The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1977

Abstract

In an earlier article in this Journal (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, V (1975), 363–83) we argued that in elections generally the critical concern of political party leaders is not how many votes they may amass. Instead, they need to be concerned with how many votes of those they receive they are actually able to use to elect candidates. It matters little if party A wins Constituency 1 by thousands of votes if it then loses Constituencies 2 and 3 by only a handful. While we suggested that the concept of the used vote that we devised might have more relevance to the Continental electoral systems than to the British and American systems, it also has some application in the latter cases as well.