Farrell, Chapter 1
|
Farrell, Chapter 1 |
Comparing
Electoral Systems Chapter
1: Why study electoral
systems? For people
who do not specialize in this area, electoral systems are
usually seen as a big 'turn-off. It can be difficult to
instil much interest in the subject of counting rules; to
enthuse about the details of how one electoral system
varies from another. After all, how many wars were fought
over whether the electoral formula was 'largest
remainder' or 'highest average'? How many politicians
have been assassinated over the issue of 'single
transferable vote' (STV) versus 'first past the
post' (FPTP)? Pity the student on a hot Friday afternoon
who has to struggle through the niceties of the 'Droop
quota'! Pity the teacher who has to burn midnight oil
getting to grips with the issue of 'monotonicity'! It
does seem fair to pose the question: why bother? What is
the point of spending time examining electoral
systems? Several
reasons can be given. First, a very large and growing
number of people specialize in electoral systems, so
somebody must think these systems are important!
In the 1989 edition of his Inter national Bibliography
on Electoral Systems, Richard S. Katz (1989) listed
some 1,500 works 'dealing with the forms and effects of
representation and electoral systems'. By 1992 this list
had grown to 2,500 works (Katz, 1992). Among these some
have made significant developments in the methodology of
studying electoral systems. For over twenty years one
name has predominated in all textbook treatments of
electoral systems. The seminal work by Douglas Rae (1967)
set the trend on how to study electoral systems and their
political consequences. It is only in the past five years
or so that Rae's work has come under closer scrutiny as
scholars, like Michael Gallagher, Richard Katz, Mend
Lijphart, Matthew Shugart and Rein Taagepera, have sought
to develop and improve on some of his ideas. Their work
(and the work of others) needs to be incorporated into
the textbook treatment of electoral systems. This is one
of the major functions of this book. Second,
electoral systems are worth examining because they have
become politically interesting. With the process of
democratization, first in Mediterranean Europe in the
1970s, and then more dramat ically in central and eastern
Europe at the end of the 1 980s, important decisions had
to be taken on which electoral systems to adopt in the
fledgling representative democracies. As we shall see in
later chap ters, in none of these cases was the 'British'
system of 'FPTP' chosen; in only one case (and only
briefly) was the STV system selected. It is interesting
to speculate on the reasoning behind these particular
decisions. Of even greater interest is the recent trend
towards reform of existing electoral systems,
notably in Italy, Japan and New Zealand-- all within the
past three to four years. This contradicts the impression
that electoral reform is rare, only occurring 'in
extraordinary historical situations' (Nohlen, 1984: 218).
These reforms also give evidence to a growing sympathy
for the 'German two-vote (often referred to as the
'additional member') electoral system, as we see in
chapter 5. Suddenly electoral reform looks possible, not
just some theoretical notion of unrealistic, out of touch
academics. There is a
third reason why it is important to study electoral
systems and that is because they define how the political
system will function. Metaphorically, electoral systems
are the cogs which keep the wheels of democracy properly
functioning. In almost any course on politics the
following themes generally feature as important topics
for consideration: elections and representation; parties
and party systems; government formation and the politics
of coalitions. In each of these areas, the electoral
system plays a key role. Depending on how the system is
designed it may be easier or harder for particular
politicians to win seats, or for particular parties to
gain representation in parliament, and it may be more or
less likely that one party can form a government on its
own. In short, there are important questions about the
functioning of political systems which are influenced, at
least in part, by the design of the electoral
system. Apart from
their primary function of ensuring the smooth running and
accepted legitimacy of the system, electoral systems are
designed to fulfil a number of other--often
conflicting--functions, such as reflecting the wishes of
voters, producing strong and stable govern ments,
electing qualified representatives, and so on. In
selecting a particular design of electoral system, the
'electoral engineers' have to take important decisions
about which function to stress most. As a result, no two
countries have the same electoral system. 1.2
Electoral laws and electoral systems It is
important to distinguish between electoral laws
and electoral systems. Electoral laws are the
family of rules governing the process of elections: from
the calling of the election, through the stages of
candidate nomination, party campaigning and voting, and
right up to the stage of counting votes and determining
the actual election result. There can be any number of
rules governing how to run an election. For instance,
there are laws on who can vote (citizens, residents,
people over seventeen years of age, the financially
solvent, etc.); there can even be laws, such as in
Australia or Belgium, obliging citizens to turn out to
vote. Then there are usually a set of rules setting down
the procedures for candidate nomination (e.g. a minimum
number of signatures, a deposit). The campaign process
can also be subject to a number of rules: whether
polling, television advertising or the use of campaign
cars is permitted; the size of billboards; the location
of posters; balance in broadcasting coverage, and so
on. Among this
panoply of electoral laws there is one set of rules which
deal with the process of election itself: how citizens
vote, the style of the ballot paper, the method of
counting, and the final determination of who is elected.
It is this aspect of electoral laws with which this book
is concerned. This is the electoral system, the mechanism
of determining victors and losers, which clicks into
action once the campaign has ended. This is the stage
where the political pundits take over from the
politicians; where the television companies dust off
their 'pendulums' and 'swingometers' and wheel out their
latest computer graphic wizardry. Campaign slogans and
electoral recriminations have ended. All attention is
focused on thousands of people shuffling ballot papers in
'counting centres' throughout the country. (At least,
this is the situation in Britain. In other countries,the
counting and even the voting are done by computer.)
Politicians, journalists and (some) voters wait with
baited breath for the returning officer to announce 'the
result'. TV presenters work long into the night, probing
with their panelists the meaning of the results and
assessing the voters' 'verdict'. This scenario
of 'election night coverage' is common to most political
systems. There may be some variation in detail, but the
basic theme is similar: we the voters have voted, and now
we are waiting to see the result of our votes, in terms
of who wins or loses and in terms of the number of seats
won by each of the parties. It is the function of the
electoral system to work this transformation of votes
into seats. To put this in the form of a definition:
electoral systems determine the means by which votes
are translated into seats in the process of electing
politicians into office. Exactly how
this translation occurs varies from one system to the
next. In some systems great effort is made to ensure that
the number of seats each party wins reflects as closely
as possible the number of votes it has received. In other
systems greater importance is attached to ensuring that
one party has a clear majority of seats over its
competitors, thereby (hopefully) increasing the prospect
of strong and stable government. The first of these
systems is said to be 'propor tional', in contrast to the
others which are 'non-proportional' electoral
systems. This book
deals with the five main types of electoral system
currently in use (Figure 1.1). First, there are the two
more common forms of non-proportional systems, FPTP and
the variants of major itarian systems (alternative vote
and second ballot). The distinguish ing feature these
systems share is that they do not aim at a proportional
result; instead, far more attention is paid to the
question of governmental stability and--generally being
based on single- member constituencies--to notions of
constituency representation. By contrast, the far more
common family of proportional systems do aim specifically
at achieving degrees of proportionality in the elec toral
result, although with mixed success, as we shall see.
Chapters 2-6 deal with the operation of each of the
systems in turn, describing how the system works, how it
has adapted (if at all), and the political context in
which it has operated. Having dealt with each of the
systems in some detail, the book concludes, in chapter 7,
with an assessment of the political consequences of
electoral systems, dealing with such questions as:
proportionality vs. stability; the role of
representatives; party campaigns, and the potential for
strategic voting. As pointed
out earlier, central to any discussion about electoral
systems and their reform are questions of stability and
the representa tion of minority interests. One is often
seen as, at least partially, a trade-off against the
other. A main contention of this book is that this
argument is fallacious: that an electoral system can
allow for max imum representation of minority interests
without necessarily threat ening the stability of
government. We will return to this point in the
concluding chapter, having reviewed the comparative
evidence in chapters 2-6. Before
proceeding to an analysis of the different electoral
systems, it is necessary to deal with two issues central
to the study of electoral systems: (1) the issue of
representation, and (2) the attempts to, as it were,
artificially' influence the effects of electoral
systems. 1.3
Conflicting views on the meaning of
'representation' The precise
meaning of the term 'representation' can vary markedly.
The basic distinction is between a 'microcosm' and a
'principal agent' conception of representation (McLean,
1991; Reeve and Ware, 1992). The first of these is
associated with proponents of proportional electoral
systems, the second with supporters of non-proportional
systems. A classical exponent of the microcosm view was
John Adams, one of the founding fathers of the USA, who
said that parliament 'should be an exact portrait, in
miniature, of the people at large, as it should think,
feel, reason, and act like them' (quoted in McLean,
1991:173). Taken literally this perspective is similar to
the governing principle behind public opinion polls, i.e.
the notion of a representative sample. In other words a
society which is made up of distinct sets of ratios (e.g.
men:women 50:50; urban:rural 70:30; middle class:working
class 40:60; black:white 20:80), should elect a
parliament which reflects these ratios in microcosm. To
put it another way, parliament should be a
'representative sample' of the popula tion. Obviously it
is impossible to achieve a perfect representative sample,
but the aim should be to get as close as possible to it.
On this view, as Lord Plant (1991:16) explains, 'the
representativeness of a parliament is accounted for by
its proportionality'. It is a sociological mirroring of
society. According to
the microcosm conception of representation, there fore,
it is the pattern of composition of the parliament that
matters, but, according to the principal-agent
conception, it is the decisions of the parliament that
matter. The basis of the principal-agent concep tion is
the notion of one person acting on behalf of another. The
representative is elected by the people to represent
their interests. h this case, even if the parliament is
comprised of a preponderance of fifty-year-old, white,
middle-class males, it is representative provid ing it is
seen to be taking decisions on behalf of the voters. It
is less important that the parliament is statistically
representative of voters, and more important that it acts
properly in the interests of the citizens, i.e.
composition is less important than decisions. In his
excellent summary of these two positions, lain McLean
(1991: 172) observes that each 'seems entirely
reasonable, but they are inconsistent'. There is no
reconciliation: either you support one perspective or you
support the other. Either you are in favour of a
parliament which is a microcosm of society or, instead,
you have a view of parliament which stresses its ability
to act properly in the interests of all citizens.
Ultimately it is a normative judgment call: 'The PR
school looks at the composition of a parliament;
majoritarians look at its decisions' (McLean, 1991: 175).
On this basis, therefore, we can see that it is not
possible to draw firm conclusions as to which is better,
a proportional or a non-proportional electoral system.
There are, however, other more empirical areas where
conclusions can be drawn. Some systems are apparently
associated with greater degrees of governmental stability
while other systems promote smaller parties better than
others. There are effects on the nature of parliamentary
representation (e.g. 'delegate' vs. 'trustee' roles), and
on the organization and campaign styles of political
parties. It is possible to be far more definitive in
assessing these themes, and we will return to them in
chapter 7. I .4
Built-in distortions to electoral systems As will
become all too readily apparent in due course, no single
electoral system achieves full proportionality: all
electoral systems distort the election result, with some
parties benefiting more than others. The best a
proportional electoral system can hope to achieve is to
minimize the degree of distortion. Quite apart
from the 'natural' distorting effects of electoral
systems (which are the subject of chapter 7), there are
instances where electoral engineers resort to added
'artificial' measures, seeking to direct the distorting
effects in their favour. There are four such measures
which merit discussion here: two which are most common to
non-proportional systems, characterized as they are by
constitu ency representation, and two which are generally
found in propor tional systems where efforts are made to
minimize the explosion of minor (and especially
extremist) parties. Let us deal with each in
turn. First, there
is the practice of malapportionment. This refers
to a situation in which there are imbalances in the
population densities of constituencies which favour some
parties over others. This can happen as a matter of
course, by population shifts not being compen sated for
by a redrawing of constituency boundaries, but it can
also be engineered on purpose. Take, for example, the
case of a governing party reliant on rural votes which
fails to redraw the constituency boundaries to take
account of rural depopulation. Malapportionment was a
serious problem in the USA prior to the 1 960s when the
Supreme Court started to play a more active role in
ordering the regular reapportionment of district
boundaries. It is
possible to build in measures in the country's electoral
laws to protect against such practices. The current Irish
constitution, for example, which was ratified n 1937,
contains a clause which ensures that each MP must
represent between 20,000-30,000 voters. If the government
does not meet this requirement it faces a constitutional
challenge. In 1968 the governing Fianna Fail party (whose
traditional electoral base is rural) sought to have this
clause diluted in a constitutional referendum, but was
resoundly defeated. A second
strategy commonly employed in non-proportional electoral
systems is gerrymandering. This refers to the
practice in which constituency boundaries are redrawn
with the intention of producing an inflated number of
seats for a party, usually the governing party. There are
two ways of achieving this. The first method is to divide
one party s supporters into smaller pockets across a
range of con stituencies to ensure that they are kept in
a permanent minority in each of the constituencies
formed, thereby preventing this party from winning any
seats. Wherever the party is too large to allow such a
method to work, an alternative tack is to try to minimize
the number of seats it can win by designing the
constituency boundaries in such a way that where the
governing party's vote is high it stands to win a lot of
seats and where it is low it stands to lose a few
seats. The term
'gerrymander' came from the shape of a constituency
designed by Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts in
1812. It was so long, narrow and wiggly that one
journalist thought it looked like a salamander, and it
was accordingly dubbed a 'gen-ymander'. Gerrymandering is
a common phenomenon in the USA where the parties have
perfected systems of 'redistricting' to their advantage
in those areas where they are in power. For instance,
Douglas Amy (1993: 44) refers to a case in the 1990 House
of Representatives election in Texas where the Democrats
won ten of the fourteen congressional seats despite the
fact that the Republicans had virtually the same vote:
the vote tally was Democrats, 1,083,351, Republicans,
1,080,788. Amy argues that, at least in part, this
reflected a successful gerrymander. A more famous example
was in California in 1982 where one constituency (or
district) 'designed to protect the incumbent Democrat
... was
an incredible 385-sided figure' (Amy, 1993:
46). Gerrymandering
is common to all non-proportional electoral systems, the
UK included (Johnston, 1986). For instance, a frequent
criticism of the Stormont government in Northern Ireland
(in exist ence from 1920-72) was that it practised a
comprehensive system of gerrymandering to protect the
interests of the majority Protestant population (for a
review, see Whyte, 1983). Gerrymandering
is generally associated with non-proportional electoral
systems which have single-member constituencies. How
ever, there are instances of its use in proportional
systems, particu larly in the case of the STV electoral
system which is characterized by multi-member
constituencies (Mair, 1986). The most notorious example
in recent Irish history was in the mid-1970s when the
minister responsible for boundary revision, James Tully,
sought
to
redesign the constituency boundaries to benefit the
governing coali tion of Fine Gael and Labour. In the
subsequent 1977 election the plan backfired badly largely
due to the fact that the swing against the governing
parties was much higher than anticipated. As a result,
the loss for the governing parties was exaggerated by the
effects of the attempted gerrymander. As Richard Sinnott
(1993: 79) has noted, this 'incident has contributed a
new term to the political lexicon. The minister
responsible was James Tully, and a tullymander is a
gerrymander that has an effect opposite to that
intended'. For
established, mainstream politicians, one of the drawbacks
of proportional systems is that they tend to produce
proportional results! It is easier for smaller parties
and for independents to win seats. There is a danger that
counted among these will be political extremists, who in
the eyes of the established politicians threaten
democracy and give proportional representation (PR) a bad
name. To try to minimize the risk of too many minor (and
especially extremist) parties it is common for PR systems
to include minimum electoral thresholds (usually a
minimum vote percentage or a minimum number of seats won)
which a party must pass in order to be granted any seats
in the parliament. Therefore, even if under the electoral
rules a party could actually win some seats, if it fails
to surpass the threshold it is not awarded any. The most
famous of these electoral thresholds operates in Germany.
After the unstable experiences of PR under the Weimar
Republic (1919-33) where successive governments were held
hostage to the vagaries of minor parties, the German
system operates a rule that a party must win either 5 per
cent of the vote or three constituency seats in order to
pass the electoral threshold (for further discussion, see
chapter 5). As we shall
see in chapter 4, electoral thresholds are quite a common
feature of PR systems. For instance, in Denmark a party
needs at least 2 per cent of the national vote to gain
parliamentary representation. In Sweden a party must
either win 4 per cent of the national vote or else 12 per
cent of the vote in one constituency to be eligible for
seats. However, not all electoral thresholds are quite so
onerous. In the Netherlands a party needs just 0.67 per
cent of the vote to qualify for seats, and in other
systems a party which fails to pass a minimum electoral
threshold is allowed to keep the seats it wins, but is
prevented from receiving what are known as 'top-up seats,
thereby ensuring an in-built advantage to the larger
parties. Such top-up advantages are enjoyed by larger
parties in Austria, Greece, Iceland, Norway and for a
time in Malta (for more details and discussion, see
chapter 4). A final means
of distorting the translation of votes to seats is to
introduce a range of party laws to restrict the
activities of certain categories of parties. The most
controversial of these laws are ones which seek to ban
parties from running in elections or, at least, to make
it difficult for them. Again Germany offers the best
example with its party law banning 'anti-system' parties
(Poguntke, 1994). Less explicit are the various legal
restrictions on the operation of certain types of party.
For instance, in the 1980s in Northern Ireland a full
panoply of legal restrictions were brought into play
which made life very difficult for the Sinn Fdin party.
Its candidates were banned from the airwaves (until
1995), except during the final three weeks or so of the
formal election campaign. (A similar ban in the lush
Republic from 1973-95 was even more restrictive in that
it included the election campaign.) Also a matter of some
controversy for Sinn Fein candidates was the non-violence
declaration which all Northern Ireland candidates were
required to sign. 1.5
Conclusion In general,
however, there is relatively little the established
politicians can do to try to influence the effects of
electoral systems on the political process. Ultimately
the main factor determining the influ ence an electoral
system can bring to bear on a polity is the way in which
it has been designed, whether in terms of the degree of
electoral proportionality it produces, the type of party
system it engenders, the degree of choice it offers to
the voter or other such factors. These issues can only be
assessed through an examination of the different
electoral systems on offer, exploring how they operate
and with what consequences. This is the function of the
remainder of this book which examines each of the five
main electoral systems in operation starting, in chapter
2, with the oldest and simplest--FPTP. The book
concludes, in chapter 7, with an overall assessment of
the political consequences of electoral
systems.
David
M. Farrell
(London:
Macmillan, 1998)
