Abstract: Sri Lanka has been singularly unlucky in the election systems it has adopted over the years. Initially we had the First-past-the-post system used in Britain, whereby the country was divided into constituencies which elected members by a simple majority. Only a few constituencies had more than one member. This system was designed to ensure representation of different communities where they were mixed up together so that two separate constituencies would not have served the purpose. Thus, Akurana usually elected one Sinhala and one Muslim member, while Nuwara Eliya, which became a multi-member constituency for the 1977 election, had one representative each of the United National Party (UNP), the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC).
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-04-20
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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