Another entry in my never-ending pontifications about majoritarianism vs. proportionality — though I have a much different take this time.
Essentially, I think what happened is that I mistook disagreeing with certain arguments in favour of proportional representation with disagreeing with PR itself. As the Canadian government’s PR exploration came to a close, and the slew of (bad) pro-PR articles faded, I was able to come to my own conclusions after observing politics throughout the world. Bad arguments still annoy me — “strategic voting is bad” is one in particular that I can’t get behind — but I’ve learned to ignore them rather than react against them.
Anyway, things that led me to change my mind:
1. The crises were solved
In my piece “Against Proportional Representation”, from January 2018, I noted that: “The Spanish election of 2015 was the first ever to require a repeat; only after ten months and the overthrow of the opposition leader was a very shaky minority government able to form. Ireland’s minority government is also historically shaky and requires herding a large group of independents. No majority is in sight following last month’s Czech elections, while Italy’s next elections are likely to plunge the country into a state of ungovernability.”
This was a correct assessment of the state of affairs at that time; soon afterwards there were also the cases of Sweden and Latvia, where negotiations were in stalemate throughout all of late 2018. In that context, I imagined that there was something structural going on, probably tied to a great realignment from left-right to open-closed (or establishment/anti-) that tore parties apart on two axes and made coalitions difficult to form.
But the Czechs figured it out after nine months, the Italians after three (somehow), the Swedes after four, and the Latvians after four; the Irish minority coalition was never really in trouble and is likely to complete its term on schedule next year.
Spain continues to have many problems creating stable majorities: partly due to a political culture unfamiliar with formal coalitions and partly due to the country’s national-unity crisis, of a sort that does tend to polarize actors. Israel also has problems stitching together a coalition across divides of personality, secularism, and ethnicity, which is hurtling them toward a (*edit:) fourth election since 2019. While it is true that a majoritarian electoral system would make majority government easier in these scenarios, I was swayed by one proposal that guarantees a government could be formed even in a deadlocked Parliament (see point #3 below).
At the time, I also believed that the fact that coalitions were less predictable (as described above) also made them less legitimate: voters could choose individual parties but could not approve coalition governments. I still think this is a legitimate concern to have, but I’ve shoved this much lower on my list of priorities; the points below easily outweigh this.
2. The Canadian election
What should have been an exciting season for me — the beginning of a federal election campaign in Canada, where I was living — ended up being less than that. The voting system meant that nearly every race in solid-red Montreal was decided from the start.
A common thread in my past skepticism of PR in Canada was a result of the constant deadlock in Belgium due to disagreements between its linguistically-based parties. The situation over there is as bad as ever: half of Flanders voted for the radical-right, while two-thirds of Wallonia opted for the centre-left, and negotiations are still stuck in a rut, nine months after elections. And I’m not reassured that this won’t happen in Canada, not really.
But Canadian history has been defined by responsible governing elites, who make sure to guarantee proper regional representation in each cabinet; in return, the Canadian population has historically been characterized by moderation, and present-day provincial politics both in Québec and English Canada generally bear this out. (Yeah, there’s Doug Ford, but I do doubt his brand of conservatism would have gotten 44% in a PR system.)
It might be that PR would be a marked improvement most of the time, but exacerbate tensions should another bout of mega-constitutional politics flair up. Given that I’ve previously overestimated the perils of “ungovernability”, I think I’m willing to make that trade-off now. (That said, I’d still feel so much better about this if all the provinces enacted PR first, just to see what happens.)
3. Minority government can work
A common thread of these first two points is a newfound faith in minority government. This has always been a hole in my anti-PR arguments — there’s nothing wrong with the idea that a minority government, holding the median legislator, could make deals with different partners on a case-by-case basis. Minority governments are how many of the above coalition crises ended up being solved: Sweden’s case is most instructive here, while the recent fiasco in Thüringen is another example.
In another case — that of Israel, where there has been no government since December 2018 — I was led to understand that, rather than needing to move away from PR, Israel could fix its problem by facilitating minority government. The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) has proposed that the leader of the largest party simply be nominated PM by the President, without a confidence vote at the beginning of each Parliament; this is already the case in Canada. I’d modify that so that the leader should be appointed who has the most parliamentary support after a predetermined negotiating period — so as to incentivize collaboration.
Admittedly, this would continue the problem where, in an evenly balanced parliament, a small party that can push one side over the top would have extortionate power — but today’s crisis in parliamentary governance is more due to parties ruling each other out rather than being over-eager to negotiate. Political cultures that aren’t very polarized would continue their existing procedures of government formation.
Basically, removing the possibility of a second election from the calculus would lessen brinksmanship. Then, after Spain’s April election, the PSOE (123 seats by itself) would have had to strike a deal with Podemos (combined 165 seats) or else risk a right-wing coalition taking power (147 seats), but this dynamic would have also forced Podemos to the negotiating table rather than make unreasonable demands. Instead, in the real world, since no coalition had a clear majority to pass a confidence vote (176 seats), there was a second election.
4. Checks and balances
The SNC-Lavalin scandal probably led me to wish that Trudeau didn’t have a single-party majority, as it has generally impeded accountability: consider that junior partners in Finland’s coalition was able to force out PM Antti Rinne for lying to parliament about a scandal — a case that the world has heard of because he was then replaced (with the same coalition!) by the young Sanna Marin. This is good: appropriate personal accountability, without drama or gridlock.
But the most obvious and alarming example of how a majority could impede accountability is the case of the Republican Party in the US. Across the pond as well, Johnson has been able to broadly degrade political standards by virtue of his personal popularity and the polarization of British politics; in cases like refusing to release a report on Russian interference in elections, this takes on an alarming and sinister quality. More generally, I’ve written about the personalization of politics throughout the world, and it’s best to avoid inflating the amount of power that individual personalities can wield.
Sometimes it could get even worse! Law and Justice, the party tearing up Poland’s independent judiciary and media, won a majority of seats on 35% of the vote the first time around. Turkey’s dictator Erdogan began his decades-long stranglehold on the country with an election where he won 34% of votes but a majority of seats. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz did win a majority of votes in 2012, but the mixed electoral system gave him a a full two-thirds of seats. This allowed him to rewrite the Constitution, something a proper proportional system would not have allowed.
I can’t say for sure that there would be more accountability for Trump in a proportional system, given how much politics can be driven by negative partisanship — after all, Netanyahu’s coalition is pretty okay with exonerating him for his crimes, and Israel is one of the most pure proportional systems on the world. But it’s certainly more likely than now. I’m also imagining a boost in turnout, if different components of today’s big-tent coalitions (for example, liberal Democrats, black Democrats, suburban Democrats, white working-class Democrats, etc.) could find political homes that were closer to them.
5. Japan’s opposition continues to struggle
Then there’s Japan, the only country where I’m a citizen, whose opposition parties continue to be useless. There’s a multitude of parties who hate the LDP, but from different directions, with the result that any opposition party ends up promoting nothing but the least-common-denominator, i.e. that Abe is bad, taxes are bad, etc. Any party actively trying to promote something different is cut down and absorbed into this broader blob to avoid vote-wasting.
So by this account, proportional representation would allow all these different parties to develop separate identities, and even if these established parties continue running purely on personality, it would be easier for a party promoting a more concrete, cohesive vision of change to gain traction. I have grave doubts about Reiwa Shinsengumi, which won seats this summer on a vow to abolish the sales tax, but at least it’s an idea that can be debated on its merits (more on this to come). Under the status quo, however, it is likely that this party will be shamed into joining the lumpy opposition mish-mash and lose its identity.
A Japan under PR would see the LDP constantly (more or less) in government, needing the support of one opposition party to stay in power, but this is more a reflection of their general competence and lack of partisan governance than an indictment of institutions. The process of the LDP choosing to align with certain parties over others might eventually provoke a polarization of the political landscape. This is better than what we have now, where the LDP doesn’t even bother investigating its myriad scandals, because it knows it will never be held accountable.
6. Policy differences and identity differences
More generally, multi-party politics allows for an equilibrium where voters choose parties through identity while parties form coalitions through policy, which is probably most sustainable. This has implications for US politics; as mentioned, the Democratic Party is a heterogenous grouping of various kinds of voters whose material interests are reasonably convergent and mutually reinforcing, but who feel (culturally) that they don’t belong in the same tent.
But it’s also relevant in countries like Japan. There, the system of single-member districts, which relies on a 50–50 divide, overlaps poorly with the country’s underlying division (pacifist-nationalist) that is closer to 30–70. One party needs simply to keep most nationalists to stay in power (the LDP), while the other would need to gather all pacifists and some nationalists to win. (I’d argue that something similar is going on in Québec, where sovereigntists are clearly in the minority and cannot form government, which in turn allows federalists a lot of leeway.)
So there might not be a policy difference between certain pacifist parties and certain nationalist parties, so they’d be able to govern together. Yet, they have difficulty running together in an election because of the identity distinction. Voters choose parties through identity; parties form coalitions through policy.
Originally published at http://kojisposts.blogspot.com on October 13, 2019.
