must involved a choice between candidates or a choice whether a particular policy is to be followed. Some democracies provide for the referendum, a device by which the voters choose directly through their ballots whether a particular proposal will become law. Controlled referendums are also sometimes used in autocracies to stimulate support in the elections.

     Electoral systems is when political leaders, must be some rule for translating people's votes into a particular selection of leaders. There are two types of electoral system  SMDP and PR. SMDP system, the state is divided into sets of districts, usually having roughly equal population. A plurality is the largest number of votes cast for any candidate. A single member is elected from each district by a plurality of votes. There are districts roughly equal populations, There is one representative from each district and plurality is the principle. SMDP tends to drive out small parties and to produce two large parties. The basic principle of PR is that political parties. Representation is proportional to the votes. PR is invented because SMDP does not give proportional results and SMDP favors large parties. PR favors all parties. 

    Some state use SMDP because the benefits outweigh the unfairness electoral participation is likely to be higher under PR than it is under SMDP. To limit the policy options into two major alternatives. The bias of SMDP in favor of large parties is a function of two conditions the first one  is If a small party has most of its strength concentrated in a few districts, it may not be hurt by the SMDP system. An example is Canada. Second, the smaller the number of district, the more likely it is that small parties will be hurt by SMDP. 

     Referendum is refer as an electoral choice. In democracies, citizens elect the leaders, and then leaders decide. In some

democracies people can also choose among different policies. This is referendum. There is no national referendum in the US, but many local ones. On the electoral participations not everybody votes. This is a problem. Electoral participation is higher in European democracies compared to the US. Some people are more likely to vote than the others, for instance, educated people, suburban residents, well-off people, farmers, and old people. National elections always get a higher turnout than the local ones. Also elections under the PR electoral system have higher participation.

     One example of a paradox of participation the chance that one man's vote will decide the issue in a national election is less than the chance that he will be killed on his way to the polls. It is called paradoxical because, if things are considered from this perspective, no one who is sensible should vote. Paradoxes have solutions, and we can try two possible solutions for this one. The paradox holds only for voters taken one at a time.

    When people vote, a single vote would not change anything. Consider the fact that voting is a collective thing. Secondly, looking at voting only in terms of costs and benefits, people could be mistaken. There are other factors such as dutifulness, love of country, social pressures, personal pride, selfish reasons and so on. Voting is always the best way to choose a leader.