Description

Whereby positions in an organisation are filled according to the outcome of Voting.

This is an Appointment pattern.

Motivation and Discussion

An Election is a means of aggregating the opinions of individuals in the electorate to appoint positions.  The positions may range across organisations or government, and involve differing degrees of judgement, decisiveness, or advocacy.  Regardless of the position, the mechanism is such that the individual is seen as representing their electorate.  This representation is what gives elected officials popular legitimacy.  

Perceptions of legitimacy are largely limited to the electorate; the extent of the electorate across the population as a whole is described by the Suffrage pattern.  Use of Voting also results in the formation of organisations for winning votes, particularly the Party.

The precise algorithm used for elections has a significant effect on the nature of appointments.  There are many variations, summarised here in three dimensions - preference, rounds and members.  The main difference within a dimension is between single and multiple instances.

Preference .  Voting is expressing a preference among options.  Systems which accept a single preference are known as plurality or first past the post.  As the largest aggregate vote wins, single preference systems favour the faction that can garner the widest possible consensus support for a single candidate, often across differing constituencies.  Factions thus have a broad range of ideas and personalities, some mutually incompatible, rather than a more coherent vision.  In multi-preference elections voters may select multiple candidates or rank them in order.  More and more diverse candidates hence compete on the ballot before the voters.  In multi-preference, there are more factions, each more ideologically coherent, but stricter intra-party discipline.

Rounds .  Single round elections determine the outcome as the result of a single act of voting.  This requires faith from the voter in the robustness of that single round of voting.  Multi-round voting results in more factional trading, deals, and repositioning between rounds.  Such greasy politics promotes backroom compromises, but also requires an explicit final commitment to the appointee by a greater portion of the electorate.  This final round commitment can strengthen the popular mandate of the appointee.

Members .  Single member electorates tend to elect candidates from major factions.  The more members of an electorate there are, the more factions are represented in government positions.  This can be viewed by the electorate as more representative and hence legitimate.  Multi-member electorates tend to increase the job security of those periodically re-elected, as major factions are likely to receive sufficient votes.

More complicated compound structures, such as separate single- and multi-member electorates being elected from a single vote, also exist.

Examples

The Athenian democracy appointed its strategoi , commanders in chief of the military, by Election.  After Periclean reforms this became the only elected position.

Venice, The Serene Republic, appointed its supreme executive, the Doge, using a combination of Election and Sortition.  German kings and the Holy Roman Emperor were appointed by small elite electorate of nobles.  Under the Polish 'Elective Monarchy' the king was appointed by a parliament of greater and lesser aristocrats.

Board members of public companies are appointed by Election, with the electorate determined by the control of issued shares.  Votes are weighted according to the control of voting stock.

Some districts in the United States appoint judges and district attorneys by Election.

Many governments use first past the post elections for government appointments, for example representatives to the lower houses of parliament in Britain, Canada and the United States are appointed in concurrent elections from geographically generated electorates.  These are single member elections.  The US has a very strong two-party duopoly.  Britain and Canada have regional two-party duopolies with occassionally competitive three-cornered contests.

Multi-preference voting - Instant Runnoff Voting, specifically - is used for elections to Australian parliament, including both the lower and upper Federal parliaments.  Australian politics is a frayed duopoly of two major parties, with a few minor also winning parliamentary seats.  Voters for European Parliament express two preferences for multi-seat regional electorates.

The vast majority of large-scale elections are single-round elections, for instance in Indian and EU parliamentary elections, and many other polities across the world.

The French presidential election consists of two rounds - a first round  with an unlimited number of candidates, and a second round where only the two most popular candidates compete directly for an identical electorate.  Both rounds are single preference elections.  US Senate seats for Louisiana are also filled this way.  Multi-round elections are common for internal party elections in parliamentary democracies such as Britain.  The appointment of the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope, is made by a multi-round election where the electorate is made up of Cardinals.  In both the latter cases election rounds continue until a single candidate commands a majority of votes.

As only one person can be president at a time, the appointment of an American President by the electoral college is a single member election.  The election itself is a compound process of simultaneous state elections appoint members of the electoral college, followed by the voting of the electoral college.  Similarly other executive roles such as the appointment of the Prime Minister in parliamentary government, the Secretary General of the UN, or the Pope, are necessarily single member elections.  

Parliaments in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan include multi-member electorates.  These are appointed by proportional representation, where seats are allocated according to the proportion of votes cast.  Britain historically had multi-member electorates, where n seats were won by the first n candidates ranked by a count of single preference votes.  These were abolished in 19th century reforms.

Related Patterns

Voting, Parliament

Related Anti-Patterns

Rotten Borough