Examining the Role of Electoral Systems in the Policy Influence of Aboriginal Populations: A Comaprative Analysis of the Canadian, Austrailian, and New Zealand Cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 2015 federal election, a surprising emphasis was placed on Canada’s electoral system. In fact, Justin Trudeau committed to making 2015 the last federal election decided under the Single-Member-Plurality (SMP) system. While much of the criticism around SMP in Canada has been centered on the fact that the winner-take-all system leads to many votes being inconsequential, less attention has been devoted to how this system often fails to represent minority peoples and communities. However, despite this disconnect in motivations to change the SMP system, both shortfalls could potentially be rectified under more proportionate voting rules. This paper examines the Aboriginal populations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in order to determine what effect more proportional electoral systems have on the well-being of these populations as well as the resulting policy influence they enjoy. Available data on education, health, housing, and income are analyzed in order to compare the well-being of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations, as well as identify any gaps in positive outcomes. This data is then compared to levels of political engagement and voter turnout under each nation’s electoral system. Australia currently uses the Full Preferential Vote and Single Transferable Voting systems while New Zealand uses a Mixed Member Proportional (MPP) system to determine election results. Although data regarding Aboriginal voter participation in Canada and Australia is limited, data shows that Māori participation in New Zealand’s federal electoral system is fairly high. However, Aboriginal voter turnout has fallen since the introduction of MPP to New Zealand in 1993, which calls into question the real effect on minority representation under more proportional systems. Despite this, analysis of newspaper coverage and government agency news releases show that the Māori appear to be the most influential of the three Aboriginal populations as it relates to influencing specific Aboriginal policies. The Canadian Aboriginal population also enjoys substantial influence, although much of this appears to stem from the legal obligations that the Canadian federal government has to Canadian Aboriginal peoples. The lack of Constitutional recognition of the Australian Aboriginal people appears to have stifled the policy influence held by the population, despite using electoral systems that often allow for a greater degree of minority representation and influence. I conclude that a combination of proportionate voting rules as well as legal recognition of Aboriginal communities is needed to create the optimal conditions of policy influence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".