Electoral Systems
Countries & Case Studies
Defining Democracies
Comparative Concepts
Potpourri
100

This electoral system is the most common way of electing presidents

Two-round (or majority-runoff)

100

The newly elected leftist president of this country called a snap election and increased his party's number of seats in parliament from 3 to 159 (out of 225 total)

Sri Lanka

100

The chief executive and cabinet are subject to assembly confidence in this system of government

Parliamentary

100

A dissatisfied parliament can use this kind of vote to dissolve the government

No confidence

100

The US Senate, whose members represent vastly different numbers of citizens, is an example of this

Malapportionment

200

This category of electoral systems can have either open lists or closed lists

Proportional representation (PR)

200

He was removed in a coup in 2019 after winning a fourth consecutive presidential election

Former Bolivian president Evo Morales

200

In a semi-presidential system, when the prime minister and president are of opposing parties, we call it this

Cohabitation

200

This concept refers to how easy it is for new parties to emerge and win seats in an assembly

Electoral permissiveness

200

Far-right candidate (and notable TikToker) Călin Georgescu was the surprise 1st place finisher in the first round of this country's presidential election last week

Romania

300

This electoral system used in the US, UK, Canada, and the Bahamas tends to favor the largest party

First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) (AKA single member district plurality)

300

This recent UK leader is remembered for mishandling Brexit, holding a disastrous snap election, and having sweet dance moves

Theresa May

300

A formal agreement between parliamentary parties to jointly rule and share cabinet positions is this type of government

Coalition government

300

This is when a party gets more than 50% of the seats in an assembly while winning less than 50% of the vote

A manufactured majority

300

While V-Dem is an increasingly popular measure of democracy in academia, these other two popular measures are funded by the CIA and the State Department

Polity and Freedom House

400

This phrase refers to the number of seats in an electoral district

District magnitude (M)

400

This far-right Spanish party rose to prominence in the 2019 election, capitalizing on backlash to the Catalonian constitutional crisis

Vox

400

Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela are each examples of this kind of political regime

Hybrid ("anocracy" or "semi-democratic" also acceptable)

400

This theory posits that there is a positive relationship between a country's economic development and its likelihood of being democratic.

Modernization theory

400

Argentina's President Javier Milei recently gifted a figurine of him wielding a chainsaw to the prime minister of this country

Italy

500

The colloquial name for Chile's pre-reform electoral system

The binomial system (or "sistema binominal")

500

He thwarted a 2016 coup in part by facetiming with the public

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

500

This political scientist railed against the "perils of presidentialism"

Juan Linz

500

What is Ns in the following equation? 

N= 1/Σ(Si)2

The effective number of parties

500

This large yellow activist won a seat in Chile's constitutional assembly

Tía Pikachu