A parliamentary vote is when voters choose their local Member of Parliament (MP). In most countries with this system, the person who gets the most votes in each constituency becomes the MP.
After a general election, the Sovereign asks the leader of the party with the most seats to form a government that will run the country. This person is known as the Prime Minister. If no party wins a majority of seats, the parties usually enter into coalition governments with other parties.
In the United Kingdom, general elections to the UK Parliament (which are called a ‘General Election’) take place every 5 years. There are 650 Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected using the ‘first past the post’ electoral system.
The most senior people in a government are called Ministers and they work in different departments in the executive. The Prime Minister appoints these Ministers and they attend Cabinet meetings. If a new government does not win a majority of seats in the House of Commons, it is described as ‘a hung parliament’.
In some parliamentary systems the MPs are chosen from individual constituencies, while in others they are chosen by using a party list. Some systems combine the two, for example West Germany after World War II pioneered a hybrid system called’mixed-member proportional’ (MMP) where some of the MMP representatives are elected from single-member districts while other are from party lists. This ensures that the number of seats that parties receive in MMP is more or less proportional to the overall percentage of votes they get nationally.