The UK is having a referendum soon on whether to change their voting system, from First Past the Post (FPTP) to Alternative Vote (AV). Under the latter system, you get to give some kind of preference statement, so if you are e.g. faced with a choice of Stalin, Hitler or George W. Bush but Bush isn’t so popular, you can vote 1 Bush and then vote 2 Stalin, thus ensuring that the genocidal maniac doesn’t get in[1]. Actually, I’m not sure if that is the correct description of AV, but I don’t really care about that so much, because this post is about the things that the British are not debating.
AV is a furphy in the debate over British election procedure, because the British have a much bigger problem: they don’t have compulsory voting, and they hold their election on Tuesdays. So only 3 people get to vote, but the people pushing this referendum are worried about improving the ability of those 3 people to have their choice represented.
What’s the best analogy for this kind of idiocy? It’s like you’re shuffling around the deckchairs on the Titanic, but your main worry is whether you should be shuffling the leather ones or the plush ones. Of course, both the leather ones and the plush ones come from the first class lounge, but nobody gives a flying fuck, because you’re all about to drown.
In Australia, of course, we have figured this problem out. Not only do we hold our elections on a Saturday, but voting is compulsory. If you are enrolled to vote, it is illegal not to vote, you have to turn up and if you don’t turn up you are fined $50 (I think – it could be more now, inflation in Australia is pretty bad at the moment). You can write a letter of excuse, but claiming “I’m an anarchist” doesn’t cut it (I know this, a friend tried it). It is by this yardstick that one is able to judge that there are only two truly civilized countries in the whole world – Australia and Turkey (the only other democracy that understands the importance of eliminating sampling bias).
Now I know that (some of) my reader(s) is (are) American, and so while you’re chomping away on your Freedom Fries and reading this, you’re probably thinking … wtf? Civilized!! But… they took away my freedom! And here’s the thing… you don’t deserve the freedom not to vote. That’s it. You should have that freedom taken from your cold, dead ballot box. You should be marched at gunpoint to the polling booth and forced to choose between two old white men[5]. When you choose not to vote, you choose not to participate in the most fundamental aspect of our modern political system. It’s like choosing not to wipe your arse (literally, in most elections). Friends don’t let friends do this sort of thing. You don’t get to tune in and turn off, not over this. And not only that – society, through the only means by which it can tell you what it thinks (the law, as promulgated by government) needs to tell you that we care what you think. And we’re willing to spank you to make you tell us – it’ll hurt us more than it hurts you. When people are given the choice to switch off of this process, the result is that the sample of the population from which the government is formed is no longer representative – it’s highly unlikely that the 45% of voters who chose not to participate in Britain’s last election were missing completely at random, and whatever bias infects that non-vote is represented in the smug visage of Nick Clegg fap-fapping around the country to tell us all about AV. The only way to ensure that the government represents the will of the people accurately is to force the people to vote.
Now, I know what you’re thinking as you reach for your gun, and look out the window for the unmarked helicopters. You’re thinking that even if people are marched to the poll-booth at gunpoint (or the end of a $50 fine), they will still cast an invalid vote, and so all you’ve done is waste half an hour of their life[6]. But this is not what happens in reality. If one views the wikipedia description of Democracy in its Purest Form (the 2007 Australian federal election), one will note that in addition to a 95% voter turnout, only 4% of voters cast informal votes. You can just feel the resentment oozing out of the page, can’t you? The evidence here is that in the most apathetic country on earth[7], forcing people to vote results in them… voting. Even though under Australia’s complex preference system, it’s really really easy to cast an informal vote by accident (you just have to put a 2 next to “Wake Up Australia” and “Wake Up Australia Queensland Reform Splinter 2” on your ballot paper). So, the evidence is that people who are forced to vote figure they might as well make their morning march worthwhile, and cast a vote that, you know, changes the country they live in.
So, those of you who are contemplating the AV referendum (or Americans who haven’t even got that far), contemplate that set of numbers – 95% turnout, 4% informal voting – and think about whether you’re being presented with a reasonable constitutional change, or a complete sideshow. First, you need to focus on fixing the basics. You need:
- Elections to be held on Saturdays
- Compulsory voting
- A democratically elected upper house [admittedly, this doesn’t apply to Americans]
Once you’ve figured out those fundamental principles of democracy, maybe then you can worry about extending preference choices to all the people who currently can’t be bothered voting at all. But, you know, you have to learn to crawl before you can walk[8].
As you were.
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fn1: Note from this example I am implying that I think Bush was not as bad as Hitler or Stalin[2]. Bleeding-heart leftist my arse[3]!
fn2: Though also, I’m officially Weighing in on The Debate, in favour of Stalin.
fn3: Note the British English spelling, which enables me to distinguish between your face, dear reader, and a donkey[4]
fn4: I’m not even drunk as I write this!
fn5: or a very old, crazy white man and a young, handsome black man who will go on to win the nobel peace prize before he’s even sat in his chair, and prove his authority to own that prize by escalating a war in a foreign country and ordering his soldiers to execute their captives in cold blood
fn6: though they do, usually, get a free sausage
fn7: Actually, Australians like to make this claim about ourselves but the evidence is, in every aspect of life, that we aren’t apathetic at all, but are quite energetic and creative and focussed
fn8:Apparently this isn’t true, and there is a proportion of babies who progress directly from lying on their backs doing nothing to walking
Compromise and Conceit 
May 6, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Seriously? I don’t quite get where Australians get this idea that compulsory voting is some how superior to non-compulsory voting. Every politically engaged Australian I’ve ever met has this smug, self-satisfied notion about it.
And I’ll assume that when you refer to a democratically elected Upper House, you’re talking about the UK. Not saying that unicameral parliaments aren’t democracy?
Now, when Australia gets smart and introduces proper proportional representation, say along the lines of the Pride of the Pacific (or MMP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_New_Zealand) then we can talk.
May 6, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Nick, are you a New Zealander? New Zealand definitely has a superior way of calculating the vote result than we do, and kiwis are right to find Australians smug, because in general we are (about things we do well). But I don’t think you can say that proportional representation by itself is a good thing. The question is what it is proportionately representative of. Compulsory voting is superior to non-compulsory voting because it forces the government selection method to be based on an unbiased sample of the population, rather than a biased sample. This is why I think AV/FPTP debates are a furphy. You need your government to be formed from a good, not a bad sample. It’s worth noting that the main reason people will choose not to vote in a non-compulsory system is that there is a cost associated with the process of voting. For British manual labourers and lower working class people, typically this cost is quite high – they need to take a day off, or arrange postal voting ahead – while for professionals it’s low (they can pop out of the office). This creates a sample strongly biased towards the wealthy and educated. It wouldn’t matter if the system worked the other way, though, and created a bias towards the unemployed and housewives; government should be decided on the basis of the opinions of everyone in (eligible) society, not just those for whom the decision is convenient. And you may think this is their lookout, not a problem for society as a whole, but democracy is not about giving only a voice to those people you think deserve it, or who show they deserve it. It’s about representing the people. Your vote is not yours alone…
… which is why I think a lot of the misunderstandings about the superior “freedom” of non-compulsory voting arise from the simple misconception of voting as an individual right. It’s not an individual right, because it’s meaningless if it’s not supported by society and the government. Your vote is meaningless if others don’t cast theirs; your vote is disenfranchised to some extent if you prefer to vote for a party whose supporters are more likely to be unable to vote than are opponents of your party. Similarly your right to vote is meaningless without good protections of freedom of assembly and association, and a free press. Voting is the ultimate social act, and like all rights that derive primarily from the correct behaviour of others, it requires legal impetus and sanctions to work properly. Other examples of this are jury duty, workplace safety laws, and of course road safety laws. No one would support the concept of voluntary jury duty, would they? And Australians of course famously support random breath testing to maintain road safety.
Of course, the “cost” of impeding your right to stay home and wank to Kylie Minogue videos instead of voting is … well, it’s almost non-existent. Whatever you were going to do that morning can wait, no doubt, and if you really think it’s more important than a $50 fine you are welcome to take the fine. But note that very few people do, and there really are a lot of things that people are willing to pay $50 to do; so this suggests that once a small cost is levied on the decision not to participate in an election, people assign a great deal of importance to the decision to participate. So what, exactly, makes non-compulsory voting superior?
The other big concern some people have is that making voting compulsory doubly disadvantages those who can’t take time off work to vote, because not only can they not vote, but they get fined. If this is a concern, then surely having your election on Tuesday (as the British do) is a crazy idea? In any case, once one makes an activity compulsory it is much easier to pass strong laws supporting the process, e.g. laws that make it illegal to punish people who take time off to vote, making postal or pre-voting easy, etc. We see this with compulsory education – if the state demands you should be educated, it is also expected to make this education easily available to you.
Regarding the unelected upper house, I’m being kind of cute here by suggesting it’s undemocratic (I know the British system is more complex than that!) But I do think there’s something to be said for prioritizing reform of this (which the Labour party put off for years!). Also, while I agree that a unicameral parliament is democratic, you can’t be half democratic, and any system where you have a unicameral parliament whose decisions are subject to review by an unelected body runs the risk of being undemocratic. e.g. Iran (and I suppose I should add here that I don’t see the UK and Iranian systems as equivalent; but Iran has an elected parliament with an unelected review panel, and is rightly decried for this i.e. presence of an elected parliament may be necessary for democracy, but it isn’t sufficient).
(Though incidentally I think there are reasons to prefer a bicameral parliament, especially to do with review powers in the Upper House. And part of the reason Australia isn’t interested in ditching it’s preferential voting system in favour of proportional representation is probably that we have proportional representation in our Upper House, and it is explicitly cast as a house of review, which puts checks on the single-member system of the lower house. This creates inertia in favour of not changing the lower house).
May 6, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Voting in the US is not mandatory, but it is a civic responsibility.
There are so many avenues for voting in the US that someone who does not vote is either ignorant of an election at hand or is too lazy show up.
If popular media is any indication of the preferences of the ‘majority’, I might have to move to another country if they made voting mandatory.
May 6, 2011 at 11:02 pm
Not voting is a vote. It says: I don’t care which party wins. A perfectly valid position to take.
The only thing is, if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t get to complain about the result. (I had friends protesting about a British Nationalist member getting elected to the European Parliament – even though they themselves HAD NOT BOTHERED TO VOTE IN THE ELECTION.)
Personally I find this whole debate pretty dry. There is no crisis in British democracy; we do okay. The current system has problems but no voting system is perfect, and change for change’s sake is pretty stupid.
May 7, 2011 at 6:42 am
Well. I just went through my first election in Canada, which basically copies British practice (although the election was on a Monday not a Tuesday.
I have to say from an Australian perspective that FPTP (and the British have just rejected the AV referendum and in effect endorsed FPTP) is a completely retarded system, and no one in their right mind could endorse it (unless they place the welfare of their chosen party ahead of the welfare of their country). Here, the Conservative Party of Canada managed to elect 54% of the MP’s on 39.5% of the vote. And they call it democracy.
As to compulsary voting, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there- Australia suffers because its political class has to appeal to every bogan, retard and inbred in the country. I see the ‘theoretical’ point on how having everyone vote is a ‘good thing’ but in practice…. not so much!
I suspect that the reason political debate in Canada isn’t as racist and debased as it is in Australia is because the racist bogans don’t vote.
Anyway, what do the Japanese do in these matters?
May 7, 2011 at 8:25 am
One variation I’d prefer from your idea is explicitly providing a “Stuff you all” option on a mandatory ballot form. It’d allow people who really don’t care to say as much via their ballot box, contingent on the fact that not caring doesn’t mean ” I can complain later”, it means “Ehh, whatever, I’m to apathetic or stupid to cast a vote”.
This option should be available, and should be first on the ballot form, as even in Australia there is an assumption that being first on the ballot form is worth a couple of percent in the election due to people who donkey vote [1]. That moves your 4% who don’t vote a couple of percent higher, but I’d agree it’s still lots more than 90% of people who cast a valid vote that has at least taken the time to decide they have a tribal hatred of the other guys [5].
I can appreciate (and feel quite a bit of sympathy) the argument that mandatory voting impinges on the freedom of people to not care, but I can reconcile myself with the loss of options by giving those same people an easy way to tell the political/commentary class to stick it up their ass [6].
“fn4: I’m not even drunk as I write this!”
I can only imagine the bile that would have spewed forth if you were and marvel in awe at your linguistic distain for others 😉
“when Australia gets smart and introduces proper proportional representation, say along the lines of the Pride of the Pacific”
I’ve got to say that reading the Wikipedia entry I couldn’t see the major point of difference except that Australia uses proportional voting in the Senate at a state level, which matters a bit more for Australia given the presence of state governments and the ability that would otherwise be given to Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane to tell the rest of the country to drop dead. If you can explain in more detail how it was different I’m all ears. The Australian upper house preferential system should give the same result as a proportional system by my quick thoughts on the maths, save that you are able to express a second preference if your first misses the quota requirement.
Is it that the Local and proportional representatives in NZ both sit in the same house?
Doesn’t NZ also have some system that reserves a certain number of sees for people who can claim Maori descent?
“You need your government to be formed from a good, not a bad sample.”
I do love how the mathematician joins with the anarchist to provide the correct definition of “good sample”. Not that Faustus bothers spelling it out. The definition is of course “When it agrees with me (but doesn’t elect Gordon Brown), it’s a good sample.”
“then surely having your election on Tuesday (as the British do) is a crazy idea?”
I’d actually introduce a related topic here that absentee and postal voting in the UK should be changed to be much easier too. The current system is willing to send me a voting form via Royal Mail, on election day, which I must return with 7 days of the election for it to be counted. Given I live in Australia, the odds of Royal Mail successfully moving the mail outside the bounds of Greater London within the timeframe are basically zero.
“As to compulsary voting, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there- Australia suffers because its political class has to appeal to every bogan, retard and inbred in the country. I see the ‘theoretical’ point on how having everyone vote is a ‘good thing’ but in practice…. not so much!”
I’ve got to disagree with this. Optional voting makes “getting out the base” even more important, but then makes political parties cater to their own fringes. We can see the result of that in the US with the Republicans drift towards the Right Wing based on chasing not a broad group of Right Wing votes, but a narrow group that are more likely to vote in disproportionate numbers (compared to the general populace).
“Australians like to make this claim about ourselves but the evidence is, in every aspect of life, that we aren’t apathetic at all, but are quite energetic and creative and focussed”
I just want to finish by saying that we absolutely are an apathetic people and I’ll hunt anyone who says otherwise to the ends of the Earth to prove my point!
[1] A donkey vote is voting 1, 2, 3, 4, etc down the ballot form. It’s the fastest one to enter and is used by people too stupid to realise you can either a) just not write anything/spoil the paper [2], b) provide a really lame excuse (i.e. my dog was sick) or by people who happen to want to vote for candidates in that order [3]
[2] Fun fact: A ballot form is probably the ultimate form of free speech in Australia. You can write whatever you want on there, and (to my knowledge) no one is allowed (or able) to track back from the ballot paper to the individual as that’d kinda spoil the point of a secret ballot. Of course, like most forms of free speech, being able to use it doesn’t mean anyone gives a shit. [4]
[3] So you can’t just discard such votes.
[4] Though I know that in uni elections, the counters/observers best fun comes from the vitrolic essays that some people write on the ballot form.
[5] And isn’t that what politics is all about?
[6] Here, I’m allowing the voters and politicians freedom to decide which entities hole the message recipients should file the message in.
May 7, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Noisms, I think a “crisis” for democracy generally derives from the legitimacy of the political class, or their actions in securing their power, not from the means of selecting them (except in the most extreme cases), but there is a problem in democracy in the UK, and it’s significant. The problem is twofold: the single-member representative system entrenches parties with a regional base over those with broad but low-level national support (which is common in the modern era for alternative parties); and the lack of preference allocations disenfranchises people who prefer a minor party, since the single-member system forces them to vote tactically (i.e. against their personal preference) but denies them the chance to express their own preference at any point. This is taken to its most ludicrous extreme in the Canadian elections this weekend, where 60% of people voted left wing but a right-wing party is ruling the country. AV is not a panacaea for this problem, but it helps a lot.
The problem that Britain faces, more than Canada or Australia, is that the people currently being disenfrachised by the system are largely people like my Dad – people who vote for UKIP or the parties even further to the right of them, who currently cannot get representation except in a small area of the South west or (very occasionally) Birmingham, where the BNP got up (it was Birmingham, right?) If Britain introduces a system that weakens the effect of regional support on voter representation, then UKIP will win big. On top of that, people who currently vote Tory when their real preference is UKIP/BNP will express their first preference, leading to no short term change in Tory representation but a long-term shift to the far right. One thing that is often said about preference-allocation systems is that they force the major parties to listen to the politics of that part of the community on their fringes (so Labour has to listen to the hard/far/green left; Tories have to outflank the far right). A shift to AV in the UK would mean a rightward and anti-European shift for both major parties, as they attempt to respond to the preference flows of the BNP and UKIP. It would also, potentially, mean UKIP holding the balance of power in the lower house. That’s a scary thought for a lot of the British political establishment, I think.
Not that this would have stopped my Dad from choosing FPTP in the referendum – if there’s one thing you can guarantee about the British lumpen proletariat, it’s that they will always vote against their own interests!
May 7, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Scott, I don’t think I can agree with you that Australian political debate is racist and debased. I don’t know how it compares to Canada, but I don’t see it, personally. It is certainly true that the political parties have to appeal to every inbred bogan retard, but then – shouldn’t they? It is a democracy, right, and even the arseholes have the right to representation. Again we come back to the issue of individual vs. group rights – if you don’t want the retards and bogans to influence politics in the UK, you find ways to discourage them from voting. In Australia you have to change their minds. You have to engage in a political debate over important issues, and in Australia these important issues are very much in the public consciousness because of preferential compulsory voting. In the UK the major parties could afford to look the other way from UKIP and the BNP because they know these people are disenfranchised, but this doesn’t work in Australia because they can express a preference, and if you don’t pay attention to their politics their preferences will bite you on the arse. This is why in the 80s and 90s the Australian Labor Party (ALP) attempted to engage the debate about indigenous rights directly; it’s the reason that the conservatives engaged with multiculturalism in the 70s. You see these debates being held very publicly, but that doesn’t mean the debate itself is “debased and racist” – it means that it’s happening in public.
Paul, I think the difference between proportional voting (PV) in NZ and Australia’s preferential voting system is that PV liberates the electorate from regional power bases. Under PV Australia would be ruled by a permanent left-wing coalition[1], because the Greens would get representation in the lower house equal to their vote share (averaging 12% over the past 8 years, right?) and the Nationals would lose most of their seats (back to a level representative of their 5%). Although those figures depend on whether PV includes preferences (maybe it doesn’t have to?) It would certainly kill the rural gerrymander for once and for all, and lead to the institutionalization of coalition politics – though it may be that this is going to happen anyway in Australia now that we’ve seen the two-party deadlock broken.
I also agree with Paul about the “none of the above” option (though I think practically it’s not really necessary) and I think some estimates have been made of the donkey vote figures and they aren’t high. And I agree that non-compulsory voting does increase the temptation for base mobilization, which is enormously destructive for whatever political party happens to have the crazy base – in America, the Republicans, and I think in the UK in the 70s and 80s most people saw the Labour Party as having a hard left base. We also see a lot of bias introduced into elections in the US depending on who is willing to fund a big get-out-the-vote drive. In the Japanese election (linked to above) it was the electoral commission; in recent US politics it has been largely highly-funded non-state agents for the left. Is a political culture where non-party agents are campaigning to get out the vote on one side of the fence, and the party is frenziedly chasing its craziest members on the other side of the fence really a good political culture? I don’t think it is.
—
fn1: I know, these predictions are meaningless
May 7, 2011 at 1:46 pm
Hmm, in that I don’t think the NZ system would work for Australia. One of the founding principles of the country was that a bicameral legislature would provide a check and balance on the power of the more populated states. Of course, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t adjust the NZ system to simply be bicameral as well, in which case there’s no reason it wouldn’t work [1].
I don’t agree we’ve seen the end of the two party system in Australia. Given Abbot’s current polling numbers we may be seeing a blip that leads into a conservative “Golden Age” [2]. Alternatively it the Greens do continue to get lower house seats [3], then we’re more likely to see the Greens become a permanent coalition partner, the same way the Nationals are. Certainly that would match their current alliance with Gillard.
Either way, the Green’s presence is likely to pull Labour to the left based on Labours well know preference for winning, regardless of whether the outcome of that victory is a good thing. For example, if Labour and the Greens did a deal that Labour would move right and the Greens would clean up the left wing votes then the Liberals would be stuffed, but Labour would sooner bomb inner city Australian suburbs than allow “their” seats to go to another party (even if they did share policy positions).
[1] Though it may take two or three elections for the general populace to understand how it works and fill in the form correctly. I’m generally stunned at the level of ignorance some Australians bring to the political process. “Howard? He was Labour, right?”
[3] Which Civilisation teaches us would give the Liberals a bonus to production and morale for their nation
[3] And it appears that the Liberals have developed tactics that ensure they either don’t, or only get them at Labour’s expense while simultaneously boosting the Liberal vote
May 8, 2011 at 5:32 am
I dunno Faustus, I try to watch television from Australia but for the most part I get Insiders from the ABC and the Today show from Nein. Watching too much Karl Stephanovic is corrosive to the soul and breeds cynicism; I mean, the guy was rooting for Pauline Hanson at the NSW elections and he wins the Gold Logie? The Australian media bring out the worst of our people. But since our voting system won’t be changing it’s a bit of a moot point anyway.
My wife had a good laugh about the whole Logie Awards thing.
Paul, the whole Green/ALP thing sort of played out here with the Liberal Party of Canada vs the New Democrats. What basically happened was that the right half of the Liberals deserted to the Conservatives and many of the Left decamped to the New Democrats. Preferential voting would have made a considerable difference to the outcome of the Canadian election and all Australians should thank the Deity of Choice we have it.
May 8, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Scott, Chris Uhlmann is a notorious repeater of the political position of the Australian, an interestingly named newspaper given it’s a money-burning toxic waste pit for the political views of a certain American media mogul. And yes, the media are a big problem for our political system. On balance though I’m not sure that Britain is doing any better, their tabloid newspapers (especially the Daily Mail) are poison for any political process.
May 8, 2011 at 7:15 pm
I’m going to sound harsh and disrespectful here (what else is new?) but I don’t necessarily feel like crying into my cornflakes over the fact that parties with “broad but low-level national support” get under-represented in the UK parliament. The only such party in existence is really the Liberal Democrats, who are an awful, pathetic group of whingers who pretty much sum up everything that is wrong with modern life. They stand for nothing and have survived for decades on merely being the “protest vote” for people who are sick of the Tories and Labour. If they can’t garner anything more than “broad but low-level support” it’s because they have no policies or principles worth a damn and can’t convince large numbers of people in any given constituency to vote for them.
In fact right now I’m feeling particularly gleeful about their imminent demise. For years and years they had the luxury of being able to spout whatever populist gibberish they liked, safe in the knowledge they would never be elected and have their policies actually face close scrutiny. Now they’re sharing power they’ve been exposed in the cold light of day for what they really are: a bunch of sandal-wearing lentil-eating opportunists who stand for nothing except trying to be nice.
Bit of a rant there, but I really do despise the Lib Dems!
I also don’t get this notion that FPTP “denies” people the chance to express their preferences. It doesn’t. Every vote gets counted – it’s not as if UKIP and Green Party ballot papers all get thrown on a big bonfire without even being looked at. In my opinion people need to be educated about how voting really works – they need to understand that the worth of their own individual vote is practically indistinguishable from being meaningless: no election ever comes down to just one vote. Once they get that into their heads they will realise that tactical voting is a farce – because it’s all based on the false premises that individual votes actually matter. If people approach voting with the understanding that their individual vote has only nugatory significance, they’ll realise it makes no difference whether they personally vote for UKIP or Labour or the Monster Raving Loony Party. So they might as well vote for the party they like.
This is politically unpalatable because nobody wants to inform the electorate that they, individually, really don’t have an effect on anything at all. But it would solve the disenfrachisement/tactical voting problem instantaneously.
May 8, 2011 at 10:30 pm
Noisms, I’m sadly torn here, because while I want to tell you that your rant is an anti-democratic screed, I too would like to see nothing more than the destruction of the Lib Dems, though I disagree with the “lentil-eating” part of your description. I suspect all the lentil-eaters have long since moved to the Greens (a party of actual principles[1]) and been replaced by baby-eaters like Nick Clegg. I think it’s an open question whether the destruction of democracy is a price worth paying in order to see the end of the Lib Dems – but at least some portion of the 61% of voters who said “NO” were thinking “Fuck you, Nick!” on Saturday.
I think your analysis of modern electoral politics is fundamentally flawed for two reasons, though. Here they are, and I’m sure you’re desperate to hear them…
1) about “broad low-level support.” The modern world is different to the time period in which modern “democracy”[2] in Britain was founded. Back then, with communication what it was (unless you believe my Dad’s stories about the Royal Mail 50 years ago, and its ability to zap letters to you at the speed of light), single-member systems were essential for political representation and tribal politics was important (localism! localism! localism! – it’s the constant refrain of modern conservatives). However, in the modern era other modes[3] of political organization and identity have developed, and it’s not a sufficient response to dismiss “low-level, broad support” as a form of genuine and legitimate political interest. For example, in Australia and NZ a minority of the population are indigenous, with serious and legitimate concerns about political and workplace discrimination, property rights and the teaching of history. They are united by a common cause[4] but will never achieve a powerful regional base like, say, the agrarian socialists whose political legacy they suffer under. In the UK there are no doubt similar movements. There are also other political movements based around, say, youth rights, expat rights, or issues of climate change and environmentalism which necessarily don’t derive from a single geographical base. In the modern era, the regional power of the established political parties is itself an anachronism, being preserved by a political system developed by those two major parties. Now, I understand the position that we shouldn’t rush into changing things for the sake of it, but this position is very different to recognizing that the world has changed and consideration has to be given to a new political framework. Arguing that the single-member system of the 18-whatevers is appropriate for the modern era is on a par with arguing that the bible is a sufficient foundation for answering all moral questions. It’s not that the morality of the bible is necessarily insufficient, it’s just that our understanding of the world and our way of living is different.
2) about “no nugatory value.” I think here you underestimate ordinary peoples’ ability to judge their fellow citizens’ opinions (especially in the era of opinion polls!) and also neglect to consider the fundamentally social nature of voting. Everyone considers what everyone else will do when they vote. Hence the common phrase “I live in a safe [x] seat so my vote is wasted no matter what I do – so I voted on principle!” This is a perfectly rational assessment of the nugatory value of ones vote. Similarly, recognizing that you’re in a seat on a knife edge, and that voting on principle may allow a bastard in, is not stupid, it’s very sensible – but it’s not the best outcome for anyone concerned. FPTP leads to the obvious situation where, with three major parties, in every seat the Baby Eating Party has 34% of the vote, and wins government in a landslide even though only 34% of the voters support it. Or it leads to the ridiculous situation of the Eating Someone Else’s Babies party winning a landslide, because the Eating Your Babies Party voters voted tactically against the Baby Eating Party, delivering a landslide to the Eating Someone Else’s Babies Party even though they hate everything that party stands for. This is not representative in any meaningful sense of the word, but it derives from individuals understanding the nugatory power of their vote.
In short, voting is understood by the majority of voters as a social act, and rational judgments based on the nature of that act lead to perverse outcomes. The ideal approach is to make the system appropriate to the society that uses it (e.g. modern UK vs. the UK of 200 years ago, or whenever the “modern” system was invented) and to use the best possible system for reflecting the nature of peoples’ votes. Also, it should be based on an unbiassed sample of the population, and our best current means for getting this is compulsory voting.
I don’t think you’ll agree with this, but I think we can both agree that Nick Clegg is going down big time, and that’s great.
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fn1: I can’t really say this because I don’t know anything about the Greens. But I think it’s fair to say – and here I’m going to go out on a limb that someone is surely going to chop off – that given Nick Griffin’s willingness to destroy the BNP rather than give up on his beliefs, the BNP is more principled than the Lib Dems. Or maybe Nick Griffin is more principled than Nick Clegg. Or maybe everyone in politics whose name starts with “Nick” should be shot. Or maybe I’ve jumped the shark.
fn2: scare quotes here refer not to the particular system chosen, but to the fact that when “democracy” was founded in the UK it excluded women and those without land title, so was fundamentally not democratic in any genuine sense. See my post about continuity in Asian history for some thoughts on the legitimacy of democracy in the interwar period, based on its short history of genuine representation and longer history as a way of resolving disputes about the property rights of the ruling elite
fn3: sorry, I hate this word but couldn’t think of a better one. I was up until 6am at Tokyo Dark Castle and my house abuts a bus depot, so I haven’t had a great deal of sleep
fn4: Now there’s a gross exaggeration and misrepresentation if ever I wrote one…
May 30, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Paul, I think the difference between proportional voting (PV) in NZ and Australia’s preferential voting system is that PV liberates the electorate from regional power bases. Under PV Australia would be ruled by a permanent left-wing coalition[1], because the Greens would get representation in the lower house equal to their vote share (averaging 12% over the past 8 years, right?) and the Nationals would lose most of their seats (back to a level representative of their 5%). Although those figures depend on whether PV includes preferences (maybe it doesn’t have to?) It would certainly kill the rural gerrymander for once and for all, and lead to the institutionalization of coalition politics – though it may be that this is going to happen anyway in Australia now that we’ve seen the two-party deadlock broken.
Damn it, this is why you’re so irritating to argue with. You bring all sorts of assumptions to the table and expect me to find the evidence that you’re making stuff up in your head.
Your comment above is based on an assumption that there is a rural gerrymander that unfairly allocates power to the Nationals. But checking Wikipedia shows this isn’t the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_electoral_system#Gerrymandering_and_malapportionment
So under the NZ system, the Greens would pick up lower house seats, primarily at the expense of the abour party. In the current parliment (which is barely controlled by the left), then you’d probably have left wing control of the lower house. But through most of Howard’s years (when he had a sizeable lower house majority) it’d still be a right wing parliment.
So your dreams of Oz being a left wing fantasy land controlled under the farm boot of a rural system that keeps the workers down seems to be nonsense.
*Sigh* Now to read Locke’s First Treatise on Government 😦
May 30, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Actually I confused the meaning of gerrymaner. What I mean is that in single-member seats, if a politician has popularity in that single seat they can win a place in parliament, while in fact a politician or party with broad national popularity but no solid regional base cannot win. This is why the Nationals have (approx.) 8 seats in the lower house on 5% of the vote, while the Greens have 1 on 13% of the primary vote – and that 1 was partly good luck. I see this as an archaic remnant of a time before modern communications, and I think it holds back the development of parties that might otherwise find a natural constituency in the modern era – parties based on gay rights, expat/diaspora issues, or political issues like environmentalism and indigenous rights that transcend local boundaries.
I think actually under PV Howard would have been a 1 term PM, because recall in 1998 he won parliament without winning a majority of the two-party preferred vote, I think [this is all from memory] by a thin enough margin for the Nationals’ regional advantage to matter.
Of course, this type of argument is largely moot, because under a PV system people change their votes to reflect their understanding of the way their vote will be reflected at counting, and so existing primary/two-party preferred voting decisions aren’t a reliable judge. But if we look at the current primary votes (or at least as close to current as I can find with a 1 second effort) we get
labour 36.5%
Coalition 44.5%
Greens 13%
So if seats are assigned proportionately, the Coalition needs to increase its share of the primary vote to win office even though currently under PR it’s in a winning position – or, more likely, throw out Abbot, get back Turnbull, and go into coalition with the Greens. Imagine that – a Liberal/Green Coalition vs. a Labour/National Party coalition!
May 30, 2011 at 4:22 pm
For Howard and ’98, my memory is that John Hewson would have been a two term PM, given that Labour didn’t get the majority of the vote at the election prior to 1996.
Under pure PV you’d hav a parliment much like the current setup. The Libs/Nats would have power very rarely (once under Howard), Labour would never have power by itself and the usual situation would be the Greens/minor parties/independents having the balance of power (once upon a time it would have been Democrats).
Frnakly, I think that would focus a lot more attention on the Greens. That could play out either way. They do get a fair bit of their vote from the fact their a protest party that never has to deliver anything. That part of their vote may leave it they actually had any sway. But on the other hand if they had real influence then people may get to see that their policies and like them, so that would potentially drive their vote up.
For the Greens I think the best indicator we’ll have is at the next election. From the start of the new Senate they have a lot of sway. If their vote is higher at the next election presumably it’s because people like how they’ve been using that influence (or alternatively they just hate Gillard and Abbott more, but let’s think positive).