Suchergebnisse

THIS PAPER FOCUSES PRIMARILY ON SYSTEMS IN WHICH EACH VOTER HAS A SINGLE (NON-TRANSFERABLE) VOTE. FOR SUCH SYSTEMS, IT SHOWS THAT, IF THE DISTRICT MAGNITUDE AND DISTRIBUTION OF VOTE SUPPORT AMONG PARTIES ARE HELD CONSTANT AND SOME EMPIRICALLY ATTAINABLE CONDITIONS ARE MET, THEN THE D'HONDT PR FORMULA AND THE PLURALITY RULE FORMULA WILL YIELD IDENTICAL SEAT ALLOCATIONS. THIS RESULT WILL SEEM LESS SURPRISING ONCE THE DEFINITION OF PLURALITY RULE IS UNDERSTOOD, BUT WILL REMAIN INSTRUCTIVE. THE PAPER ALSO SHOWS THAT, DISTRICT MAGNITUDE HELD CONSTANT, D'HONDT AND PLURALITY RULE HAVE IDENTICAL THRESHOLDS OF EXCLUSION. THESE TECHNICAL RESULTS ARE USED TO ILLUSTRATE BROADER TERMINOGICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONFUSIONS IN THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE.

Modern British government is government by party leaders in Cabinet. It is still the 'Crown in Parliament' which formally takes or authorizes every legislative or administrative action, but of the three major components of the Crown in Parliament – the Commons, the Lords, and the Sovereign – the first is now virtually unchecked. The House of Lords can only minimally delay acts of the Commons, and both the Lords and the Monarch have long since lost their ability to veto (much less initiate) legislation. Since those in the Cabinet control the agenda of the House of Commons, since the Cabinet almost invariably consists solely of the leaders of the party with a majority of seats in the Commons, and since the influence of party on voting in Parliament is very strong, the Commons itself has in essence only retained a veto over the legislative proposals of the majority party's leaders who sit in the Cabinet. As a recent essay on legislation in Britain notes, 'today's conventional wisdom is that … Parliament has relinquished any capacity for legislative initiative it may once have possessed to the executive in its midst'.