preview

Voting In Western Government

Decent Essays
Open Document

One of the paramount purposes of western government is to protect the individual rights of every citizen. This means that each citizen is allowed to lawfully practice their beliefs. That being said it is very difficult to satisfy everyone’s political agendas (nearly impossible on the large scale of national politics), this is where elections come into play. Western government is constructed on the foundation that the masses should choose who represents them in government by voting for who they align with politically. However the electoral process is often disputed because creating a completely impartial system that treats all votes equally and also manages to divide power in a responsible way is extremely difficult. This is where you can see …show more content…

Voting decides who will lead a country, and represent its values and culture to the rest of the world. This is why everyone gets an equal say, or do they? Some countries like Israel actually count each vote as equal through their “proportional representation” electoral system; this means that the number of the seats a party receives in the Knesset is directly linked with how many votes it received. For example in the 2015 election the Zionist union received 19% of the vote and was therefore given 24 seats out of the total 120. In contrast there are countries such as Canada which focus more on electing “main stream” government. Canada uses a system known as “first past the post” in which you vote in a mini-election within your riding (district), and the winner of each riding wins a seat in the HOC, in the end the party with the most seats becomes the government. There are many flaws with this system, for example if you are right-winged but live in a predominantly left-winged riding, your vote doesn’t go towards anything. However more importantly, the vote-to-seat ratio isn’t fair. This was clear in the 2015 election where the Green party received over 600,000 (over 3% of the vote), and yet only received 1 seat (.3% of the seats); and where the liberal party received …show more content…

Canada and Israel both advanced tremendously in certain aspects of government, but both are also greatly lacking in other aspects. Israel and Canada seemed to have progresses in opposite parts of government; Canada has a very “Responsible government”, while Israel has a very “Representative Government”. These are both vital for good governing, and while I have to admire Israel’s electoral system, I believe that the Canadian system (The Westminster Parliamentary System) provides a much more stable government. And although Canada needs to better represent each voter, its system remains true to the hopes and wishes of the average citizen. Which (as I said earlier) is one of the fundamental principles of the Western

Get Access