SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 2024
Moses Pinto
In a single-member constituency only two parties can contend for electoral victory with any hope of success; a third party is doomed to perpetual defeat unless it can manage to absorb the following of one of the major parties and thereby become one of the two parties itself.
Generally, parties would not thrive on the uncertainty of defeat. That prospect would drive its members to one or other of the two parties. The single-member constituency would thus mold all the parties contending in the elections into a bipartisan pattern as observed by V.O. Key (1952) in his book titled: Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups.
The voter would perceive that the smaller parties were under a tremendous electoral disadvantage, and although he might have preferred one of these parties to all others, he decides not to waste his vote and would choose to cast it for the lessor of two evils as represented by one of the two largest parties prevailing.
Regrettably, this further weakening of the minor party could increase the degree to which it is under-represented in the legislature, and hence it may become entrapped in a downward spiral from which there would appear to be no escape unless the minor party was invited to form a coalition government.
The relevant assumption here being that the percentage of seats won by the smaller parties would almost always be less than the percentages of the total poll (under-representation) count while the reverse would hold true for the larger parties (over-representation).
It could be perceived that the strategy of the new entrants into the Goan political context involves an understanding that in the subsequent (not the present) elections these minor parties in the Goan scenario would attract more votes because the electors by then would have started to feel encouraged that these minor parties were here to continue rather than heading for a political extinction. Eventually, a type of equilibrium would be then produced in which all parties would then stand an equal chance of survival.
Of greater political significance, however, appears not to be the number of parties contesting the elections but the number of winning seats that would produce an advantage to any single political party thus allowing it to form the government independently.
The election gamble becomes one in which the odds would be almost completely indeterminate, since the number of winning candidates that a party might have, could bear a very uncertain relationship to its total vote. While conversely, some parties due to the geographical distribution of their voters and the apportionment of the constituencies, could become almost permanently under-represented or over-represented.
It would only be evident when they grew strong enough by themselves in terms of proportional representation or having secured enough adherents among the other parties thus being sufficient to form a majority that these new entrants could establish the true worth of their respective manifesto.
A rather recently reinvigorated phenomenon may be observed wherein a regional party shall decide to put up candidates in sections of the country where it had never contested elections before and shall attempt to spread its campaign efforts into these new sections. Although this would appear as being quite significant in its over-all influence on the party’s diversity and reach, could it be able to effectively address the governance and legislative needs of these new sections even if it were to secure victory by a narrow margin? An introspection from the works of John G. Grumm (1958) published in the Midwest Journal of Political Science.
The median voter theorem proposes a relation to ranked preference voting put forth by Duncan Black in 1948. It states that if voters and policies were distributed along a one-dimensional spectrum, with voters ranking alternatives in the order of proximity, then the voting method would lead to the election of the candidate closest to the median voter.
Assuming, for instance, that there exists an odd number of voters and at least two candidates, and also assuming that voter’s opinions were distributed along a spectrum. Assuming that each voter ranked the candidates in an order of proximity such that the candidate closest to the voter received their first preference, the next closest would receive their second preference, and so on. Then there would exist a median voter and this theorem shall prove that the election shall be won by the candidate who was closest to the median voter.
Let the median voter be A. The candidate who would be closest to A shall receive the first preference vote. Suppose that this candidate was X and that X lies to A’s left. Then A and all voters to A’s left (comprising a majority of the electorate) will prefer X to all candidates to X’s right, and A and all voters to A’s right will prefer X to all candidates to his left.
The Condorcet winner here would be the person who would win a two-candidate election against each of the other candidates in a plurality vote. For a set of candidates, the Condorcet winner shall always remain the same regardless of the voting system in question, and could be discovered by using pairwise counting on voters' ranked preferences and this would precisely be the case with X here; so it shall follow that X would win any election conducted using a method satisfying the Condorcet criterion due to the preference of the median voter A.
(The author is a lawyer by profession)
