The Ethnic Implications of Preferential Voting

John Coakley, Jon Fraenkel

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

    Abstract

    Around the turn of the century, political developments in Northern Ireland, Fiji and Papua New Guinea encouraged claims that preferential voting systems could steer polities in the direction of 'moderate' multi-ethnic government. Sixteen years later, we have a longer time period and larger volume of data to reassess these verdicts. This article investigates ballot transfer and party vote-seat share patterns in the seven deeply divided polities with some experience of preferential voting for legislative elections or direct presidential elections (Northern Ireland, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Estonia, Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Southern Rhodesia). We find little support for centripetalist claims that such systems encourage 'moderate' parties. We argue that where district magnitude is low, where voters are required to rank preferences and where ticket voting prevails, departures from vote-seat proportionality may favour 'moderate' parties, but such heavily engineered systems may simply advantage the larger parties or yield erratic outcomes.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)671-697
    JournalGovernment and Opposition
    Volume52
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2017

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'The Ethnic Implications of Preferential Voting'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this