Blog 7 Duverger's Law: Australia

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Emily Coesens

Prof. Hawkins

Pl Sc 150

November 2, 2012

Blog 7 Duverger’s Law: Australia

            Australia is a democracy that has a direct preferential majority vote voting system.  Within this system voters will rank the candidates in order of preference on the ballot.  When determining the seats each delegate gets within the House of Representatives the individual who receives an absolute majority, 50 percent plus 1 of the votes, will receive the seat; however, if an absolute majority is not reached, those who voted for the candidate with the lowest amount of votes will have their votes transferred to their second preference.  This will continue until one of the candidates receives an absolute majority.  Another interesting fact about Australia’s voting system is that voting is compulsory, and those eligible who do not vote must pay a fine. The district magnitude is based upon population and therefore the number of seats allotted to each electoral district is dependent on that, making it a multi-member district. The formula used to allocate the seats is as stated earlier a preferential majority vote or in other words a plurality style. The list structure is done through listing individuals vying for the seats rather than the party in which they are running for.  Those voting are supposed to rate each candidate in order of preference for the voting system to work.  The order in which they are listed is done by a random draw and there seems to be no information as to whether there is a threshold for a party to be registered as a party; however to be elected in the House of Representatives one must receive a minimum of 50 percent plus 1 of the votes.

            The party system in Australia is an interesting one.  For intents and purposes they are said to be a two-party system; however if one looks deeper it can be seen that one of these parties is not a solid unit but rather a coalition.  The determination for the effective number of parties for this country is not black and white; for there are two ways it can be done.  On one hand you could consider the coalition to be one party as many view it or you could separate it into its different sections which is how others view it.  If you were to take the first, when completing the formula the effective number of parties comes out to be 2.19, but when you separate the party into coalitions the resulting formula ends up equaling 2.95.  So I suppose Australia could be considered to have three effective parties if you were to separate the coalition, but only two parties if you do not.

            With this information Duverger’s law may be correct.  He “states that the effective number of parties in any electoral district is a function of the electoral rules: SMDP rules produce two effective parties, while proportional representation rules allow for more, depending on whether or not there are multiple social cleavages.” Australia has a proportional representation system; according to the data it is determined to only have two effective parties as long as the coalition is counted as one party. On the other hand if one allows the coalition to be determined as a grouping of several different parties then the law would be incorrect for then the data shows that there are three effective parties.  For all intents and purposes the law is upheld by the statistics found in Australia, for even though there are different areas in the coalition they act more like subsections of a single party than a different party, and if they are claiming to be part of the same party then they can be counted as so.

Works Cited

Australian Electoral Commission. Voting-House of Representatives. 1 November 2012 <http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/How_to_vote/Voting_HOR.htm>.

Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. About Australia. 1 November 2012 <http://www.dfat.gov.au/facts/electoral_system.html>.

The Inter-parliamentary Union. Australia House of Representatives. 1 November 2012 <http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/2015_E.htm>.

Wikipedia. House of Representatives (Australia). 1 November 2012 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Representatives_%28Australia%29>.