Electoral System Reform in Advanced Democracies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The electoral system is the set of rules and procedures used to translate votes cast for specific candidates or political parties into seats in a legislative body; some scholars also include presidential or other executive elections under the rubric of electoral systems. Electoral system reform, often called simply electoral reform, is the adoption of some fundamental changes in these rules and procedures. Although no clear agreement exists on how much change is required in order to qualify as electoral system reform, the term is generally understood to mean more than incremental changes in specific features of an electoral system. Thus, electoral system reform typically means a shift in the main principle by which allocation of seats takes place, such as a move from majority allocation to proportional representation or from candidate-based to party-list allocation (or vice versa). By this standard, electoral system reform is a relatively rare event. Major reforms of electoral systems have taken place in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in several key countries, including France (twice), Italy (twice), Japan, and New Zealand. In addition, in the latter part of the 20th century, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have adopted for their own parliaments new electoral systems that are fundamentally different from those used for the UK House of Commons. Serious discussions of reform, in the sense of wholesale change in the principle of representation, have occurred in Canada (including some its provinces) and the United Kingdom. However, as of the early 21st century, reforms of the electoral system for the UK and Canadian House of Commons and Canadian provincial legislatures have not occurred. Some researchers increase the number of relevant cases by including more-incremental modifications to electoral systems rather than only wholesale changes. Within the family of proportional representation, incremental changes include alterations of the threshold (the minimum vote share needed to win a seat) or in the rules applying to the role of preference votes for individual candidates in the ordering of party lists. Such changes are much more common than wholesale changes between proportional and majority principles of representation. Most researchers do not consider changes in district boundaries (or the criteria to be used in such boundary drawing) in plurality/majority systems to be reform, since they are more-routine procedures periodically required by the laws of most countries using such systems.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
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".