Tag Archive for 'vote'

Some Hung Parliament Hypotheses

Published on 8 May, 2010. 5 Comments

Hypothesis 1: Any meaningful electoral reform in the UK would effectively prevent the Tories from ever having an overall majority again. Because of this, the Tories, whatever overtures they may be giving Clegg at the moment, can never credibly commit to real electoral reform.

The Tories have been a minority party in UK politics for three-quarters of a century. That may seem odd, given that they’ve come out with an overall majority of MPs in nine elections since, but you have to go all the way back to Stanley Baldwin in 1931 to find the last leader of the Conservatives to lead the party to get over 50% of the votes in a general election*. Even in Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 landslide, the Tories only managed 44% of the vote, but won a large majority of seats as the opposition vote was split between Labour and the SDP/Liberal Alliance. Winston Churchill, now considered one of the greatest Prime Ministers of all time, never even actually won an election on the popular vote. During his three elections as Tory leader, he managed to win a majority of MPs in just one, and even then with a slightly lower percentage of the national vote than Labour.

The Conservatives know all this, and David Cameron, a former student of politics, knows it as well as an of them. The history of the Conservative party since universal suffrage has been of a declining popular vote, mitigated only by the gradual split of the center-left between Labour and the Liberals. With the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, this had been good enough to secure frequent parliamentary majorities for the Tories, but under any even remotely proportional system their hopes for an overall majority would almost completely disappear. Their choices would either be eternal opposition, or a shift to the left for occasional coalition governments. Neither are particularly appealing to die-hard Tories.

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On The Ordering Of Ballot Papers

Published on 27 March, 2010. 0 Comments

Even in the already nerdy field of political theory, the discussion of the ordering of candidates on ballot papers is quite an obscure one. It is, however, one of the few areas of politics where reform would be simple, uncontroversial, and provide relatively clear benefits to the democratic process. The problem is a pretty simple one; because our ballots are ordered alphabetically by surname, a candidate with a surname like Aaronson will likely be placed at the top of the list, whereas a candidate whose surname is Zykowski will be placed at or near the bottom. People have a slightly higher tendency to vote for candidates placed further up the list, so Aaronson is more likely to get elected purely because of his name.

There are a few different systems used or proposed to combat this. The first, and probably the simplest, is to just randomize the positioning of candidates on the ballot paper. From one election to the next, this does prevent a candidate like Aaronson appearing on top of the ballot every time. However, in any given election there is still one candidate who appears on the top of every ballot, and hence receives an advantage from that position. Likewise, one candidate will be unfortunate enough to be on the bottom of every ballot, and will be similarly disadvantaged.

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Just How Proportional Is Proportional Representation?

Published on 11 December, 2009. 0 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing on electoral reform, based on a submission I sent into the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution recently. You can find the full series by clicking here.

When Proportional Representation by Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV) was first established as Ireland’s electoral system in 1921, it was presented as an alternative to the first-past-the-post  (FPTP) system employed in the UK. The main reason that the new system was adopted was that, as its name suggests, it is more proportional than FPTP, in that the number of seats each party wins should be roughly proportional to the share of the vote they receive. While PR-STV has certainly improved from FPTP in that regard (not a difficult feat, as FPTP is particularly disproportional), it is worth noting that Ireland was the first country to implement PR-STV in national elections, and hence there was little evidence at the time it was chosen with which to analyze its proportionality. With almost a century of elections now held under the system, however, there’s now a considerable amount of data with which to examine whether PR-STV fulfils its purpose of proportionality.

The above graph shows the correlation between the proportion of national first-preference votes (FPV) a party receives and the number of seats it wins as a result. It is based on the results of every party in every general election held since 1981 (the first 166-member Dáil), and each point on the graph represents a party’s result in one of those elections. The dashed red line represents a perfectly proportional allocation of seats according to national vote.

What’s immediately visible about our current PR-STV system from the graph is how it benefits the larger parties compared to a perfectly proportional system. In only one outlying case did either of the state’s two large parties win less seats than would have been allocated proportionally (FG, 2002), and in every other election they received a bonus from the PR-STV system. For Fianna Fail in the 1997 and 2002 elections, this bonus gave them an extra 12 and 13 TDs, respectively, over their representation in a purely proportional system.

The PR-STV system, as currently implemented, likewise disadvantages smaller parties.  The second graph is enlarged to only show the results of parties that received less than 8% of the national FPV. It can be seen that in the considerable majority of cases, parties in this bracket win less seats than a proportional system would allocate them. Furthermore, there are often large variations in the number of seats won on a similar proportion of the vote. For example, between the 1992 and 1997 elections, the Progressive Democrats went from 10 to 4 seats, despite receiving exactly the same proportion of the national vote on both occasions (4.7%). In a perfectly proportional system, they would have won 8 seats in each election.

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The Healy-Rae Criterion and Reforming Irish Politics

Published on 18 June, 2009. 8 Comments
The Healy-Rae Criterion and Reforming Irish Politics
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Hence, I propose a simple criterion to be applied to all proposals for reform of the Irish political system:
If Jackie Healy-Rae still gets elected to the national legislature under the new system, the reform hasn’t worked.
I don’t mean this to be an attack on Mr Healy-Rae himself, but rather an observation of the way in which his repeated election is symptomatic of wider problems across the political system.
Jackie Healy-Rae, by his own admission, is a Kerry politician, not a national politician. He works for the people of Kerry, makes sure Kerry is pothole-free, fights for funding for Kerry hospitals, amenities and infrastructure, and sorts anything and everything out for his Kerry electorate. Many would agree that this is hard work, and judging by his continued reelection, a lot of his constituents think that he’s doing it well. The problem is that it’s not his job.

Faith in the political system in Ireland is reaching an all-time low. With a government that thinks “legal obstacles” are an excuse for every occasion, and an opposition that believes the best way to deal with a massive budget deficit is to borrow more money, some people have started to call for a complete overhaul in how our leaders are elected. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if these voices grow both in number and in volume over the coming months, as the gravity of our country’s situation begins to sink in. As this debate comes to the fore, I propose that everyone keeps in mind a simple criterion to be applied to all proposals for reform of the Irish political system:

The Healy-Rae Criterion

If Jackie Healy-Rae still gets elected to the national legislature under the new system, the reform hasn’t worked.

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How Haughey Lost The Lisbon Campaign, And What The Government Can Do About It

Published on 14 April, 2009. 0 Comments

The Lisbon Treaty referendum last year could be described in pretty much every way as a complete and utter mess. The government put a long and complicated international treaty to referendum, through an unintelligible constitutional amendment, then completely failed to convey the actual implications in a clear and concise manner. The No campaigners proceeded to engage in scare tactics on a myriad of topics almost completely unrelated to the treaty, while the European institutions themselves showed a shocking lack of understanding of the Irish electorate throughout the campaign. The voters, understandably, refused to vote for something they couldn’t possibly be expected to understand, and the Lisbon Treaty has been in limbo ever since.

Oddly enough, the person most responsible for the whole debacle isn’t in fact any of the above, but rather a man who died before the Lisbon Treaty was ever written; Mr Charles J Haughey.

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