Duff Spafford

The Electoral System of Canada

The working of the electoral system in Canada is investigated in this paper. The object is to identify the more important factors which go to determine the share of seats in the federal House of Commons won by a political party at a general election. Factors considered are share of vote, distribution of the vote and number of candidates in the field. The responsiveness of share of seats to variations in these factors is estimated by fitting linear equations by least squares to data for the fourteen federal general elections which took place in Canada between 1921 and 1965.

Life in Print: Citation of Articles Published in Volumes 1–10 of the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique

The Social Sciences Citation Index was canvassed for citations of all articles, notes, review articles, comments and replies published in volumes 1–10 of the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique . The data show that nearly three-quarters of the 335 items published between 1968 and 1977 were cited at least once, with a greater likelihood of the citation appearing in non-Canadian than in Canadian publications. English-language items were cited four times as frequently as French-language ones, on the average, and those with at least some Canadian content were cited nearly twice as frequently, on the average, as those with no Canadian content.

Mill's Majority Principle

In the course of arguing his case for electoral reform, John Stuart Mill proposes a criterion of government by majority which has gone largely unnoticed. Mill holds that any majority coalition of representatives in an assembly must directly represent a majority of electors. A representative directly represents those electors, and only those electors, who voted in his favour at his election. An implication of Mills version of the principle of majority rule is that, given an assembly of any considerable size, all but a small fraction of the electorate must have direct representation.