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The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1977

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

A. S. Cohan  and
R. D. Mckinlay
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Extract

In an earlier article in this Journal (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, V (1975), 363–83) we argued that in elections generally the critical concern of political party leaders is not how many votes they may amass. Instead, they need to be concerned with how many votes of those they receive they are actually able to use to elect candidates. It matters little if party A wins Constituency 1 by thousands of votes if it then loses Constituencies 2 and 3 by only a handful. While we suggested that the concept of the used vote that we devised might have more relevance to the Continental electoral systems than to the British and American systems, it also has some application in the latter cases as well.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 1978 , pp. 492 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 For a description of the Irish electoral system, see Chubb, Basil, The Government and Politics of Ireland (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 349–52.Google Scholar

2 For a full description of the derivation of the used vote formula, see ‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcome’, pp. 364–8.Google Scholar

3 Interviews with political leaders were conducted in March and December, 1975, under a grant from the Social Science Research Council (United Kingdom).

4 See Groennings, Sven, ‘Notes Toward Theories of Coalition Behaviour in Multiparty Systems: Formation and Maintenance’, in Groennings, Sven, Kelley, E. W. and Leiserson, Michael, eds., The Study of Coalition Behaviour: Theoretical Perspectives and Cases from Four Continents (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 445–65.Google Scholar

5 See Cohan, A. S., ‘The Problem of Northern Ireland: Perspectives of the Irish Political Elite’, International Affairs, LIII (1977), 232–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar