[Don't miss the great discussion on this issue that has been ongoing at the propagation bench!]
UK Labour Party chair, Hazel Blears, commenting on the possibility of proportional representation in a future elected House of Lords, says:
I’m always torn on this. When I was a candidate in Tatton people always used to say to me: ‘We’re really good Labour people, we’ll never win and our vote doesn’t count’ [indeed it does not--ed.].
But equally the bit that I really dislike about PR is if you lose your constituency link.
I know people have got some models where you can still have a constituency link [indeed we do!--ed.]. But if you look at a lot of PR systems, particularly in Europe, you end up again with a political elite who all live in London or Madrid or Paris…
[My emphasis; from epolitix by way of Make My Vote Count]
This is a rather stubbornly held view. It is also wrong. Even leaving aside MMP and STV and turning our attention to strictly list PR, the claim that the “political elite” (which I am understanding in this context to mean legislators) hails from and permanently resides in the capital city is not supported by the evidence.
My reseach on this question shows that with lower-magnitude districts (by which I mean under about 10 seats) legislators tend to have high rates of district nativity and prior service on local councils–probably higher than in the US House! This is so even when lists are closed, and thus as a legislator, “you are dependent for your place on the party list,” as Blears goes on to say in the extension of the quotation above.
When lists are open, on the other hand, the rate of local origins among legislators is higher still–and increasingly so as the district gets larger–because the competition for preference votes gives parties even greater incentives to nominate candidates with a “constituency link.”
Even more remarkably, research by Michael Latner (who comments below) and Anthony McGann shows that even in Israel (single national district closed list PR) and the Netherlands (which has nearly irrelevant districting and preference voting), there is substantial regional representation. From their abstract:
Although central metropolitan areas are somewhat over-represented in the legislatures, so are the most peripheral regions. This is due to the fact that parties tend to choose representatives from the geographical regions where they expect to be electorally competitive.
In other words, even where it would be least expected due to “national” PR lists ranked by party leaders, parties cultivate constituency connections. Why? Presumably because voters want them, and the highly competitive environment of proportional representation means that parties ignore constituent demands at their peril.
Related to this discussion, see Espen’s comment about a proposal to reduce district magnitude in South Africa, while retaining overall national proportionality.
It’s Blears’ familiar claim that existing M.P.s are in some way linked to their 70000 electors which they couldn’t possibly be if they were one of 5 M.Ps in a 350000 strong constituency that always strikes me as nonsense.In reality we’ve been voting for party not its representatve for years as any analysis of election results since 1945 demonstrates.
STV which allows the voter a degree of choice between every party’s candidates would enhance links with local members but the likes of Blears will never accept it because they know too many of their colleagues would be finished.(I mean to say–would ANYONE put John Prescott as their preferred Labour choice ?!)
Seed planted by psg (London) — 04 August 2006 @ 09:43
Pattie and Johnston (Political Geography, 22, 2003) have also shown that the local campaign context in Britain is an important determinant of vote shares. Even a closed PR list might actually improve genuine descriptive representation within small geographic regions. In our research mentioned in the first post, McGann and Latner also examined representation down to the level of Dutch Gemeenten, looking for bias in city size representation. Even there we found higher than expected levels of representation in terms of the proportion of representatives living in small towns. It seems that even small towns and rural areas will receive adequate, if not over-representation (measured as the percent of MPs over the percent of the national population), due to the fact that in a PR environment, every vote counts, providing parties with an incentive to compete even where they receive small vote shares. If parties can “spread” their seats rather than have them concentrated in the regions where they do best, they can establish broader constituency bases and maximize incumbency advantages. When parties strive to be national, they contribute to over-representation by seating members within the geographic strongholds of smaller parties. With regard to constituency links, voters who vote for the largest parties are therefore likely to be living fairly close to a large/majority party MP under either MMD or SMD. I’m not sure what such a change would mean for the “losers” under SMD. I am not familiar with any research documenting how far the average runner-up voter (in their district) lives to a winner from their preferred party, but I would guess that it would be no worse, on average, under PR.
Seed planted by Mike Latner — 04 August 2006 @ 13:03
2007 Israeli Non-Resolution: An electoral reform proposal
The President’s panel on political reform (The Megidor Committee) is expected today to make a formal proposal that Israel’s current single national-district system be replaced with a two-tier system.
Scion grafted by Fruits and Votes — 01 January 2007 @ 12:48