E-mail Archives6/2/98 To: CV&D Core list Here is the first of two updates to the new "core list". The idea behind the core list is to send essentially unedited material to people with a particular interest in voting system reform and elections. This will allow me to circulate more information to people who can put it to good use and to make our "key list" updates shorter -- key list updates generally will no longer contain such full-length articles. NOTE: I expect to send two- to-three "core list" updates a month. If you would rather not receive them, please let me know -- no offense taken! Given that I have a backlog of important material, I will send you two updates: one focused on international elections and reform and the accompanying one on developments in the United States. This update includes: - 6/2/98 Reuters article on British Support for PR # # # (The Labour Party government in the United Kingdom has taken steps that have led to the introduction of forms of proportional representation for elections in Scotland, Wales, London and Northern Ireland and for next year's national elections to the European parliament. The government also has started a process that may lead to a national referendum on adoption of PR for electing the House of Commons.) Poll: Britons Back Switch to PR elections LONDON, June 2 (Reuters) - Almost three quarters of Britons would vote to scrap the first-past-the-post voting system which gave Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair their big parliamentary majorities, according to an opinion poll published on Tuesday. Campaigners for a switch to proportional representation (PR) to elect the lower House of Commons were delighted by the poll, taken to coincide with the launch of their all-party Electoral Reform Coalition. "What this tells us is that before we even begin campaigning, we have got this great bedrock of support," Andrew Puddephatt, director of the constitutional change pressure group Charter 88, told a news conference. Thanks to Britain's system, Blair's Labour Party won a 179 seat Commons majority in the May 1997 general election despite getting the support of just 44.4 percent of those who voted. Thatcher's majorities in both 1983 and 1987 topped the 100 mark when her Conservatives won marginally lower shares of the vote. Blair promised before last year's election that Britons would be given a chance to choose whether to keep the present single-seat constituency system, which consistently benefits large parties, or to switch to a specific Proportional Representation alternative. He has set up a committee under former European Commission President Lord Roy Jenkins, a minority Liberal Democrat, to decide precisely which PR system should be on offer at the referendum. The commission is expected to report in October, opening the way for the plebiscite to take place well before the next general election, due by mid-2002. According to the poll, conducted by NOP, 72 percent of voters back a change to PR. The figure fell to 57 percent after pollsters gave their interviewees a concise summary of the arguments for first-past-the-post. Any electoral system in which seats won by a party were broadly proportional to its share of the total vote would produce a seismic change in British politics. The current position -- that a party with a solid parliamentary majority can push legislation through with little chance of defeat -- would become the exception. The Liberal Democrats, consistently under-represented in parliament, might become junior partners in a coalition government. Blair already plans PR systems for next year's election of parliaments for Scotland and Wales and for the next election of Britain's members of the European Parliament, but has declined to say whether he would back change for Commons elections. But the prospect of PR has alarmed the opposition Conservatives, who fear it would make their return to power much more difficult since the Liberals would prefer to join Labour rather than them in a coalition. They will initiate a debate in parliament later on Tuesday on what they say are the merits of the existing system -- foremost among them that it produces strong government. # # # Some Divided Nations Do Find a Way to Stand Out of Ireland have we come./ Great hatred, little room,/ Maimed us at the start." William Butler Yeats' lines, written in 1931, could stand as well for scores of other quarrels in this fractious century, each feeding on great hatred, little room. Yet out of Ireland there came Friday, from both the republican south and the British-ruled north, the prospect -- nobody would dare claim more -- of genuine peace. Few political failures are more widespread than the inability of neighbors divided by religion, language or ethnicity to remain peacefully in the same national unit. The cycle is familiar: Terrorism, rebellion and civil war engender secession and separatism. Still, some diverse societies have managed to stick together by stretching the traditional notions of nationhood and sovereignty. Thanks to innovative political arrangements and a commitment to accommodation, these special cases have bypassed the idea, born in 19th-century Europe, that self-determination and nationhood are indissoluble. Consider the Aland Islands on the Baltic shores of Finland, the multi-ethnic border region between Germany and Denmark, or the Kuna Yala area of Panama, home of the most autonomous Indian community in Latin America -- examples scarcely known abroad, on the principle that an airliner that does not crash is never news. These and other exceptions, however, are known to a new breed of specialists at institutes devoted to reconciling minority and majority rights. Among them is British-born Andrew Reynolds, a Notre Dame political scientist, who recently returned from a year in Stockholm at IDEA, the acronym for the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Reynolds is closely following developments in Scotland and Wales, whose voters last year approved the creation of new home-rule assemblies using systems of proportional representation, as well as Northern Ireland, where 108 members are to be elected to a provincial legislature, ending decades of direct rule from London. "What this means is new faces, many new faces, since as few as 2,000 votes will be needed to elect a member," Reynolds elaborates. "It can end the monopoly exercised for so long by the handful of old faces." The precondition for power-sharing -- the mantra of electoral reformers -- is a voting system that encourages minority representation. This can be the bridge to "consensus democracy" or "consociation," terms coined by the political theorist Arend Lijphart of the University of California at San Diego. Schleswig-Holstein, the disputed border area straddling Germany and Denmark, affords a little-known example. In the 19th century the argument over this ethnically mixed territory was so dense that Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister, remarked that only three people understood it -- Prince Albert, who was dead; a German who went mad, and Palmerston himself, who could no longer remember its details. After a war and periodic eruptions, a settlement was finally ratified in the 1920s to guarantee the political and cultural rights of some 50,000 or more Danish-speakers in German-ruled Schleswig-Holstein. Today, in the border city of Flensburg, families can decide whether to identify with the Danish minority and send their children to Danish-language schools, along with other assurances of autonomy. Although voided during the 12-year Nazi era, the bicultural system was reinstated after 1945 and a seat in the state parliament was guaranteed to a deputy representing the Danish minority, no matter how many votes he or she received. Reciprocally, Denmark extends comparable privileges to its German-speaking minority. Fittingly, in 1996 Denmark and Germany jointly established a European Center for Minority Issues in Flensburg. Its mission is to be a long-term clearinghouse on majority-minority relations, especially in the post-communist east. A different solution was devised for the Aland Islands, an autonomous, demilitarized and neutral region of Finland. Though these 6,500 islands are sparsely populated, their location has been of urgent strategic concern to Sweden -- a "dagger pointed at Stockholm" in the traditional alarmist phrase. From 1157 to 1809, the islands were Swedish. When control of Finland passed to Russia, so did power over Aland. When Finland gained independence and control in 1917, some 25,000 islanders, nearly all Swedish-speakers, clamored for reunion with Sweden, which Finland vehemently opposed. The dispute passed to the League of Nations in Geneva, and in a forgotten success its Council awarded the Aland Islands to Finland with conditions that still apply. The Alanders have complete cultural autonomy, they can decide who may live in their islands and are ruled by an Autonomy Parliament, or Lagting. They have their own flag and have even issued their own elegantly designed postage stamps. Though neutral and demilitarized, the Alanders elect two members to the regional Nordic Council and can block any treaties that affect the islands. "Ask an Alander whether they feel Swedish or Finnish, and most would say: 'Neither. I'm an Alander,"' asserts Susanne Eriksson, secretary of the Aland Parliament. Interestingly, what is called the Aland model has been studied by some Argentines and Britons urging a similar arrangement (soberania compartida, or shared sovereignty) for the Falkland Islands, or Malvinas, over which Britain fought and won a war 16 years ago. In a very different setting, the Kuna Indians of Panama have acquired considerable autonomy over some 365 Caribbean islands, large and small, stretching to the border of Colombia and known as Kuna Yala, the Land of the Kunas. After the Kuna rebelled against Panama in 1925, they won the right to control access to their islands, and since 1974 some 35,000 Kunas have had two designated seats in Panama's national Congress. Minority-majority relations in Panama (population 2.7 million, 7 percent Indian) are by no means untroubled, as on such issues as who should license prospecting for underground minerals. But compared with other countries with significant indigenous populations, the Kunas are an envied model. In 1989, the first Inter-American Indigenous Congress on Natural Resources and the Environment was organized by the Kuna Indians, and representatives of 17 nations took part, the reverberating start of an empowerment movement. Power-sharing, pooled sovereignty and "consociational alternatives" (to use Lijphart's tongue-twisting term) influenced South Africa, where minority rights are enshrined in a new constitution. Robert Richie, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Voting and Democracy, thinks they are also pertinent to the United States. Nearly all American elections are based on what electoral reformers call the winner-take-all principle, i.e., there is no representation for runners-up. Still, as skeptics point out, electoral fixes are in themselves not a cure-all for deep schisms based on religion or ethnicity. Power-sharing and minority representation are obviously easier when population figures are small. Like Tolstoy's unhappy families, every such dispute is unhappy in its own way, making general rules difficult. # # # Choice Voting in the Republic of Ireland Choice voting is the method of proportional representation used to elect the parliament in the Republic of Ireland and to elect local assemblies in Northern Ireland. Choice voting (also called the single transferable vote and preference voting) is a candidate-based system in which voters rank candidates in order of choice: 1, 2, 3 and so on. Most voters in Ireland tend to vote along party lines, and the system usually results in parties winning seats in close proportion to their vote in particular constituencies. Choice voting is quite popular in the Republic of Ireland. Earlier in the century it was upheld in two national referendums, and the report of a recent constitutional commission commented on its popularity. The 1997 parliamentary elections were instructive -- particularly in how the system eases polarization. There are 41 constituencies in Ireland of between three and five representatives. Using choice voting in such constituencies creates "winning thresholds" (the percentages of votes a candidates needs to win a seat) of between 17% (when there are 5 seats) and 25% (when there are three seats). All of these constituencies have representatives from at least two parties. Supporters of the largest single party (Fianna Fael) elected at least one representative in every district, while the second largest party has representation in 37 of the 41 constituencies. Smaller parties also won a fair number of seats. Note that proportional representation hasn't mean the "breakdown" of a two-party system: rather, it has created a competitive two-party system, both in the sense that every constituency has healthy competition and that the major parties have enough competition from smaller parties to ensure their responsiveness to their core supporters. Ireland certainly has done well economically in the last two decades. Over the last decade its economy has been the fastest-growing in Europe -- its growth rate in 1997 was 8% -- to the point that its gross domestic product is higher than that of the United Kingdom on a per capita basis. The voters have kept legislators working hard, however -- no incumbent government has won re-election for two decades. The combination of every constituency having representatives from more than one party and both parties having a recent history of governing the country has certainly created a less polarized political environment than in the United States Congress. In the United States, in contrast to Ireland, it is very rare for a party to lose control of Congress (it has happened once in 44 years), while most districts are one-party fiefdoms. # # # "Controlled Experiments": Women in legislatures that Australia uses PR (choice voting / STV) for its Senate, and single member districts using instant runoff voting for its House. Australia 1983 1997
House (IRV) 5% 15%
Senate (PR/CV) 20% 31%
We see that two to four times as many women get elected under PR as under winner-take-all. Germany uses PR (Mixed Member) for its legislature, with half the seats filled from single member districts using first-past-the-post, and the other half allocated in a compensatory fashion to the parties based on their percentage of the party list vote. Germany 1983 1994
Districts (FPTP) 4% 13%
Party List (PR) 16% 39%
We see that three to four times as many women get elected from the party lists as from the single-member districts. New Zealand used first-past-the-post from single member districts through 1993, and now uses German-style MMP since 1996. New Zealand 1993 1996
Districts (FPTP) 21% 15%
Party List (PR) x 45%
----- --- ---
Total 21% 29%
We see that the percentage of women increased by more than a third when the switch was made from winner-take-all to PR. In addition, three times as many women get elected from the party lists as from the single-member districts. These results strongly suggest that, with all other variables held constant, more women are elected under PR systems than under winner-take-all systems. # # # (New Zealand adopted mixed member proportional representation in a remarkable referendum in 1993. Negotiations over formation of a coalition government triggered a backlash against MMP. Following is a feature commentary by Rod Donald that ran in Wellington's "Dominion" paper in March 1998. Donald is the Alliance spokesperson for Electoral Reform and Green Party Co-Leader. He played a central role in the highly effective campaign for MMP.) IT'S ALL MMP'S FAULT! Did you know that MMP is responsible for the outbreak of RCD in New Zealand? I didn't until I read Graham Hunt's dangerous little book "Why MMP Must Go". Hunt's claim that "under First Past the Post a group of South Island farmer vigilantes would probably not have been allowed to get away with breaching New Zealand's tough biosecurity laws" was one of the more hilarious in his book. What makes it dangerous is that it contains many other equally idiotic statements which readers who don't know the truth may accept. Hunt holds MMP responsible for everything that's happened since the election which he doesn't like but doesn't blame MMP for events he clearly supports, such as Jenny Shipley's political assassination of Jim Bolger. For instance Hunt blames MMP for Tuku's $89 undies and Winston Peters' altercation with John Banks in the corridors of Parliament but he fails to acknowledge that all three are constituency MPs elected by FPP. Hunt describes MMP as "alien", an ironic description given that even in Britain, the home of our former FPP system, elections for regional parliaments will soon be held using a version of MMP rather than FPP. Predictably Hunt also criticizes their reform process rather than acknowledging that Britain, like New Zealand, is moving away from the rather crude, undoubtedly unfair and certainly archaic FPP to the voting method which is now predominant in Western democracies: proportional representation. Hunt implicitly acknowledges this trend by promoting a system called Supplementary Member or SM for New Zealand instead of a return to FPP. The letters SM say it all: this system is truly Sado-Masochistic. SM is neither proportional, nor does it guarantee single party governments. SM makes sure small parties win less than their fair share of seats by giving those parties which win the bulk of the constituency seats far more than their entitlement. Under SM it would be quite possible for a party to win a majority of the seats and become government even though it won less votes than another party. It would be equally possible for no party to win a majority of the seats leading to either a minority or a coalition government. The main countries using SM are South Korea, Japan and several of the new nations emerging from the USSR, states with democratic traditions quite different to the New Zealand experience and ones which are certainly more "alien" in Graham Hunt's terms than Germany, Scotland or Wales. In the 1992 Referendum voters were not fooled by this shonky system. It received only 5.6% support compared to 70.5% for MMP. Hunt states that his book is "the first to turn its guns unashamedly on the Mixed Member Proportional system". He hints that it is only one weapon. To that extent it must be taken seriously. "Why MMP Must Go" is designed to be the manifesto for the sequel to Peter Shirtcliffe's Campaign for Better Government. This new campaign will also be backed by those big businesses which find representative democracy an anathema. Hunt and his backers make it clear they want "to restore a basic two-party system" because "effective government comes from the ruling party being able to carry out its mandate without fear or favour". The alternative they claim "is to allow minorities to hold sway without any effective curb on their power". They conveniently forget that every FPP government from 1954 to 1993 had the support of only a minority of voters yet wielded absolute power. That arrogance was one of the many reasons for the electorate's determination to dump FPP. If you believe Graham Hunt is working in the interests of democracy rather than furthering the agenda of the corporate sector then I guess you'll find it plausible that RCD is the fault of MMP and even perhaps that Elvis is alive and well and living in New Zealand. |