Markus Schulze Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 8:45 AM
If you are going to mess about with MMP to the
extent that you suggest in the hope of making
some significant improvements to what is
basically a very poor voting system, why not
just adopt STV-PR and do the job properly?
When you promote pure STV in a country that
already uses proportional representation by
party lists, then you will be accused immediately
that you were dishonest and that your real aim
was to increase the effective threshold to gain
representation.
My own experience says that, when you want to
promote STV in a country that already uses
proportional representation by party lists,
then your proposal must contain provisions
to compensate party proportionality on the
national level. Otherwise, your proposal is
a non-starter.
Markus, you make a very valid point which I, as a practical reformer, fully
appreciate. Any reform proposal, and the campaign to
support it, must be wholly appropriate to the local political circumstances.
It would certainly not be part of my agenda to increase the representation
threshold for any political purpose, but I do recognise
the political problems that can be created by very low effective thresholds
(e.g. Israel). It must, however, be accepted that many
party list systems (including MMP systems) have imposed thresholds and that
these thresholds are completely arbitrary, e.g. 5% of
the party list vote nationally - but why not 4% or 6%? . If you are going to
impose such an arbitrary threshold, why go the bother
of summing the votes nationally? Why not just use the effective thresholds
that would result from the underlying regional structure
that exists in many countries and is built into in their voting systems (e.g.
where parties present lists on a regional basis)?
It must also be appreciated that the effective threshold to gain representation
in STV-PR is lower than a simple analysis based on
dividing the national first preference vote by the average quota would suggest,
for two reasons.
In STV, the vote transfers are extremely important and when these are taken
into account, the effect on small parties and
candidates with less support can change the perspective very dramatically. For
example, in the 2007 local government elections in
Scotland (3 and 4-member districts) the lowest proportions of quotas secured by
winning candidates of the five main parties were:
0.32, 0.42, 0.42, 0.46, 0.48, Malta shows the dangers of getting hung up on
first preference votes when the main feature of the
STV voting system is that the votes are transferable. It is also an unsafe
assumption that every first preference vote for a
particular candidate is a party vote for that candidate's party.
Parties and candidates (usually) respond to the characteristics of whatever
voting system is in use. Thus the approach adopted by
smaller parties where it is STV-PR, is to concentrate their resources where
their support is strongest and so achieve the local
threshold. That's how the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, with about 2% of
the first preference votes province-wide, won 2% of
the seats overall in the Northern Ireland Assembly (1998) when the district
magnitude was only 6 (Droop quota threshold = 14.3%).
There is always a trade-off between guaranteed local representation (small
districts) and proportionality (large districts),
whatever the voting system. While STV-PR, as normally implemented, might
reduce the effective threshold to gain representation for
parties nationally, that loss has to be set against the gains for the voters of
more localised representation and of shifting the
balance of power and accountability from the parties to the voters. How that
balance is best presented depends on local politics.
No matter how enthusiastic the electors may be, such a change will nearly
always be opposed by the larger political parties and
their backers!!
James
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