Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
they produce. Drawing on Norris and Lijphart, 11 we can distinguish between three
electoral ‘families’: majoritarian, mixed and consensual. This section will begin
by defining and describing majoritarian democracies and the types of electoral
systems that produce ‘winner takes all’ governments. Next, it will discuss consensual
democracies and the electoral systems that produce governments where
two or more parties share power in coalition. Finally, it will discuss democracies
that fall somewhere between majoritarian and consensual.
Majoritarian (or ‘winner takes all’) systems
In Australian federal elections, we vote for candidates standing for two different
houses: the House of Representatives (lower house) and the Senate (upper house).
Whichever party or group of parties wins a majority of seats in the House of
Representatives is, according to the Constitution of Australia and convention since
1901, given the opportunity to form a government. Much more often than not, one
party (or in the case of the Liberal–National Coalition [the Coalition], a formal
alliance of parties) gets to form a government in its own right. Why? And relatedly,
why do the Coalition and Australian Labor Party (ALP) have such a stranglehold
on government in Australia?
The answers lie in Australia’s system of electing one person to represent each
electoral division in the country. In electoral terms, Australia’s House of Representatives
has a ‘district magnitude’ of one (i.e. one member per electoral division).
For example, in the seat of Fenner in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), the
candidatewhowinsthemajorityofthevoteiselected.Asecond-placedcandidate–
even if they attract 49.99 per cent of the final vote – wins nothing.
There are two specific electoral systems that produce majoritarian governments.
The first is plurality, or ‘first past the post’, voting. This is the most straightforward
way of voting, both in terms of the voter recording their preferred candidate and for
electoral commission staff counting votes at the end of election day. Used in the UK
and in most US elections, plurality voting requires voters to choose their favourite
among all listed candidates. They do not need to rank candidates; depending on the
jurisdiction they can use a cross, a number ‘1’ or a tick to designate their chosen
candidate. The simplicity of plurality voting helps to include non-native-language
speakers and those with low literacy in the electoral process.
On the other hand, plurality voting results in the most disproportionate
electoral outcomes of any voting system. Imagine an electorate in London in which
50.001 per cent of voters choose one candidate, Jane Smith. In the unlikely event
that all of Jane Smith’s votes were counted first, there would be no need to ever
count the other 49.999 per cent of votes. In an electorate of 100,000 voters, 49,999
votes would not even need to be counted; we could declare the winner based on
the total votes for Jane Smith. Therefore, 49,999 voters would have left their homes,
11 Lijphart 1994; Norris 2004.
92