Another Andrew Coyne blog post on proportional representation

I better be careful about posting too many Andrew Coyne articles. People will start thinking that I’m in love with him or something. Either that or he decides to sue me for copyright infringement. But he is a strong supporter of electoral reform, proportional representation more specifically. And almost all of his thoughts on electoral reform make sense and mirror a lot of mine.

This time, Mr. Coyne is writing about how the current fiasco that we’re seeing in parliament is not indicative of what politics would be like under proportional representation (and BC-STV by extension). Politics would be more inclusive, civil and conciliatory compared to the childish mud-slinging that is actually encouraged under our first-past-the-post system which I talked a bit about in my "Why change to BC-STV?" post.

Different electoral system, different coalition

Andrew Coyne - Wed, Dec 10 2008

Against the notion, often found in the comments here, that the the last two weeks is just a preview of life under proportional representation, the folks at Fair Vote Canada offer a timely rebuttal. Recalculating the party standings as they would obtain under PR, they suggest a very different coalition would have emerged:

Most likely, the three people sitting at the front of the room at the recent coalition press conference would have been the Liberal leader representing an 81-member Liberal caucus, the NDP leader representing a 57-member NDP caucus and the Green Party leader representing a 23-member caucus. Assuming a proportionate assignment of portfolios, the resulting coalition cabinet might have been 13 Liberals, 8 NDP and 4 Greens.

The regional composition of the coalition would have been dramatically different. The coalition would have boasted about 43 MPs in the west, rather than just 21, and in Quebec 30 MPs rather than 14.

What about Mr. Duceppe? He would have been sitting on the opposition benches with just 28 Bloc MPs, rather than the 49 he has today that give him the power to pull the plug on a federal government.

Of course, even this is misleading, since elections held under PR would not just spit out the same parties with different seat-counts, but more and different parties, with different electoral bases — less regional, more ideological — and different incentives. For example, Green voters today go to the polls in the certain knowledge that they will elect no one. How many more people would vote Green if they knew their votes would actually count?

In other words, the present instability and division is not a reflection of what would obtain under PR, but is rather a direct consequence of the anomalies of first past the post:

A fair voting system would also have provided a more stable and effective government. The expiry date on the proposed coalition is three years at best and more likely less than two years. Because first-past-the-post voting allows a relatively small shift in support to produce a windfall of seats for one party or another, the current system subverts stable and effective government.

“Today the parties’ spin-meisters are working hard to divide voters into warring camps and pit entire regions against one another,” said Larry Gordon, Executive Director of Fair Vote Canada. “When careers in Ottawa are on the line, country be damned. Will Canadians turn on one another rather than the real culprits? Or are we finally fed up with this madness and the old-guard party leaders who defend an electoral system that serves their own interests but not those of the voters?”

Fair Vote Canada is calling on Liberal, Conservative, NDP and Green voters to stand together – call it a people’s coalition – to demand equal and effective votes for all and legitimate majority rule for Canada.

Pie in the sky? An Angus Reid poll released today suggests not:

Following two weeks of political turmoil in Ottawa, Canadians are taking a second look at their existing electoral regulations, and almost half of them believe the implementation of a proportional representation system would be good for the country, a new Angus Reid Strategies poll has found.

In the online survey of a representative national sample, 33 per cent of respondents believe the current first-past-the-post system, where candidates win seats by getting more votes than any other rival in a specific constituency, is the best one for Canada. However, 47 per cent of Canadians would be open to trying different guidelines.

Almost three-in-ten (28%) would switch to a proportional representation system, where parties win seats in accordance with their share of the national vote, and one-in-five (19%) prefer a mixed- member proportional voting system, which would allocate some seats on a constituency basis, and others by proportional representation.

More thoughts on proportional representation from Andrew Coyne

This was a blog post from Andrew Coyne’s own blog on Maclean’s Magazine’s website. The article was mainly written to discuss whether the coalition that was proposed by the Liberals/NDP/Bloc Quebecois would actually be a good idea; but at the end (I highlighted it in red) he also provides a good synopsis of how minority governments would be much different, much more stable, and much, much, more conciliatory under proportional representation (ie single transferable vote) than under our current first-past-the-post system. That would certainly be a big improvement over the brouhaha that's going on in Ottawa right now.

Notes on a crisis: the coalition is not illegitimate, just ill-advised

ANDREW COYNE | December 3, 2008 |

To be clear: there is nothing unconstitutional or illegitimate in the notion of a coalition government, per se. Nor would the Governor General be committing any sin against democracy were she to disregard the prime minister’s advice, following his defeat in a confidence vote, and call upon the coalition to form a government, rather than dissolve Parliament and call new elections. Constitutional scholars are virtually unanimous that she has that option, and only slightly less so that she should in fact exercise it.

But it is not a slam dunk. She must take into consideration whether the coalition is likely to last, or whether its in-built volatility is such as to condemn Canada to a prolonged period of instability and uncertainty. But even if she does hand them the keys — and that is much the more probable result: whatever misgivings she might have, she would doubtless feel she lacked the legitimacy to exercise such discretion — that doesn’t make it a good idea.

My beef is not with the notion of a coalition, as such. It is with this coalition, at this time. My criticisms are not that it is undemocratic, but that it is unstable; not that it is illegitimate, but that it is misdirected and unjustified. (The opposition is entitled to vote no confidence in the government for any reason it likes — but I am entitled to say that the reasons it offers are humbug.) The policies it pursues are, in my judgement, likely to prove calamitous for the country, and ruinous for the Liberal party. But if that is what the majority of the House decides, that is how our system works.

Up to a point. The public’s views of the result cannot simply be ignored. It may be that the Conservatives are appealing to popular ignorance of parliamentary government, with their demands for an election before any change of government. But it may also be that there is a broader question of legitimacy at play: past a certain point, if a thing is rejected by the public, it becomes illegitimate. This is such a bizarre situation, such an extreme application of the traditional Parliamentary prerogative to choose a government — defeating a government so soon after an election, and propping up such a rickety contraption in its place, even leaving aside the question of the Bloc’s involvement — that the public’s response may well be, like the child in the New Yorker cartoon, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

MOREOVER: A number of people have written to ask how I could have a problem with the coalition, given my support for proportional representation, with its tendency to produce coalition governments. But the two are entirely separable questions. First, as I say above, I have particular problems with this coalition, as opposed to coalitions in general. But second, and more fundamentally: the present situation is not a template for what would obtain under PR.

A minority government is a very different thing under first-past-the-post than under PR, and so would be the coalitions that arise. There would be different parties, with different bases — less geographical, more ideological — and different incentives: whereas FPTP, with its highly leveraged outcomes — a 2 per cent swing in the popular vote leading to a 60 seat swing in Parliamentary representation — encourages parties to push the button on an election the minute they think they have the upper hand, under PR there is no such payoff — a 2% swing means 2% more seats — and no such incentive. As a result, modern PR systems tend to be more stable, not less, than FPTP. And the coalitions are typically formed before elections, not after: the National Party and the Liberals in Australia run as a ticket, as do the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union (and, more often than not, the Free Democrats) in Germany.

Under PR, there would be fewer Bloc seats, and thus less likelihood that it would hold the balance of power. There would be more parties, and thus more possible coalition partners. And there would be much less incentive to partisan rancor: majority governing coalitions would be formed, not by splitting votes, but by combining them.

Criticism #2: BC-STV will lead to more minority governments.

This is another common argument presented that switching to BC-STV will lead to more minority governments, with critics trying to paint this apocalyptical picture of never-ending minorities mired in legislative stand-offs with political life being relegated to one long campaign as endless elections, being called every 6-12 months, usurp political discussion.

First off, I’ll start off by saying that, yes, there will be more minorities. And that’s how it should be; it’s pretty rare for a majority of the population to vote for a single party. So if a party only wins minority support in the ballot box, then it should likewise only win a corresponding minority of seats in the House or Legislature. Conversely, a party should be awarded a majority government only if the electorate wants one i.e. a majority of the electorate votes for that party. So when you think about it, the critics’ argument that FPTP is better because it produces more majorities is poor because it has to do so by misrepresenting the votes of the people.

But that’s not the only flaw in their argument. The critics’ assertion that switching to BC-STV will mean more elections because of more minority governments is based on the assumption that minorities under BC-STV will be as unstable as under FPTP. This isn’t true. In the Republic of Ireland, the average life of a minority in the last sixty years has been 3.7 years. Over the same time period Canada and BC, governments have lasted 3.15 and 3.55 years respectively (info courtesy of Antony Hodgson). And don't forget that we have had more majority governments. There is actually a page on the Elections Ireland website that lists the election years along the top. If you take a look, you see that elections actually happen relatively infrequently, with some minority governments even lasting as long as 5 years.

Why is this? Because there is a flaw, inherent to FPTP, that actually provides incentives for politicians to bring down minority governments sooner rather than later. Since STV addresses this flaw, the incentive is removed, leading to longer lasting minority governments.

This flaw, again, has to do with our FPTP system’s failure to produce proportional results; it simply is not cut out to deal with elections where there are more than 2 candidates. Because it is not able to account for vote splitting, margins of victory etc., you have these elections where small changes in the polls can lead to wildly skewed election results.

Let’s take our 2008 federal election as an example.

Stephen Harper and the Conservatives ended up winning 143 seats, a 15% increase from 2006, despite the fact that their share of the popular vote only increased by 1.3% (from 36.3% to 37.6%). On the flip side, Stephan Dion and the Liberals lost 27 seats, a 26% fall from 2006, even though they only dropped 4% in the polls. (wikipedia)

And this is why politicians call elections so frequently under minority governments. Because they know that small changes in public popularity can lead to huge swings in election results. So they wait until the political winds shift ever so slightly in their favour, and then bring down the government, hoping to capitalize on the windfall.

Mr. Harper called an early election for this very reason, banking that the polls would shift just enough to give him a majority. If the polls went in the other direction, you can bet it would be Mr. Dion working to bring down the government.

Now let’s take this scenario and apply it to the context of STV. Under STV, because it is proportional, a small increase in the polls would lead to.... only a small increase in seats won and visa versa. So the Conservatives 1.3% boon would only translate to about an extra 3-4 seats in the House; calling an election wouldn’t have really changed the look of parliament. The incentive has now been removed because public opinion usually doesn’t vary that much so politicians don’t have a reason to call an election since it’s not going to lead to a dramatic shift in power.

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