An op-ed in the Irish Times decries the “inefficiency” of Irish politics. About the Irish political system, Gemma Hussey asks:
Is it fit for purpose? Is our electoral system, which frames that political establishment, suitable for Ireland of the 21st century? [...]
We have in Ireland an electoral system, multi-seat proportional representation, which almost ensures that a broad range of the best brains and achievers in the country will never see the inside of Leinster House, much less the Cabinet room. At the same time, we have too many Dáil members.
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.
The solution? A party-list system and a smaller, unicameral parliament.
Actually, Ireland’s 166-member first chamber, the Dáil, just about nails the “right” size under the cube-root law, given a population of around 4.1 million. I’ll leave it to others to discuss the merits of STV vs. list forms of proportional representation for the 21st century.
Maybe the Irish parliament should be elected using a two tier system using STV in multi member districts (149 seats), and a nation wide at large tier using the best loser system (17 seats). 149+17=166 members.
Does STV produce too much localism? Is this the case in Tasmania where it is use in the lower house there? What about Malta? What about Northern Ireland? Does it increase pork barrel spending much more so than FPTP?
The problem is that so very few countries use STV, so one has very little idea how it works in other circumstances. It’s is the rarest of the rare electoral systems.
How would STV work in ethnically divided countries? Only in Northern Ireland does one get to see how it works in action. The preferential voting is optional not compulsory till it exhausts.
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 23 May 2009 @ 17:01
Actually Northern Ireland and the Republic are both cases of ethnically divided nations. There is also the case of India where the president and vice-president are elected by STV in a federal/state electoral college. India and Ireland have both had a number of ceremonial presidents from religious minorities.
Originally both the republic and the province used STV which was mandated for a certain time at the establishment of both states under the treaty. Northern Ireland changed to FPTP as soon as it was allowed. Minority MPs vanished from the Northern Ireland parliament, moderates vanished from the majority representatives among Northern Ireland MPs, and the strange and oppressive confessional state was created which continued until the outbreak of the Troubles.
Broadly I think of keeping legislative bodies small as cheap thrills politics. It does not really adversely effect the interests of sitting MPs. It does not seriously effect the budget in either direction.It does allow its advocates to make fine sounding but entirely contentless claims about reducing the size of government.
Adding an MMP component to STV is not generally a good idea and finding objective math to support it is is actually somewhat challenging. Ireland would do better to ban even-numbered seats and raise the minimum district magnitude to 5 or 7.
I am not here abandoning my fetish that every electoral system should include adjustment seats so that where the largest party in terms of popular receives less seats than its percentage of the votes it should get sufficient MPs to make up the deficit. I would expect such a rule to be rarely invoked because it would kill dead, in Madisonian terms, any interest in manipulating boundaries.
Seed planted by Alan — 23 May 2009 @ 17:44
Does STV produce too much localism? … Does it increase pork barrel spending much more so than FPTP?
Hussey doesn’t argue this. To her credit she recognizes that FPTP wouldn’t solve the (perceived) problem. In fact, it would make it worse.
I honestly don’t know whether Ireland has a real localism problem that needs solving. It is a small place (by North American standards), and the district magnitude has declined over the years, so even multi-member districts provide plenty of opportunity to schmooze with constituents. Maybe there is a problem. But it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Hussey’s diagnosis is not widely shared.
Seed planted by Bob Richard — 23 May 2009 @ 17:48
I suppose I should mentioned Tasmania where the 1998 reduction in district magnitude was a type case of cheap thrills politics. The traditional labor/liberal duopoly in the house of assembly was threatened by the emergence of a strong Green party. Indeed there was an unsuuccesful Labor/Green confidence and supply arrangement in the early 90s.
Labor and the coalition justified the reduction on the grounds of small government and the Green threat to ‘majority rule’. Each of the 5 districts (they use the boundaries for the federal SMDs) was reduced from 7 MHAs to 5. The theory was that the larger quota (1/6 instead of 1/8) would prevent the return of Green MHAs.
A classic example of how small government arguments are often really entrench us in power arguments.
Seed planted by Alan — 23 May 2009 @ 18:09
Let’s compare Irrish TDs with Australian Senators and (mainland) Legislative Councillors to test the theory that effectively closed lists (well, technically STV, but where list ranking corresponds to chances of election/ defeat even more exactly than in some list systems, such as Belgium and The Netherlands) produces a higher quality of harder-working legislator.
To get a true comparison, exclude those Senators/ MLCs who are at the bottom of their party’s ticket (or the only one elected for it) and who therefore still have to worry about the actual election after the preselections have been finalised. In other words, compare the one or two Spittzkandidat fortunates at the top of the ticket – those who’d be elected if Ireland replaced “free list” STV with closed lists.
I wonder if she has considered adopting aspects of the Australian version of “stage-managed mainland STV”. Obviously no democrat in their right mind would copy above-the-line ticket voting, after seeing how it works in practice (viz, safe seats for life for the top two from each major party, while letting minor parties win seats on 2% of the primary vote). But allowing like-minded candidates to have their names grouped, and to specify their order on the ballot, by “mutual consent” (as the NSW Constitution Act delicately phrases it), would enable Irish parties to protect their quality candidates from the fear of defeat for having eaten too little rubber chicken on the campaign trail. Combining this with fully optional preferences and party designations on the ballot might mean this avoids the worst extremes the Australian system throws up, like Mal Colston or Steve Fielding/ Robert Wood.
The NZ Royal Commission proposed a simialrly “semi-scripted” version of STv (with ticket-voting, but this was only 4 years and 1 election after it had been used in Australia, and its worst effects were not yet apparent).
Seed planted by Tom Round — 23 May 2009 @ 19:20
Also, introducing self-ranked candidate groups for Dail elections could be done by ordinary statute, and wouldn’t require a Constitutional referendum. The Ir[r]ish Supreme Court has given the Oireachtas wide leeway regarding ballot-order, eg allowing alphabetical ranking even though it mean well over 50% of the Dail had surnames A-M.
Possibly this could be combined with the “circuits” idea: divide each constituency into precincts (not necessarily equal in [voter] population), with a different ballot-order for all papers distributed in that precinct. A party’s team could, if they wanted, re-arrange their order to put the local heroes highest in their home precinct, or run a uniform order in all precincts. If they didn’t specify an order, it should be rotated, or at least drawn by lot.
(I wouldn’t die in a ditch to stop a party giving its high-profile candidates some amount of head-start over their intra-party rivals – a small amount, as a tie-breaker. What I do object to is fixing the race so the top-ranked candidates start three feet away from the finishing line, and the others start three hundred feet away – as mainland Australian upper House “scripted STV” does – such that the election day becomes a formality so far as concerns which individuals are elected from which party teams.)
Seed planted by Tom Round — 24 May 2009 @ 02:56
I’d go for Robson Rotation myself and let the chips fall where they may.
Seed planted by Alan — 24 May 2009 @ 03:03
Alan, that’s also my 1st pref, but I wouldn’t want “We can’t afford to print 20 different permutations of the ballot-paper” or “it doesn’t guarantee every locality a representative” to be the deal-breaker that makes some form of “open-list STV” to be broadly acceptable to a polity. If facing a clever, well-funded “No STV” campaign, it helps to have a few different variants that preserve the basic attractions of the system while adjusting the shoe to where it pinches in particular places. (Eg, obviously “huge electoral districts” is a bigger ask for a Canadian Province than for the ACT).
Re “A classic example of how small government arguments are often really entrench us in power arguments”
- I remember thinking back in 1998, “If they want to reduce the Tasmanian Assembly from 35 seats, but if 25 seems to small to field a viable Ministry + backbench + Opposition, why not move to three 9-seaters?” I predict if you’d proposed that before 1998, the “let’s white-ant Hare-Clark” brigade in the Big Two Parties would have backtracked and had all sorts of reasons why 27 seats is far too small for a Lower House of government.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 24 May 2009 @ 05:32
> “broadly UNacceptable to a polity”
For some reason, it wouldn’t let me amend, even under the Ten Minute Rule.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 24 May 2009 @ 05:49
“small government arguments are often really entrench us in power arguments.”
Alan, EXACTLY!
And so, of course, are supermajority requirements and malapportionment (defenders of the US Senate, are you reading this? Probably not).
Seed planted by MSS — 24 May 2009 @ 14:37
1. If Ms Hussey’s concern that Cabinet Ministers are too distracted from the big picture by their parish-pump electioneering, it might make more sense to increase the maximum number of Ministers who can be appointed from the Irish Senate (currently 2, I believe). After all, the PM appoints 11 of 60 Senators so there is ample room there to elevate Bono to the Foreign Ministership or what have you.
(Allowing appointed legislators to serve as Ministers is, to me, better than allowing – a fortiori requiring – Ministers to come from outside the legislature. As others have noted, if US Cabinet Secretaries fall out with the President, they retire not to the Congressional backbench but to private life. They may have resigned a hard-fought Senate seat or Governor’s chair to take a position that depends on the President’s pleasure. As a result, the President does not always get full and frank feedback from the Cabinet.
(I have a lurking suspicion that some time in 2010 or ’11, some huge foreign policy crisis will break out, and Obama will blame it on Hillary and dismiss her. She reverts from being Secretary Clinton to being, not Senator Clinton, but Citizen Clinton, and at a stroke Obama has not only politically neutralised a potential 2012 primary rival, but accomplished something the Republicans have achieved fror only two of the past 31 years – no Clintons holding public office).
2. Ms Hussey’s comment that “Swedish ministers are required to live in Stockholm, devote themselves to their government work, but in return are placed at the top of their party list at the next election” is debatable. In 1995, the Swedish PM allowed one (female) Minister to live outside the capital and “telecommute” to Cabinet meetings. (See “Log Cabinet”, The Economist (25 February 1995), p 60.
Roland Huntford’s comment is 38 years old (and his entire book is a scathing critique of Sweden – whether from the Left or the Right I can’t tell, but it’s scathing), but I see no institutional reason why things would have changed since:
‘The weakness of the Diet [ie, Riksdag], and its irrelevance to the search for political advancement, are not the arcane discoveries of political theorists, but truths so evident to the average Swede as not to be worth discussing. He knows that, although Cabinet ministers are nowadays expected to sit in the Diet, it is in the bureaucracy that they achieve their position, seats being provided as an afterthought. And he also knows full well that a Diet seat is usually the reward of a party hack or a stalwart of a corporate organisation. This is perfectly acceptable. Personality is at a discount in Swedish politics. Indeed, to say that an election has concerned personalities is to speak in a derogatory manner. Elections in Sweden are not about politicians but parties; that is to say, not about men [sic], but impersonal interest groups or disembodied manifestoes.
‘This is partly a consequence of proportional representation. The huge constituencies involved, with their cohorts of participants, mitigate [scil militate] against personal identity. The average Swedish constituency sends fifteen members to the Diet, and engages 150 candidates at a General Election. On the other hand, most European countries have some kind of proportional representation without necessarily abolishing the significance of the individual candidate: Germany is a case in point. But the Swede has consciously banned personality from politics; he has done so to obtain peace of mind. As a corollary, he has no respect for the Diet, which he sees as an assembly of nonentities. To him, the Diet’s function is to toe the party line, and keep the files moving. The real power lies elsewhere…’
Huntford, The New Totalitarians, (1971), Chapter 7: “The Rule of the Apparatchik,” pp 138-39.
3. Ms Hussey’s statement that “Finland, Norway and Denmark have much smaller legislatures (though all of them have greater populations than Ireland)…” is debatable.
3.1 If by “legislators” she is including Irish Senators, this is true at a stretch (226 compared to 200, 169 and 179). But if she includes Senators, this undercuts her argument that all Irish MPs must focus on local constituency work and aren’t talented/ visionary enough to serve as Ministers. (William Butler Yeats was an appointed Irish Senator, for Epone’s sake!)
3.2 OTOH, if by “legislators” she means “elected members of the lower house”, then her claim is true only at a very, very tenous stretch (166 TDs compared to 200, 169 and 179 – a difference of at most 17% and as little as 1.8%) that verges on gross exaggeration.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 26 May 2009 @ 23:05
I agree about drawing ministers from the legislature and having ministers with the ability to talk back to the president because they have an independent power-base. Since about 1980 there have a series of claims about efficiency overriding accountability, best encapsulated in the Thatcher TINA (there is no alternative) claims.
Recent events have shown that many of those efficiency were actually so much hot air. It’s a nontrivial fact that the California ideology, which is being dissected in loving detail by John Quiggin, only seems to have prevailed in FPTP or AV countries. Indeed New Zealand moved to MMP largely because a government elected on a platform of social democracy proceeded to introduce the most radical version of the California ideology ever tried.
It’s also probably a nontrivial fact that California has reached this dramatic fiscal impasse after decades of allegedly small government, we can do more with less, all tax reductions are good, the market is supreme etc etc. Efficiency in government does matter, but saying it is the sole or supreme object of constitution-making is just more cheap thrills politics.
Let us compare Darwin and New Orleans. In 1974 Darwin suffered a direct hit from a Cat 5 cyclone. Over 90% of all structures were levelled. The destruction included communications and was so complete that the federal government did not learn of the disaster for some hours. The population of Darwin in 1974 was a greater proportion of Australia’s population than New Orleans was of the US population when Katrina hit. The nearest city, Brisbane, was 1800 kilometres away.
Many economic conservatives cited Katrina as evidence that government cannot do certain things. Yet Australia, a poorer country under much more difficult geographic circumstances and after much greater destruction, had the first evacuation flights running within 19 hours of the cyclone and had almost the entire population evacuated to the other side of the continent within a week. The city was rebuilt within years to new building standards that have withstood every subsequent cyclone. Government can work.
Accountability is at least as important as efficiency and the record suggests that the higher the level of accountability in a government the less likely that government is to have taken the Californian road. The record also suggests, as Tom details, that the prophets of efficiency are not always all that efficient in analysing or citing data.
Seed planted by Alan — 27 May 2009 @ 04:12
If Ministers are elected, they should be genuinely responsive – that is, having a consitutency to worry about, voters to listen to, and a real fear of being unseated at the next election.
On the other hand, if Ministers are meant to be technocratic experts, they should be appointed – ie, dispensing with the time-consuming charade of finding a safe electorate or an unassailable spot high on the party ticket – to non-voting seats, preferably in the upper house, for the whole life of the legislature.
The Swedish alternative makes them too dependent on the party while the US alternative makes them too dependent on the President.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 27 May 2009 @ 19:01
# 13-There used to be a rule that when a British MP was appointed a Minister of the Crown, he had to resign his seat in the House of Commons and stand in a by-election. It was based on the idea that an MP could not hold an office of profit and remain an MP. Winston Churchill was defeated in just such a by-election in 1908, but was returned for another constituency later.
[long URL deleted per comment, per comment policy. It was only a Wiki cite anyway.]
They eventually changed the rule, as I imagine it was getting pretty inconvenient by the 1920s…
As for Gemma, there is an occasional bleat from Irish politicans (usually failed ones, like Gemma) about the indignities of the system, but all I can say is that on the two occasions the Irish have been asked to change the system, they have declined.
Seed planted by Dermot — 28 May 2009 @ 05:47
We should have passed the hat around to buy Ms Hussey a return ticket to British Columbia a month ago. No-BCSTV could have added her argument that STV encourages excessively localised representation to Schrek The Third-of-a-Vote’s insistence that STV destroys localised representation.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 28 May 2009 @ 09:12
I only just realised that Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh is a member of the Rajya Sabha, the indirectly-elected upper house. It is extremely unusual for a Westminster prime minister to sit in the upper house although it was common in Britain until the last century. In 1969 Senator John Gorton was elected leader of the government party and therefore Prime Minister of Australia. Gorton immediately resigned from the Senate and contested a seat in the House of Representatives. (There is a 3 month grace period when you do not have to be an MHR or senator to hold ministerial office) Evidently Sonia Gandhi consulted Tom before working out the composition of the government.
Seed planted by Alan — 28 May 2009 @ 12:09
If only…!
Ireland’s Const spells out explicitly that the Taoiseach and Finance Minister must be Lower House MPs, not Senators. Aust has the same rule – via convention, not law – for their equivalents, the PM and Treasurer.
Interestingly, Australia adopted (or borrowed) this convention at a time when arguably Senators were more electorally responsive than MHRs. Whatever the other defects of the 1901-48 block vote system (and these were manifold), it did not give individual Senators security of tenure, even if you were “top of the ticket”. If your party’s vote dropped from 51% to 49% in a State, you and your two colleagues were out of the Senate. STV elsewhere ensures this level of individual responsiveness, but not since 1949 in the Senate, thanks to party-ranked ballot groups, full compulsory preferences, and (now) ticket-voting.
It makes sense that an hereditary British Lord, a life-appointed Canadian Senator, or an indirectly-elected Irish Senator, can’t serve as Head of Government. (With 11 of 60 being appointed by the HoG, would that allow “bootstrapping” by a Taoiseach? [*]). It also makes sense, post-1948, that a semi-directly-elected Australian Senator can’t serve as PM (especially now, post-1977, that parties control whom the State Parliaments can appoint to fill Senate vacancies). But before 1948, the “no PM in Upper House” rule wasn’t as obviously justifiable on the grounds that “A Head of Govt must hold a Lower House seat, if not separately elected by popular vote”.
India – very unusually among the democracies I know of – allows appointed members in the Lower House (maxmimum 2, if the President thinks the Anglo-Indians are under-represented). Plus the indirect elections for the Upper House seem quite fiercely contested (STV in the State legislatures). I wonder if this -perhaps – may have eroded the upstairs/ downstairs distinction that other Westminster systems retain.
[*] Yesterday I was at a very interesting conference to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Constitution of the Colony/State Queensland. Among other things I learned that, just before it voted to abolish itself in 1922, the Qld Legislative Council had as many as 66 members (mainly Labor MLCs who were supposed to vote for abolition but then got swayed by the perks of office) as against only 72 in the Assembly. This raises the intriguing “What if…?” that, had the Upper House not been abolished and had grown just 10% larger, to overtake the Assembly in size, it would have been the “most numerous House” of the State Parliament and its franchise would have become the controlling definition for federal electoral purposes. Which would have meant, under the Australian Constitution, that all of Qld’s MHRs and Senators would have been chosen by… the Governor in Council.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 29 May 2009 @ 18:56
I cannot cite the case on the way out the door, but I think the High Court has now ruled that the more numerous branch provision is spent and the Electoral Act is controlling. Also without citation, I do not not know how that reads with the decision last year in the Prisoners Franchise case which held that the phrase ‘chosen by the people’ limits the legislative power of the Commonwealth to restrict the franchise through that same Act.
For greater clarity, our constitution requires that ministers be MHRs or senators. It is a matter of convention that the prime minister and treasurer must be MHRs. NSW has had treasurers from the legislative council.
Seed planted by Alan — 29 May 2009 @ 20:01
Alan’s right, alas – but it remains intriguing that Aust and USA use “most numerous House” to mean “lower”, given that at the time the Aust Const was adopted, the Lords outnumbered the Commons (around 1,000 to 600) and I assume (from passing references in history books and the like) that this was so in 1776.
The Supreme Soviet of the USSR had two houses of 750 members each. One was apportioned among Union Republics by population and the other on a basis of equality for different classes of federal regions.
If by “lower” house we mean “closer to the popular majority”, it would make more sense to say “the House with more elective members”, or if equally sized, with the shorter term. Term length should be later in lexical order because otherwise the Bundesrat would be “lower” than the Bundestag (at-will vs 4 years), and many US (and now Australian) State legislatures would be tied on that criterion.
“Elective” member = (a) elected, or (b) filling a casual vacancy in an elected seat. (eg, appointed replacement Australian and US Senators are not “elected” but their positions are still “elective”).
C/f the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 (Imp) which defined a “representative” colonial legislature as one with “[at least] Half” of its Members elected by the inhabitants.
If both houses had the same term and the same number of seats (eg Supreme Soviet), I suppose the highest Dauer-Kelsay index (“smallest % of the population who elect a majority of seats”) would apply.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 29 May 2009 @ 21:32
(1) The words are there because people like Hare and Griffith worked explicitly form a limited number constitutional models. They pirated large slabs of Canada and larger slabs of the US.
(2) The case is Roach v Electoral Commissioner, which turned on the interpretation of s30:
Roach’s case held that you do not have a parliament elected by the people (as required by s30 and other sections of the Constitution) where all sentenced prisoners are excluded from voting and invalidated an act to that effect passed by the Howard coalition.
Seed planted by Alan — 31 May 2009 @ 22:57
Hare? You mean Clark?
Seed planted by Tom Round — 01 June 2009 @ 01:21
Yes, I mean Clark. I was obviously drooping and did not give this the proper quota of attention.
Seed planted by Alan — 01 June 2009 @ 02:45
I’ve just returned to Ireland after a 20-year hiatus. Clearly all attention is focused on the economic meltdown, which is especially bad here, and the Lisbon Treaty (passed safely last weekend — thank God!). Less well known is the fact that, yet again, the Irish political elite are considering the possibility of electoral reform. Following in the wake of two other processes of review over the past decade, there is an ongoing process of deliberation by an all-party, two-house ‘Joint Committee on the Constitution’. This has been considering a series of issues relating how to possibly reform/update the 1937 Irish Constitution — the electoral system being the latest. Possible outcomes are: no change; radical overhaul (AV and MMP appear most likely alternatives at this point); or minor fixes to the existing system (e.g. introduction of Gregory for surplus transfer as is used for Senate elections; replacing by-elections with countback; rotation of candidate names). At this stage my best guess is that little if anything will come out of this — but who knows.
Seed planted by David Farrell — 05 October 2009 @ 07:38
Gemma Hussey may get her wish.
The Irish Greens agree. Their platform calls for:
“A proportion of the seats in Dáil Éireann to be elected by a top-up procedure. In a Dáil of 130 seats, 100 could be elected as now in multi-seat PRSTV constituencies and 30 seats could be filled from national party lists, so that all parties with at least 2% of the national vote are proportionally represented.
The current system of multi-seat constituencies has considerable advantages. Representatives are close to the people who elect them. However, there is concern about TDs being over-loaded with constituency matters at the expense of national issues. Our proposal would allow for a balance between local and national concerns among deputies.”
This has just been added to the governing coalition’s new Programme for Government:
“Within 12 months, the Electoral Commission will also propose reforms to the electoral system, including:
- Examine and make recommendations for changes to the electoral system for Dáil elections, including the number of deputies and their means of elections.”
This refers to establishing a new Independent Electoral Commission, which will no doubt have some members prepared to look at this seriously. The “concern about TDs being over-loaded with constituency matters at the expense of national issues” has been expressed for years by all parties and commentators. The leadership of all parties would benefit from top-up seats from national lists. I’d bet it’s going to happen. (But perhaps with the same 166 seats, rather than 130.)
Topped-up STV: its time may have finally come.
Seed planted by Wilf Day — 12 October 2009 @ 15:00
Topped-up STV is a truly interesting possibility. In fact, in a modified form (with single-member seats in non-urban constituencies), it was what Julian West once suggested for Canada, but with only a 17% ratio. I am not sure, however, if it is new. Malta’s system is supposed to work in a such a way that top-up seats are allocated if a party gets a majority of the votes but not of the seats… can someone please clarify? Thanks.
Seed planted by Ren Aguila — 13 October 2009 @ 01:34
Malta has a provision that guards against a reversed plurality, based on the party with the lead in first preferences.
That rather undermines the principle of STV, however, which is to allocate seats to the final distribution of preferences. In Malta, one would have incentive to give one’s first preference to the party one wanted to head the government, thereby undermining one of the alleged advantages of STV’s vote-ranking provision.
I would assume that a STV version of MMP would need to have two votes: one ranked at the nominal tier, and one for overall compensation via a list tier (whether or not there are separate party lists, or “top up” members are drawn from the nominal tier somehow).
Seed planted by MSS — 13 October 2009 @ 13:58
“A classic example of how small government arguments are often really entrench us in power arguments.”
–from Alan, upthread (#4); I had missed that one till now.
I might change “often” to “always” (or nearly so), but agreed!
Seed planted by MSS — 13 October 2009 @ 14:04
As discussed elsewhere, one could work a top-up version of STV by counting wasted votes at the electorate level across the whole country and that would stay much more firmly within the logic of STV. I am somewhat critical of Mixed Member Proportional because it seems to me that it exaggerates, rather than improves, the proportion of waster votes through the threshold and through the presence of overhang seats. One can say that MMP rewards parties that do well at the district level, but one could equally say that FPTP rewards parties that do well in the same way.
I will struggle against the temptation to call top-up STV Mixed Member Preferential or MMP.
Seed planted by Alan — 13 October 2009 @ 18:35
What to call topped-up STV? I’d just call it a possibility. If Ireland doesn’t adopt it, it won’t need to be named outside Ireland. And if Ireland does adopt it, it will be named what the Irish call it. The desire of some American electoral reformers to some up with new and better names for European electoral systems reminds me of part of the standard Canadian political science joke: The International Political Science Association held a symposium on The Elephant. The French presenter spoke on The Sex Life of The Elephant. The American spoke on How To Breed Bigger and Better Elephants. The Canadian topic was: “The Elephant: is it a federal or a provincial responsibility?”
Seed planted by Wilf Day — 15 October 2009 @ 01:09
The Irish proposal is radically different from mine and gravely flawed by using first preferences instead of final preferences as the basis for the compensatory tier. What the Irish minor parties should be advocating is larger district magnitudes which would accomplish their aims much more effectively. The Irish system uses the smallest district magnitudes of any STV country and is subject, as discussed elsewhere in this blog, to Tullymandering. Even if the minor parties did not win seats in the larger districts, the major parties would still have to reach accommodations with them over preferences.
Seed planted by Alan — 15 October 2009 @ 21:30