In part I of this series I sifted through the results of the BC referendum on electoral reform to figure out what the electorate was saying. I reviewed the most common electoral systems very briefly, then I bashed our current system while also pointing out the issues that held the BC electorate back from supporting proportional representation.
In part II I described the hybrid electoral system and my proposed Riding Choice version of it.
In part III last month I pulled together some numbers showing electoral system trends around the world in recent decades and showed the path we need to take to successfully make change happen.
So here we are. April. 2019. It is three days since the PEI election and another attempt at bringing in a proportional representation (pro-rep) system. Another attempt that came very, very close, but failed. 51% voted to keep FPTP (first-past-the-post, as our current system is often called), 49% voted to change to pro-rep.
The electoral reform attention now turns to Quebec, where the governing CAQ have said they will introduce legislation by the fall to bring in pro-rep, without a referendum.
PEI seemed like they had a good chance of being the first to move to pro-rep since they had a previous vote supporting it, but with low turn-out. The ‘No’ side said the rural areas of the province had voted strongly to keep the current system because they feared losing their representation under the new system.
All this is the same old narrative. All this supports what I’ve been saying in this series on electoral reform. We need a new idea to get over the hump and to satisfy much of the electorate. Imaging if the referendum results were reversed, and it passed with 51%. That still leaves 49% of the population unhappy. We need to try and do better than that.
More than a Transitional System
I feel like the kid in class jabbing their hand toward the ceiling and saying ‘oh! oh! oh!’. I feel like I have an answer, but the teacher’s not picking me.
That’s because the Riding Choice hybrid system I favour is a good way to lower the hump and get robust popular support for electoral change. It is electoral reform that can actually succeed because it empowers the electorate, gives ridings that want to stay FPTP the option to do so, and gives those that want pro-rep that option on a riding-by-riding level.
I argued in part III that it can lead to a variety of fully proportional systems in the future, so it is a good transitional choice for those that want pro-rep. Now I want to make a stand for it to be a good destination in it’s own right, not just a place you drive though because it is on the highway and you get annoyed that you have to wait at the stop light before you can carry on your way to your real destination.
Ridings Choice is a compromise. It is proportional some places but not others. It might look funny on a map. The electoral map might change. Yes, but it is a new level of democratic control; what I called in part III ‘Democracy 2.0’. It is an electoral system I see appealing to Millennials who want that type of control, and also to some stereotypical old farmer who doesn’t want to change. If there are enough people like him in his riding, he doesn’t have to.
We need to remember that people want good government much, much more than they care about the mathematical similarities or differences between the national popular vote and the seat count. We need to remember that no one is proposing a system with just one big riding or a single transferrable vote system (STV – where fractions of wasted votes and second choices are redistributed to mathematical perfection), even though these are the most proportional. Everyone knows there needs to be more to pro-rep than just pro-rep.
We need to remember that while our current system can make a prime minister with a majority government on 39% of the vote, or a Quebec premier with a majority on 37% of the vote, a very proportional pro-rep system can make a leader with an even lower percentage of the vote (plus support from other parties). Both are less than ideal.
What is ideal? That is a tough one. As I pointed out in part III there are countries going in all sorts of directions with electoral reform, except to FPTP. What is important is good governance from a government the electorate sees as legitimate. Maybe that isn’t fully pro-rep, and it isn’t FPTP.
My Glass is Half Full
I say semi-pro-rep just might be better than full. I say half-proportional is a glass half full, and that a glass half full is just right, as long as it gives good government and I think it will.
With semi-proportionality majorities will be harder to come by, but we don’t need to descend to small and medium sized parties cobbling coalitions together. Here’s the range of more likely outcomes with a semi-proportional system:
Imagine a government that squeaks out a majority. Will they govern like they own the place? No, because backbenchers have power and will moderate the governing party. Imagine a government that is close to a majority. They can govern as a minority and not make a coalition. They are an integral party, but held in check. This is the sort of government we have in Nunavut and the NWT all the time – consensus government, we call it. Now imagine a slimmer minority government but still a more robust leading party than we see in some pro-rep systems. It forms a coalition with one of the other three or more parties present in the assembly. They have a choice about who to partner with (if anyone) and don’t need a massive voting block to reach a majority so the chances of the coalition involving convoluted backroom support deals (or the ever-feared ‘fringe party’) is really low.
These are good results. In a fully proportional system the electorate is often more evenly split (our FPTP gives a bump to the bigger parties (nationally or regionally), so if you take that away and take away strategic voting, the votes will be more evenly divided among our 5-6 parties) and you see a ‘winning’ party with only 33% of the vote. Some countries see coalitions with four parties in them, formed behind closed doors after the election. Not the most democratic.
I am not the only one to think like this. This is why parallel systems, where there is a FPTP part and a pro-rep part, giving a semi-proportional result, are used in 35 countries and are the fastest growing system on a percentage basis. This is also why some countries have instituted a Majority Bonus System.
Majority Bonus System
This system gives an extra block of seats to the party with the most seats in order to create a majority government. The logic being that a majority government is more stable and decisive in its governance. Governments that use it tend to use the Party List form of pro-rep, so they are taking a proportional result and making it semi-proportional on purpose.
This system was first used by Mussolini in Italy in 1924. Mussolini being a dictator, he used it to keep being a dictator. It is a highly questionable and odd way to do things, but it makes the point that there are advantages known in the big wide world to having a semi-proportional system.
You wouldn’t know it in Canada, where we have the Proportional Will Be Our Saviour side of the argument and the Ain’t Too Broke Don’t Wreck It side of the argument. Remember the idea of the middle ground? It fell out of everyone’s pocket simultaneously when we were pulling our phones out to go on Twitter and Facebook and react to extreme views and ignore moderate ones. It seems like Jean-Pierre Kingsley, long-time Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, is the only one (other than me) advocating a semi-proportional system here.
By the way, Italy tweaked the Majority Bonus system and kept it after Mussolini. They recently got rid of it in favour of a parallel system (so still keeping the semi-proportional philosophy). It is also used in Armenia, San Marino, Argentina, Greece, and in regional elections in France ( France seems to use every kind of electoral system at some level of government).
Semi-proportional Options
Okay, so I’m sure I’ve convinced you of the merits of a semi-proportional electoral system. By semi-proportional, to be clear, I mean much more proportional than now, but not letting mathematically beautiful proportionality be the goal instead of a tool to achieve governance that is both legitimate and good.
Great. What are our choices? Well, there’s the Majority Bonus system Mussolini invented, that runs a proportional election and then just gives out seats like door prizes to muck it all up afterwards. Oooh, that’s tempting…
There’s the parallel system, where we run a FPTP election with extra large ridings, thereby wrecking the best feature of FPTP (which is having the smallest ridings possible, which gives the most in-touch and nuanced local connection to MPs). It then also runs a pro-rep party-list election along side the FPTP election. Big ridings, double election with two different kinds of MPs, but at least a semi-proportional outcome chosen by the electorate. More tempting, but no thanks.
Mixed Member pro-rep (MMP) is essentially the same as the parallel system except the pro-rep seats are divided up to make the overall result fair – considering what happened in all the FPTP ridings. In a parallel system, the pro-rep part ignores the FPTP part on purpose to make the result semi-proportional. MMP seems to be all the rage in Canada, being what PEI voted on this week, the most popular of the three options BC voted on last year, what Ontario put to a referendum in 2007, and what Quebec is proposing. My criticisms of parallel also go for MMP: it is an awkward compromise, with larger ridings and two different kinds of MPs. It is popular because it keeps ridings while becoming proportional, which makes sense to proponents of pro-rep in Canada because we recognize our connection to ridings. If you shrink the proportional part of it (so that only 20% are proportional and 80% are ridings), you can get a semi-proportional result. It still smells like awkward compromise, and I think we can do better.
There is the hybrid system, where some parts of the country use FPTP and some parts use a proportional system. Panama is the only country I know of to use this system. Why only one country? The challenge with this system is deciding who gets which system. It could be politically manipulated, or it could just seem arbitrary, even with an impartial Electoral Boundaries Commission. As I’ve said before, if there is any country where this makes sense, it is a country with large rural areas as well as large urban centres. No country in the world fits that description better than us. Jean-Pierre Kingsley knows about such things and supports this system.
The Riding Choice hybrid system removes the one major flaw of the hybrid system: deciding in an open and transparent way that the electorate feels is legitimate who gets which system. It lets riding decide to stay FPTP or team up with neighbours to form multi-seat ridings that will be more proportional.
Semi-proportional just might be the outcome we want. Riding Choice hybrid system is the best semi-proportional system, tailor-made for Canada. All MPs are elected the same way and all represent ridings that elected them. Ridings where the majority want to keep their small ridings, as even many in PEI want to do, can. Ridings where riding size is not important, likely in cities, can go to multi-seat ridings to be more proportional. And if the electorate wants to move to be almost fully proportional, they have the power to do so. It gives the electorate the levers to adjust the system to get what we want without making things more complicated or unstable.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
We can find the idea of the middle ground again. It doesn’t have to be fully pro-rep or bust. Pro-rep almost won in PEI. But even if it did, it would have squeaked out a win and still left almost half the electorate unhappy (at least initially). We can aim higher. We can do better. We can all get along. Riding Choice will give a much higher percentage of the electorate what they want. Majority is the bar in elections and referenda, but majority should never be the goal. Democracy is about good governance for all.
References
Information on the PEI referendum: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/slim-majority-vote-no-to-electoral-reform-in-prince-edward-island-referendum-1.4392157
Information on the Majority Bonus system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_bonus_system
