A winner-take-all electoral system is one where a voting bloc can win all seats in a legislature or electoral district, denying representation to any political minorities. Such systems are used in many major democracies. Such systems are sometimes called "majoritarian representation", though this term is a misnomer, as most such systems do not always elect majority preferred candidates and do not always produce winners who received majority of votes cast in the district, and they allow parties to take a majority of seats in the chamber with just a minority of the vote.
Any election with only a single seat is a winner-take-all system (as it is impossible for the winner to take less than one seat). As a result, legislatures elected by single-member districts are often described as using "winner-take-all". However, winner-take-all systems do not necessarily mean the majority of voters are represented properly. A minority of voters across the country may take all the seats; a minority of votes cast in a district may elect all the winners in a district. Conversely, a party with just a sliver of votes in a country-wide sense may have local dominance and take a seat in a particular constituency.
Formally, a voting system is called winner-take-all if a majority of voters, by coordinating, can force all seats up for election in their district, denying representation to all minorities. By definition, all single-winner voting systems are winner-take-all. For multi-winner elections, the electorate can be divided into constituencies, such as single-member districts (SMDs), or the election can be held using block voting with at-large or multi-member districts.
Majoritarian representation does not mean the party with a plurality or majority always receive a majority of seats, which is not always guaranteed (see hung parliament). Sometimes the party receiving the most votes gets fewer seats than the party with the second most votes (see electoral inversion).
The principle of majoritarian democracy does not necessarily imply that a winner-take-all electoral system needs to be used, in fact, using proportional systems to elect legislature usually better serve this principle as such aims to ensures that the legislature accurately reflects the whole population, not just the winners of the election and the majority rule is then used within the legislature. The most widely accepted modern views of representative democracy no longer consider winner-take-all representation to be democratic. For this reason, nowadays winner-take-all representation is most often used in single-winner districts, which allows nationwide minorities to gain representation if they make up a plurality or majority in at least one district, but some also consider this anti-democratic because of the possibility of an electoral inversion (like in the case of some US presidential elections: 2000, 2016).
Winner-take-all and proportional systems are the most commonly used voting system worldwide, followed by mixed electoral systems, which usually combine winner-take-all and proportional representation, although there are mixed system that combine two winner-take-all systems as well. Winner-take-all representation is also contrasted with proportional representation, which provides for representation of political minorities according to their share of the popular vote and semi-proportional representation, which inherently provides for some representation of minorities (at least above a certain threshold). Within mixed systems, mixed-member majoritarian representation (also known as parallel voting) provides semi-proportional representation, as opposed to mixed-member proportional systems.
Historically the first multi-winner electoral systems were winner-take-all elections held at-large, or more generally the multiple non-transferable vote.[citation needed]
Until the first half of the 19th century, the classic winner-take-all system of block voting began to be more and more criticized. This introduced in two senses:
The version of block voting using electoral lists instead of individual candidates (general ticket or party block voting) was almost completely replaced by party-list proportional voting systems, which fully abandon the winner-take-all ideal in favor of equal representation. However, with the majority bonus or majority jackpot types of mixed system, this type of winner-take-most system has partially reappeared in certain electoral systems.
Winner-take-all representation using single-winner districts is the most common form of pure winner-take-all systems today, with the most common being single-member plurality (SMP).
However, due to high disproportionalities, it is also considered undemocratic by many.[who?] In Europe only Belarus and the United Kingdom use FPTP/SMP to elect the primary (lower) chamber of their legislature and France uses a two-round system (TRS). All other European countries either use proportional representation or use winner-take-all representation as part of a mixed-member winner-take-all system (Andorra, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine) or a mixed-member proportional system (Germany). However, other European countries also occasionally use winner-take-all systems (apart from single-winner elections, like presidential or mayoral elections) for elections to the secondary chamber (upper house) of their legislature (Poland) and sub-national (local and regional) elections.
Winner-take-all system are much more common outside Europe, particularly in the countries of the former British Empire, like Australia (IRV), Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, India, Pakistan and the United States (FPTP/SMP).
Nowadays, at-large winner-take-all representation is used for national elections only in the Senate of the Philippines, while it is sometimes still used for local elections organised on non-partisan bases. Residual usage in several multi-member constituencies is reduced to the election of the Electoral college of the President of the United States. Block voting is also used to elect a part of the assemblies in the regional elections in Italy and France.
Below is a table of winner-take-all systems currently used on a national level.[1][2] Single-winner elections (presidential elections) and mixed systems are not included, see List of electoral systems by country for full list of electoral systems.
Key:
Countries that replaced winner-take-all representation before 1990 are not (yet) included.