4.2 - Objectives of Election Rules
Electoral systems are designed to achieve specific goals around ballot access, election outcomes, and accountability, and democratic and authoritarian regimes use these rules toward very different ends.
Effects of Proportional Representation
Proportional representation tends to increase the number of parties in the legislature, minority representation (letting ethnic and religious groups win seats roughly proportional to their share of the population), and women's representation. This happens because party lists let parties include diverse candidates, and voters can support a party knowing women and minorities are included somewhere on that list. Mexico's gender quotas, first on PR lists and now full parity rules for all candidates, have increased female representation dramatically, to about half of both chambers as of 2026, and the PR component more broadly lets smaller parties representing specific constituencies win seats they otherwise couldn't. Single-member districts, by contrast, tend to produce candidates who are male and from the majority ethnicity, since major parties there gravitate toward whoever seems most electable in a single race.
Effects of Single-Member District Plurality
Single-member district systems tend to produce two-party systems, since third parties rarely win individual districts and voters avoid "wasting" votes on candidates unlikely to win, pushing everyone to consolidate around two major parties. The UK's first-past-the-post system creates Conservative-Labour dominance, and Nigeria's system produces a similar APC-PDP duopoly.
These systems also provide strong constituency service: a single representative per district creates clear accountability, since voters know exactly who represents them, and representatives can focus specifically on local issues. UK MPs hold "surgeries" where constituents can meet them about local concerns, and Nigerian representatives similarly advocate for their specific districts. This also provides direct geographic representation, since every territory gets its own representative and regional interests, both rural and urban, get distinct representation. The trade-off is that this comes at the cost of overall proportionality between vote share and seat share.
Presidential Election Rules
Different systems use different rules to determine presidential winners. Plurality systems, like Mexico's, elect the president with simply the most votes, not necessarily a majority, and with no second round; in 2006, Calderón won with 35.9% against López Obrador's 35.3%, a plurality sufficient to win despite no majority support. This produces a decisive result in a single round without an extended campaign, but it also means the president may lack majority support, raising legitimacy questions when the margin is small.
Plurality mattered less in 2024, when Morena's Claudia Sheinbaum won with almost 60% of the vote, more than double runner-up Xóchitl Gálvez, and became Mexico's first woman president. It matters most in close races split three ways, like 2006.
Plurality with geographic distribution, used in Nigeria, requires a candidate to win the most votes nationally and at least 25% of the vote in at least two-thirds of the states (24 or more of 36); if no one meets both conditions, a second round is held. The purpose is to ensure the president has support spanning ethnic and regional divisions rather than just one region, preventing, say, a northern candidate from winning purely on northern votes. This kind of majoritarian rule gives the winner a genuine national mandate by requiring geographic breadth, not just raw vote totals. In 2023, Bola Tinubu (APC) won with only about 37% of the national vote but cleared 25% in more than 24 states. His opponents argued he also needed 25% in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, but the Supreme Court upheld his win in October 2023.
Absolute majority with runoff, used in Iran and Russia, requires over 50% to win outright, with a second round between the top two candidates if no one clears that bar in the first round. In Iran's 2005 election, Ahmadinejad won only 19.4% in the first round but won the runoff with 61.7% against Rafsanjani. Russia's system is designed so Putin wins outright in the first round, though the runoff mechanism theoretically exists. This kind of majoritarian rule gives the winner majority legitimacy and can force coalition-building between rounds, though it also extends the campaign period and, in authoritarian contexts, can be manipulated regardless of the formal rules.
Iran's most recent runoff came in 2024, after President Raisi died in a helicopter crash. No one won a majority in the first round, where turnout fell to about 40% (a record low for a presidential race), so reformist Masoud Pezeshkian faced hardliner Saeed Jalili in a runoff and won. Russia has held only one presidential runoff, in 1996, when Boris Yeltsin beat Communist Gennady Zyuganov; Putin has won every one of his elections in the first round, including with 87% in 2024.
Ballot Access Regulation
Electoral regulatory organizations set the rules for ballot access and competition, and how they're structured says a lot about a regime.
Authoritarian systems tend toward restrictive access: Iran's Guardian Council vets every candidate before elections, excluding reform-minded candidates and requiring demonstrated support for Islamic values, which limits candidates and reduces real competition. In the 2020 Majles elections, it disqualified over 7,000 candidates, including 90 sitting MPs, leaving only regime-approved options. The objective here is maintaining regime control while still going through the motions of holding elections.
The Guardian Council screens presidential candidates the same way: for the 2024 presidential election, it approved only 6 of the 80 people who registered. Russia's Central Election Commission plays a similar gatekeeping role. In 2024 it kept antiwar candidate Boris Nadezhdin off the presidential ballot, citing problems with his voter signatures.
Democratic systems tend toward independent commissions instead: Mexico's National Electoral Institute (INE) operates independently of government, registers candidates fairly, monitors elections, and works to reduce fraud and enhance competition. Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) registers voters and parties and conducts elections, working to ensure fairness even if with mixed success in practice. The objective here, as part of democratic development, is increasing electoral integrity and genuine competition rather than restricting it.
Mexico's institute started as the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) in 1990, after the disputed 1988 election, became fully independent of the government in 1996, and was replaced by the National Electoral Institute (INE) in 2014. Nigeria's INEC was created in 1998 to run the elections that returned the country to civilian rule in 1999. Both still face pressure: in 2023, President López Obrador's "Plan B" law tried to shrink the INE's staff and budget before the Supreme Court struck it down, and Nigerian elections are still marred by vote buying, violence, and court fights over results.
Appointment Systems for Legislative Bodies
Appointments to legislative bodies can either promote diversity or advance elite control, depending on how they're designed.
The UK's House of Lords illustrates the diversity-promoting version: the monarch formally approves every appointment, the Prime Minister recommends most members (including names put forward by other party leaders), and the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission recommends nonpartisan "crossbench" members and vets every nominee. This brings in experts, minority representatives, and former officials to add expertise and less partisan perspective than the elected Commons. Almost all members are now life peers, whose seats can't be passed down: the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 removed the last 92 seats held by hereditary nobles in April 2026, leaving life peers plus 26 Church of England bishops.
Iran's Guardian Council and Russia's Federation Council illustrate the elite-control version instead. Iran's Guardian Council has half its members appointed directly by the Supreme Leader (6 Islamic jurists) and half nominated by the judiciary with Majles approval (6 legal experts), ensuring religious oversight over the elected legislature. Russia's Federation Council has two members from each region, one chosen by the regional legislature and one by the governor, plus up to 30 members appointed directly by the president (a power added in the 2020 constitutional amendments). Since the Kremlin controls who becomes governor and United Russia controls nearly every regional legislature, loyalty flows all the way up through the Federation Council.
Putin also reasserted federal power over the regions. In 2000 he grouped them into seven federal districts, each run by a presidential envoy who watches over the governors for the Kremlin. A North Caucasus district was added in 2010 and a Crimean district in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea, making nine (the Crimean district was merged into the Southern district in 2016, so there are eight today). Direct elections for governor were abolished in 2004, so the president nominated governors and regional legislatures confirmed them. Elections came back in 2012, but with a "municipal filter" (candidates need signatures from 5 to 10% of local council members, who are mostly United Russia), and a 2013 law lets a region skip the popular vote and have its legislature choose a governor from a list of candidates approved by the president, which several North Caucasus republics, such as Dagestan and Ingushetia, do.
So the objectives differ sharply: democratic appointment systems aim to balance representation, add expertise, and reduce partisanship, while authoritarian ones aim to control institutions, install loyalists, and centralize power.
Election Rule Changes and Representation
Changing electoral rules affects how well religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups get represented, and the direction of change often reveals regime intent. Mexico added a PR component and gender quotas specifically to increase women's and smaller parties' representation, a change meant to enhance diversity. Russia has changed its Duma electoral rules multiple times in ways that consistently advantaged United Russia and disadvantaged opposition, a change meant to benefit the regime instead. Nigeria's combination of population-sized House districts with equal Senate representation per state helps balance ethnic group representation. Iran reserves five seats for religious minorities (two for Armenian Christians, one for Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, one for Jews, and one for Zoroastrians), providing minimal representation even as overall candidate vetting restricts broader political diversity. The pattern holds pretty clearly: democratic systems tend to change rules to improve representation, while authoritarian systems tend to change rules to maintain control.
The details of the rules matter too. Mexico caps each party's share of Chamber seats at 8 points above its share of the vote, but the cap is applied party by party, not to coalitions. In 2024, Morena and its allies (the PT and the Green Party) won about 55% of the vote for the Chamber, but once the INE handed out the PR seats, their bloc held 364 of 500 seats (73%), more than the two-thirds supermajority needed to amend the constitution. The opposition called it overrepresentation, but because each coalition partner was counted separately, the rules allowed it. In early 2026, President Sheinbaum proposed making PR candidates campaign for votes instead of sitting on party-controlled lists and cutting the Senate from 128 to 96 by dropping its 32 PR seats. The Chamber of Deputies rejected it in March 2026 (259 to 234, short of the two-thirds needed) after most deputies from Morena's own allies, the PT and the Green Party, voted against it, since fewer PR seats would hurt small parties most. So as of 2026, the 300/200 and 96/32 splits still stand.
The UK changed rules too, at the devolved level. For its May 2026 election, Wales switched its Senedd to closed-list PR, with 96 members elected six at a time in 16 districts. Plaid Cymru won 43 seats with 35% of the vote and Reform UK 34 seats with 29%, while Labour, which had led every Welsh government since devolution in 1999, fell to 9 seats. Seat shares were far closer to vote shares than FPTP usually produces, though the biggest parties still got a bonus because each district elects only six members.
Timing of Legislative Elections
Election timing varies based on each country's term-limit policies. Fixed terms, where elections happen on a set schedule, are used by Mexico (Chamber of Deputies every 3 years, Senate every 6), Nigeria (House and Senate both every 4 years, on the same day as the presidential election), China (NPC every 5 years), and Iran (Majles every 4 years). Russia's Duma also runs on a set schedule in practice: its term was lengthened from 4 to 5 years in 2008, and the president can dissolve it only in narrow cases (like the Duma rejecting his choice for prime minister three times), which has never happened. The UK is the flexible one: an election must be held within 5 years, but the Prime Minister can ask the monarch to dissolve Parliament earlier to pick a good moment, as Rishi Sunak did when he called the July 2024 election months before he had to. (The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 took that power away, but it was repealed in 2022.) Term limits on legislators themselves are rare, and Mexico is the big exception. From 1933 until a 2014 reform, Mexican legislators could not serve consecutive terms at all. The 2014 reform, first used in the 2018 election, let deputies serve up to four terms in a row and senators two (12 years either way), but a 2025 constitutional amendment brings back the ban on consecutive reelection starting with the 2030 elections. Fixed terms tend to provide stability, while flexible terms let governments time elections for strategic advantage.
Bottom line: electoral rules aren't neutral technical choices, they reflect and reinforce underlying power structures and regime type. Democratic objectives tend to be competitive elections through independent commissions, diverse representation through PR and quotas, accountability through geographic representation, and stable, fair rules generally. Authoritarian objectives tend to be controlled competition through candidate vetting, elite control through strategic appointments, a legitimacy appearance through elections whose outcomes are still managed, and flexible rules changed whenever it benefits the regime.