Contextual Determinants of Electoral System Choice - Ã bo Akademi

simultaneously avoiding disproportional seat allocation between parties. Like listPR, STV facilitates minority representation, and makes it more likely that womenare elected. The third merit, governmental stability, is mainly based on evidencefrom Ireland. A further merit is the little number of ‘wasted’ votes. The elector cansafely vote his or her real order of choice without worrying about any later choiceaffecting an earlier choice; no later choice is ever counted unless and until allearlier choices are elected or defeated. There is, consequently, no need for tacticalvoting. Moreover, STV provides a better chance for the elections of popularindividual candidates than list PR.Because of voting for individuals instead of party lists, STV needs rather smalldistricts in order to function well. In large entities, STV may be utterlyunworkable, since the ballot would be huge and so would the number of candidateswith whom voters would have to be familiar. Another drawback, caused by thepreferential voting, is that candidates of the same party are also competing againsteach other, and the system may, thus, increase fragmentation within parties. Withevidence from Ireland, Mair points out that STV is vulnerable to gerrymandering:borders between constituencies have been redrawn, equal electorates have beengiven unequal numbers of seats, and the district magnitude has been manipulatedin order to maximize partisan advantage (1986: 299-300). Finally, STV is oftencriticized on grounds of complexity, and that the system demands a certain degreeof literacy and numeracy (Reynolds and Reilly 1997: 84).2.2.4 Mixed Electoral SystemsBefore the 1990s, the category of mixed electoral systems was associated with onedemocratic country only, West Germany. Its electoral system was given a range ofdifferent titles, e.g. ‘additional member’, ‘mixed member proportional’,‘compensatory PR’, ‘personalized PR’, and ‘two-vote’ (Farrell 2001: 97). For along time, Blais and Louis Massicotte write, mixed systems were “dismissed aseccentricities, transitional formulas, or instances of sheer manipulation doomed todisappear” (1996: 65). This opinion is principally due to the fact that mixedsystems had been, with a few exceptions, applied only in countries without anyrecord of democratic longevity. Since the early 1990s, however, mixed systemshave become quite fashionable, and, according to another study by Massicotte and32