Saturday, March 24

Is Queensland a Democracy?

This is slighty off-topic, but it's election week here in Queensland. I had a look over some recent election figures, and wondered if we really get what we vote for.

Here is a list of parties comparing their percentage of the vote, and the percent of seats won in the post-election parliament.


2001 is probably the worst (from a fariness point of view). Kind of makes me wonder how democratic my state really is. surely there's a better system we could move to. One where the parliament represents the vote.

For maths nerds, there is a thing called the Gallagher Index. The higher the rating, the less the result reflects the proprtion of voting. 0 represents a perfect election, the New Zealand elections come in about 1. Queensland's 2001 election was over 20.

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UPDATE: On the preliminary figures below, it looks like this election was over 30 on the Gallagher index.

Preliminary figures:
LNP - 50% vote - 88% seats
Labor - 27% vote - 8% seats
KAP - 12% vote - 2% seats
Greens - 8% vote - 0% seats
Independents - 5% vote - 2% seats

UPDATE 2: Image from Election analyst Antony Green.

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