Blake Brown
PLSC 150
Blog 7
Electoral systems, as well as the number of effective political parties within a given country, differ throughout the world. It has been generally accepted that there is a relationship between electoral system type and the emergence of political parties. One political theory, Duverger’s Law, attempts to explain this correlation. According to Duverger’s Law, the effective number of parties in any electoral district is a function of the electoral rules1. Generally speaking, the two main types of electoral systems are single-member-district plurality systems (SMDP) and proportional representation systems (PR). Under Duverger’s Law, SMDP systems tend to consolidate parties into two main parties, favoring large parties and hurting small parties. Contrary to SMDP systems, Duverger’s Law states that PR systems are beneficial to the establishment of multiple political parties1.
Indonesia is one example of a proportional representation system that can effectively test Duverger’s Law by observing its electoral rules and the effective number of parties. In particular, Indonesia’s House of Representatives displays many factors of the PR system that give rise to a multi-party system.
Indonesia is a very diverse country made up of hundreds of islands, a plethora of different cultures, and multiple corresponding political identities. In order to support all of these different political interests, Indonesia has adopted the proportional representation system. The variations and electoral rules of its PR system tend to support the emergence of multiple effective political parties. In Indonesia’s PR system, the country is divided into 33 constituency districts, with district magnitudes ranging from 3 to 12 seats depending on the size of the population of each district2. Within each of these districts the Hare Quota is used as a formula to distribute the House of Representatives’ 550 seats to political parties3. Specifically, any candidate who receives 30 percent of the votes (the lowest quotient) in an area is automatically awarded a seat3. This means that constituencies with the lowest district magnitude of three are very likely to be represented by three different political parties. Despite this allowance for multiple party seats within a district, a threshold of 2.5 percent limits excessive party representation3. In regard to the voting process itself, Indonesia voters can either select a party or an individual in preferred list structure2. This promotes greater diversity in electoral decisions because voters are not constrained to voting for just parties, but can also select individual candidates. All of these aspects of Indonesia’s PR are system have led to the creation of several influential political parties.
To demonstrate how these rules have affected the number of political parties within Indonesian politics, it is important to review the election results of the last election. In 2009, 38 registered political parties participated in the election for the House of Representatives. Of those 38 parties only nine gained political representation due to the election threshold4. This number corresponds to the actual number of effective parties in Indonesia which is calculated by the Neff. After calculating all of the election results it was found that Indonesia has a total of 9.62 effective parties. It is very interesting to note that this number is almost identical to the number of parties that won seats in the election. Yet, this result is not surprising considering only the nine top parties have representation in the government and are worthy to be deemed “effective.”
From the information gathered about Indonesia’s Proportional Representation System it is clear that Indonesia’s experience supports Duverger’s Law. The proportional system that is found within the elections for the members of the House of Representatives does indeed cause multiple parties to effectively participate in the government.
1. W. Phillips Shively, Power and Choice: An Introduction to Political Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 230-236.
2. “Indonesia: Continuity, Deals and Consensus,” The Electoral Knowledge Network, accessed October 31, 2012, http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esy/esy_id.
3. “Indonesia (House of Representatives): Electoral System,” Inter-Parliamentary Union, accessed October 31, 2012, http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/2147_B.htm.
4. “Indonesian Legislative Election, 2009,” Wikipedia, accessed October 31, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_legislative_election,_2009.
I like your post and thought it was really interesting to learn about how Indonesia has 33 voting districts, and that there is a threshold of 30% to win a seat in each district. I did my blog on Israel, and see a few similarities. Like Israel, Indonesia has dozens of political parties, but only about 1 out of 3 or 4 gained any representation in office--in Indonesia there were 9 parties, in Israel there were 12 parties. Then your formula gave you 9.62 for effective number of parties; in Israel it was 6.7, so they're both pretty similar. One major difference is there is only one voting district in Israel--the entire state! In Indonesia there are 33 so I found that pretty interesting.
ReplyDeleteGreat work, interesting point regarding the diverse culture, geography, and make-up of the country benefit from the proportional representation system of the country.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to read this because almost all of the blogs that I have read have indicated that Duverger's Law is true. It is fun to actually look at the statistics behind the many countries of the world and find that these formulas work, and do tell us important information. It's cool to see that the number 9.62 matched almost perfectly with the number of parties that actually won seats.
ReplyDeleteWow, that's a lot of effective parties. Interesting.
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