Week 11 — Votes Into Seats: Design an Electoral Rule and Read the 2024 Result — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — design an electoral rule for a made-up country, read the 2024 UK result with the data scaffold, and explain to a roommate why the most votes do not always mean the most seats.

This week you learned the difference between a plurality and a majority, what parties do, the four electoral-system families, the D'Hondt method, Duverger's law, and how to read the 2024 UK general election for what it documents and what it does not settle. Week 8 gave you the three-layer read (design, practice, verdict), and Week 1 gave you the empirical/normative distinction; this assignment puts both to work on an election. In this assignment you work two short counting problems, interpret each one, and explain the vote-to-seat gap to someone who has never studied electoral systems. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will design an electoral rule for a made-up country, then read a real election. Treat your country as illustrative: it is not real, and no real person, candidate, or current officeholder belongs in it. Report the 2024 figures at the party level only.

Work these two problems, showing how you got each count:

Your made-up country's legislature has 120 seats elected by proportional representation, and one party wins 35 percent of the list vote. If its seat share matched its vote share exactly, how many seats would it hold?
In the 2024 UK general election, Labour won 33.7 percent of the vote and 63.2 percent of the seats. What is the gap between its seat share and its vote share, in percentage points?

Beside each count, add the interpretation that makes it political science:

Problem 1, your electoral rule. Choose one of the four families (first-past-the-post, majority-runoff, proportional representation, or mixed-member proportional) for your country's legislature, and say how a winner is decided under it. If you choose a proportional or mixed rule, say whether it uses an electoral threshold and how your count fits it; if you choose a plurality or runoff rule, say how your count compares with what that rule would give a party with 35 percent spread thinly across many districts. Say which party system your rule tends toward, using Duverger's law as a tendency with its mechanical and psychological effects and its named exceptions. Then defend your choice with at least one premise labelled empirical and one labelled normative, state the strongest case for a family you rejected as its defenders would put it, and give your reply.
Problem 2, the 2024 result. Read the House of Commons Library's figures with the five data questions: what is measured, over whom and when, what it shows, what it does not show, and whether it shows correlation or cause. Use the contrast between Reform UK (14.3 percent of the vote, 5 seats) and the Liberal Democrats (12.2 percent, 72 seats), and name the mechanism behind the gap. Then sort three claims by kind and layer: "the election used 650 single-member constituencies under plurality rules", "Labour won 411 seats on 33.7 percent of the vote", and "Labour's seats gave it a mandate for every promise".

Explain it to a non-expert

A roommate tells you, "The party with the most votes always gets the most seats, so an election result is always a fair picture of what voters wanted." Write a 3–5 sentence message to that roommate that explains, in everyday words, the difference between a vote share and a seat share, uses the 2024 contrast between Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats as the example, and names one limit of what the seat count can tell you. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coach explaining a tournament's tiebreak rule to a parent in the stands. Model answer: "Our team won more games than the other team, but they still finished first because the league ranks teams by points, and a draw earns a point too. So the standings depend on the scoring rule, not only on wins. If the league counted wins alone, the order would flip. The limit is that the table tells you who finished where, not whether the rule is the fairest one."

Use that pattern for your message to the roommate, with your own wording and evidence.

Show how you got each count. A reader should be able to reproduce both counts from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

After you finish, reread your work and revise at least one choice, reading, or explanation. Then add a short reflection (3–4 sentences) on one of two options of equal weight, your choice: (a) which choice or reading you changed and why the new version is better; or (b) which place in your first draft swapped a vote share and a seat share, or treated a seat count as a mandate, and how you caught it.

Deliverables

Submit a single file containing:

the two counts, each with the values and the operation shown;
your electoral rule (its family and how a winner is decided, the threshold or district comparison, the party-system tendency with Duverger's two effects and exceptions, a defense with premises labelled by kind, the strongest case for a rejected family, and your reply);
your reading of the 2024 result (the five data questions, the Reform UK and Liberal Democrat contrast with its mechanism, and the three claims sorted by kind and layer);
your message to the roommate; and
your revision note with the reflection option you chose.

Keep it to roughly two pages. Clear and accurate beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about four minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of your rule with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the rule, the reading, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Use only the House of Commons Library's 2024 figures given here, and state Duverger's argument in your own words. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's analysis, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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