Authors: Hermet, Badie, Birnbaum & Braud
Summary: This 990 words entry starts with a definition of the concept as follows: election is the procedure used to choose political representatives by voters who exercise their political right. Election is both a principle of government and a technical of government. As a principle, it is the real fundament of the representative democracy, which gives to people the power of legitimating representatives through the electoral choice.
As far as the technical of government is concerned, there are many electoral formulas which have different influence on electoral results: namely, for example, the most famous dichotomy between majority and proportional systems. More recently, there has been an increasing of the number of mixed electoral systems. It is an attempt to combine the pro's of both systems, namely the possibility of having stable and strong majorities (from the plurality or majority system) and the chance of having at least some representatives also for small parties (from proportional systems).
At the end of the entry, the authors underline that the election was invented to simplify the political process, whereas now it is becoming rather a chaotic procedure; for example, there is often confusion in the interpretation of results, or in regulating the electoral campaign, and so on.