Paul Davies has a brilliant post (followed by some brilliant commentary) up at Make My Votes Count, in which he suggets something very much contrary to the conventional wisdom: Except in the very short run, a hung parliament could be bad for the Liberal Democrats, as could a coalition government. Even proportional representation could be bad for the long-term interests of Britain’s third party.
As Joe Patterson notes in a comment to Paul’s post, a key advantage of PR would be that it would, finally, allow us to know where the real centre of British politics lies–most likely not with the marginal voter in the marginal constituencies, which all three major parties currently fight over.
In fact, as I have argued repeatedly here at F&V, the empowering of the center (or the centre) is what makes PR the most democratic family of electoral system. Yet most of the time, advocates and opponents of PR alike speak of it as a system that empowers minority parties.
I think you’re right, but only w/ the caveat that the PR-elected legislature selects the head of government. I’m not sure if that holds for list-PR in presidential systems. Yes? No?
Seed planted by Miguel Centellas — 22 September 2006 @ 18:44
P.R. has worked well for the Lib Dems. in the Scotland and Wales,it’s impossible to know how things might turn out in a reformed U.K. House Of Commons.
Where is the centre in U.K. politics? The Tories are positioning themselves to the left of Labour on civil liberty issues.The Lib Dems have been to the left of both for some time.What Labour and The Tories have left is the remnants of class voting and it’s only in that sense that a distnct ‘centre’ exists.
Seed planted by psg (London) — 26 September 2006 @ 07:40
Miguel, good question. PR would empower the center within the body so elected. In a parliamentary system, empowering the center within the chamber to which the executive is accountable means establishing a government that is accountable to the center.
However, in a presidential system, the chamber elected by PR is, by definition, separate from the government, which is only as center-empowering as the electoral system for president allows it to be. If the president is elected by less than a majority, and has a veto, it results in narrower accountability than if there were no presidency (or a weaker one).
However, it should still be the case that, ceteris paribus, the center is more empowered when the legislature is elected by PR than otherwise. That is, if the president and the legislative majority both are skewed away from the center, that’s worse for moderate voters than if only the president is.
Seed planted by MSS — 26 September 2006 @ 09:31
psg, I think that is right–”it’s impossible to know how things might turn out in a reformed U.K. House Of Commons”–and that’s the spirit in which I understand the discussion prompted by the folks at MMVC.
That is, we can’t assume that, just because some party is under-represented by FPTP, it necessarily would enjoy only positive results from a swith to PR. A given party’s current votes are partly endogenous to the current electoral system, as is the structure of current competition. So, while the current third party might be advantaged, other factors might not remain constant with an electoral-system change.
Seed planted by MSS — 28 September 2006 @ 14:44
So it seems like the argument here is that the Lib Dems would lose their salience as a protest party. Well… under PR (not STV) every party would have to redefine itself in some way to maximize its constituency under the new system, right? Lib Dems, Labour, and Conservatives included.
But PR would also lift some of the artificial left-right dichotomy. As I understand it, “empowering the center” isn’t about empowering any sort of specific center per se, but rather about more broadly representing the median voter or moderate voters in government as opposed to only those on one side of this enforced left-right division. So the Lib Dems could go about their business and figure out their new purpose without this pressure to define themselves as the “center party” in order to attract protest votes from both sides. And any “protest” sheen that might be lost could probably counteracted by the fact that they’d actually have a chance at being part of a government…
Seed planted by Alex — 28 September 2006 @ 17:13