In 1981, the Nationalist Party won more votes nationally but Labour won more seats and formed the government — the constitutional crisis that triggered the 1987 reform.
Where this was said
At 43:50 · chapter starts 40:20
David Grech turns to Malta's most recently introduced electoral innovation: the gender-balancing mechanism that can add up to eight additional women to parliament after an election if the natural result produces insufficient female representation. He explains the mechanics: after the election, the parties identify female candidates who narrowly missed election, rank them by what percentage of the district quota they achieved (not raw vote totals), and the highest-ranked are elevated to parliament as additional members. He walks through the 2022 application of the mechanism, noting that some women achieved 12–14% of the district quota and were elevated on that basis. Jon then raises the critical objection: by creating a separate track for women who enter parliament through the mechanism, the law arguably discriminates against women who ran in the main election but lost — and also against men in comparable positions, who have no equivalent corrective route. David engages seriously with this tension, acknowledging it is a genuine ideological conflict between corrective equality of outcome and formal equality of process, and noting that courts in Malta and Europe have been asked to adjudicate similar questions.
In 1981 the Nationalist Party won more votes nationally but Labour won more seats and formed the government. The resulting constitutional crisis led directly to the 1987 amendment that introduced the bonus-seat mechanism — a constitutional guarantee that the party with the most votes always controls parliament.
The constitutional bonus-seat mechanism awarded Labour nine extra seats in 2013 and seven extra seats in 2017 to ensure their parliamentary majority matched their popular vote majority.
Malta's constitutional correction mechanism — which awards bonus seats to ensure the party with the most votes also holds a parliamentary majority — has been in place since 1987 following a constitutional crisis.
After the election, eight women were added to parliament under the gender-balancing mechanism. They were ranked not by how many votes they received but by what percentage of the district quota they achieved — so a woman who got 14% of the quota in a large district ranked above one who got more absolute votes but a smaller percentage. The mechanism is corrective but also creates a secondary discrimination: women who ran in the main election are disadvantaged versus those added through the quota.
The gender-balancing mechanism introduced by the governing party added eight women to the Maltese parliament, selected by ranking their share of the quota achieved in their respective districts.
Cave paintings discovered in the Chauvet Cave in southern France date back 37,000 years to the early Paleolithic period, showing that humans sought transcendence beyond survival even then.
Friedrich Nietzsche collapsed into madness after collapsing in Italy upon seeing a horse being beaten, spending the final 10 years of his life as an insane man — Greene's example of the daemon taken too far.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were ancient Greek rituals lasting thousands of years that initiated participants — including the greatest thinkers of antiquity — into an experience of death and rebirth that Greene says makes Burning Man look trivial.
By his own account, Giacomo Casanova slept with over 120 women and contracted venereal disease 11 times — a life of extreme aesthetic indulgence that ended in total isolation.
Joel de la Garza noted that the CISO role is a relatively recent invention, with Steve Katz widely credited as the first-ever CISO.
Superficial adoption of electricity gave factories only 6% efficiency gains; fully redesigning factories around it delivered a 3x productivity improvement that powered 20th-century US growth.
Harold Ramis recounted that during Caddyshack filming, storms kept the cast cooped up in a Florida hotel for days, during which they partied and did drugs all day and night.
In the 1820s, China accounted for 25% of global economic output, making it the world's largest economic machine — a historical precedent for its current AI superpower ambitions.
66 Americans held hostage at the US Embassy in Iran were released after 444 days, within hours of Reagan's inauguration.
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