Embodying Trust in the Electoral System

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method for distributing votes in democratic elections in such a way that allows for the public to put their trust in independent candidates or those from small political parties. Using the case of a party founded by the authors called The Pluralist Party the paper presents primary data to evaluate the effectiveness of the method – called delegated transferable voting (DTV). Using an auto-ethnographical empirical study in which one of the authors plays a significant role as anthropologist, the paper finds that DTV is more likely to lead to the election of independent candidates over party political ones. Pluralism advocates the election of those who are independent of political party whips in order to best represent the people. The election of independent candidates or small parties is a model of pluralism that can achieve this. The empirical study, through investigating the campaigning methods used by The Pluralist Party, shows that putting effort into an election – whether money, materials or labour and however funded – can improve outcomes for political parties. Making use of official government data in addition to the collected data showed that a higher number of votes for the Pluralist Party was associated with a higher education level, more rooms in a household, a lower number of people not in education, employment or training, and a lower ‘knol,' which is a unit for measuring brain activity.