The most common kind of majoritarian system is the one that's used in the United Kingdom in the United States, in Canada, in other former British colonies like India and Jamaica. It's the first past the post or single member district plurality system as I've indicated in this system The country is divided into a series of single member districts. whoever wants to contest, can contest in those districts and the person with the most vote wins. he or she may be a party member, an independent, if independents are allowed to run. But it's the first candidate past the post, the one with the most votes whether a majority or not, that wins in essence, the whole seat. There are advantages and disadvantages, pluses and minuses to the, First Past the Po-, Post, system. you know, the biggest advantage, perhaps, aside from the tendency to manufacture a political majority as I'll demonstrate, is simplicity. It's really easy to administer, very low in cost, very clear in its implications for the voters, if you vote for a particular candidate That's who you want to represent you in that district. and by implication, his or her party is the one you want to have the dominant position, the majority position in the national legislature. This has a very clear tendency to produce governing majorities by a single partying, as I'll show. What are the disadvantages? We've already begun to explore those in debating the pluses and minuses of majoritarian versus consensual institutional designs. The first past the post system tends to produce unrepresentative outcomes. That's not an unde, unintended byproduct even. It's almost a, a purpose to empower a majority even if the minorities wind up having fewer seats than they otherwise would've. Another disadvantage could be seen as unintentional or a byproduct of the principle intentions. People are forced to engage in strategic voting rather than sincere voting. That is they may have a preference. programmatically ideologically for a party that represents their heart, their true beliefs. Maybe it's the green party, but the green party maybe has no more than 5 or 10% support nationally. And so they decide that they are going to vote for a party that has a chance of winning the district. And then, as we'll also see in the case of India, the first past the post system, can encourage ethnic parties. When different identity groups are territorially concentrated. If they are territorially concentrated, then a party can think well I can win that district. because that's where my people live. And so it doesn't generate much in the way of incentives toward cross cutting cleavages in that circumstance. Now let's look at how this actually plays out In a real sequence of elections. British elections for the Parliament between 1945 and 2005. And what we see here is the tendency Of the first pass the post system, in a two party system, or if you will a two and a half party system, because you have conservative and labors, the two principal parties in Britain. And then over time there's been another third party such as the liberals. There were the social democrats, they merged into the liberal democrats. But we'll look at the the principle third party, or combination of them. in the far right hand column. Now what we see is that there's often a big gap between the percentage of the vote a party wins, and the percentage of the seats. So we can see here in 1945, just after the end of World War II. The labor party won 47.8% of the seats. But it got a whopping 61.4% of the votes. And then, a couple of elections later. Labor won an even higher percentage of the vote, but then, it lost control of the government which went to the Conservative party, which got a slightly smaller percentage of the vote, but it was sufficiently spread Across single member districts, so it won 51% of the seats. And you can see here other instances some quite remarkable, of plurality parties not quite winning a majority of the vote, or not even coming close. winning a strong majority of the seats. October of 59, conservative party gets lsightly less than 50% of the votes, but nearly 58% of the seats. And of course things can become more unstable when there's a third party getting A significant share of the vote, and I'll come back to that. Let's look at October of 1974. Labor gets 39% of the vote, only slightly more than labor gets 39% of the vote, only slightly more Than the conservative party, but wins 50% of the seats. Or take the revolution that brings the conservatives to power. Margaret Thatcher wins 44% of the vote. gets 53% of the seats. And then we see subsequently in conservative governments, really not a very strong plurality of the vote. 42% of the vote, roughly, geting 61% of the seats, 58% of the seats Then 52% of the seats. Labor falls to 31% of the vote and 25% of the seats. Tony Blair comes in and get 43% of the vote and 64% of the seats. This we call. This gap between the 2 for a plurality winning party. A massive seat bonus. And that is precisely what a majoritarian electoral system is intended to do to manufacture a majority. And we can see that when a third party is getting a significant share of the vote 15, 20, 25%. If its vote is spread out in a lot of different districts, it may really be, savaged in the, translation of votes into seats. In 1983 when Margaret Thatcher was re-elected the third party got a quarter of the vote, not much less than the labor party. But it got only three and a half percent of the seats. More recently it improved it's seat performance perhaps with more strategic concentration on certain territorial districts. Now let's look at the difference. Between the last two British elections 2005 and 2010. And we see something very interesting here. The Conservative party in 2005 got 32% of the vote, 32% of the seats. Labour got a huge seat bonus in the final term of Tony Blair. It won only slightly more of the vote than Conservative party did. About three percentage points more. But it got 25 percentage points more in seats because it kept winning by small margins in a large number of territorial districts. With pluralities, that sent it, and its candidates first past the post. So in May of 2005, Labor got 55% of the seats, with 35% of the vote. Then in 2010 labor declines by six percentage points in the vote. But as we see, by 15 percentage points in the seats, down to 40% of the seats. And with a very small gain in popular vote, less than 4 percentage points of the popular vote, the Conservatives pick up 17% seat Additional. they go from 30% of the seats in Parliament to 47%. Now, for the first time in a very long time in Britain, that was not enough to give them control of Parliament, so they need to form A coalition with the Liberal Democrats. But what's interesting here in these two elections is that even though the Liberal Democrats did slightly better in their percentage of the vote -- from 22 to 23% -- they actually did worse in their seat share. But because The overall outcome was different. The conservatives needed them as a coalition partner. So, you see here, small changes in the allocation of votes from one election to the next can lead to very big swings In the percentage of seats that a party has in Parliament, that is what majoritarian electoral systems do, they manufacture majorities even from very, very weak pluralities.