UK Election: What difference would proportional representation have made?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The episode is called "A Victory for Democracy".
Tories managed to successfully seem to offer the people the pretend choice with the complete FUD that was the AV referendum, which means any other referendum is not likely for many years.
Couple that with continued huge over-representation of the SNP, which certainly will rub many English voters the wrong way, and maybe.
In 2012/2013 Labour managed to defeat the government in the vote. The boundary changes would undoubtedly have favoured the Tories, but that's because the Tories are more popular, not because of some nefarious plan.
Even if you supposedly makes it fairer by evening out constituency sizes, and even if the people doing it are trying to be fair, the net effect due to the electoral system can very easily be to disenfranchise the voters even more.
That solves the gerrymandering problem. Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of getting whichever party currently benefits from gerrymandering to agree to switch to the neutral algorithm.
But the over-representation of SNP - a party they've vilified, and that actively fights Tory policies, and that drags up the whole "Scottish MP's voting on English issues" deal may very well make more Tory voters sympathetic to a system that'd reduce the SNP influence.
Similarly, he's in charge of coming up with the EU options, when he wants us to stay in. Hopefully he won't muck that one up too badly.
In short, referendusm are political tools, not necessarily the voice of the nation.
If Scotland does leave, Cameron will deserve the blame for the "don't let the Scots have any influence" strategy that won him this week's Westminster election, but the independence question seemed fair enough, especially with oblique hints that more devolution would be forthcoming anyway.
I have a horrible feeling the EU options will hinge more on the "no" campaigners being far more motivated to vote than those satisfied with the status quo, particularly on the assumption that the "pro EU" side will appear to have enough of a lead in telephone polls and goodwill from major political parties to be just fine.
The only real difference is that a Labour party which opted to weight behind the Devo Max campaign rather being backed into sharing a "No" platform with the "Westminster parties" might not have lost so many votes to the SNP. That might have entered Cameron's political calculus too.
Ideally in Tasmania we probably should also be thinking about abolishing our upper house (Legislative Council) and adding more members into the House of Assembly. The LC has ended up with around 70-80% independent members, incumbents almost always win their elections if someone even bothers to challenge them, and public engagement is almost non-existent. The Legislative Council won't be abolished anytime soon however, because the Legislative Council has to vote to change the state constitution and they wouldn't abolish themselves anytime soon.
[1]Whilst many individuals' tactical decisions would look different in a PR election, it's difficult to see the pattern of vote shares being hugely dissimilar; with there still being a media-fed late frenzy of English voters backing the right as an alternative to "being held" to ransom by coalitions involving the nationalists
And that consideration is also a reason why I don't think you can assume the pattern of votes would be all that similar: You would not get rid of tactical voting - you would get tactical voting in different ways where e.g. parts of the uncertain Tory voters on the left wing would be more likely to vote Lib Dem or Labour out of fear of a Tory/UKIP coalition.
I'm Norwegian, living in the UK, and in Norway coalitions are the norm these days, and voting patterns certainly are strongly influenced based on perceptions about whether or not you're enabling a coalition you might not lead. Currently we do have the equivalent of a Tory/UKIP coalition, and it has lead to a massive resurgence for our Labour party, and the centrist parties that enabled the coalition have largely collapsed in polls as it's clear a lot of their voters don't want to help prop up such a coalition again (the parties does not have a majority but negotiated a supply agreement with our liberal party and christian democrats).
We didn't have PR in this week's election, but we did have near-universal expectations that future governments would be enabling some form of coalition or supply agreement. Ultimately the Labour campaign foundered precisely because voters anticipated the Scottish nationalists and other minority parties extracting a heavy price for coalition. By contrast, the Conservatives had shown themselves as able to dominate a coalition agenda, and the only UKIP agenda that centrist or tactical Tory voters might have actually feared as opposed to finding distasteful was promised to be decided by referendum anyway; that wouldn't have changed if UKIP had been expected to win a sizeable chunk of seats.
I'm not saying that votes wouldn't change at all, but I am saying that unless the parties also radically altered their campaigns or more lefties turned out to vote, a right-leaning, Conservative lead coalition would have been an even more likely victor under PR
Promises to voters (which I think is what you mean with voter mandates) are just the worst. They tend towards the unrealistic and assume party control over a majority of seats without defectors. Everything about them is dumb. Good riddance.
Having more parties is a good thing. It implies negotiation between them and it leads to more rational laws. When you have just one or two parties it's much easier for them to abuse their power and pass crazy laws.
Now if a party holds a minority government (the way parliamentary systems are meant to be), there can be a vote of non-confidence to oust the governing party. At that point, the governor general has to choose between allowing a coalition (if that is indeed what the other parties want) or hold another election.
Public opinion does not hold sway in these matters. Our current majority government (now branded The Harper Government) was elected with ~24% of eligible voters (40% of those who actually showed up to vote). Take a look at some of the Ekos [1] polls, our governing party does not have the majority of Canadian support. There is also no way to do a MP recall campaign at the federal level, some provinces provide this though, such as BC.
We very much need electoral reform in Canada. Our senate is too partisan (not to mention, appointed at the whims of the governing party) and first-past-the-post is a broken electoral system. My hopes are for Mixed Member Proportional Representation similar to Germany and New Zealand.
I guess that in lieu of money, you could portion out votes. 1000 votes per person, for example. And then they can be spent in the same way that money is spent in quadratic voting.
That might not be bad.
Many countries with PR systems rarely if ever have single party majorities. In Norway the current two party coalition is a minority government that needed a supply agreement with two further parties (technically one of them would be sufficient) to secure a majority. In the recent past we've had coalitions with up to four parties, several of the coalitions being minority governments. Our last single party majority government was in the 60's I think.
Think 'Blue dog' democrats.
So if you prefer Owl > Gorilla, you still have to go with Gorilla as #1 because Owl might not have enough to beat Tiger. This means it still leads to Tiger vs. Gorilla two party system.
It's already implemented in Australia and they still have a two party government.
Here's an example here:
http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting-versus-irv/c1mmu
With IRV Obama would've crushed all of his competitors when he got elected for the 2nd term. IRV seems to favor incumbents greatly, which is probably why things haven't changed so much in Australia either - so not much better than FPTP in the US. People still very much vote strategically with IRV.
With approval voting on the other hand, Stein (Green Party candidate) would've had a huge chance in the election. Maybe she would've still lost, like the chart predicts, but we would've had much better kind of debates than Obama vs Romney.
Romney would've been crushed because he was so disliked. In fact many other "fringe" candidates that were liked in that election would've done much better under approval voting than under FPTP or IRV.
You dislike PR since it'd allow small parties to actually get representation and thus "cause chaos". If you think AV doesn't have this problem, it must be because you think AV would keep the small parties out just like FPTP. But if that's case, why bother switching to a system that changes nothing?
The end result is the consensus candidate is elected while allowing everyone to vote for who they want. It is simple and it works well in practice.
Personally, I favor a system where there is a clear winner chosen by the majority of popular vote, but where minorities have a "right to representation" where they can make their voices heard in the political debate. Not easy, but possible.
The list you vote for determined how many seats that list (party) get in each region, but striking names or adding names of people on other lists alters the order in which seats will get allocated to the people on the lists.
It is not very often used, but when particularly controversial candidates are fielded it sometimes does affect who gets in.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/defeat-ed-ba...
If you look at the Australian model, you actually can do this. You can either vote above or below the line (forget which is which), with one you vote for the list the party derived, the other you select the party and then rank all of their candidates. In practice thou the majority don't rank and it is sort of irrelevent that you can.
IMHO, even with individual candidates it is more or less the party they represent that decides the winner anyway.
For the lower house, we have optional preferential voting. So you number from 1 to something, and stop when you want. Then a slightly complex counting system occurs where votes for least-voted candidates are redistributed to the next preference, and repeated until you get a result.
The upper house voting system does have some issues though. Most people consider voting below the line complex, and you can only mark one party above the line. Then independent senators only appear below the line, since they are in no party (which has caused an independent senator to make a party, just to appear above the line).
Better vote for another party instead.
With the party-list system, you generally vote for parties and not for persons.
That said, approval voting would've worked even better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote...
The UK establishment doesn't want PR. That alone is a great reason to get it, besides many other good reasons.
Occasionally people vote for an outstanding personality who does not belong to a party they generally support. This is as it should be.
"Voters in Britain do not elect a parliament", but shouldn't they?
In your opinion this is what fairness means. In my opinion, this system leaves millions without a say in the direction of the country proportional to the support their opinions have in the populace.
Not only do I find it unfair, I find it offensive and undemocratic, and as a result I don't see a government elected under such a system as having any legitimacy.
It's worth pointing this out: It is not up to you to define what is fair. Nor is it up to a majority. It is up to everyone. When a system leaves a substantial number of people finding it unfair and feeling robbed of any opportunity to be represented, it is unfair, whether or not the majority thinks it's the most awesome system ever.
If you care about fairness, you need to care about gaining consensus, not about whether or not you're above or below 50%.
> Unfair? No - given that, at this election, voters did not give majority votes to a UKIP candidate except in that one instance.
First of all, it is not majority of a constituency but a plurality. This is a big deal. My seat was won with 43%: The majority of his constituents wanted to be represented by other people. We won't ever know who would have been preferred by a majority of constituents under one of the many systems intended to actually get to a majority choice.
Secondly, that the results matches the rules does not mean they're not unfair.
When peoples votes carry different value based on where they live, then that to me by definition is unfair.
The ad is quite horrible though, a cheap way to manipulate the viewer by appealing to his emotions.
I love preferential voting. You get to vote for a minor party or candidate while also ensuring the candidate you hate most does not benefit from you doing this. There is basically no need to vote strategically and back candidates you don't like purely because you hate them less than someone else. You just list all the candidates in your personal preference from 1 to x.
I am fundamentally uncertain that a majority of the electorate understood AV when they were voting - and this was certainly supported by my own conversations at the time with moderately intelligent people who plainly did not understand it. And, in fact, the majority of the electorate did not even vote at all on the issue.
Proportional representation is undeniably more democratic than either FPTP or AV, but it does mean you end up having to live with the fact that a rather alarmingly large proportion of people have views that the majority find unsavoury (eg. the BNP managed nearly 2% of the votes in the 2010 election).
That's democracy for you.
Besides, the BNP arose from a climate of austerity and declining real incomes. If you have a functioning political system that doesn't do that to the majority, you deprive the unsavory minority of political oxygen.
Same phenomenon as "math/computer is hard" being acceptable and an excuse not to try, or even listen. You can see the roller shutter come down in their eyes.
I guess we Australian can't be too smug as we voted no in a referendum in 1988 asking if we wanted freedom of religion. Apparently the FUD then was over funding for religious schools.
The other consideration was that many people wanted a different system to AV.
The fiction that someone who gets the majority of a seat will represent all their constituents is just that. And blatantly offensive to many of us who consistently sees our representatives acting against our interests and not care the slightest about the portion of their constituents who are not likely to be possible to sway to vote for them.
You are also wrong: It is not by definition going to be the majority opinion of everyone in my "community".
For starters, the person who won the seat I live in got 43% of the vote. The majority of my community wanted other people to represent them.
The current system the worst of both worlds: Single seat constituencies without even the pretence of trying to find a candidate a majority would stand behind.
Secondly, lets disabuse ourselves of the notion that the electoral boundaries matches a "community". They do not.
My seat includes uppper class areas in Shirley, with million pound mansions, as well as council estates like New Addington - the latter is one of the places in the UK with the lowest average life expectancy. The electoral seat encompasses perhaps a dozen separate communities that rarely mixes other than superficially. We can see clearly how divided this seat is - as many others - by looking at council election results, where various wards go very, very firmly on way or the other, while the seat as a whole is a very marginal seat (this election the Tory incumbent held onto his seat with a 165 vote plurality).
In reality, if one were to draw up geographically based communities based on how people actually live and work and interact together, there'd be maybe a dozen separate areas.
Apart from the flaw of thinking that areas as large as a parliamentary seat - even in London where the population density means the physical areas are fairly small - will be homogenous enough or closely enough linked to represent a single community, when you look at the overall electoral results you see pretty clearly that "community" does no longer - if it ever did - match geographical boundaries. Communities are split between parties that stands so far apart that pretending that community is geographical is a joke.
But in the end whether or not you believe that the representative should represent a community, or that the point is to represent the voices of the people, the fact is that this system leaves millions upon millions of users without a voice where it matters, and without the ability to influence decisions in parliament if they vote their conscience.
You may think that's acceptable. I don't. I find it an affront to the very idea of democracy.
I should say I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but the solution is to change the mind of those in your community and the politics will follow.
From my point of view, having the right to vote or not is worthless in this system, as it does not provide any influence (I accept that it matters to many others - if your views are close enough to one of the big parties, then things are different).
Democracy is about legitimacy first and foremost: If those who take part does not see the system as legitimate, it isn't legitimate. And that is not down to a majority to decide. That is down to society as a whole. And this is a lesson many "democracies" still have yet to learn. Yes, we can't get everyone to agree on what makes a legitimate system, but a system that actively shuts out millions is not legitimate whether or not a majority thinks it is.
> If you want to change things you need to convince the people around you that things need to change.
This is just pure nonsense unless you happen to live in an area that is politically homogenous and populated with people are politically relatively close to you.
We have a problem where the system is geared for a century ago when communities where geographically close. I have more in common with people politically close to me on the other side of the globe than I have with my next door neighbour (who'd like me deported since I'm not born here).
I should not need to convince a plurality of a local "community" (that doesn't exist) of my views to get a single voice in parliament if far higher number of people across the country holds the same views.
So to me, this government has no legitimate authority. I abide by laws because of the consequences of not doing so, not because I accept the legitimacy of this government.
Anyone with minority political views is always going to frustrated in a democracy. Even if every issue was voted on directly by all citizens then without the support of the majority any proposal you support will be rejected. To effect change you need to change the minds of your neighbours. The good thing about modern society is improved communication allows an individual to influence others far away and effect change on a national and international basis where once they were confined to those physically around them.
Tactical voting is a big thing in the UK.
On the other hand, I think this generally underestimates the improvements possible by shifting to a more proportional system.
I'm interested to see how the conservatives manage to introduce some kind of English devolution while at the same time retaining their inbuilt electoral advantages.
Also any article on reform of the UK electoral system should end with "We have an unelected House of Lords that people have a birthright to sit in, and has Bishops. End this embarrassment now".
Coalition governments, often still minority governments, have been the norm for half a century.
All of Scandinavia for that matter.
For my part, I see reducing the race to a two-party system as exactly what should be avoided. It leaves the opinions of a large proportion - often a majority - of society unrepresented or overruled.
As an example: The Tories now has a majority in parliament despite gaining only 36.9% of the vote. The majority of British voters does not want Tory policy. Yet it's what Britain will get. Yes, the rest disagree on what the differences should be. But a proportional system forces the parties to negotiate and find solutions that actually has majority support - the least bad solutions.
I would take that over stability any day, if that was the choice. But it isn't. Unless you're going to claim that the Scandinavian countries are unstable.