Reforming An Electoral System – An Experiment That Failed: Romania 2008–2012

Abstract

An increasing number of electoral systems is being introduced which seeks to combine single-member districts with a proportional allocation of seats according to parties' national vote shares. One such system, that differed in its key features from many others, was introduced in Romania in 2008 and used in that year's general elections, when it performed reasonably well. It did not at the next elections in 2012, when an unforeseen consequence of a coalition winning more than half of the votes cast was that a number of 'overhang' seats was allocated to each house in the bi-cameral parliament, representing some 20 per cent of the total number of elected members. The system was then abandoned and replaced by the previously-used proportional representation system. This paper describes the system and its operation at the two elections, discussing the reasons for its introduction and later abandonment.Most electoral systems fall into one of a small number of 'families', identified by a few criteria: the number of members returned from each constituency; the method of voting; and the method deployed for translating a party's vote total into its number of legislative representatives (Farrell 2011;Gallagher and Mitchell 2018). In many countries one of the foundational criteria of their electoral systems is that legislators are returned from separate areas within the national territory; their major representative role is for their residents there -alongside their functions as national legislators (either in government or in opposition) -and they are expected to promote their constituents' individual and collective interests. Such systems, as has been well-established, generally produce disproportional outcomes for political parties contesting elections, hence the decision in many countries (as in much of western Europe: Carstairs, 1980) to adopt proportional representation systems in multi-member constituencies where the links between legislators and specific territories might be much weaker. Additionally, where there are more than two candidates in single-member districts it is frequently the case that none receives support from a majority of those voting at an election, leading to the introduction of the Alternative Vote system in a few countries (such as Australia: Farrell and McAllister, 2008), which retains the link between each legislator and a separate, defined territory but ensures that the elected candidate has majority support.Until relatively recently most countries opted for either the plurality system in single-member constituencies or preferential voting in multi-member districts aimed at achieving (near-)proportional representation, but a number have sought an alternative system that combines desirable elements from those two. Multi-member proportional (MMP) systems, for example, combine representation from single-member constituencies for a substantial proportion of the elected members, thereby ensuring close links between a territorially-defined electorate and its representative, with the remainder electe...

Candidate’s physical attractiveness as a consequence in an election

“…Results are frequently recorded on the basis of ballot tallies from the polling centres. Dependent on the voting system as well as the kind of voters, results from the voting centres are then transmitted to district and/or regional tabularisation centres and finally to the national tally centre (Bieber & Wingerter, 2020;Giugal, Johnson, Buti & Radu, 2020;Jones, 2020;Ehrhard & Passard, 2020). The Election Management Bodies (EMBs) are in charge of organising the entire electoral process including tabulation of election results as well as announcing the victor of specific electoral contests.…”