MALTA: STV IN A TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

Although STV is often held up as a voting system that maximizes voter choice and does not presuppose partisan candidacies, political parties play a key role in Malta and are firmly entrenched at every level of electoral politics, including the mass public. There are virtually no formal barriers that impede candidacies by independents or third parties, yet only two, the Nationalist Party (PN) and the Malta Labor Party (MLP) have been represented in parliament for the past thirty years. In the Maltese setting, STV primarily serves to allow for competition within parties. The incidence of cross-party transfers is minimal. The two major parties routinely over-nominate. Even though the system is highly proportional, a minor deviation in the vote-seat ratio led to a major political crisis in 1981, when a party whose candidates had received an absolute majority of first-preference votes wound up as a loser in parliamentary representation. The ensuing impasse was resolved through a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that the party winning the popular (i.e. first-preference) vote will form the Government, by giving it a