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The focus of this research note is on the causes of imbalanced, if not indeed lopsided, election results that yield dominance within provincial legislatures. Two alternative areas of explanation are assessed here. The first relates to electoral system factors. Certainly, the single member plurality electoral system and its resulting disproportionality is a key part of the argument here. Yet this cannot be the whole story, not least because election results are not so lopsided in every province, nor indeed at the federal level. Thus what also will be assessed in this area are two other, related, aspects of elections: the total size of the assembly and the number of individual constituencies, as well as relevant party system factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there have been many analyses of the phenomenon of 'manufactured majorities', that is, those where a party wins a majority of seats on a minority of the popular vote, there has been much less analysis of situations where this party in fact comes in second in the popular vote. This article analyses such 'spurious majorities' by assessing all such outcomes in democratic parliamentary elections. Spurious majorities have essentially been a phenomenon of Commonwealth elections, especially in Australian states and to a lesser extent Canadian provinces. Spurious majorities tend to occur in two-and-a-half-party systems with relatively close vote totals between the two main parties, in elections that do not use party list proportional representation. They arise from both malapportionment and 'the equivalent of gerrymandering'. Despite their unfairness, spurious majorities have rarely led to substantive electoral system change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional analysis of European Parliament elections is that they have little to do with ‘Europe’ in the sense of pan‐European issues or mandates. This article will assess two contrasting hypotheses about such elections. The first approach is the classic model of these elections being second‐order elections with the expectation of an anti‐government swing vote. The second, alternative hypothesis is that these elections demonstrate the expression of anti‐integration sentiment. Such an expression, however, is more easily realised where there is a sui generis anti‐'European consensus’ party available. It will be shown that, for most member countries, one of the two competing explanatory models clearly fits better statistically than the other. Moreover, more of the fifteen member nations fit into the second model, where European Parliament elections are indeed about Europe in a broad philosophical sense. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]