Electoral system in the context of "Campaign finance"

An indirect election or hierarchical voting, is an election in which voters do not choose directly among candidates or parties for an office, but elect people who in turn choose candidates or parties. This electoral system is one of the oldest forms of elections and is used by many countries for heads of state (such as presidents), heads of government (such as prime ministers), and/or upper houses. It is also used for some supranational legislatures. The body that controls the federal executive branch (such as a cabinet) is in many countries elected indirectly by the head of government with exception of the directorial system. Upper houses, especially in federal republics, are often indirectly elected, either by the corresponding lower house or cabinet.

Positions that are indirectly elected may be chosen by a permanent body (such as a parliament) or by a special body convened solely for that purpose (such as an electoral college). An election can be partially indirect, for example in the case of indirect single transferable voting, where only eliminated candidates select other candidates to transfer their vote share to. Similarly, supranational legislatures can be indirectly elected by constituent countries' legislatures or executive governments.

Direct election is a system of choosing political officeholders in which the voters directly cast ballots for the persons or political party that they want to see elected. The method by which the winner or winners of a direct election are chosen depends upon the electoral system used. The most commonly used systems are the plurality system and the two-round system for single-winner elections, such as a presidential election, and plurality block voting and proportional representation for the election of a legislature or executive.

By contrast, in an indirect election, the voters elect a body which in turn elects the officeholder in question. In other settings, politicians and office holders are appointed.

Voting is the process of choosing one or more officials or representatives by casting an oral vote or a ballot, a document that formally expresses voter's preference or preferences as to whom should be elected or whom the voter likes and thinks has best chance to be elected. Voting can also be used to decide on policy usually by a majority but sometimes a super-majority is required. In Republics and representative democracies, a portion of the population votes to choose representative government members.

Electoral systems, the procedure for converting votes cast into winners, vary depending on both the country and the political office. In many countries organizations work to reform the election system, usually to make it fairer and ensure that as many votes as possible are used to elect the winners.

Anti-politics is a term used to describe opposition to, or distrust in, traditional politics. It is closely connected with anti-establishment sentiment and public disengagement from formal politics. Anti-politics can indicate practices and actors that seek to remove political contestation from the public arena, leading to political apathy among citizens; when used this way the term is similar to depoliticisation. Alternatively, if politics is understood as encompassing all social institutions and power relations, anti-politics can mean political activity stemming from a rejection of "politics as usual".

Anti-politics tends to focus on negative assessments of politicians and political elites by civic organisations, the media and citizens, whereas political apathy may involve disaffection with other elements of a political system, such as the electoral system or party system. Since the 2000s, increasing dissatisfaction with democracy has been a theme of scholarship in both the Americas and Europe, with some political scientists describing high levels of political antipathy as a 'crisis' which risks democratic deconsolidation. Anti-politics has become a key concept in accounts of political dysfunction in liberal democracies, typically dissatisfaction with politics and mistrust of politicians.

In welfare economics and social choice theory, a social welfare function—also called a social ordering, ranking, utility, or choice function—is a function that ranks a set of social states by their desirability. Each person's preferences are combined in some way to determine which outcome is considered better by society as a whole. It can be viewed as mathematically formalizing Rousseau's idea of a general will.

Social welfare functions are studied by economists as a way to identify socially optimal decisions, giving a procedure to rigorously define which of two outcomes should be considered better for society as a whole (e.g., to compare two different possible income distributions). They are also used by democratic governments to choose between several options in elections, based on the preferences of voters; in this context, a social choice function is typically referred to as an electoral system.

Social choice theory is a branch of welfare economics that extends the theory of rational choice to collective decision-making. Social choice studies the behavior of different mathematical procedures (social welfare functions) used to combine individual preferences into a coherent whole. It contrasts with political science in that it is a normative field that studies how a society can make good decisions, whereas political science is a descriptive field that observes how societies actually do make decisions. While social choice began as a branch of economics and decision theory, it has since received substantial contributions from mathematics, philosophy, political science, and game theory.

Real-world examples of social choice rules include constitutions and parliamentary procedures for voting on laws, as well as electoral systems; as such, the field is occasionally called voting theory. It is closely related to mechanism design, which uses game theory to model social choice with imperfect information and self-interested citizens.

Plurality voting is an electoral system in which the candidates in an electoral district who poll more than any other (that is, receive a plurality or relative majority) are elected.

Under single-winner plurality voting, and in systems based on single-member districts, plurality voting is called single member [district] plurality (SMP), which is occasionally known as "first-past-the-post". In plurality voting the leading candidate, whether or not they have a majority of votes, is elected. Under all but a few niche election systems, the most-popular are elected. But under systems that use ranked votes, vote tallies change and are compared at various times during the vote count process. Where votes are transferred, the system is not generally referred to as a plurality system.