The Political Consequences of the Electoral System in Northern Ireland

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Coakley
Author(s):  
James McAuley ◽  
Jonathan Tonge

Despite a decline in membership in recent decades the Orange Order remains one of the largest and most significant organisations within civil society in Northern Ireland, representing a significant proportion of the Protestant population. The Orange Order claims a moral and political rationale to opposition to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and many of the political consequences that have followed. Drawing upon a large membership survey of the Orange institution (the first such survey ever undertaken), and abetted by in-depth semi-structured interviews, this paper examines core political and social attitudes of Orange Order members in a post-conflict environment. It identifies core discourses on offer within Orangeism, and how these structure responses to contemporary events. It concludes that the maintenance of “traditional” discourses within the Orange Order (seen by its critics as a barrier to the modernisation of unionism) may be key to its endurance against the odds in a changing political context and increasingly secularized world.


2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Jansen

Abstract. The alternative vote (AV) is an increasingly popular proposal for electoral reform, largely due to Australia's success with it. This article considers the experiences of Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia with AV in past provincial elections. AV had little impact on proportionality and voter turnout, but did contribute to significantly higher rates of ballot rejection. AV was associated with an increase in the number of parties competing in elections, but this is more likely due to a changing social structure than electoral system change. AV facilitated coalitions where incentives to cooperate already existed, as in British Columbia, but it did little to encourage or induce coalitions in Alberta and Manitoba. On balance, it differed little from the single member plurality system.Résumé. Le vote préférentiel (PV) est une proposition de plus en plus populaire de réforme électorale. Son attrait s'explique en grande partie par son succès en Australie. Cet article étudie les expériences de VP lors d'élections provinciales au Manitoba, en Alberta et en Colombie-Britannique. Le VP a eu peu de répercussions sur la proportionnalité et sur la participation électorale, mais a contribué à augmenter considérablement le nombre de bulletins de vote rejetés. On observe, en association avec le VP, une augmentation du nombre des partis en présence, mais ceci était vraisemblablement dû à l'évolution des structures sociales plus qu'au changement du système électoral. Le VP a facilité les coalitions lorsque des raisons de coopérer existaient déjà, comme en Colombie-Britannique, mais n'a guère encouragé ni provoqué de coalitions en Alberta ni au Manitoba. En définitive, la différence avec le système majoritaire uninominal a été négligeable.


Author(s):  
Reuven Y. Hazan ◽  
Reut Itzkovitch-Malka ◽  
Gideon Rahat

This chapter, which focuses on the Israeli electoral system as a prototype of an extreme PR system, has five main sections. First, it uses the 2015 election results to analyze the properties of the electoral system and the nature of its outputs. Second, it reviews the three prominent features of the Israeli electoral system and their origins: its PR electoral formula, its nationwide electoral district, and its closed party lists. Third, it examines the developments that led to the consideration and implementation of reform initiatives. Fourth, it assesses the political consequences of the system for parties and the party system, for government formation and durability, and for the legislature and legislative behavior. Fifth, it addresses the puzzle of increased personalization despite the absence of a personalized electoral system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haruo Nakagawa

Akin to the previous, 2014 event, with no data on voter ethnicity, no exit polls, and few post-election analyses, the 2018 Fiji election results remain something of a mystery despite the fact that there had been a significant swing in voting in favour of Opposition political parties. There have been several studies about the election results, but most of them have been done without much quantitative analyses. This study examines voting patterns of Fiji’s 2018 election by provinces, and rural-urban localities, as well as by candidates, and also compares the 2018 and 2014 elections by spending a substantial time classifying officially released data by polling stations and individual candidates. Some of the data are then further aggregated according to the political parties to which those candidates belonged. The current electoral system in Fiji is a version of a proportional system, but its use is rare and this study will provide an interesting case study of the Open List Proportional System. At the end of the analyses, this study considers possible reasons for the swing in favour of the Opposition.


Author(s):  
Ericka A. Albaugh

This chapter examines how civil war can influence the spread of language. Specifically, it takes Sierra Leone as a case study to demonstrate how Krio grew from being primarily a language of urban areas in the 1960s to one spoken by most of the population in the 2000s. While some of this was due to “normal” factors such as population movement and growing urbanization, the civil war from 1991 to 2002 certainly catalyzed the process of language spread in the 1990s. Using census documents and surveys, the chapter tests the hypothesis at the national, regional, and individual levels. The spread of a language has political consequences, as it allows for citizen participation in the political process. It is an example of political scientists’ approach to uncovering the mechanisms for and evidence of language movement in Africa.


Our world of increasing and varied conflicts is confusing and threatening to citizens of all countries, as they try to understand its causes and consequences. However, how and why war occurs, and peace is sustained, cannot be understood without realizing that those who make war and peace must negotiate a complex world political map of sovereign spaces, borders, networks of communication, access to nested geographic scales, and patterns of resource distribution. This book takes advantage of a diversity of geographic perspectives as it analyzes the political processes of war and their spatial expression. Contributors to the volume examine particular manifestations of war in light of nationalism, religion, gender identities, state ideology, border formation, genocide, spatial rhetoric, terrorism, and a variety of resource conflicts. The final section on the geography of peace covers peace movements, diplomacy, the expansion of NATO, and the geography of post-war reconstruction. Case studies of numerous conflicts include Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzogovina, West Africa, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.


Author(s):  
Julia Schulte-Cloos ◽  
Paul C. Bauer

AbstractWhile a large body of literature empirically documents an electoral advantage for local candidates, the exact mechanisms accounting for this effect remain less clear. We integrate theories on the political geography of candidate-voter relations with socio-psychological accounts of citizens’ local attachment, arguing that citizens vote for candidates from their own local communities as an expression of their place-based identity. To test our argument, we exploit a unique feature of the German mixed-member electoral system. We identify the causal effect of candidates’ localness by relying on within-electoral-district variation coupled with a geo-matching strategy on the level of municipalities ($$\hbox {N}=11175$$ N = 11175 ). The results show that voters exhibit a strong bias in favor of local candidates even when they are not competitive. More than only expecting particularistic benefits from representatives, citizens appear to vote for candidates from their own local community to express their place-based social identity.


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