Closed List - Criticism

Criticism

Voting systems using a closed list employ a listing of candidates selected by the party. Whoever controls this list is in a crucial power-brokering role. Members (candidates) elected from the list are essentially in thrall to the list maker—their political survival depends on how high up the list their name appears, or whether it appears at all.

The party executive or party leader generally control the list, consequently closed-list systems transfer political power to the un-elected persons (strategists, delegates, party officials, etc.) who author the party's list of candidates. However, parties can mitigate this by using an internal vote of their members or an open primary to determine the ordering of the lists.

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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

    I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.
    Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)

    The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.
    George Steiner (b. 1929)