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Cube Rule
The cube rule or cube law is an empirical observation regarding elections under the first-past-the-post system. The rule suggests that the party getting the most votes is over-represented (and conversely, the party getting the fewest votes is under-represented). It was first formulated in a report on British elections in 1909, then extended to elections in other countries. Both in theory and in practice, the cube rule is only applicable in a two-party system. In a multi-party democracy operating under the first-past-the-post system, the cube law invariably fails, often leading to capricious results.Rein Taagepera, "Seats and votes: A generalization of the cube law of elections." ''Social Science Research'' 2#3 (1973): 257-275online/ref> Suppose we have two parties which receive A and B percent of the vote. According to the cube rule, the ratio of A seats-won to B seats-won should be proportional to A3/B3. So if A wins 60% and B wins 40%, the ratio of votes A/B = 60/40 = 1.5, b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cube Rule Graph
In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. Viewed from a corner it is a hexagon and its net is usually depicted as a cross. The cube is the only regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It has 6 faces, 12 edges, and 8 vertices. The cube is also a square parallelepiped, an equilateral cuboid and a right rhombohedron a 3-zonohedron. It is a regular square prism in three orientations, and a trigonal trapezohedron in four orientations. The cube is dual to the octahedron. It has cubical or octahedral symmetry. The cube is the only convex polyhedron whose faces are all squares. Orthogonal projections The ''cube'' has four special orthogonal projections, centered, on a vertex, edges, face and normal to its vertex figure. The first and third correspond to the A2 and B2 Coxeter planes. Spherical tiling The cube can also be represented as a spherical tiling, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Empirical Evidence
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. There is no general agreement on how the terms ''evidence'' and ''empirical'' are to be defined. Often different fields work with quite different conceptions. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain belief is rational. This is only possible if the evidence is possessed by the person, which has prompted various epistemologists to conceive evidence as private mental states like experiences or other beliefs. In philosophy of science, on the other hand, evidence is understood as that which '' confirms'' or ''disconfirms'' scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories. For this role, it is importan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First-past-the-post
In a first-past-the-post electoral system (FPTP or FPP), formally called single-member plurality voting (SMP) when used in single-member districts or informally choose-one voting in contrast to ranked voting, or score voting, voters cast their vote for a candidate of their choice, and the candidate who receives the most votes wins even if the top candidate gets less than 50%, which can happen when there are more than two popular candidates. As a winner-take-all method, FPTP often produces disproportional results (when electing members of an assembly, such as a parliament) in the sense that political parties do not get representation according to their share of the popular vote. This usually favours the largest party and parties with strong regional support to the detriment of smaller parties without a geographically concentrated base. Supporters of electoral reform are generally highly critical of FPTP because of this and point out other flaws, such as FPTP's vulnerabili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Two-party System
A two-party system is a political party system in which two major political parties consistently dominate the political landscape. At any point in time, one of the two parties typically holds a majority in the legislature and is usually referred to as the ''majority'' or ''governing party'' while the other is the ''minority'' or ''opposition party''. Around the world, the term has different meanings. For example, in the United States, the Bahamas, Jamaica, United Kingdom and Zimbabwe, the sense of ''two-party system'' describes an arrangement in which all or nearly all elected officials belong to either of the two major parties, and third parties rarely win any seats in the legislature. In such arrangements, two-party systems are thought to result from several factors, like "winner takes all" or "first past the post" election systems.Regis PublishingThe US System: Winner Takes All Accessed August 12, 2013, "...Winner-take-all rules trigger a cycle that leads to and stren ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multi-party
In political science, a multi-party system is a political system in which multiple political parties across the political spectrum run for national elections, and all have the capacity to gain control of government offices, separately or in coalition. Apart from one-party-dominant and two-party systems, multi-party systems tend to be more common in parliamentary systems than presidential systems and far more common in countries that use proportional representation compared to countries that use first-past-the-post elections. Several parties compete for power and all of them have reasonable chance of forming government. In multi-party systems that use proportional representation, each party wins a number of legislative seats proportional to the number of votes it receives. Under first-past-the-post, the electorate is divided into a number of districts, each of which selects one person to fill one seat by a plurality of the vote. First-past-the-post is not conducive to a prolif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States House Of Representatives Elections, 2002
The 2002 United States House of Representatives elections were held on November 5, 2002, in the middle of President George W. Bush's first term. Although it was a midterm election under a Republican president, the Republican Party gained a net eight seats, solidifying their majority. Some speculate that this may have been due to increased support for the President's party in the wake of the September 11 attacks. This was one of three mid-term elections in which the party of the incumbent president did not lose seats either in the House or in the Senate (the other such mid-term elections were in 1934 and 1998). It was the sixth midterm election in which the President's party increased its number of seats in the House, after 1814, 1822, 1902, 1934, and 1998. This is the only midterm election since 1978 which left the President's party in control of the House. Overall results Summary of the November 5, 2002 United States House of Representatives election results SourceElecti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States House Of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber. Together they comprise the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The House's composition was established by Article One of the United States Constitution. The House is composed of representatives who, pursuant to the Uniform Congressional District Act, sit in single member congressional districts allocated to each state on a basis of population as measured by the United States Census, with each district having one representative, provided that each state is entitled to at least one. Since its inception in 1789, all representatives have been directly elected, although universal suffrage did not come to effect until after the passage of the 19th Amendment and the Civil Rights Movement. Since 1913, the number of voting representative ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plurality (voting)
A plurality vote (in American English) or relative majority (in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth) describes the circumstance when a party, candidate, or proposition polls more votes than any other but does not receive more than half of all votes cast. For example, if from 100 votes that were cast, 45 were for ''Candidate A'', 30 were for ''Candidate B'' and 25 were for ''Candidate C'', then ''Candidate A'' received a plurality of votes but not a majority. In some votes, the winning candidate or proposition may have only a plurality, depending on the rules of the organization holding the vote. Versus majority In international institutional law, a "simple majority" (also a " majority") vote is more than half of the votes cast (disregarding abstentions) ''among'' alternatives; a "qualified majority" (also a " supermajority") is a number of votes above a specified percentage (e.g. two-thirds); a "relative majority" (also a "plurality") is the number of votes obtained that is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island country by area, covering . New Zealand is about east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The country's varied topography and sharp mountain peaks, including the Southern Alps, owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland. The islands of New Zealand were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans. Between about 1280 and 1350, Polynesians began to settle in the islands and then developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight and record New Zealand. In 1840, representatives of the United Kingdom and Māori chiefs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mixed Member Proportional Representation
Mixed-member proportional representation (MMP or MMPR) is a mixed electoral system in which votes cast are considered in local elections and also to determine overall party vote tallies, which are used to allocate additional members to produce or deepen overall Proportional representation. In some MMP systems, voters get two votes: one to decide the representative for their single-seat constituency, and one for a political party. In Denmark and others, the single vote cast by the voter is used for both the local election (in a multi-member or single-seat district), and for the overall top-up. Seats in the legislature are filled first by the successful constituency candidates, and second, by party candidates based on the percentage of nationwide or region-wide votes that each party received. The constituency representatives are usually elected using first-past-the-post voting (FPTP) but the Scandinavian countries have a long history of using both multi-member districts (memb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rein Taagepera
Rein Taagepera (born 28 February 1933) is an Estonian political scientist and former politician. Education Born in Tartu, Estonia, Taagepera fled from occupied Estonia in 1944. Taagepera graduated from high school in Marrakech, Morocco and then studied physics in Canada and the United States. He received a B.A. Sc (Nuclear Engineering) in 1959 and a M.A. (Physics) in 1961 from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1965. Working in industry until 1970, he received another M.A. in international relations in 1969 and switched to academe as a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, where he stayed for his entire American career. Taagepera is professor emeritus at University of Tartu. Political career Taagepera served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies from 1986 until 1988. In 1991, he returned to Estonia as the founding dean of a new School of Social Sciences at the University of Tartu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
