Hello James,
I continued the chain of thoughts a bit.
On Aug 14, 2005, at 17:59, James Gilmour wrote:
Juho Laatu Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2005 2:50 PM
Since then I have learned to respect also the good sides of
two-party systems like stable governments and ability to drive clear
policies.
These are interesting and important points that electoral reformers
should not ignore. Public opinion polls in the UK
have shown that UK electors do want "stable government" and "strong
government", ie government that "can get things
done". (In the same surveys, electors will also express support for
results that would better reflect the parties'
shares of the votes, but that potential conflict is not usually
explored in opinion polls.) Maybe similar views have
been expressed by electors in surveys in other countries. "Strong
government" is one argument advanced by the two
major UK parties for maintaining the "two-party system" and for
keeping the FPTP voting system that (extremely unfairly)
has usually produced a clear one-party majority government.
But what does "strong government" really mean? In the UK from 1945,
we had a succession of "strong governments", ie
one-party majority governments that pushed through very partisan
legislation and changed policy on almost every aspect
of public life: public/private ownership of major industries,
pensions, health, education, social policy. But the
changes in the voters' wishes at successive general elections were
exaggerated by the defective voting system so that we
had alternating single-party, majority "strong" governments, each of
which reversed the policies of its "strong"
predecessor and set policy in the opposite direction. This period of
continual alternation of policy was almost
certainly very damaging to the UK. The 18 years of Conservative rule
from 1979 (mostly under Margaret Thatcher) and the
three successive election wins for Labour under Tony Blair from 1997
are in sharp contrast to the instability of the
first 35 years of the 60 year post-war period.
So were the 1945-1979 governments "strong"? They were able to push
through their policies, but only for short periods.
Perhaps "strong government" would be better defined to mean government
that can advance durable policies that survive
through successive administrations with only comparatively small
changes in response to the wishes of the voters as
expressed in the (usually small) changes in the voting patterns.
I must add one item in my list of good sides of two-party systems. That
is the fact that there will be a change, and the change will be
considerable. ;-) But I agree with you that this benefit, like the
other listed benefits too, may often be more of a problem than a
benefit. Multiparty systems (and one-party systems) have their problems
too. So I'm not sure that change to a multiparty system would have a
permanent positive effect. Change is however likely to bring some new
thinking and thereby maybe positive changes to politics, which is good
in general in this kind of stable times.
I do sympathise multiparty systems more than two-party systems, but I
just wanted to pint out that also two-party systems have their
underlying clear logic that might sometimes work for the benefit of the
citizens/voters. When observing my own thoughts about how to improve
the multiparty systems I note that my strongest interests are maybe in
the direction of making the system more responsive to the interest of
the voters. This need must be quite universal since I believe that in
time any bureaucratic system finds some tricks how to increase its own
power and how to serve the benefits of the system instead of the
benefits of the owners/voters. This applies also to the democratic
parliamentary system.
I'll be one step more concrete and describe one interesting line of
development for the multiparty systems. In order to allow and make the
parties move, and hear and reflect the true wishes of the voters one
could support dividing the parties in smaller units with some small
ideological (or other, like regional) differences. Technically the idea
is to allow allow structured groupings in the elections. Instead of
having only party X in the elections the party could have subgroups
like X/right-wing, X/greenish, X/women, X/northern, X/against-the-war,
X/join-the-EU. This way politicians would be more tied to following the
wishes expressed in the elections and it would be harder to continue
the same old policy after the pretty speeches before the elections :-).
This method would also allow "fine-tuning"
There are voting systems that support alliances of parties but I'm
unaware of any systems that would allow this kind of hierarchical
structures. It is btw no problem to have also more than two layers, and
no problem of having some of the layers above the parties (e.g. a
grouping of all the conservatively oriented parties). Note that this
kind of arrangements also to improve the proportionality of the
elections a bit.
Votes could be simply counted hierarchically so that first seats are
allocated to the highest level groupings, and then within each grouping
to the smaller groupings. Different allocation methods exist (I find
the largest remainder/Hare/Hamilton the most fair, if there are no
additional needs like reducing fragmentation to small parties). My
starting point is open list methods where voters vote individual
candidates (that belong to some grouping, that may belong to some
bigger grouping etc.).
My basic point was thus that the proposed kind of dynamism could help
achieving a political system that does not suffer from to strong
changes from black to white, nor from too stagnated political setting
and ignoring voter opinions. (Maybe grass is always greener on the
other side of the fence, but it is good to believe that the current
democratic systems can still be improved and that our current concept
of democracy and associated mechanisms are not yet the ultimate best
solution (that mankind can find).)
In the EM mailing list there also seems to be a lot of interest in
systems that are "party-free", like STV. In addition to all these I'm
interested in developing also the party based voting methods further.
I know that STV-PR works perfectly well without parties and that some
electoral reformers promote STV-PR because they
believe it will further their political aim to "smash the political
parties", but STV should not be classed as a
"party-free" system. There are very strong political parties
everywhere that STV-PR is used for public legislative
elections. In some countries using STV-PR, the voters are extremely
partisan and there is almost no cross-party voting.
In others, cross-party voting is used very greatly by the voters to
express their wishes to the full. What is unique
about STV-PR is the power it gives to the voters, if they want to use
it.
Yes, STV style systems do not exclude parties although they allow also
the flexibility of living without strict political groupings. This
feature is a nice addition to the more traditional systems. On the
other hand political groupings have also their value in that voters do
not need to know the personal opinions of many candidates whom they
should list in their vote but they can rely in on the well known
ideological groupings. The hierarchical system described above (and
open lists in general) have the property that the vote given to
candidate A will be inherited by his/her party if (s)he will not get
elected. The inheritance chain is thus given by the candidate instead
of by the voter (in a ranked ballot). Being able to give a
"transferrable vote" A>partyX is easier than listing all the candidates
of that party (A>A2>A3>A4>A5... in STV). I guess theoretically the
ideal solution (if not too complex) would be to take the benefits of
both systems - both freedom to express any kind of preferences (STV
style) and ability to refer to groups and benefit of default
inheritance chains.
James Gilmour
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Best Regards,
Juho
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