Distributia mandatelor la alegerile parlamentare din noiembrie 2008

Abstract

The new electoral system used in parliamentary election in Romania in 2008 raised some questions about the allocation of mandates to candidates placed on 2nd, 3rd and even 4th place in their constituency. In my article I show what was the scale of this phenomenon and I argue that it is both a problem of categorizing the electoral system as well as a problem o apparently breaching one of Arrow’s condition: the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Finally, I explore in more detail one of the “irrelevant alternatives”, the size of the uninominal constituency.