Huge moment in Montréal: Transition Montréal has announced it will bring proportional representation to city and borough councils!That means fair results, no...
That is my favourite kind of question! Unfortunately, social sciences are pretty hard to demonstrate causation. (Any research would involve so many subjective decisions, e.g., Turkey is nominally a PR country but I imagine İmamoğlu and others would uhhh, have strong disagreements with that. Do you count poorer countries with a complicated recent history? If we restrict too much the sample size becomes negligible etc.)
But, after having doorknocked and bugged friends to do so as well for proportional representation in 2015, I’ve watched what’s happened across the world since and it’s spooked the shit out of me. In part, what I’ve seen are the causal mechanisms, which I think are twofold:
FPTP disincentives fringe/extreme parties. Think back to the thankfully short lived PPC here. That’s not to say they can’t take hold, look at Reform UK or the Republicans. But, in both cases, it took the collapse or infiltration of an existing mainstream party, which thankfully, is pretty rare. As much as I dislike and disagree with Polievre, few reasonably informed Canadians would put him or the Conservatives in the same bucket as the far Right parties in Europe/America.
In recent, more polarized years, it’s been harder for parties to compromise to pass significant legislation, which has resulted in surprising stagnation and papering over problems. As a joky but illustrative example, in Germany, the trains no longer run on time! (Seriously, if you’ve been to Germany 20 years ago, you’ll know what a bizarre thing that is to say. It’d be like basketball replacing hockey here.) But that inability to pass bold, significant legislation means problems don’t get addressed and people don’t see much significant change in their lives.
Our system has a lot of faults. But in my eyes, the biggest strength is that a government with a majority can really do things as there are fewer checks and balances. Think back to how effective and targeted CERB was, proportionally, we spent a fraction of what the US did but it helped people who really needed it and quite well. Despite being interrupted by a pandemic and then fighting off challenges to his leadership, Trudeau still started us on a path to subsidized childcare (absolute game changer if we can get that over the finish line) dental and pharmacare. BUT, for all that strength, it also means we are much more susceptible to disastrous outcomes with a bad government.
Sorry for coming back to this just now. Here’s the wall of text I wanted to write. Don’t use an LLM to summarize, I put non-zero effort in it. 😄
You kinda sum up the strength which is also a weakness of FPTP in your last paragraph. It provides more power with fewer votes which, when used by a competent party can lead to … more competent results. Like with CERB.* And when the party isn’t, the results are … not so. That puts a much higher responsibility in the parties themselves. Which, could also be democratic institutions, but not necessarily. I think that responsibility means people need to understand they have to be involved with their party between elections. Vote for leaders, other things. Most people I know don’t understand that and how important it is. Thing is, the way FPTP is presented to voters, is the same as PR is presented. There are elections, here are the parties on the ballot, and there are some strange names next to each party. That looks suspiciously similar to how PR is presented. However if they vote like they would in a PR election, FPTP delivers unexpected results. To a large extent that’s a problem with the parties and the education system, both of which must work to educate Canadians on how the system works and how to get the result they want out of it. But with PR there’s no need for such education. Is that better for democracy? I’m not sure, leaning towards no. Which leads me to a perhaps more pertinent question that’s rarely discussed. What does it mean to be democratic, to have democracy? If I asked random person, they’d likely say - elections. And some years ago I’d have said the same thing. But as you highlight, there are many places where elections are held but the elected governments do not represent the interests of the majority of voters. There are places where there isn’t traditional elections and governments do represent the interests of the majority of the population. These days to me democratic is any system (not just electoral) where the majority’s interests are well represented by their government and there are processes through which that majority can change the direction of the government as those interest change over time. Through that lens, I can see both successes and failures with both PR and FPTP. And lately I’m starting to think that (puts leftist hat on) the variable that determines whether a government represents its people in either system is how captured the political systems is by the owner class. If we ignore the capitalist economic dynamics producing this capture and focus on the electoral system, what remains interesting is which one of the two is more resistant to such capture. To examine that (non-exhaustively), one could to look at how much capital it takes to enter an election and have a meaningful chance to get elected. In the Canadian FPTP, as far as I know, there’s no required entry fee and a candidate can run as an independent, so no payments to a party are required. Then a candidate has to get themselves known to get a reasonable chance to be elected. To do that they have to walk and talk to people. In a metro area, that would require other people’s labour and thus likely non-insignificant capital. In a small town, it can probably be done with very little help and money. Bonnie Critchley’s candidacy comes to mind. So in this regard, our FPTP seems to have low capital bar. I rather like that. The per-riding race which produces majorities with minorities of votes really helps our independent candidate here. I like that too. If they have something to say that their neighbours like, they have a fighting chance. Unfortunately, I don’t know well enough the equivalent process looks in a typical PR to compare. :D A brief glance tells me that’s not as easy in list-PR systems. Also minimum percentage cutoffs are common. Doesn’t sound too good for Bonnie’s chances against the capital-flush PP. Apparently independents are common in STV. But either way I think the over-focus on the exact dynamics of PR or FPTP and pointing to one vs the other as a panacea for the insufficient democratic representation we get might be a (unintended) distraction. There are differences and they do produce different effects in some dimensions but I think in our current context the overarching driver behind the way many of us feel unrepresented is capital capture of the political system. And that has power way beyond the exact mechanism we do elections. Therefore the solutions are different and they can be deployed within FPTP, aaand perhaps they have a higher chance of getting the real power needed to unfuck the wider socioeconomic system with fewer votes. Does that make any sense in your opinion?
* Huge fan of the fiscal pandemic response BTW. I was honestly quite shocked that we took a page of MMT and we executed it fairly well.
Good faith Q: Do you have evidence of causation between PR and the results you highlight?
That is my favourite kind of question! Unfortunately, social sciences are pretty hard to demonstrate causation. (Any research would involve so many subjective decisions, e.g., Turkey is nominally a PR country but I imagine İmamoğlu and others would uhhh, have strong disagreements with that. Do you count poorer countries with a complicated recent history? If we restrict too much the sample size becomes negligible etc.)
But, after having doorknocked and bugged friends to do so as well for proportional representation in 2015, I’ve watched what’s happened across the world since and it’s spooked the shit out of me. In part, what I’ve seen are the causal mechanisms, which I think are twofold:
FPTP disincentives fringe/extreme parties. Think back to the thankfully short lived PPC here. That’s not to say they can’t take hold, look at Reform UK or the Republicans. But, in both cases, it took the collapse or infiltration of an existing mainstream party, which thankfully, is pretty rare. As much as I dislike and disagree with Polievre, few reasonably informed Canadians would put him or the Conservatives in the same bucket as the far Right parties in Europe/America.
In recent, more polarized years, it’s been harder for parties to compromise to pass significant legislation, which has resulted in surprising stagnation and papering over problems. As a joky but illustrative example, in Germany, the trains no longer run on time! (Seriously, if you’ve been to Germany 20 years ago, you’ll know what a bizarre thing that is to say. It’d be like basketball replacing hockey here.) But that inability to pass bold, significant legislation means problems don’t get addressed and people don’t see much significant change in their lives.
Our system has a lot of faults. But in my eyes, the biggest strength is that a government with a majority can really do things as there are fewer checks and balances. Think back to how effective and targeted CERB was, proportionally, we spent a fraction of what the US did but it helped people who really needed it and quite well. Despite being interrupted by a pandemic and then fighting off challenges to his leadership, Trudeau still started us on a path to subsidized childcare (absolute game changer if we can get that over the finish line) dental and pharmacare. BUT, for all that strength, it also means we are much more susceptible to disastrous outcomes with a bad government.
Sorry for coming back to this just now. Here’s the wall of text I wanted to write. Don’t use an LLM to summarize, I put non-zero effort in it. 😄
You kinda sum up the strength which is also a weakness of FPTP in your last paragraph. It provides more power with fewer votes which, when used by a competent party can lead to … more competent results. Like with CERB.* And when the party isn’t, the results are … not so. That puts a much higher responsibility in the parties themselves. Which, could also be democratic institutions, but not necessarily. I think that responsibility means people need to understand they have to be involved with their party between elections. Vote for leaders, other things. Most people I know don’t understand that and how important it is. Thing is, the way FPTP is presented to voters, is the same as PR is presented. There are elections, here are the parties on the ballot, and there are some strange names next to each party. That looks suspiciously similar to how PR is presented. However if they vote like they would in a PR election, FPTP delivers unexpected results. To a large extent that’s a problem with the parties and the education system, both of which must work to educate Canadians on how the system works and how to get the result they want out of it. But with PR there’s no need for such education. Is that better for democracy? I’m not sure, leaning towards no. Which leads me to a perhaps more pertinent question that’s rarely discussed. What does it mean to be democratic, to have democracy? If I asked random person, they’d likely say - elections. And some years ago I’d have said the same thing. But as you highlight, there are many places where elections are held but the elected governments do not represent the interests of the majority of voters. There are places where there isn’t traditional elections and governments do represent the interests of the majority of the population. These days to me democratic is any system (not just electoral) where the majority’s interests are well represented by their government and there are processes through which that majority can change the direction of the government as those interest change over time. Through that lens, I can see both successes and failures with both PR and FPTP. And lately I’m starting to think that (puts leftist hat on) the variable that determines whether a government represents its people in either system is how captured the political systems is by the owner class. If we ignore the capitalist economic dynamics producing this capture and focus on the electoral system, what remains interesting is which one of the two is more resistant to such capture. To examine that (non-exhaustively), one could to look at how much capital it takes to enter an election and have a meaningful chance to get elected. In the Canadian FPTP, as far as I know, there’s no required entry fee and a candidate can run as an independent, so no payments to a party are required. Then a candidate has to get themselves known to get a reasonable chance to be elected. To do that they have to walk and talk to people. In a metro area, that would require other people’s labour and thus likely non-insignificant capital. In a small town, it can probably be done with very little help and money. Bonnie Critchley’s candidacy comes to mind. So in this regard, our FPTP seems to have low capital bar. I rather like that. The per-riding race which produces majorities with minorities of votes really helps our independent candidate here. I like that too. If they have something to say that their neighbours like, they have a fighting chance. Unfortunately, I don’t know well enough the equivalent process looks in a typical PR to compare. :D A brief glance tells me that’s not as easy in list-PR systems. Also minimum percentage cutoffs are common. Doesn’t sound too good for Bonnie’s chances against the capital-flush PP. Apparently independents are common in STV. But either way I think the over-focus on the exact dynamics of PR or FPTP and pointing to one vs the other as a panacea for the insufficient democratic representation we get might be a (unintended) distraction. There are differences and they do produce different effects in some dimensions but I think in our current context the overarching driver behind the way many of us feel unrepresented is capital capture of the political system. And that has power way beyond the exact mechanism we do elections. Therefore the solutions are different and they can be deployed within FPTP, aaand perhaps they have a higher chance of getting the real power needed to unfuck the wider socioeconomic system with fewer votes. Does that make any sense in your opinion?
* Huge fan of the fiscal pandemic response BTW. I was honestly quite shocked that we took a page of MMT and we executed it fairly well.
Reading this with full attention is still on my list!
That put a huge smile on my face, thanks!
I didn’t just go “honestly aksing” and then dash into thin air. 😂
Ahaha, you’re a class act!