PR and extremists

[ewx]

A few people have expressed the objection to PR that it might lead to BNP MPs (I think twelve is the figure currently being bandied around). Rather than repeat my responses to that each time someone says it:

1. Some of the BNP votes may be protest votes. The BNP vote might very well turn out to be less in a situation where they might actually get seats.
2. FPTP doesn’t actually possess some magical anti-BNP property. It just happens not to give them any MPs because of the way their support is currently spread. That situation isn’t guaranteed to persist.
3. Choosing an electoral system to disadvantage a specific party is fundamentally dishonest. There are lots of better reasons people say they like FPTP, even if they aren’t persuasive to me. (I know this is the Internet and so everyone who disagrees is assumed to be arguing in bad faith, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)
4. A handful of ineffectual extremist MPs publicly making idiots of themselves is a reasonable price for a fair voting system (whatever you think a fair voting system looks like). I think that as well as being predisposed to ineffectiveness, the other parties would tend to cooperate to deny them any real power (because supporting them would be electoral poison).

Arguably we already have some extremists (of various kinds) in Parliament already, you just don’t find out they’re an extremist until they make a politically unwise outburst.

Is this academic, since the most we’ll get is a referendum on AV (which is electoral reform but isn’t PR)? Maybe, but I think that even a lost referendum would keep the electoral reform debate open in the medium term, so (if extremist support remains near current levels) the point will remain relevant.

I need a politics userpic.

Comments

[thegreatgonzo.livejournal.com]

Given the election of Ian Paisley Jr I don't think we even have to wait for an outburst to find out

[imc.livejournal.com]

Choosing an electoral system to disadvantage a specific party is fundamentally dishonest.

What about to disadvantage all minority parties? It's been pointed out that some real-world PR systems discount any votes from each region that amount to less than 5% for a party in that region.

Some of the BNP votes may be protest votes.

I'd be interested to know what basis there is for this. I can think of much better ways to protest. :-)

I need a politics userpic.

Me too.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

"I need a politics userpic."

Perhaps a (`shopped, if necessary) picture of Clegg and Cameron holding hands?

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

The one BNP voter I know a) refuses to listen to reason and b) states that they're only voting for the BNP because they know there's no chance they'll get i.

What about to disadvantage all minority parties?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Some form of that effect is surely inevitable, e.g. any party that gets less than T/N votes for turnout T and N total seats is out of luck. So unless someone is arguing for direct democracy, where to put the threshold is ultimately an implementation detail.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Bravo! Excellent post. I support your four points completely.

I fear that a lost referendum (and the press barons would fight hard for such a thing) will be seen by the anti-voting-reformers as an excuse to kick the issue into touch for a generation; I dearly hope for a Lib-LD coalition that proposes AV as a bill without referendum (and, ideally, STV through referendum) though it seems increasingly unlikely to me - and I fear that it wouldn't even pass as a bill because there are so many small-c conservatives even within Labour. Bah.

So do I. It would be tempting to steal something from the ERS.

[fanf]

http://heady.co.uk/politics/cameron_clegg_lib_con_talks.jpg

[fanf]

The British Columbia experience is sobering. The first referendum on STV got 57% of the vote which wasn't enough to get the 60% threshold required; they asked again a few years later and STV was resoundingly rejected :-(

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Uhr, isn't STV just a funny foreign term for AV? (Or vice versa, depending on your point of view!)

To be honest, although I would most likely vote in favour of AV at a referendum, I wouldn't be too impressed if it were simply pushed through without consultation merely to curry favour with the smallest of the three main parties!

Re: What about to disadvantage all minority parties?

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Implementation details are exactly what I'd be interested in hearing before I offered up a vote one way or other -- presuming we get a referendum, of course...

There seems to be a lot of "PR as magical pixie dust" around at the moment, and personally whilst I think it'd be a good idea if suitably implemented I would also like to see a) some link to a 'local' MP retained, since at least some of us have MPs who are actually local and do a good job at it, and b) potentially an overall reduction in the current number of MPs. It looks to be a tough juggling act to combine PR with either, never mind both.

[fanf]

AV is preferential voting (number candidates in order of preference) with single member constituencies, known in the US as instant-runoff voting. STV is preferential voting with multi-member constituencies, known in Oz as Hare-Clarke.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Personally I'm in favour of preference voting, with proportionality being less critical.

The focus on the BNP is ridiculous, they are a fringe party with no influence. What's more worrying is the mainstream parties making xenophobe noises in the hope of picking up BNP voters.

Re: What about to disadvantage all minority parties?

[fanf]

STV can give you both (a) and (b) with no trouble at all, though it gives you multiple MPs for each much-bigger constituency.

Implementation details are exactly what I'd be interested in hearing

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Sure, the point is merely that the threshold is never going to be 0.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

403 l-(

What's more worrying

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And they've been doing that for years anyway. Perhaps actual BNP MPs would demonstrate there's an irreducible minority you just can't seduce short of actually becoming a nazi party. Hey, I can dream...

[gerald_duck]

Yes, some of the BNP votes may be protest votes, but equally some people may be inhibited from voting for the BNP because they don't think the BNP can win and prefer to vote tactically.

FPTP does have a "magical" anti-minority-party property. Yes, by concentrating support in a handful of constituencies it is possible to get an MP with an arbitrarily small share of the vote (in theory), and we might get unlucky and have one or two BNP MPs once in a while, in the same way we currently have a Green MP, but there is still a systematic bias against small parties that have no regional emphasis. I would argue that this bias is good. You might argue it's bad, but I don't think you can argue it doesn't exist.

If choosing an electoral system to disadvantage a specific party is fundamentally dishonest, what about choosing one to advantage a specific party? I say that's just as dishonest. Now, disadvantage or advantage compared with what? If the status quo, that's a strong argument about changing to an electoral system that predominantly and massively benefits the LibDems. If not compared with the status quo then presumably compared with some metric of fairness — but which and why?

Yes, nine times out of ten an extremist will be simply sidelined. But what about the time when their support for some issue might be make-or-break? How do we feel about the fact that the Conservatives might attempt a minority government in which they have to keep the DUP sweet, for example?


Also, my main concern about PR is that I do think strong majority governments are a good thing and favour a system that's biased in favour of them. People keep trying to tell me that I'm wrong to think it, citing examples of coalitions that have worked. They say "Relax, plenty of countries have coalition governments. Sometimes the coalition takes six or nine months to hammer out, but they get there eventually."

If successful government by coalition is genuinely potentially compatible with the UK's political psyche, perhaps we should get good at it before consigning ourselves to hung parliaments in perpetuity, not after?

[fanf]

Crap. It was Cameron as Travolta and Clegg as Newton-John doing "Summer Lovin'."

[gerald_duck]

And yet, in France, where they have proportional representation, the FN does have influence. A decade ago, it was quite a problematic level of influence for several years.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK; I'd seen both AV and STV described as "known in the US as instant-runoff voting", hence thought they were equivalent (as I suppose they are for a single seat!). Cheers.

[fanf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerbo_Law (dangerously near to Godwin's law!)

I note that we have been trying out PR in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, where it has worked OK.

[nunfetishist.livejournal.com]

And in fact the British demanded PR in Ireland as a condition of independence.

[gerald_duck]

Er… surely those are arguments against PR?

At least, given a sufficiently cynical stance, they're consistent with the view that PR is bad for a nation or region that uses it. Mussolini was arguably worse for everyone else than he was for Italy, and it's not evident that the UK had Ireland's best wishes at heart when granting it independence. (-8

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

t works again for me. Edit: if I load that page directly and don't click through from here (?)

[fanf]

Ah, probably a crappy anti-deep-link check :-/

[fanf]

The reference to the Acerbo law was in reply to the first part of your comment, about making special laws for or against particular political parties. Nothing to do with PR.

Ireland has political problems but these are due to corrupt government and weak parliamentary oversight, not PR. The reason for PR in Ireland (originally) and in Northern Ireland (now) is to avoid unfair representation for nationalists versus unionists (etc.) and it has succeeded magnificently at that.

[gerald_duck]

So maybe the question is: are we in the UK more scared of political paralysis and indecision or of getting taken over by a malevolent dictator? It seems PR protects against the latter, and majority-promoting electoral systems (whether FPTP, some kind of thresholded PR-STV, or a "gamma-corrected" system) protect against the former.

Or maybe it's possible to protect against both. Or neither.

[fanf]

Where is the evidence of PR causing paralysis and indecision?

[sweh.livejournal.com]

"I need a politics userpic"

Maybe you could make one from http://www.yes-minister.com/images/ypm16_cartoon1.jpg :-)

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

The point is not that we should choose FPTP specifically to exclude the BNP (or indeed UKIP who would also be pretty bad). It's that we should be very careful before moving to some other system and think about what the actual consequences would be, not just argue that the alternative is obviously fairer.

Any system of government and elections will always exclude some people and that exclusion could easily be unfair. Under any system, 51% of the voting power could combine to tax the other 49% disproportionately. In a representative democracy, between elections your representatives can choose to do things that would not be supported if there were a referendum.

Any voting system we can choose will have flaws (see Arrow's theorem etc). AV and STV will be vulnerable to tactical voting, just in different and more complicated ways than FPTP. STV will lead to nightmares of counting.

At the very least, if we're going to switch to a system that guarantees permanent coalition with little chance of every getting away from it, let's see how it works within the context of the UK. There are countries around the world where PR works fine, and others where it works badly.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

There are lots of possible points that might be, but there really are people saying “no PR because it’ll give the BNP MPs” and that’s specifically what I wanted to respond to.

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I'm not particularly bothered about the BNP per se getting a few MPs, but I do think that FPTP generally keeps out single-issue parties in general and that's a good feature.