Abstract
The origin of this book lies in my belief that there is a dearth of readable works relating, comparing, and analyzing the use and gerrymandering of electoral districts in different election systems worldwide. Moreover, I resent the attitudes I found among many political scientists that gerrymandering to advantage or disadvantage certain candidates or political parties is a problem unique to the United States, and that systems with proportional representation largely escape this problem. As this book demonstrates the drawing of election districts or allocation of seats to states, provinces, administrative units, or multi-member districts, or the failure to do so, for the benefit of specific political officials or interests in the national legislature is common throughout the world and is a form of gerrymandering.
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Notes
- 1.
Lists of nations having bicameral or unicameral legislatures are provided in Appendix B.
- 2.
I was especially aided by the reports of the OSCE/ODHIR (Organization for Security and Co-operation for Europe/ Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights) assessing specific countries and elections. Its reports cover 57 (mostly European) countries—Afghanistan, Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States of America, and Uzbekistan.
- 3.
PR—proportional representation, voting with each political party entitled to representation according to its share of the vote; FPTP—first-past-the-post, plurality voting with a single winner; TRS—two round system, plurality or majority voting with two rounds of voting to provide a single winner; MMP—mixed member proportional, a mix of FPTP and PR elections with limits on a party’s share of seats, but no fixed number of seats in the national legislature; P—parallel system (also called Mixed Member Majoritarian [MMM]), with a mix of FPTP and PR elections and a fixed number of seats; STV—single transferable vote, with ranked or preferential voting designed to achieve proportional representation; AV—alternative vote (also called instant run-off voting) with ranked or preferential voting among multiple candidate designed to achieve a single winner; Blk—block voting (also called multiple non-transferable vote), for electing several representatives of the same party from a single multimember electoral district; SMD—single-member district; MMD—Multi-member district. A more extensive description of these election systems is available in the text of this book.
- 4.
See, www.un.org/undpa/en/members; Overseas Territories , Dependent Areas, and Disputed Territories, One World Online at www.nationsonline.org and www.worldonline (The Nations Online Project). How Many Countries Are There in the World in 2018? Political Geography Now (January 11, 2018).
- 5.
These include nations such as the United States (e.g. Puerto Rico, the American Virgin Islands, Guam, Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands), Great Britain (e.g. the Falkland Islands, Jamaica, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Saint Helena, Jersey, the Pitcairn Islands, Monserrat, the Turks and Cacaos Islands, and Gibraltar), France (e.g. New Caledonia [there are also many overseas départements of France as discussed in Chap. 12]), Tanzania (e.g. Zanzibar), Kingdom of the Netherlands (e.g. Aruba, Curacao, and Sint Maarten), Denmark (e.g. the Faroe Islands, Greenland), New Zealand (e.g. the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau) and China (Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan [disputed]). See, Overseas Territories, Dependent Areas, and Disputed Territories, One World Online @t www.nationsonline.org and www.worldonline (The Nations Online Project).
- 6.
- 7.
See, Appendix C, A Case Study of Iran. Most political scientists consider Iran a theocracy. Iran considers itself a democracy. Religion (Islam) is a critical element of Iranian government structure, but so are elections. Election outcomes affect both domestic and foreign policies.
- 8.
See. Political Scientists and Electoral Reforms in Europe and Canada : What They Know, What They Do by Camille Bedock, Damian Bol, and Thomas Erhard, 16 Election Law Journal 445 (2017), published online (September 1, 2017). Actually the symposium was called “What Do Political Scientists Know About Electoral Reform That Practitioners Do Not (Emphasis added)?”.
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Bickerstaff, S. (2020). Introduction. In: Election Systems and Gerrymandering Worldwide. Studies in Choice and Welfare. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30837-7_1
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