Talk:Table of voting systems by nation

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1 Old Discussion
2 Incomplete tables
3 Afghanistan missing
4 Merging it back into one table from two
5 Preventing an edit war
6 Footnotes problem
7 Party-block vs Bloc Voting
8 Israel
9 Changes
10 Chile

[edit] Old Discussion

Will this table just cover the legislature? executive? What is the scope? Also, putting it in some sort of order may help. --Jiang 23:44 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Well, the way I imagined it, it would cover national (e.g. British House of Commons) and supernational bodies (e.g. European Parliament), but only those bodies whose members are directly elected by a significant portion of people. I imagined it would only cover the legislature, but I guess we could have executives in another table ("district size" and "threshold" don't make any sense for them, after all).

Also, I can imagine a few schemes for organizing rows: alphabetically, alphabetically by continent, or alphabetically by voting system. DanKeshet

What does district size mean? Rmhermen 04:54 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I added some text to voting systems. Does that answer your question? DanKeshet 19:17 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes but I find it counterintuitive. I would rather see it as US - 435 districts, Israel - 1 district or US 1 per district, Israel 120 per district. Rmhermen 16:19 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, now you have me confused. There are three bits of info we could include:

District Size (aka District magnitude aka Seats/District)
Number of districts
Total number of Seats.

For example:

Country	District Size	Number of districts	total seats
USA	1	435	435
Israel	120	1	120
Ireland	3-5	41	166

Which of these three do you think should be included? Under what headings? DanKeshet 16:40 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I suppose Seats/District makes sense. District size makes me think of physical or population size of the district. Rmhermen 16:49 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why not include all three? Martin

Sure! We can use your "key" to cut down the size of the table header tags so more can fit in the table. DanKeshet 18:57 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Resources for research:

I have saved a page, based mainly on the first link directly above, at Table of voting systems by nation/temp. There are many improvements that need to be made before that's a useful table

Integrate the information about the total seats from the second link above.
Mark the district size for all of the single-winner systems
Fill in the rest of the data we know.
Order more coherently (perhaps by system (grouping systems by multiple-winner (grouped by party vs. non-party) vs. single-winner) and then by number of seats?

Peace,

DanKeshet

From talk:table of voting systems by nation/temp: I split the single-winner from the multiple-winner. This cuts down on the number of non-applicable and redundant fields, as any system using FPTP will by definition have a district size of 1, and no election threshold.

In order to edit these files, I have imported the tables into Openoffice.org calc, sorted them, then "exported as webpage", and cleaned-up the HTML afterwards with emacs. I may write a script for cleaning up the Openoffice results.

Lastly, somebody changed the Belgium election threshold to 5%. I thought I had read it was 0. Was I wrong?

DanKeshet

Even though this chart is not yet finished, it is a great improvement over what we have at Table of voting systems by nation. I suggest we move this there now and worry about finishing later.

Yeah, add the Senate back in. Why not?

--Jiang 21:14 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, I'll move this to the real page soon, but first, I have a file that has the number of seats in each parliament, by country, and soon I'll be able to insert this data into each country on the list. When I can get that done, I'll move it there. DanKeshet --- Could we change list to party list? It just doesn't seem right. Rmhermen 18:00 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes. That's much better. DanKeshet 20:09 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The Australian senate has districts of 2 or 12, but nothing in between?! How bizarre! How did that come about? DanKeshet

See Australian_Senate#Size pm67nz

OK, that's not bizarre at all. But I'm still confused by the wording. It says that usually, half of the Senate is elected at a time. Does this mean that half the states elect their full 12-seat slate? Or that each state elects six senators, in which case the "district size" would be 6, just as the "district size" in the US senate is 1 because you only elect 1 senator at a time, even though 2 senators come from that state? DanKeshet

True, from a voting systems point of view the district size is 6. I'll change it. pm67nz

I'd be interested in seeing a list of the counties that don't have a voting system, either that or link to such a list.

A few things: 1) our formatting for both Parallel and AMS systems is pretty messed up. Saying Parallel-FPTP is bad enough; but then we mix in a Parallel-Party list! I'll bet the two countries have the exact same system. Do we need a third table for Parallel systems so we can have different slots for their two systems? Or should we go through and change Parallel-FPTP to Parallel (FPTP,Party List)?

Two: I'd like to include notes about whether the PR systems are closed- or open- list. Should I have a new category or just include it in their name? Like "d'Hondt (closed list)"? DanKeshet 20:08, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

This page is in need of a serious edit/touch up. As others have said, there is some that say Parallel-FPTP, some that say Parallel-Party List and some that say AMS yet most of these mean the same thing. Not only that but a few say Saint Laguna and d Honge (or whatever they're called) which are basically just ways to count for AMS!

[edit] Incomplete tables

Considering this article was started 2 years ago, it looks very incomplete. Especially for the bodies there are mostly blanks. Isn't that just a matter of looking these things up in the articles for the respective countries and is it then just that nobody has taken the time? (Or would that constitute informational incest, or what should I call it?)

Also, only three countries (Poland, Spain and USA) have more than one body listed, but there must be more such countries (eg the Netherlands and the UK). And in the USA there are elections for house of representatives, senate and president, but the last one isn't listed.

Oh, and one thing confuses me. How can you have a parliament in a single-winner voting system? Just one person having a parley with himself? :) Ok, I assume that means that, for example, a single person is elected per district to sit in parliament. But that should then be made more clear. Although I understand that explaining all the possible political voting systems may be beyond the scope of this article.

For another thing; some body-links are to a generic article (eg parliament) while others link to the specific body of that country (eg Canadian House of Commoms). That should be more consistent.

Finally, wouldn't it make more sense to have the country-names link to the politics article (if any) or at least the politics section in the main article for the country?

DirkvdM 17:58, 2005 May 20 (UTC)

[edit] Afghanistan missing

Afghanistan is currently missing from the list. I'm not exactly sure what voting system they're using, however - The Economist said they are using Single Non-transferable Vote, but in the same article they also referred to candidates for parliament coming in second-place, implying that they didn't win a seat (which would not be SNTV but instead first-past-the-post.) Does anyone know for sure? Scott Ritchie 01:33, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merging it back into one table from two

A while ago, this was split into two tables, however I feel it might be a lot easier to use if we merge it back into one. Having a country listed in two separate tables is a bit burdensome, and the problem of "redundant fields" (namely threshold) isn't really that big of an issue. Scott Ritchie 04:05, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Preventing an edit war

Ok, two users (User:Alanmak and User:Instantnood) have been reverting the page back and forth without bringing it up in talk. Please do so here. Thanks! Scott Ritchie 02:15, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Footnotes problem

The footnotes are currently messed up -- 25 identified in the table, but only five actually present. I'd offer to help correct this, but I'm not sure what the final goal is supposed to be...... JXM 16:46, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

You're right, they need to be find/replaced with the original format that all links to the same footnote. Scott Ritchie 07:14, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Party-block vs Bloc Voting

From what I understand of bloc voting, it is different from party-block voting. Someone with more free time than I do, please remove the links linking "Party-block voting" to "Bloc Voting".

Party Block Voting -- party fields in more than n candidates, party wins majority, all candidates win seats (less democratic, much worse than FPTP)

Bloc Voting -- many candidates running for n seats, top n candidates get seats (much more democratic)

[edit] Israel

The info about Israel (d'Hondt method) is a bit misguiding. In Israel, seats are initially allocated simply by calculating an index for a single seat, by dividing the total number of valid votes (minus the votes for the parties which didn't pass the threshold) by 120. Then, parties are allocated seats according to the index. For example, if party X got 420,000 votes and each seat is worth 40,000 votes, it gets 10 seats. Only then, for the remainder seats, the d'Hondt method is used. So the first d'Hondt quotient for party X would be 420,000/11. The system is complicated further by allowing "remainder agreements" between any two parties, so that their combined d'Hondt quotient would be larger. If the pair get a seat, the party with the largest (seperate) quotient gets it.

So as you can see, the Israeli system is not classic d'Hondt, and perhaps deserves an article of its own. But what should we write in the table? Maybe add this info as a footnote? --84.229.192.196 00:09, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changes

I've merged the tables and put in links to the various things that get elected for each country. To me it seems logical that the tables be merged -- if I want to see what electoral system Colombia uses, I want to go to the C's and look for Colombia, and not have to then check another table to see if they elect something else using a different system.

I've left blank lots of cells in the table. Some of these are because it's obvious -- there is only one elected member in a FPTP district -- and some are because I couldn't find the actual answers.

I've been lazy about open and closed lists, and forgotten to mention most of them.

There are almost certainly some errors at random places in the table. aceproject.org and relevant Wikipedia articles disagree sometimes.

Probably some of the footnotes could go, but I'm exhausted and can't be bothered working out what to do with them.

I've left out some countries by oversight. Pappubahry 05:33, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Chile

The voting system for the Chamber of Deputies and Senate is not D'Hondt method. I'm not an expert and I don't know the real name of the system, but here is called sistema binominal. The D'Hondt method is used in the municipal elections. --B1mbo 05:34, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

You're right, and I've changed it accordingly. Pappubahry 06:18, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

I've changed it back to D'Hondt: The sistema bionominal used in Chile means: every district has two seats and every list has two candidates. When the first list has more than twice the votes of the second list, the first list gets both seats, in the other case the first and second list get one seat each. That's exactly what D'Hondt would do. SNTV on the other hand would give the two seats to the two best candidates, irrespective on which list they are.

Example:

list A: 67% votes candidate A1: 52% candidate A2: 15% list B: 33% votes candidate B1: 17% candidate B2: 16% Elected are both candidates of list A, with SNTV it would be candidates A1 and B1. Bancki 13:20, 2 May 2007 (UTC)—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bancki (talk • contribs) 13:19, 2 May 2007 (UTC).

OK, according to ipu.org the requirement to get the two seats is to get two-thirds of the vote, but most sources agree with you that you need double the second-placed list. Pappubahry 22:31, 2 May 2007 (UTC)