Unit 4: Variety/Family of Electoral System
The electoral system = the translation rule — votes into seats. The family tree’s three branches (Nepal uses all three faces across its tiers).
4.1 First Past the Post (FPTP) System
The rule: the constituency’s single seat to the most votes — the plurality, not the majority. The virtues: simplicity (the voter’s easy act); the constituency’s ** MP-and-voter link (the geographic accountability); the stable two-party-ish systems‘ tendency (the wasted-votes’ squeeze on the small parties — Duverger’s Law, by name: FPTP’s mechanical-and-psychological push toward two parties); the decisive-and-cheap administration; the exclusion of the extremes’ logic. The vices: the disproportionality (the seats-vs-votes gaps — a party’s 35% can take the majority); the wasted votes (the losers’ millions unrepresented); the gerrymander’s invitation (the map-drawer’s mischief — delimitation’s stakes); the minorities’ geography-dependence (the spread minority wins nothing; the concentrated one wins all — Nepal’s Madhes representation’s old FPTP pattern); the spoiler-and-split dynamics; the majority’s own absence (the winner with 30% of the constituency’s mandate — Nepal’s fragmented FPTP fields routinely elect on pluralities). Nepal’s FPTP:** the 165 constituencies of Article 84(1)(a) — the 1990–1999 House’s system, continued as the mixed system’s geographic half.
4.2 Proportional Representation (PR) System
The rule: the seats in proportion to the votes — the parties’ lists (the closed list: the party’s rank-order fixed, the voters choose the party — Nepal’s Article 84 design; the open list: the voters pick the candidates too — the comparative options), with the allocation mathematics (the divisor formulas — the d’Hondt and Sainte-Lague families; Nepal’s current statutes’ allocation method is described by commentators as the Sainte-Lague divisor, with the threshold-and-quotient details per the Act) and the thresholds (the minimum-vote bar to any seats — the small-party filter). The virtues:
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