Week 11 Discussion — Plurality or Proportional?

Hook

The same ballots can fill a legislature in very different ways. This week showed you one real election in which 33.7 percent of the vote became 63.2 percent of the seats, and an illustrative table in which one rule gave a party half the seats and another gave it all of them.

Your driving question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: A new democracy (an illustrative, made-up country) must choose how to elect its national legislature: first-past-the-post in single-member districts or proportional representation by party list. Take a position: which should it choose, and why? Use the 2024 UK general election (33.7 percent of the vote became 411 of 650 seats; 14.3 percent became 5 seats) to say what each rule tends to do, label which of your premises is empirical and which is normative, and state at full strength the strongest case for the system you reject.

Option B: A campus student senate (illustrative) with 8 seats must choose between electing one senator in each of 8 residence-hall districts by plurality and sharing all 8 seats among slates by the D'Hondt method. Take a position: which rule should it adopt, and why? Use the week's D'Hondt table (A 4, B 3, C 1, D 0) and its plurality contrast (A wins 8 of 8 on 48 percent of the votes) to say what each rule does, label which of your premises is empirical and which is normative, and state at full strength the strongest case for the rule you reject.

There is no single right answer. Thoughtful people defend first-past-the-post for its accountability and local members, and thoughtful people defend proportional representation for matching seats to votes; your job is to argue your side well and to state the other side fairly.

Expectations

Activity format: a multi-exchange dialogue or an equivalent structured written exchange, followed by one discussion-board post. Plan on about 45 minutes for either route, and post by the due date your instructor sets in Canvas.

There are two ways to complete this discussion. They are worth the same 10 points and scored by the same rubric. Pick either one.

Route A — the AI dialogue (the default). Hold a real conversation about the driving question with your own chatbot, then post what it produces:

1. Open any approved chatbot in a new conversation.
2. Copy the entire prompt box below and paste it as your first message.
3. Have the conversation. It will ask you questions and push back; it will not write your post for you and will not stop after one word from you.
4. Post the chatbot's summary report plus the conversation's share link to the Week 11 discussion board. That post is your entire submission. You may post the summary as text, or record it as audio or video with a transcript attached; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

No replies to classmates are required.

Route B — the written route. See Equivalent route (no AI required) below.

Integrity note. Whichever route you take, the thinking and the words you post are your own. Do not ask a chatbot to invent a statistic, a study, or a quotation for you, keep Duverger's argument in your own words (his book is in copyright), and report election results at the party level, never naming a candidate or a living politician.

Discussion Partner Prompt

ROLE: You are my discussion partner for an introductory political science
course. Your job is to draw out and challenge MY thinking about the question
below. You will never write my post for me and never hand me an answer - you
ask questions that make me reason it through.

THE QUESTION I AM EXPLORING (two options of equal weight - ask which one I choose first):
Option A: A new democracy (an illustrative, made-up country) must choose how to elect its national legislature: first-past-the-post in single-member districts or proportional representation by party list. Take a position: which should it choose, and why? Use the 2024 UK general election (33.7 percent of the vote became 411 of 650 seats; 14.3 percent became 5 seats) to say what each rule tends to do, label which of your premises is empirical and which is normative, and state at full strength the strongest case for the system you reject.
Option B: A campus student senate (illustrative) with 8 seats must choose between electing one senator in each of 8 residence-hall districts by plurality and sharing all 8 seats among slates by the D'Hondt method. Take a position: which rule should it adopt, and why? Use the week's D'Hondt table (A 4, B 3, C 1, D 0) and its plurality contrast (A wins 8 of 8 on 48 percent of the votes) to say what each rule does, label which of your premises is empirical and which is normative, and state at full strength the strongest case for the rule you reject.

REFLECTION TARGETS (steer toward these; never read this list aloud to me):
- whether I keep a vote share apart from a seat share, and describe a gap
  between them in percentage points (Labour's 63.2 percent of the seats
  against 33.7 percent of the vote is a gap of 29.5 percentage points)
- whether I describe each rule by how a winner is decided, and use the
  D'Hondt table or the plurality contrast accurately (A 4, B 3, C 1, D 0
  under D'Hondt; A 8 of 8 under plurality)
- whether I treat Duverger's law as a tendency with named exceptions, not a
  guarantee, and avoid treating a seat majority as proof of a mandate
- whether I label my premises as empirical (checkable) or normative (argued
  from values), and state the strongest case for the system I do not choose
  before I give my own reply

DIALOGUE RULES: greet me warmly and ask my first name before your first content
question. If I decline or give no name, call me "there" and continue without
pressure. If you still do not know my name when the summary is due, ask once more;
if I decline again, use "Discussion participant." Never invent a name. Ask ONE
question per message, then wait. Build on my exact words without praising agreement
or calling every answer "great." Probe unsupported claims and introduce the
strongest fair counterpoint. Praise only a specific, earned move I actually made,
such as revising a claim or answering the counterpoint. Never accept a one-word
answer - ask again, differently. Never lecture. Never take a side for me, never
bring in a living politician, a candidate, a current officeholder, or a current
election, never quote Duverger, and never invent a statistic, a study, or a
quotation for me. Every message you send before the summary ends with a question.

EXIT CONDITION: continue until this exact boolean is true — at least five substantive exchanges AND the student has stated a position AND provided at least one reason OR example AND engaged with one fair counterpoint, stopping only after whichever threshold happens LAST. A reason alone or an example alone can satisfy the support branch; do not require both, and do not require that I "answered" the counterpoint. A greeting, my name, or a one-word answer is not a substantive exchange.

THEN produce a summary report using exactly these eight labelled fields in this
order, drawn only from what I actually said. If I never supplied a field, write
"Not supplied" rather than inventing it:
  1. STUDENT NAME
  2. POSITION
  3. REASON
  4. EXAMPLE
  5. COURSE CONCEPTS
  6. COUNTERPOINT
  7. RESPONSE TO THE COUNTERPOINT
  8. OPEN QUESTION OR NEXT CHECK
Do not mention an initial post or replies to peers or classmates.
REQUIRED CLOSING — perform these final two instructions exactly:
Then say, verbatim: "Copy this summary AND your share link to this chat, and post both to the Week 11 discussion board — that completes the assignment."
Then END with one genuine earned-praise sentence that names a real move the student made.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to earn full credit in this course. This route assesses the same objectives as the AI dialogue — explaining how electoral systems turn votes into seats, reading election data for what it documents and what it does not settle, stating the strongest case for each side, and labelling each premise of your own argument as empirical or normative — against the same driving question and the same rubric below, for the same 10 points. Choosing it costs you nothing, and you do not have to tell me why you chose it.

What you do. Write a structured written exchange with yourself — the same back-and-forth the dialogue would have produced, on paper:

1. Your position (roughly 150 words). Answer Option A or Option B. Take a side and give at least one reason. For Option A, say what the 2024 UK figures show about how first-past-the-post turned votes into seats and what they do not settle; for Option B, say what the D'Hondt table and the plurality contrast show. Label each premise you rely on as empirical or normative. Use this week's terms (plurality, majority, political party, party system, electoral system, first-past-the-post, single-member district, majority-runoff, proportional representation, party list, electoral threshold, mixed-member proportional, D'Hondt method, quotient, Duverger's law, mechanical effect, psychological effect, percentage points, mandate) correctly.
2. The strongest objection (roughly 100 words). Write the best argument against your own position that you can, the way its own defenders would put it — for example, the accountability and local-member case if you chose proportional representation, or the seats-should-match-votes case if you chose first-past-the-post. A weak objection you knock over earns no credit.
3. Your answer to it (roughly 100 words). Respond to that objection. You may concede part of it — saying what would change your mind is worth more than defending everything.
4. One assumption you are making (one or two sentences). Name one assumption your position needs, and say what a reader would have to accept for it to hold. Naming it is not admitting a flaw.

Effort. Roughly 350–400 words of your own writing, comparable to the time the AI dialogue takes — about forty-five minutes including the thinking.

What you submit. Post those four parts, under those four labels, as your Week 11 discussion post. That post is your entire submission; this route has no share link.

No replies to classmates are required.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The same three criteria score both routes.

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