Fruits & Votes is the Web-log of Matthew S. Shugart ("MSS"), Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
Perspectives on electoral systems, constitutional design, and policy around the world, based primarily on my research interests.
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I have generally been keeping away from the circus that is the US Republican Party’s presidential nominating process, 2012.
However, this one is right up the F&V alley.
Michigan is not allocating its delegates proportionally, notwithstanding what various news accounts I have heard and read say.
According to Frontloading HQ, the most reliable source on such matters, Michigan would have had 59 delegates, had it not violated rules on the scheduling of state contests. Those 59 would have been allocated thus:
42 congressional district delegates (3 in each of the 14 congressional districts in the Great Lakes state): allocated winner-take-all based on the congressional district vote.
14 at-large delegates: allocated proportionally to candidates surpassing 15% of the statewide vote.
3 automatic delegates: free to choose whomever.
Due to the national party penalty, the state expects to have only 30:
28 congressional district delegates (2 per each of the 14 districts): allocated winner-take-all based on the vote in the congressional district.
2 at-large delegates: allocated winner-take-all.
0 automatic delegates: Penalized states lose their automatic delegates.
Notwithstanding the 14 (23.7% of the total) statewide delegates that would have been allocated sort-of proportionally1, neither plan could be called a “proportional” allocation.
The contest looks like it is going to be very close between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. If it were really proportional, the two leading candidates might be expected to emerge with about equal numbers of delegates. However, given that it is in fact a system in which the winner of each congressional district will take 2 delegates (and the runner up none), the allocation will come down to the regional distribution of candidates’ support. One of them could get nearly all the delegates, if the regional distribution is relatively even. Or the split could be nearly equal. Or the one with the second highest vote share could even emerge with substantially more delegates than the statewide plurality winner.
A disproportional result is increased in probability by the malapportionment inherent in using plurality allocation in congressional districts. The districts are apportioned based on overall population, yet they would be highly unequal in Republican voters–a quirk that is contained in the primary rules of many states.
The candidate who is stronger among Republicans who live in districts with more Democrats will be advantaged. It is not clear to me which candidate that might be.
“Sort of”, because there is nothing proportional about a 15% threshold. [↩]
As I type this item, we are a few hours from the caucus meeting of the Australian Labor Party, where a decision will be made on the party leader. Current leader and PM, Julia Gillard, is being challenged by former PM (and until a few days ago, Foreign Minister), Kevin Rudd. Today’s caucus vote is a good case study in parliamentary vs. presidential democracy.
In Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers, David Samuels and I make the point that Prime Ministers in parliamentary democracies are agents of their parties, whereas parties in presidential systems must select executive candidates who can succeed as agents of the electorate. We show that this fundamental institutional distinction has consequences for the types of leaders who are chosen under each system. We suggest this is because the qualities that make a potential executive leader a “good agent” of the party might be only loosely correlated with the qualities that make a potential leader sufficiently popular to win a separate election. Australia today is apparently going to give us an excellent case study in exactly why these leadership-selection distinctions matter.
It now appears, based on various news accounts, that Gillard has outmaneuvered Rudd and will survive the challenge, notwithstanding evidence that Rudd is favored by the voters.
If public opinion polls are to be believed, Rudd is vastly more popular than Gillard. For example a Newspoll survey, reported in The Age, has Rudd preferred over Gillard, 53% to 28%. Polls also suggest that he would run a closer contest, or even beat, opposition leader Tony Abbot, while Gillard would lose badly.
However, Australia does not select its executives by popular vote. The only voters who matter under the rules the Labor Party uses are the members of its parliamentary caucus. The Sydney Morning Heraldestimates that the 69 of the 103 caucus members back Gillard and only 29 Rudd.
That’s 67% Gillard in the caucus (and it may end up much higher), 53% Rudd in the public.
Rudd’s wife says the challenger’s campaign is “people-led“. Right; that’s the problem! Rudd and his backers are encouraging voters to contact their Labor MPs on Rudd’s behalf. I doubt many MPs will be swayed. This is their decision.
If the challenger is more popular with the public than the incumbent, one might expect that it would be the marginal seat-holders who would most tend to be in favor of the challenger. After all, they are the Labor MPs who are most vulnerable, and therefore would gain most from whatever additional votes a changed leader might bring to their party. Yet marginal members are actually more likely to favor the incumbent party leader and PM, Gillard, over Rudd. According to a count by the Sydney Morning Herald, only 5 of Labor’s 20 most marginal MPs favor Rudd. They are prepared to sacrifice their seats for the current leader. As the Herald concludes:
Another MP said marginal seat holders tended to support the leader because they got the most attention “Name me a leader who doesn’t listen to marginal seats and I’ll show you a leader who won’t win,” the MP said.
Evidently she listens to the selectorate that matters most to a PM’s career, an area in which Rudd has an ongoing failing.
If Rudd really is more popular, by such a wide margin as polls suggest, one might expect MPs and Senators to be persuaded. Of the many tasks a party leader has to perform, one of the most important is to be able to lead the party to electoral success. Quite likely, however, the caucus members simply do not believe the leader makes this much difference. There is little objective reason to think it would matter as much as the polling says, for when an election actually comes, voters in a parliamentary system will select their legislators based overwhelmingly on the party record, and not on images of the leader. Besides, before the election there is a government and a party to manage, and for Labor caucus members, they have been there, done that with Rudd.
From the point of view of the caucus, it can’t be a good thing to contemplate entering a second consecutive election with a PM who came to power due to an inter-electoral leadership “spill”. Divided parties rarely prosper–it is almost a political-science truism. Better to get this behind them–if they can–and get on with governing and repairing a record on which to run come the next election.
The Labor Party will undergo a leadership ballot on Monday morning after Kevin Rudd quit his post and flew back to Australia to challenge Julia Gillard for the job she took from him 20 months ago.
If Rudd wins, it may have implications for the current Labor-led minority government. At least two of the independent MPs have given some indications of doubt that they’d support a government under a changed PM.
Judge Magdy el-Agaty of the High Administrative Court said the elaborate system that apportioned seats among individuals and political parties violated the constitution. He referred parts of the election law to the Supreme Constitutional Court for a final judgement…
The parliamentary election… was held under an elaborate system under which a third of seats were allocated to individuals and two thirds to political parties.
Agaty said this ratio violated the constitution and half of seats should have been reserved for individuals. He also said parties should not have been permitted to field candidates for the seats reserved for individuals.
“The court views that allowing political parties to run for independent seats violates the principles of constitutional equality and has doubtful constitutionality,” Agaty said in the ruling, which was handed down Monday and released Tuesday.
Should the candidates on party lists, and their ranks, be determined by a system of primary elections? The New Zealand Herald has an editorial on 20 February that suggests primaries for the list tier of the NZ MMP system.
Whatever the calibre of party appointees to Parliament, it seems wrong that they are not subjected to some sort of electoral test. Perhaps list seats should have to be filled by the party’s highest polling losers in electorates – or perhaps an American system of party primary elections could compile the lists.
Some American primaries are open to all voters in the state, others are restricted to voters who have registered with one of the parties. The restricted system could work for party lists under MMP. Candidates for the list could campaign for the support of voters registered with the party for a primary in each region before the election. They would be ranked for list seats in order of their total vote at the end of the primaries.
First of all, let me say that I reject the labeling of party-list candidates, however the list is determined, as party “appointees”. Those who enter parliament via the list are elected–directly elected, even–but via a different method. There is nothing inherently “more democratic” about elections via plurality or other “nominal-vote” rules, nor about open lists, nor about primary elections.1 Regardless of such arguments, however, are primaries in closed party list systems, including the list tier of a mixed-member system, a good idea?
I am skeptical, although at this point I do not have a fully formed idea about this. I am somewhat biased against primaries in list systems because of the experience of some Israeli parties, but political problems in Israel always seem to be somewhat, shall we say, overdetermined. So maybe primaries, per se, are not the problem.
In this context, it is interesting that today’s news has an article from Israel’s Ynet, “PM speaks out against elimination of Likud primaries”.
The Ynet article is without any context, and no other stories about proposals to eliminate primaries in the Likud have come through my news feed. The story quotes PM, and Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu as saying “The Likud used to [be] very centralized, and we decided to open it up. Today we have 130,000 people, instead of 3,000, deciding who will represent the movement”.
Do only 130,000 people participate in Likud primaries? There were 729,054 voters for Likud in the last general election. So that means that a selectorate equivalent to only around 18% of the party’s general-election constituency is effectively setting the lists. Yes, I recognize that 130,000 is a lot more than 3,000, but even 3,000 is a large (and thus at least potentially representative) body for a “centralized” process. Again, there is nothing inherently more democratic about having a self-selected minority of a party’s voters choosing its lists than there is of having a large conference of party delegates do the same.
I hope readers will offer some comments in favor of, or against, primary elections in closed-list PR systems, because this is an area of electoral systems and party organization where my thoughts are far from crystallized.
As for the possibility of having the “list” seats filled by the party’s highest polling losers in the districts, I have already addressed that. I put “lists” in quotation marks here, because strictly speaking, there are no party lists if all of the PR tier is filled in this way. [↩]
No, this is not the much-anticipated essay on the possibility of open lists in New Zealand, but it does belong in the series on the MMP review.
Rather, this is a comment on the NZ Electoral Commission’s introduction to the issues on list types. While I find the issues pages at the MMP review website to be generally well done, the Commission does not get things quite right on the issues on open and closes lists. It says:
In contrast [to closed lists], open lists allow voters to express a preference for one or more candidates on the list and not just the party. Although the seats are still allocated among the parties based on their respective shares of the vote, voters may influence which candidates are elected to fill these seats. How much influence depends on the rules of the open list system. In its simplest form, voters have some ability to change the order of candidates set by a party on its list, but most candidates are elected in list order. More open systems allow voters to determine for themselves the rank order of candidates, and in some, voters can rank any of the candidates, regardless of party.
It seems very odd to me to refer to intermediate types of list as “the simplest form” of open list. (more…)
This is one section in a planned series on “improving MMP”, as the New Zealand Electoral Commission sets up its process of reviewing the electoral system that New Zealanders voted to retain at the referendum in November, 2011.
Campaigners for “Keep MMP” in downtown Wellington, the day before the vote.
The terms of reference for the mandatory review now underway include the question of whether to continue allowing dual candidacy–the right of a candidate to stand simultaneously in a district (electorate) and on a party list. In this essay, I will suggest that banning dual candidacy outright would be mistaken, but I will consider some possible provisions that would ameliorate the potential “legitimacy” problem that can arise from losing electorate candidates gaining a seat via the party list. I will caution against a “best loser” provision, which would allow candidates to win PR seats only if they have run close losing races in their electorate. Instead I will suggest an “incumbent defeat assurance”, whereby incumbent MPs who earn fewer votes that their party’s list in the district, and lose the district, would not be able to retain a seat via the list. I will also suggest an alternative form of “best loser” rule that rewards those electorate losers who outpoll their parties in their districts.
Overview
One of the most criticized aspects of MMP in New Zealand is the possibility that a candidate can lose an electorate contest, yet remain in parliament via the party list. This seems to be especially subject to criticism in the case of incumbent electorate MPs, who are perceived as having been defeated by their voters, yet reelected thanks to the closed party list.
One can argue that this is not really a problem at all. The idea of a mixed-member system is that there are two ways of winning election: being a local constituency MP, or being a party MP. It is sometimes alleged by critics that losing a district race but winning on the list is entering parliament “by the back door”. But that is not accurate, because MMP is a system that might be said to have two “front doors”, neither of which is less legitimate than the other. It is not as if the lists are secret. If voters do not like the list of candidates of a party, there are other parties to choose from. This is the advantage of proportionality–more choice of parties–and in a competitive inter-party context, parties that get a reputation for nominating bad candidates to their list are not likely to prosper. (Work by Jack Vowles has shown that, in any case, incumbent MPs who lose the district but remain MPs due to their list rank tend to last only one more term. That is, their parties do not renominate them, or do not give them a viable list rank, next time around.)
However, if one concedes that the presence of MPs who are district losers but list winners is a problem–whether of actual legislative performance and accountability, or simply bad PR (in the sense of public relations)–there are various ways to address it. (more…)
I did not get to Auckland until after the election, so my campaign sign photos are all from the South Island, or Wellington. But this is one of my favorites, from Errol’s photostream.
In a previous thread it was established that Australia has a strange record of prime ministers being removed by their own parties at a far greater rate than anywhere else. We appear to be about to confirm that tendency:
Caucus members have been back in their electorates for two months and they have had plenty of time to soak up voters’ feelings. Now that they are returning to Canberra this weekend before the resumption of Parliament next Tuesday, some are admitting, away from the microphones and the cameras, that they cannot see how they can continue to support Gillard as their leader.
We may also be about to establish a record for prime ministers doing a Lazarus.
By using the polling place data posted by the New Zealand Electoral Commission1 we can see the correlations between a party’s strength and voters’ electoral-system preferences.
The figures that follow are simple local regression (lowess) plots of the share of the vote for a given party and the share for a given electoral system in New Zealand’s general election and referendum of November, 2011.2 The data points themselves are suppressed because with around 6,000 polling places, the graphs would be overly cluttered. (For reasons indicated in a comment referenced below, the analysis is based on 5,375 polling places.)
Before I go any farther with this, I want to shout out a big THANK YOU to Vasi, who extracted the party-vote data from the many separate files posted at the Electoral Commission website.
Figure 1 shows the relationship between the support for each of New Zealand’s four largest parties–National, Labour, Green, and New Zealand First–and support for keeping the current MMP system. What stands out most is how linear the decline in support for MMP is as National support increases. Relative to Labour strength, support for MMP reaches a point where it levels off, but that is mainly because even where Labour receives around 50% support, the vote for MMP is already approaching 80%. Strong Green support is correlated with strong MMP support. No surprise there. There is a rather more limited relationship to votes for New Zealand First.
Figure 2 shows support for the two alternatives that were most likely to be favored by voters who wanted to change from MMP: Supplementary Member (SM, which is what I would call MMM) and First Past the Post (FP(T)P). Clearly, Labour strongholds were duly skeptical of SM, while support for both systems is associated with National’s strong polling places. There is actually a steady 30% or so support (on average) for FPTP in places where Labour wins more than about a third of the vote. I am not sure what to make of this; maybe strong Labour areas include many voters who long for the old days of Labour majorities under the former electoral system.
Figure 3 looks at the two large parties and support for the two options in Part B of the referendum that entail ranked-choice ballots: Preferential Vote (PV, which is usually known as the Alternative Vote) and the Single Transferable Vote (STV). Note that the lowess curves never rise above about 12% for either system. The one thing that stands out for me here is that there is actually some growing support for PV/AV as Labour strength increases. That makes sense, given that Labour could expect to benefit from many Green voters’ transfers. The sharp decline for PV/AV as National support increases is the mirror image of Labour’s trend–and is actually stronger, perhaps because National has so few potential allies who would give it second (or third, etc.) preferences. Still, we can’t make too much out of it, given that support for this system is so low overall. Not surprisingly, support for STV, which is nowhere high, decreases with support for either major party.
Figure 4 shows a rather interesting divergence of support for the two ranked-choice systems according to the strength of three smaller parties, Greens, New Zealand First, and United Future. Finally, we find out who wanted STV: Green voters! Well, actually, even they don’t want it very much, as places where their party vote reaches 40% or more still vote less than 20% for STV as their preferred alternative. Nonetheless, a trend for more STV support in locations with many Green voters certainly makes sense, inasmuch as STV is the only other proportional system on offer. It is a clear second best for supporters of a party like the Greens, which has generally dispersed support, but also (as the graph clearly shows) some pockets where it is locally quite strong. Local strength might enable it to combine with other parties and elect MPs in a few districts, while elsewhere its votes would transfer to Labour and help it elect an additional MP or two.
There is not much trend for the other parties, or for the Alternative Vote (PV), although places where there is a significant minority of United Future voters clearly are not places where voters see much benefit in the Alternative Vote.
Fun with Stata! And thanks again, Vasi, for your assistance!
_____________
See comment #6 for some information on the data.
And throwing aside all concerns about ecological fallacy! [↩]
All percentages (really, shares) of votes in Part B of the referendum are calculated with the denominator being TOTAL votes in the referendum (i.e. informal votes are included). [↩]
Earlier this week, I reported the polling-place correlations of votes for various options in the New Zealand electoral-system referendum of 2011.
An analysis of the split-voting statistics, as compiled by the Electoral Commission, offers another window on the same questions addressed there. The advantage of these data is that they are based on the Commission’s examination of individual ballot papers, as votes in the two parts of the referendum were cast on a common ballot.1
As we already knew, most voters who voted to “Keep” MMP (Part A of the ballot) did not vote at all on Part B, where they could select among several potential replacement systems. In fact, 54.7% of “Keep” voters cast “informal” ballots (meaning blank or invalid).
What is most striking is that of those who cast a vote in Part B, a very large plurality voted for the old First Past the Post (FPTP or FPP) system. The percentage of valid Part B votes for FPTP cast by those who voted in Part A to keep MMP was 40.4%! I wonder how many of these were “insincere” votes, by voters who assumed that FPTP could never defeat MMP in the follow-up referendum that would have happened in 2014 if a majority had voted for change in Part A.
The next most popular choice for “keep” voters was STV, with 24.0%. This, of course, makes sense. Voters who prefer proportional representation ought to rank STV and MMP one after the other as their sincerely preferred choices among the systems on offer.
For third place among “keep” voters who chose any system in Part B, “Supplementary Member” actually edged out “Preferential Voting”, 18.7% to 16.9%. The choice here is an interesting one, as it indicates a preference for any sort of mixed-member system–Supplementary Member is actually a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system–over a return to all single-seat districts with ranked-choice ballots. (Preferential Vote = Alternative Vote or Instant Runoff.) In terms of sincere voting, it is not straightforward which of these “should be” preferred by voters whose first choice is MMP.
On the one hand, MMM (SM) retains a tier of nationwide proportional seats, but these would cease to be compensatory (and, under the specific proposal, there would have been many fewer of them). On the other hand, while PV (AV) abolishes all party-list seats, it gives voters for a losing party in a district the potential of determining on preferences which of the big parties wins the seat. Both systems would likely produce majority governments frequently, but those majorities and the campaigns that produced them would have been of a different character.
As for the “change” voters, there are no surprises. Only 3.7% did not cast a valid vote in Part B. Of the remaining voters who did cast a valid vote, just under half (49.8%) voted to go back to FPTP, and 28.0% voted for MMM (SM).
In the earlier correlation analysis of polling place results, I noted the lack of correlation between the vote for Part A and the vote for STV. As we saw above, 24.0% of “Keep MMP” voted for STV, and so did 12.4% of the “Change” voters (for whom STV came in third place, ahead of PV/AV). When the informal votes are included in the denominator, the percentages drop to 10.9% and 11.9%, strikingly close. It is not possible to say for sure from the available data, but maybe STV was a Condorcet winner in the wider electorate, albeit not an especially popular one overall. That would make some sense, as it provides the compromise features of all members being elected in local districts, yet offering a considerable degree of proportionality.
In any case, MMP is now clearly confirmed as the New Zealand electoral system, and so discussion shifts to the formal review of MMP, and how the system might be “improved”.
The same page at the Electoral Commission carries out the split-ballot analysis in each district, although not in each polling place. [↩]
The New Zealand Electoral Commission has now released its data showing votes in the 2011 electoral-system referendum at the level of the polling place.1
I have taken a very quick look at the data, and can report some interesting correlations. Keep in mind this is aggregate data, albeit at the level of the polling place, and not individual-level data.2 All of the numbers reported here are thus simple correlations of the vote percentages for a given option on Part A of the ballot (keep or change from MMP) with percentages on Part B (the choice of an alternative system, should “change” win).
(Acronyms in parentheses indicate how the systems were identified in the referendum, which is not always consistent with how they are more commonly known outside NZ, and to the terms I prefer to use.)
These correlations suggest that voters who were happy with the current MMP system were more likely to simply abstain than to select any replacement option from Part B. This is a trend that, as noted earlier, was already apparent from the national aggregate data.3
It is interesting that the only electoral system from Part B that has a positive correlation with a polling place’s percentage vote to keep MMP is the Alternative Vote (known in New Zealand as “Preferential Vote”). It is somewhat surprising that pro-MMP voters would not be more likely to have chosen the only other proportional system on offer, STV. Yet the vote for STV bears hardly any correlation at all with “keep MMP”.
Now, correlations between “change” (i.e. replace MMP) with Part B options:
Not surprisingly, these are close to mirror images of the correlations with “keep MMP”, except for the STV vote (which is simply not well correlated with however a voter voted in Part A).
It is evident that voters who were discontented with MMP were unlikely to abstain from choosing an alternative, and were about as likely to go for either of the majoritarian systems on the ballot that did not entail ranked-choice ballots–that is, FPTP or MMM (SM), but not AV (PV).
As for the small percentage of voters who declined to mark a choice on the keep/change question, this is positively correlated with only one option in Part B: FPTP. It is a weak correlation, at .145, but all of the others are negative and not much different from zero. Perhaps this means that the sort of voter who would abstain in Part A was a low-information “good old days” FPTP voter. (“I don’t get this whole electoral systems thing, but I know things were better before we got rid of FPP.”)
There are more detailed analyses one could do, particularly taking into account partisan trends in electorates and polling places,4 but this makes for a good starting point.
_______________ Small corrections, 2 Feb.
It is in section 7 at the Commission’s Statistics page. I am grateful to Robert Marsh, Senior Project Leader at the Electoral Commission, for sending me the link. [↩]
There are 6,066 observations. The median number of referendum ballots cast per polling place was 129. [↩]
However, as Manuel Alvarez-Rivera noted in a comment to our earlier discussion, at the electorate (district) level, the correlation between “Keep MMP” and an informal vote (abstention or invalid) in Part B, was 0.97. So, when we look at the polling place, the correlation drops quite a bit. [↩]
The latter would be very time-consuming, as the Electoral Commission does not seem to have put out a single data file that contains all the polling places, but only the electorate-by-electorate data. So it would be very time consuming–albeit possible–to do this analysis. [↩]
If by my laws you walk, and my commands you keep, and observe them,
then I will give-forth your rains in their set-time,
so that the earth gives-forth its yield
and the trees of the field give-forth their fruit.
--Vayikra 26: 3-4
F&V time: This blog's date function is so set as to start a new day at approximately local sunset.
(Why, if we have "day" and "night," should a new "day" start in the middle of the night?)
FRUITS: Support your local, organic growers; and, plant vines and fig trees and pomegranates for the generations to come...
VOTES: For democratization and full representation, for environmental sustainability, social justice, and peace, always sincerely...
