The ________ is the most common electoral system used in general elections in the united states.

Responsiveness and Stability in Electoral Systems

Electoral systems must also balance responsiveness and stability. These refer to the relationship between a change in voting patterns and the consequent change in the elected assembly. PR systems are (in theory) perfectly responsive; a 5% increase (or decrease) in the votes for a party will translate into a 5% increase (or decrease) in the number of seats held by that party. In practice, changes in vote totals may not translate perfectly into changes in seat totals because of threshold requirements and limited assembly size.

The balance between stability and responsiveness is more complex in territorial representation because the vote–seat ratio of a particular set of electoral districts can produce outcomes that are either too stable or too responsive. In the former case, even large changes in the overall vote total do not change the composition of the elected assembly, whereas in the latter case, small changes in the vote produce huge swings in the legislature. Overly stable systems result when parties have either large majorities or small minorities in districts. Even relatively large losses or gains by one party or another in total votes are not sufficient to change the majorities or minorities in many districts, so the composition of the assembly remains unchanged. In contrast, a set of districts with very narrow margins may be overly responsive because a tiny shift in the electorate may cause one party to lose every seat. A particular set of electoral districts may also be asymmetrically responsive: a large loss of votes by one party may not produce any change in the assembly, but a small gain in votes may result in significant gains.

Stability and responsiveness raise final dilemma of territorial representation. The principle of accountability holds that voters should be able to remove an incumbent from office, and elected officials are presumably more responsive to their constituents if they are in danger of losing the next election. At the same time, legislatures benefit from some degree of political continuity and stability. Thus a situation that is desirable in an individual district – accountability ensured by narrow election margins – may produce excessive responsiveness when applied in every district.

The Geography of Constituency Definition

The electoral system in most countries involves the use of territorially defined constituencies; the contest for votes is split into a large number of separate areas (Farrell, 2011). Those districts vary greatly in their size depending on the electoral system deployed: in some countries, notably those using single-member constituency systems, the details of their definition can crucially impact on an election outcome because the overall result reflects not just the total number of votes cast but also in how many separate districts a party (or a candidate in a presidential election) wins the largest number of votes.

This issue of where to draw district boundaries has attracted much attention among American electoral geographers, because redistricting there – of Congressional Districts, for example – has traditionally been undertaken by the political party in power in the relevant state, which has sought boundary configurations that promote its electoral interests and penalize its opponents' (Morrill, 1973; Winburn, 2009; Bullock, 2010). Two main ‘cartographic abuses’ have been identified. The first is malapportionment, whereby constituencies are either created with substantial variations in their population or such variations are allowed to develop with differential population changes (for example, rural to urban and central city to suburban migrations). A party whose electoral strength is in areas where on average constituencies are small will tend to perform better – i.e., win more seats relative to its vote share in the relevant legislature – than one whose strength is in areas where they are larger. Malapportionment was outlawed in the 1960s ‘redistricting revolution’ and American courts now require that all districts have equal populations. But the second ‘cartographic abuse’ has been much more difficult to remove. Gerrymandering involves the drawing of constituency boundaries to benefit one party rather than another, and can be practiced even where equality of electorates is the paramount consideration. Much gerrymandering involves the drawing of odd-shaped constituencies, so as to create as many constituencies as possible where the party involved should obtain a majority of the votes (as illustrated by Monmonier, 2002).

Although gerrymandering is a deliberate strategy to promote partisan ends, Gudgin and Taylor (1979) showed that even where the boundaries are drawn by strictly neutral, nonpartisan bodies, nevertheless the equivalent of gerrymandering can be the outcome. They showed – through sophisticated mathematical and statistical reasoning – that, for a given geography of party support, different constituency configurations for an area could result in very different electoral outcomes. Extending their work in the United Kingdom, for example, Johnston and Rossiter (1983) showed that in Sheffield, a city with six constituencies, although the most likely outcome was Labour winning five seats and the Conservatives one, some configurations would give Labour six seats whereas others would see it win only four. Disproportional outcomes – with one party getting a larger share of the seats than of the votes – could thus eventuate even where neither malapportionment nor gerrymandering was practiced.

Further work on this issue in the United Kingdom has identified not only disproportionality in election results as the product of nonpartisan districting but also bias – defined as differential treatment of the parties even when they have the same share of the votes. At the 1997 general election, for example, if – under certain assumptions – Labour and the Conservatives had won an equal share of the votes, Labour could have gained 82 more seats than its opponent (out of 652). Four years later, Labour's advantage in a similar situation could have been 142 seats; in 2005 it could have been 112; and in 2010 – when the Conservatives won 7% points more of the votes – if the two parties had been equal Labour could have won 54 more seats. Johnston et al. (2001; Johnston and Pattie, 2009, 2011a) used a mathematical procedure to decompose this bias, finding that part of it was due to malapportionment, part to an equivalent of unintentional gerrymandering (Labour's votes were more efficiently distributed across the constituencies than were the Conservatives'), part to variations in turnout (there tend to be more abstentions in Labour-held seats), and part to the differential impact of smaller parties. That methodology, which focuses on the two largest parties only (and has been applied to the US Electoral College: Johnston et al., 2005b), has been extended for the analysis of three-party systems (Thrasher et al., 2011; Borisyuk et al., 2010). As a consequence of that bias, the British government changed the rules for redistributions in 2011 to remove any malapportionment effects (Johnston and Pattie, 2012a; Rossiter et al., 2012).

2 The Geography of Constituency Definition

Almost all electoral systems allocate (at least some) legislative seats by territorially-defined constituencies. Definition of constituency boundaries is crucial: victory or defeat can depend upon a constituency's voters' characteristics.

Interest in constituency definition developed during the US 1960s ‘redistricting (or reapportionment) revolution’ (Baker 1966). Two ‘abuses’ were practiced widely where parties controlled redistricting: malapportionment, whereby constituencies with widely differing populations were created—parties maximized their returns (the ratio of seats to votes) by having small constituencies where they were strong but large ones in their opponents' heartlands; and gerrymandering, whereby parties delimited constituencies, whatever their size, so that their supporters were in a majority in as many as possible (Morrill 1973, 1981). Malapportionment was outlawed by the Supreme Court in the 1960s and strict equality criteria were set. Gerrymandering was considered much harder to tackle, because of difficulties proving intent to discriminate against those minorities protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, used in most of the relevant cases (Grofman 1990); the Voting Rights Act 1965 and its successors provided a basis for challenging maps which apparently discriminated against black voters, although the Courts have been inconsistent in their rulings (Grofman 1998). Redistricting is largely nonpartisan in its conduct elsewhere, but parties in the UK influence the details to their own electoral benefit (Rossiter et al. 1999).

Defining constituencies, using smaller areas as building blocks, exemplifies the modifiable area unit problem well-known in spatial statistics. Gudgin and Taylor (1979) developed a sophisticated theory of the process which they linked to the production of electoral bias—both intentional, through explicit malapportionment and gerrymandering strategies, and unintentional, through nonpartisan procedures with outcomes consistent with those strategies: other geographical factors are important bias generators, such as district size effects (Taagepera and Shugart 1989). Bias identification has been extended using Brookes's (1960) index, subdivided into six components, all spatial (Johnston et al. 1999, Rossiter et al. 1999).

Territorial Plurality Representation

The other common electoral system is territorial plurality representation. In the simplest version of such a system, two or more candidates compete for a single seat from specific territorial units (districts, ridings, boroughs, etc.). In such single-member, first-past-the-post systems, the candidate with a plurality (or majority) of votes wins the election. The major advantages of such systems are (in principle) greater accountability and closer ties between representatives and constituents because representation is tied to a specific territorial constituency. All territorial plurality systems, however, suffer from bias in the vote–seat relationship: the proportion of votes gained by a party as a whole may not correspond closely to the proportion of seats they receive in the legislature. Table 2 illustrates how territorial representation can lead to such disproportionality in a five-member assembly representing five districts with equal numbers of voters.

Table 2. Territorial plurality representation in a five-member assembly

District% Votes for candidates from party A% Votes for candidates from party BWinning candidate15149A25248A35149A45248A51090BTotal votes43.256.8–Total seats80% (4 seats)20% (1 seat)–

In this example, candidates from Party A win close elections in four of the five districts but the party loses the fifth district badly. The four narrow margins mean, however, that Party A wins 80% of the seats in the assembly with just over 40% of the total vote. (Under PR, Party A would win just two of the five seats or 40%.) Departures from proportionality can be even more severe if three or more parties contest each district and winning candidates only achieve pluralities rather than majorities. Perhaps the best-known recent example of the vote–seat problem was the 2016 US presidential election, in which Donald Trump received nearly three million fewer popular votes than those for Hillary Clinton, but won the electoral college vote with narrow victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Although the vote–seat problem is endemic to all territorial systems of representation, it is of particular concern when it leads to the exclusion of minorities. Territorial systems are also highly vulnerable to gerrymandering, a technique that influences the vote–seat ratio by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts, boroughs, or ridings.

Variations of the single-member, first-past-the-post system can either ameliorate or exaggerate vote–seat bias. The voting system in multimember or at-large districts (where candidates run for several seats simultaneously) can either completely exclude minority parties and candidates or can provide a mechanism for proportionality. In the former case, election rules might require candidates to run for particular seats and require voters to cast one and only one vote for each seat. A cohesive political plurality could then elect all representatives. Alternatively, candidates might all run against each other simultaneously with the top vote getters winning the election. Such an arrangement prevents the exclusion of a political minority but allows the election of candidates who have a relatively narrow base of support. If the top candidate attracts 70% of the vote, for example, the remaining representatives would be elected with less than 30% support among the electorate. Nor do such systems guarantee proportionality since (as in the above example) a single candidate might win the lion's share of the vote.

Numerous electoral mechanisms have been proposed and employed to overcome seat–vote bias and to address the problem of minority exclusion. The single transferable vote (called instant runoff voting or IRV when used to elect candidates to a single seat) identifies the candidates with the broadest support by having voters rank them in order of preference. Ballots that would otherwise be wasted (either because the first-choice candidate received more votes than needed for election, or too few to be competitive) are transferred to the voter's second (third, etc.) ranked candidate until all seats are filled. Single transferable vote attempts to ensure a closer match in proportionality between votes and seats while still retaining a territorially based system of representation.

JudgeIt

In winner-take-all electoral systems (such as are used in Great Britain, France, the United States, and much of Asia and Africa) there is a complex relationship between a party's share of votes and its share of seats in legislative bodies, and an extensive body of literature has developed in efforts to unravel this relationship. First, district lines may be gerrymandered—that is, drawn to deliberately favor some parties at the expense of others. Second, there is a tendency, even in the absence of gerrymandering, for minority parties to waste votes (since only the party finishing first in a district wins representation), thus providing bonus seats to the leading party. A specific form of this effect is the so-called “cube law,” which states that in a two-party, single-member plurality system the ratio between the parties' proportion of seats will be equal to the cube of the ratio between their proportion of votes. Originally noticed at the turn of the 20th century, the cube law was first set forth formally by Kendall and Stuart. Others have since criticized the specific form of this “law” on both theoretical and empirical grounds, but there seems to be little or no dispute that some such effect usually, although not invariably, does occur.

Gelman and King developed a program called JudgeIt to sort out these effects. Among other things, JudgeIt provides estimates of the effect of “partisan bias” (favoring one party over another for a given division of votes) and “electoral responsiveness” (the effect of changes in the division of votes on the number of seats won). JudgeIt can be used to analyze an existing set of districts or to predict the impact of a proposed districting plan. It has been used both in scholarly research and in the redistricting of a number of states.

Which electoral system is used in the United States?

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