In the thread quoting a critic of STV in Ireland, Tom Round has quoted an extraordinarily scathing and interesting critique, from 1971, of party-based representation that is well worth replanting here:
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…’
–Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians, (1971), Chapter 7: “The Rule of the Apparatchik,” pp 138-39.
The Swedish electoral system has been revised recently to make preference votes more important in the final ranking of lists. Perhaps the change was motivated in part by disenchantment with the sorts of behaviors that led to Huntford’s critique.
Thanks, MSS. I guess there is a case to be made for checking whether election rules have changed in the past 38 years…
Interestingly, I believe that Sweden used relatively open lists at the time. (If you think it’s hard finding accurate data on current electoral systems using Wikipedia…). I base this assumption on:
(a) mentions in Lakeman (1974) that Sweden at the time used an unusual form of preferential write-in lists, where the value of a ballot was reduced (by increasing its d’Hondt divisor by one) every time its highest continuing candidate was elected; and
(b) a statement by a Swedish exchange student at my school in the 1980s that a voter had to select on party list but was entitled to cross names off it. (My insistent questioning about this must have puzzled him, but Johan acquitted himself well, and I wonder how well an Australian exchange student would fare explaining the Senate voting system in Norwegian or Xhosa…)
No doubt someone could devise a metric for measuring changes in how “closed” a list system is in practice – ranging from 1948 France’s “voters can alter the list order, but the change only takes effect if 50% of voters do it” to the Swiss or Finnish systems at the other end of the system.
Perhaps “% of MPs who would not have been elected if closed lists were used”?
And yeah, Huntford is damning about pretty much every aspect of Swedish society (not, interestingly, about Scandinavia in general – he praises Norway and Denmark by comparison) but his own ideological orientation is curiosuly obscure. If forced to guess, I’d say he’s likely a Hayekian, yet he praises the Swedish Communists for standing up to the smothering SDAP “consensus” and the cover has a praise blurb from Tribune. And no, Google didn’t cast much extra light.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 27 May 2009 @ 21:29
Wasn’t there fears in Sweden when switching over to open party list PR, that fewer women would be elected?
Yet Sweden has the highest proportion of women in terms of percentage in it’s parliament anywhere in the world.
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 28 May 2009 @ 03:10
I don’t quite understand this critique. Yes, it may be true that personality is banned from politics up here compared to many other places of the world. So? Isn’t that a good thing? It means, among other things, that women are well-represented. Party members care whether you are good at advancing the party agenda, and not much about whether you’re a man, a woman, had affairs, smoked pot in your youth, has sufficient animal magnetism, whatever.
When we vote for a party, we know what we get. If the party apparatchicks (that is, members) for some reason aren’t good at electing the politicians that advance the cause best, well, we find out that too pretty quickly.
There are really two things I need to look at when deciding which party to vote for: the party program, and whether the party’s organizational culture is acceptable to me (only one major party in Norway fails the latter. Guess which, politics buffs!) I don’t have to form an opinion about any particular person’s character through watching TV! The members do that for me, and having worked with the politician in question for a long time, they are usually much better at it than I am.
Seed planted by Harald Korneliussen — 28 May 2009 @ 05:05
Harald’s point underlines that different democracies have different expectations of how “personalised” politics should be. Sweden is at one end of the spectrum, with (say) The Philippines at the other. I wonder if Swedish voters are less interested in differentiating individual candidates within a party because they have a choice between a firm four-party coalition on the Right and a firm three-party alliance on the Left? Rather than deciding between Clinton and Obama for a single Democratic Party nomination, a Swede can decide among the Social Democrats, the Communists and the Left Party.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Australian voters can be highly partisan in federal elections but highly candidate-centred in local council polls. No contradiction there. One of many reasons I favour STV is that it can cover just about every type of election with minimal adjustment; it doesn’t need, say, French or Italian-type arbitrary stipulations that towns below X population must use limited vote or FPTP, while towns above that population must use party lists, to elect their local council.
Now, since it appears to be my office on thris thread to quote exuberant critiques of party-list PR, I offer this, from Irish journalist Mary Ellen Synon… with the caveat that her blog is titled “Euroskeptic” so that anyone who’s picked up The Spectator in the past thirty years or so will be familiar with her line of argument:
I thought Belgians were allowed to pick one individual candidate on both the main candidates’ list and the suppleants list? Or does this apply only for federal, community, provincial and local (etc) elections, but not for Belgium’s Euro-MPs?
Seed planted by Tom Round — 13 June 2009 @ 18:46
Norway has not yet copied Sweden’s open lists, as far as I know. But their 19 counties are local enough that it may not matter too much. Of the 169 MPs just elected, fully 52 are the only MP of their party elected from that county, another 20 are one of two, and another 45 are one of three. I’d say those voters know who they’re voting for.
What a lovely system: with such small districts, they need the 11% national compensatory seats to make it fair, but they have no national lists; the best near-winners are elected to the adjustment seats (google translates the term as “dithering mandates”). The red-red-centre government’s junior left partner, the Socialist Left Party, owes 5 of its 11 seats to that system. Only the largest party, Labour, gets no compensatory seats. Also, the little Liberal party fell just below the 4% threshold but still won a local seat among Oslo’s 17 seats and the 16 in Akershus (which embraces numerous suburbs of Oslo), although failing to qualify for compensatory seats.
Seed planted by Wilf Day — 14 September 2009 @ 22:59
I’m a bit hazy on what constitutes proper open and closed lists, but in Norway, you can reorder the candidates on a party list, and you can also cross out those you don’t like.
It used to be the case that you could “cumulate” people, somehow casting more than one vote for them, but only with respect to list ordering – God knows how it was counted. You also write in people from other parties’ lists (or complete unknowns), with the caveat that this affected how your vote was counted, so if you put up a Red candidate on your Labour list, you would in fact give about 1/20 of your vote to the Reds.
These two options, cumulation and “danglers”, appear to have been removed. I don’t think it makes any real difference; there is still the option of coordinated campaigns for overturning the “official” party ordering, but it’s very rare.
Seed planted by Harald Korneliussen — 18 September 2009 @ 13:37
Sweden’s just re-elected a centre-right PM for the first time, but he’s lost his absolute majority; an anti-immigration party holds the balance of power.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 20 September 2010 @ 08:43