| Description |
We all know he famous Abraham Lincoln quote from the Gettysburg Address, "A government of the people by the people, for the people." However, do Americans and even British citizens feel like "the people" are in charge o f the government? With constant criticism directed at the representational democracies of the United States and United Kingdom, political scholars along with a few lawmakers have contemplated alternative ways to elect representative officials. Some of the proposed electoral reforms are based on proportional representation (PR) systems, with arguments that proportional representation better reflects the vote share and thus the will of the electorate. However, critics argue that there is a lack of accountablitity with PR, meaning the electorate has no control over the actions of the elected official. Ideally, representational democracies fulfill three major requirements. First, there must be a function that allows the electing body to hold the elected agent accountable for his or her actions on their behalf. Second, the end result of an elected government must accurately the end result of the vote share, Third, the electoral system may not directly or indirectly exclude any certain non-geographically based constituency. The following analysis will explore and evaluate the current "first past the post" systems used in the U.S. and U.K., as well as the proposed PR systems including single transferrable vote, party lists, and mixed proportional. The Electoral College will be separately evaluated. The goal is to determine whether one-system functions, based on the three above requirements, as a better representative democracy than the other, and whether the governments of the U.S. and U.K. may want to consider an electoral reform to that system. |
