In this article you will learn about the Merits and Demerits of First Past the Post System in Political Science.
Merits of First Past the Post System
The First Past the Post System happens to be a very popular principle as it is being followed by most of the democratic countries of the world. Even when almost every politically aware person agrees that there are several defects of this system, yet it continues to remain very popular. There have been several reasons behind its continued popularity :
- It is a very simple system.
- It is fully democratic in nature as any candidate can win by getting more votes than other contesting candidates.
- Under this system, every party gains in some constituencies and also suffers in some other constituencies. In this way, the system does not prove to be very defective in practice, and
- Because of its very simple nature, it can be easily operationalised and the people can easily understand its working.
The real culprit under this system is the existence of a very large number of political parties and consequently a large number of contesting candidates from each constituency. This leads to division of votes amongst several candidates and it enables the candidate getting a relative majority and not a real majority of votes polled in his constituency to win the election. Precisely, it is due to such a situation that the First Past the Post System becomes a source of vote-seat gap and election of a representative with an unreal majority. In every such country which has a multi-party system and in which each constituency witnesses a multi-corner contest, this acts as a defective system.
Demerits of First Past the Post System
First Past the Post System/Relative Majority Vote Victory System has been a subject of hot criticism. It is argued by many that though this system leads to the election of governments yet it has been responsible for one of the biggest shortcomings of an election system - the vote-seat gap or the big disproportion between the popular votes polled and the seats won by the political parties. Often the system helps a candidate who secures a minority of valid votes polled in a constituency and yet elected as the representative of the people by virtue of getting more votes than every other candidate contesting from the concerned constituency. Under this system, a party which gets less percentage of popular votes and secures more seats can become a ruling party. Hence, this system is defective.
Three main demerits of First Past the Post System :
- Smaller parties do not get a fair number of seats and representation.
- When electoral results are out in an election, it is often found that there came to be a big gap between the percentage of votes polled by various parties and the seats secured by them in the legislature.
- In all multi cornered election contests in various constituencies, a large number of votes are not really productive because these are polled by all the defeated candidates. The winner is one among several defeated candidates. The winner is in a position to win not because he got a real majority but because he got more votes than every other candidate taken individually. The percentage of votes secured by the winning candidate is very often quite less than the percentage of votes polled by all the defeated candidates together.
This article on Merits and Demerits of First Past the Post System in Political Science is contributed by Dipshikha Anand. If you like LawStudyPoint.com do follow us on our Twitter handle.