It’s an interesting time for us fans of the Single Transferable Vote. (In case you don’t know, STV is a voting system where the voter ranks the candidates in order of preference, used in places such as Malta, Tasmania, elections for the Australian Senate, local council elections in Scotland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, all elections in the Irish Republic and all elections apart from Westminster elections in Northern Ireland.)
In the wake of the 2001 election, a Citizens’ Assembly was set up to consider improvements to the system – using a rather interesting method of random selection of one man and one woman from each of the 79 electoral districts, plus two First Nations reps. After a year of operation, the Citizens’ Assembly recommended (as any sensible body would) the adoption of STV in multi-member constituencies. A 2005 referendum got 57.7% of voters in favour (and a majority of voters in all but two electoral districts), but the threshold had been set rather artifically at 60%, so it was not implemented. On Tuesday, the voters get another go, with a slightly refined proposal. I wish them well. (Not sure if any are reading this – almost all my Canadian readers are in Toronto.)
The air of unreality that still pervades Leinster House in the face of the biggest crisis to face the country since the second World War is a commentary on our much vaunted multi-seat PR system. It is a system that has given us one-party domination for the past quarter of a century with the inevitable development of crony capitalism and its disastrous consequences in the housing bubble and banking crisis.
I disagree. (Obviously.) One-party domination has been delivered by the voters generally voting for one party – and not just over the past quarter-century, but in 18 of the last 23 elections since 1932. Crony capitalism developed not because of the electoral system but because of the policy choices of the policy actors – not just the elected politicians, but the unions and the employers, in agreeing the Social Partnership deals which kept the economy going but also protected all of those actors from serious public scrutiny. The electoral system had nothing to do with it; it was a form of groupthink which, in fairness, originated in reaction to a previous economic crisis. (I confess I don’t read the Irish media much these days, so my information may not be up to date; I found blog posts by my fellow emigrants Henry Farrell and P O’Neill rather interesting on the root causes of the crisis.)
The electoral system imposes a lifestyle on politicians which is directly inimical to good government and is a considerable deterrent to potential participants. The skills required to massage a constituency seven days and nights a week have nothing to do with running a small European country with an open economy. Ministers have to spend 20 to 30 hours a week attending local functions, holding clinics, going to funerals – they’ll lose their seats if they don’t.
She proposes a reduction in the number of members of Parliament (currently 166 for a population of 4½ million – compare British Columbia’s 79 for exactly the same population), which I agree with, and a switch to open list voting (as we have in Belgium) which I disagree with.
It is a poor argument that the electoral system makes life difficult for politicians because they have to spend too much time paying attention to voters. In a democracy, that is surely desirable rather than damaging. The fact is that the excessive – and it is excessive – clientelism of Irish politics long predates the adoption of proportional representation in the early 1920s. Probably it goes back to Daniel O’Connell’s invention of the political party as a mass membership organisation in the 1830s, a system which was then exported (with some variations) to the United States. The memoirs and biographies of Irish politicians of the late nineteenth century, unburdened by the duties of actual government, reflect the desperate need to keep the constituents on-side. Even though most of Ireland was dominated by a single party, the leadership could never safely gift parliamentary seats to its favourites – Parnell’s authority was deeply dented by his (ultimately successful) enforcement of his lover’s husband’s candidacy onto his local supporters in Clare and then Galway.
From the other side of the argument, I have to say that politics here in Belgium is equally criticised locally (with I think slightly less justification) as being too clientelistic, despite the fact that we already have Hussey’s preferred open list system. Our mayor in the village where we live has been in office since the municipal boundaries were last redrawn in 1976. He is grooming his niece for the succession. There are of course plenty of instructive similarities between Belgian and Irish political history, and as he built his movement in the 1830s O’Connell found much inspiration in the recent revolution here.
(Hat-tip for the two IT articles to Brian Walker on Slugger O’Toole, who agrees with me that they are asking the wrong questions.)
Interesting for the Kindle rankings if nothing else – I think Cyber Circus has been £2.68 for a while, with the paper copy at 9.99, while the price disparity between the paper and e-copies of The Islanders is much smaller and the difference in rankings is correspondingly smaller. I don’t know what the regular price for Osama is, but it’s now £3.68 and it was free for a few days, I wonder if free downloads count towards the sales rank?
I have read three and I have difficulty ranking them – currently By Light Alone is top with Embassytown and Osama right behind, but ask me tomorrow and I might have changed my mind. I’d be happy with any of them as winners, and have the other two waiting to be read.