Electoral Reform essays

Electoral Reform essays Without some form of elections, there is no democracy. In todays world, different states across the globe are uniquely recognized by the culture, political history and party organization they stand on. Given this, states develop unique electoral arrangements from the vast variety of these systems to accommodate their political needs. Elections do much more than simply determine who will form the next government; they have several important functions in a state. The primary role of elections, of course, is to provide a routine mechanism for recruiting and selecting the individuals who will occupy seats in representative institutions (Jackson and Jackson, p. 364). Also, regularly held elections provide the people of the state with a means to review the governments record and mandate and decide whether to replace it with an alternative. Once governments have been elected, they inherit a legitimacy to rule the state and carry out the mandate on the voters behalf. In all societies, elections also act as agents of political socialization and political integration, providing a unifying focus for the country (Jackson and Jackson, p. 365). There are three main types of electoral systems: single-member plurality, single member majoritarian and proportional representation. In our discussion, we will focus on the current system used by the Canadian government, the single-member plurality system, and whether Canada should consider replacing it with the proportional representation system. It is my goal to argue the advantages of changing the Canadian electoral system to the proportional representation system (from this point on referred to as PR), versus maintaining the current single-member plurality system (from this point on referred to as SMP). Before we begin to dissect this issue, we must first keep in mind, a few stipulations. It is my opinion that the advantages and disadvantages of the PR versus SMP are that ...