As noted by Wilf in a previous thread on a proposed reform of Israel’s executive-legislative structure, a commission appointed by President Moshe Katsav has recommended a mixed-member system for Knesst elections, according to Haaretz.
The proposal is for a ratio of 75% single-member districts to 25% compensatory seats, with a single vote (unlike most mixed-member systems in current use). Wilf notes that it is “almost exactly the MMP model used in Nordrhein-Westfalen, but minus the essential safeguard: overhang seats in case 25% [compensation seats] is not enough.”
In a very detailed and helpful comment in that earlier thread, reader Espen offers a critique that I felt worthy of its own planting. The remainder of this post is not mine; it is Espen’s. I have also moved some follow-up comments from the other thread to this one.
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I haven’t been able to find the actual report. But from the description in the Haaretz article it appears as if the commission more or less copied the previous electoral system for the Italian Senate (which still applies in the Trentino-Alto Adige region). An excellent description of that system can be found at electionresources.org/it
The purpose of the 30 additional seats is not to achieve overall proportionality. These seats are instead awarded proportionally based only on votes for candidates that did not win their constituencies initially1– without regard for how many constituency seats their parties already have won. So, it is not a parallel system, nor is it fully compensatory. Its degree of proportionality lies somewhere in between, depending to some degree on how and where the votes are cast.
According to another text written by the same author, found at the commission’s website (but which apparently describes an earlier version of the proposal), the additional seats are then awarded to initially “losing†candidates in the order in which they were ranked in advance by their parties (a sort of closed list without an actual list in the normal sense).
Such a system would likely lead to the parties forming fewer and clearer pre-election alliances (and the winning coalition most likely getting a larger than proportional share of the seats). But it perhaps would not lead to fewer parties in the Knesset. Small parties could negotiate/blackmail their way to safe constituency seats in return for providing votes for a coalition, as seen in Italy. Also, there would no longer be a national threshold2, but on the other hand small parties might find it hard to run candidates and collect votes in all constituencies.
If Duverger’s law kicks in, perhaps the larger parties could become more dominant both in terms of votes and seats (especially since there would be no party vote with which the smaller parties could demonstrate their true support level, which would be useful in future bargaining). That seems to be the hope of the drafters, as it was when the one-vote MMP system was introduced in West Germany after the war, and as it was when the MMP systems were introduced in Italy in 1993.
Finally, while the proposal does not achieve the level of proportionality that many participants here would want to see in an MMP system, this is probably the intent of the drafters. Also, I give the commission kudos for avoiding the warped incentive structures that some MMP systems can contain. However, I think they gloss over the challenges of drawing single-member constituency boundaries in Israel.
1. It appears that surplus votes for winning candidates (i.e. votes above the nearest challenger) do not count in the national proportional stage, although I could be mistaken about that. This means that such votes can be “wasted†in the sense that they no longer help the top candidate, while not helping elect anyone else, either. However, an inclusion of such votes would reduce proportionality since that would be another advantage for the constituency winners.
2. Assuming that the average constituency winner got 40% of the vote, the 60% who supported none of the initial winners would compete for 30 proportional seats nationally. As one can see, for a small, unattached party the removal of the present 2% hurdle would not be a great improvement. In fact, the proposal might cut their number of seats in half (at least).
/Espen
It would be better if Israel is moving to a MMP system to have 55% of the (66) seats are 1 List district and 45% are (54) single member districts considering that Israel has been using a one 120 member district since independence.
Has anyone ever thought of combining the Australian Alternative Vote for the single member districts and the other half just List seats? This would be a one ballot system where the First Preference indicated is also a vote for a Party List at the same time.
Under this system voters would be obliged to rank all candidates until they exhaust. This system could promote tight alliances between larger and smaller parties. The larger parties would need the second and lower preferences of the smaller parties to win a single district seat and they could also agree to flow preferences in the other direction for a small party to win a single member district seat. This system could promote two broad coaltions.
The advantage of this system is that a candidate has the support of an absolute majority in a district and it is done by a small parties preferences transfering to the larger party. Can anyone think of any disadvantages of such an MMP system?
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 18 October 2006 @ 22:47
The authoritarian bent of the Katsav Commission proposal
This proposal would greatly enhance central executive authority, without making that executive accountable to the electorate, through popular election.
Scion grafted by Fruits and Votes — 20 October 2006 @ 10:45
“Has anyone ever thought of combining the Australian Alternative Vote for the single member districts and the other half just List seats? This would be a one ballot system where the First Preference indicated is also a vote for a Party List at the same time.”
Yes, the MMP system which the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly almost finished designing (they ran out of time, and voted to proceed with STV instead, so they never finished).
“This system could promote tight alliances between larger and smaller parties. The larger parties would need the second and lower preferences of the smaller parties to win a single district seat and they could also agree to flow preferences in the other direction for a small party to win a single member district seat. This system could promote two broad coalitions.”
It might well. Or it might favour the centre party in a three-party system.
“The advantage of this system is that a candidate has the support of an absolute majority in a district and it is done by a small parties preferences transfering to the larger party. Can anyone think of any disadvantages of such an MMP system?”
Yes.
1. If one party was most voters’ second choice, it could easily win so many local seats that MMP could not compensate, if it used regional lists and no overhangs.
2. Some voters would have a sincere second preference. Others would only try to stop a party they dislike. The “true majority” would be a false majority based partly on negative voting.
3. No MMP jurisdiction does this, because the core concept of MMP is to respect the voter’s first choice.
4. Combined with open lists for the regional seats, the number of choices would be too large. This feature would add complexity illogically, and is not necessary. Some voters would decline to state any second preference, so the winner might still not have 50%.
Seed planted by Wilf Day — 20 October 2006 @ 19:55
Agreed. AV in an MMP system makes little sense. As Wilf notes, it could make it impossible to compensate (via PR lists) if one party dominated the SSDs on account of transferred preferences. It is also superflous. While it might be nice to have the local MPs backed by majorities, it does not matter to the logic of MMP if MPs are winning with under 50% (in single-seat districts), because the other parties will simply win more list seats to compensate. (This, of course, assumes enough compensatory seats to make full PR possible.)
Jenkins (UK, late 1990s proposal) also had AV in the districts. In fact, because it was set up to be minimally proportional (very low number of seats elected by compensatory PR), it was known as “AV+” and was, indeed, more AV than PR/MMP.
Seed planted by MSS — 23 October 2006 @ 11:49
Hungary uses for its MMP single member districts a 2 round system in conjunction with 20 county lists tier and a national list tier. I know its MMP system isn’t as proportionate as New Zealand’s system is, but it is more proportionate than say a Parallel system. Albeit the Hungarian electoral system is exceeding complicated. I think Hungary may be the only country in the world using MMP that is using for its single member districts a 2 round system. Does anyone know by the way does Hungary’s electoral system use overhangs?
I think with a one ballot MMP system using the Alternative Vote for half of the seats and the other half being a closed party list single national tier would prevent the two vote problem where parties split themselves up into two and run a decoy party list to increase and double the amount of seats they would win if they had follow the rules.
One if you had a country where the party system was regionally fragmented like Papua New Guinea and they wanted to use a system of Proportional Represenation that would encourage a consolidation of a party system.
Should they use an MMP system; the single member districts use the Alternative Vote where all candidates must be ranked till exhausted and closed party lists or use the Single Transferable Vote where all candidates must be ranked till exhausted in small multiple member districts no smaller than 3 and no larger than 7.
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 23 October 2006 @ 14:18
Hungary is not MMP.
I believe Lithuania still uses two-round majority within a strictly parallel system. Albania did so at one time, but I believe it is MMP (with plurality for the SSDs) now.
Seed planted by MSS — 24 October 2006 @ 06:37
I see that the proposed Israeli electoral system also would not be MMP according to Matthew’s definition. I have three other comments to the discussion.
Firstly, if a compensatory calculation process is only partially proportional, or if the number of list seats available is insufficient to reach overall proportionality, then it obviously matters politically which electoral system is used to elect constituency members. This may to varying degrees be the case in all MMP systems except those using “Ausgleichsmandate” to correct overhang seats.
Secondly, using AV to elect constituency members in an MMP system would possibly, but not necessarily, create a need for even more compensatory seats in order to achieve overall proportionality. Local factors would largely determine this, such as the party system and the geographic distribution of votes (though these factors would in turn also be affected by the chosen system). Nor would the use of AV necessarily leave the system more susceptible to tactical vote splitting or decoy-list-running schemes. Such possibilities for “cheating”, as well as other instances where an increase in some votes or some seats is not to the actual benefit of a party, is a problem inherent in most MMP systems because of the combination of different types of logic. This is what I refer to above as “warped incentive structuresâ€. There are often ways of counteracting such incentives, however.
Suaprazzodi’s proposed single multipurpose Alternative Vote in fact offers marginally fewer opportunities for such phenomena than a regular two-vote system, since with the former the party vote and first preference vote necessarily must be identical. This is not to deny that counter-intuitive results might very well appear, but this could for instance be corrected in two ways (here in an AV variation of the partially compensatory system proposed in Israel):
a) “vote deficits” (the difference between first preference votes for a successful constituency candidate and 50%+1) could be transferred to the national calculation, but only if the party had enough of a surplus nationally to cover these.
b) The first preference votes for constituency candidates that were eliminated in order to give another candidate an absolute majority, could also be excluded from the national calculation (a sort of clone penalty).
Last comment – the Hungarian electoral system does not provide for overhang seats, since the number of constituency seats won by a party is simply not a factor when calculating list seats. This is the case for the county seats, which are calculated solely on the basis of list votes for parties reaching the national hurdle. It is also the case for the national list seats (where the same hurdle applies), which is calculated on the basis of first valid round votes for candidates who were not elected in the final round, and list votes that were not already used to elect county seats. This mild compensatory effect at the national level is what separates Hungary from having a parallel system.
By the way, Papua New Guinea could do worse than have a variant of the Hungarian system, if the intention was to help tie local independents together into national parties without completely marginalizing them in the process. Needless to say, these are vastly different countries, so who knows whether this would lead to strong parties as in Hungary or whether the local independents would end up selling their affiliations to the politically highest bidding party.
Horribly long comment, I know, but there were a lot of interesting points to respond to here.
Seed planted by Espen — 24 October 2006 @ 20:50
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 @ 13:06