• DOI:10.4135/9781446288740.N2
• Corpus ID: 22221622

Electoral Systems and Election Management

@inproceedings{Carter2010ElectoralSA,
  title={Electoral Systems and Election Management},
  author={Elisabeth Carter and David M. Farrell},
  year={2010}
}

• Elisabeth Carter, D. Farrell
• Published 2010
• Political Science

The sine qua non of representative democracies is a process of elections that is fair and competitive. This is the role of electoral institutions, which determine how elections are fought, how the act of voting results in the election of political representatives and the determination of which political leader (in a presidential system), or party or set of parties (in a parliamentary system), is to form the executive leadership for the next few years. Electoral institutions cover a multitude of responsibilities. This chapter deals with two: the electoral system, which is responsible for determining how the voting act translates into an election result; and election management bodies, providing the over-arching structure within which the electoral process occurs. We spend most time on the first of these issues, starting in section 2.1 with a classification of the world’s different electoral systems. This is followed, in section 2.2, by a review of the main political consequences of electoral systems. Section 2.3 deals with questions relating to electoral system design and reform. In section 2.4 our attention shifts to a focus on the issue of election management, with an overview of how this varies across our range of democracies.