Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Electoral systems
government’s four terms that the two parties had governed together. The parties
share little common ideological ground, with each compromising considerably on
a range of policies in order to produce a workable coalition agreement.
While the ensuing ‘grand coalition’ represents a large portion of the German
left–right political spectrum, we also expect it to be relatively unstable. Either or both
parties might choose to dismantle the coalition (likely causing new elections to be
held), rather than continue to compromise on so many issues and support policies
that are a long ideological distance from their usual position. Where parties are closer
in terms of their ideological and policy preferences, they both (or all, in the case of
larger coalitions) have greater interest in maintaining the coalition and staying in
government. 14 We also know from the German case that individuals who had voted
for candidates from ‘grand coalition’ member parties are less likely to vote for those
parties in subsequent elections. 15 In other words, they punish parties for entering and
governing in coalitions with other large, ideologically dissimilar parties.
In this way, consensual political systems face the opposite dilemma to
majoritarian systems. They provide high levels of representation by opening up
government and ministerial appointments to more than one party (and often to
parties representing a large range of ideological views). On the other hand, parties
can withdraw from a coalition agreement at any time, causing the government
to collapse and new elections to be held. Accordingly, consensual systems can
see more voters changing their mind between elections, and higher rates of
government turnover and of parties emerging and dying.
While specific forms of majoritarian electoral systems are rather straightforward
and few in number, there are many ways of electing consensual governments, with a
large range of complexity. The most common electoral system producing consensual
outcomes is called partylistvoting. In party list systems, parties are allocated a
percentage of seats based on the percentage of votes they receive. The closer the
percentage of votes won to the percentage of seats won, the more proportional
a system is. Depending on whether an electoral threshold is used in a party list
system, parties might be required to win a certain percentage of votes before they
areawardedaseat.Further,themeansbywhich‘remainders’aredistributed(e.g.if
a party wins 38 per cent of votes in a ten-seat division, they will only be allocated
three seats and 8 per cent of the total votes are ‘remainders’) will contribute to system
proportionality. However, these are secondary concerns.
Imagine an electoral division with ten seats vacant. Each party nominates a
list of candidates for election, with a maximum of ten candidates (because, in
theunlikelyeventthatthepartywins100percentofthevote,thereareonly
enough seats for ten candidates). The most successful party, the fictional Centrist
Conservatives, wins 30 per cent of the vote and is awarded three seats. In a closed
partylistsystem, parties determine the order of candidates on the list, meaning
14 Powell and Powell Jr 2000.
15 Banaszak and Doerschler 2012.
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