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strange_complex) wrote2011-04-25 09:50 pm
strange_complex) wrote2011-04-25 09:50 pm
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1. Alan Renwick (2011), A Citizen's Guide to Electoral Reform
This is an assessment of all the main possible methods for electing national governments, written by a lecturer at the University of Reading with the explicit aim of making "the findings of research on electoral systems available to a wider audience ahead of the referendum in the UK planned for May 2011." A fellow Yes campaigner recommended it to me at the beginning of this year as a balanced, rigorous and accessible guide to the main strengths and weaknesses of both First Past the Post and the Alternative Vote, so that I'd be equipped to argue about both intelligently in the course of the referendum campaign - and it has certainly provided that extremely effectively. Not only that, but the timing of the publication means that the author wrote it in the full knowledge that a referendum on the issue was going to be taking place, so that he was able to draw on up-to-date material such as the outcome of the 2010 General Election and comment on up-to-date issues such as the planned constituency boundary changes. So although the book actually goes beyond simply FPTP vs. AV, it is particularly well-geared to the current debate between the two, and examines them with the specific circumstances of the referendum in mind.
The book begins by setting out what sort of criteria it is sensible to judge electoral systems by. Here, Renwick formulates a template consisting of issues such as rewarding popularity, achieving fair representation, enabling effective government, offering voters real choices, encouraging turnout, providing meaningful local representation and preventing corruption. He then goes on to apply these criteria successively to First Past The Post, the Alternative Vote, simple methods of Proportional Representation, Mixed electoral systems (i.e. any system where some MPs are elected by one method and some by another) and the Single Transferable Vote. Another two chapters consider factors beyond the voting system per se which also affect the fairness of the system, such as the ways in which candidates are selected by parties and systems of recall. And the final conclusion weighs all of the competing systems up together, points out that no electoral system is perfect, and fundamentally advises readers to consider the facts calmly and rationally in the run-up to the AV referendum on May 5th.
Throughout, Renwick strikes what was for me the perfect balance between being accessible and readable for non-experts, while at the same time tackling technical issues thoroughly and without trying to gloss over the more complicated details. His arguments are very much grounded in serious academic research - presumably conducted mainly in the course of writing a previous publication entitled The Politics of Electoral Reform, but here presented in a more accessible manner for the interested general reader (why hello there, impact agenda!). Further reading and complicated technical calculations are provided at the end of the book if you want to know more (which I generally did), but kept out of the main text in order to maintain a clear focus on the key issues.
Of the electoral systems covered, I've known that First Past The Post produces horribly distorted results ever since seeing John Cleese's classic video on the subject at some point in my teens. But Renwick brought home to me just how distorted it is. He reports (p. 27) that according to a BBC pre-election model (which I can't now track down online), if Labour, the Tories and the LibDems had each won 31% of the total national vote in 2010, Labour would have got 314 seats in parliament, the Tories 207 and the LibDems 100 - an effect produced by factors such as the unequal geographical spread of their voters, unequal sized constituencies, poor turnout and more. Whatever you may think of any of the three main parties, that clearly isn't fair.
Even worse (p. 28), roughly 1 in 10 elections under FPTP produce the 'wrong' winner - i.e. the party which wins the most votes nationwide does not secure the most seats in parliament. This happened in the UK in 1929, 1951 and February 1974, and also occurs in the same proportion across comparable countries elsewhere using the same system. As Renwick says, "On such an important issue, this is surely a worrying error rate." One hell of an understatement, I think. It quite shocked me to learn that the system was really that distorted - and it certainly gives the lie to the No to AV camp's claims that FPTP delivers decisive results and ensures a clear winner. Not in one in ten elections, it doesn't.
Unfortunately, the Alternative Vote alone cannot fix these problems with disproportionality, because it isn't a proportional system either. Indeed, as Renwick concludes, "the reform that we are being offered in the coming referendum is not very radical". But as he also shows, it is better (though not perfect) at identifying the Condorcet winner in each constituency. Understanding that was what really solidified my own support for AV, and enabled me to write this post all about it. It seems to me pretty important that each constituency should be electing an MP who has demonstrated a real mandate of support within their own seat - to say nothing of the beneficial knock-on effects of ensuring that which I covered in my previous post on the subject.
Meanwhile, as for proportionality at the national level, Renwick uses the results of this research into how voters might have used preferential voting in the last seven elections (now updated to include 2010) in order to investigate the issue. He uses something called the Gallagher Index to measure disproportionality in election results - which is quite complicated but basically compares the difference between vote share and seat share for each party, and then combines the results into a single overall figure encapsulating the degree of mismatch between the actual election result and a perfectly proportional result. He then produces a lovely graph on p. 68 comparing the degree of disproportionality under the two systems. And thankfully, I can share his findings with you without breaching his copyright, because a graph based directly on Renwick's research is also included on p. 17 of the IPPR report on AV, which is publicly available online and can be downloaded here:
To me, what that basically shows is that over time, the two systems are pretty much the same. Sometimes FPTP is more disproportionate; sometimes AV is. Well, at least that's assuming that polling data on how people might have used preferential voting has anything to do with how they actually would in real life - which, to be fair, is a pretty huge leap. Still, you have to work with what you've got, and my take on that is that AV isn't any worse than FPTP from the point of view of proportionality, but it does do a better job of identifying the majority consensus in individual constituencies. Ergo, it's worth having.
The other systems which Renwick investigates are Simple Proportional Representation, Mixed electoral systems and the Single Transferable Vote. All of these either are or can be proportional systems (depending on exactly how they're set up), which certainly makes them superior to FPTP in my book. But I can't say I'm very keen on the ones which dispense entirely with constituencies and / or remove the capacity of voters to vote on the basis of individual candidates rather than just parties. I have a German colleague who is used to a mixed system, whereby voters have two votes at election time: one for an individual local constituency MP, and one which is used to elect a second set of MPs allocated on a nationwide proportional basis. She thinks it is a great system for Germany - but she did also comment that Germany is a federal nation with much stronger local government than we have in the UK, so that if she had a local problem, she would go to her local town council (or equivalent) rather than her local MP. That's not the case in the UK, and I think that having two separate 'streams' of MPs, half of whom were busy with local constituency casework and half of whom were not, probably wouldn't work for us.
All in all, I think Renwick is right to say that the Single Transferable Vote is probably the best possible system for a country like ours. It's preferential, in that voters use numbers to rank candidates, but it differs from AV in that the constituencies are larger, with each one usually returning between three and five MPs (each requiring between 1/4 and 1/6 of the highest-ranking preferences in the constituency to win). The larger constituencies thus contain a more diverse set of voters, helping to overcome the distortions currently caused by geographical concentrations of party support, while the proportions of votes in each constituency translate more directly into a proportional set of local MPs. The nationwide result isn't perfectly proportional, but it strikes a good compromise between being much more reflective of the national will than FPTP or AV, while still making it difficult for extremist parties to win seats. It also maintains a constituency link for all MPs, and indeed arguably offers better local representation for individual voters, since there is a greater chance that at least one of the your local MPs will be from the party you consider most representative of your own views. Thus Tory voters can call on their local Tory MP, Labour voters the Labour one, etc.
No system is perfect, though, and Renwick also points out that STV can make MPs all too responsive to the will of their local constituents. This happens in particular if parties put up more candidates per constituency than there are winnable seats in it, meaning that candidates within the same party are competing against one another for the available seats, rather than just against representatives of other parties. This can be a good thing for voters, because it allows them to select the particular candidates they like from their favoured party, rather than only having options which a party selection system has presented to them. But it also makes all seats inherently marginal, and gives MPs a very strong motivation to make sure that they please their own contituents above all else - including party whips trying to get them to support unpopular measures. In Ireland, which uses STV, it's arguable that these sorts of factors recently caused MPs to avoid tackling their national debt for all too long, thus leading to the country requiring a bailout package. Clearly, that wasn't the only factor, since Ireland is far from the only country which has suffered from a banking crisis in recent years. But it's a sobering example of how that sort of problem can be exacerbated by an electoral system which mitigates against making decisions which are necessary in the long term but which will be unpopular in the short term.
Obviously, it would probably have been helpful if I'd got round to reviewing this book a little earlier than 10 days before the referendum, so that anyone interested in reading Renwick's views for themselves could have had time to buy their own copy and read it before putting their cross on the ballot paper. But thankfully, Renwick's views on AV specifically are readily available online in the form of this briefing paper produced for the Political Studies Association. I can recommend it very highly to anyone wanting a properly balanced account of the arguments. Like the book, his assessment of the various strengths and weaknesses of AV as compared to FPTP in the paper is balanced, nuanced and objective. But the fairly clear conclusion to me is that AV is a small but measurable improvement on FPTP - and therefore worth having.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
The book begins by setting out what sort of criteria it is sensible to judge electoral systems by. Here, Renwick formulates a template consisting of issues such as rewarding popularity, achieving fair representation, enabling effective government, offering voters real choices, encouraging turnout, providing meaningful local representation and preventing corruption. He then goes on to apply these criteria successively to First Past The Post, the Alternative Vote, simple methods of Proportional Representation, Mixed electoral systems (i.e. any system where some MPs are elected by one method and some by another) and the Single Transferable Vote. Another two chapters consider factors beyond the voting system per se which also affect the fairness of the system, such as the ways in which candidates are selected by parties and systems of recall. And the final conclusion weighs all of the competing systems up together, points out that no electoral system is perfect, and fundamentally advises readers to consider the facts calmly and rationally in the run-up to the AV referendum on May 5th.
Throughout, Renwick strikes what was for me the perfect balance between being accessible and readable for non-experts, while at the same time tackling technical issues thoroughly and without trying to gloss over the more complicated details. His arguments are very much grounded in serious academic research - presumably conducted mainly in the course of writing a previous publication entitled The Politics of Electoral Reform, but here presented in a more accessible manner for the interested general reader (why hello there, impact agenda!). Further reading and complicated technical calculations are provided at the end of the book if you want to know more (which I generally did), but kept out of the main text in order to maintain a clear focus on the key issues.
Of the electoral systems covered, I've known that First Past The Post produces horribly distorted results ever since seeing John Cleese's classic video on the subject at some point in my teens. But Renwick brought home to me just how distorted it is. He reports (p. 27) that according to a BBC pre-election model (which I can't now track down online), if Labour, the Tories and the LibDems had each won 31% of the total national vote in 2010, Labour would have got 314 seats in parliament, the Tories 207 and the LibDems 100 - an effect produced by factors such as the unequal geographical spread of their voters, unequal sized constituencies, poor turnout and more. Whatever you may think of any of the three main parties, that clearly isn't fair.
Even worse (p. 28), roughly 1 in 10 elections under FPTP produce the 'wrong' winner - i.e. the party which wins the most votes nationwide does not secure the most seats in parliament. This happened in the UK in 1929, 1951 and February 1974, and also occurs in the same proportion across comparable countries elsewhere using the same system. As Renwick says, "On such an important issue, this is surely a worrying error rate." One hell of an understatement, I think. It quite shocked me to learn that the system was really that distorted - and it certainly gives the lie to the No to AV camp's claims that FPTP delivers decisive results and ensures a clear winner. Not in one in ten elections, it doesn't.
Unfortunately, the Alternative Vote alone cannot fix these problems with disproportionality, because it isn't a proportional system either. Indeed, as Renwick concludes, "the reform that we are being offered in the coming referendum is not very radical". But as he also shows, it is better (though not perfect) at identifying the Condorcet winner in each constituency. Understanding that was what really solidified my own support for AV, and enabled me to write this post all about it. It seems to me pretty important that each constituency should be electing an MP who has demonstrated a real mandate of support within their own seat - to say nothing of the beneficial knock-on effects of ensuring that which I covered in my previous post on the subject.
Meanwhile, as for proportionality at the national level, Renwick uses the results of this research into how voters might have used preferential voting in the last seven elections (now updated to include 2010) in order to investigate the issue. He uses something called the Gallagher Index to measure disproportionality in election results - which is quite complicated but basically compares the difference between vote share and seat share for each party, and then combines the results into a single overall figure encapsulating the degree of mismatch between the actual election result and a perfectly proportional result. He then produces a lovely graph on p. 68 comparing the degree of disproportionality under the two systems. And thankfully, I can share his findings with you without breaching his copyright, because a graph based directly on Renwick's research is also included on p. 17 of the IPPR report on AV, which is publicly available online and can be downloaded here:
To me, what that basically shows is that over time, the two systems are pretty much the same. Sometimes FPTP is more disproportionate; sometimes AV is. Well, at least that's assuming that polling data on how people might have used preferential voting has anything to do with how they actually would in real life - which, to be fair, is a pretty huge leap. Still, you have to work with what you've got, and my take on that is that AV isn't any worse than FPTP from the point of view of proportionality, but it does do a better job of identifying the majority consensus in individual constituencies. Ergo, it's worth having.
The other systems which Renwick investigates are Simple Proportional Representation, Mixed electoral systems and the Single Transferable Vote. All of these either are or can be proportional systems (depending on exactly how they're set up), which certainly makes them superior to FPTP in my book. But I can't say I'm very keen on the ones which dispense entirely with constituencies and / or remove the capacity of voters to vote on the basis of individual candidates rather than just parties. I have a German colleague who is used to a mixed system, whereby voters have two votes at election time: one for an individual local constituency MP, and one which is used to elect a second set of MPs allocated on a nationwide proportional basis. She thinks it is a great system for Germany - but she did also comment that Germany is a federal nation with much stronger local government than we have in the UK, so that if she had a local problem, she would go to her local town council (or equivalent) rather than her local MP. That's not the case in the UK, and I think that having two separate 'streams' of MPs, half of whom were busy with local constituency casework and half of whom were not, probably wouldn't work for us.
All in all, I think Renwick is right to say that the Single Transferable Vote is probably the best possible system for a country like ours. It's preferential, in that voters use numbers to rank candidates, but it differs from AV in that the constituencies are larger, with each one usually returning between three and five MPs (each requiring between 1/4 and 1/6 of the highest-ranking preferences in the constituency to win). The larger constituencies thus contain a more diverse set of voters, helping to overcome the distortions currently caused by geographical concentrations of party support, while the proportions of votes in each constituency translate more directly into a proportional set of local MPs. The nationwide result isn't perfectly proportional, but it strikes a good compromise between being much more reflective of the national will than FPTP or AV, while still making it difficult for extremist parties to win seats. It also maintains a constituency link for all MPs, and indeed arguably offers better local representation for individual voters, since there is a greater chance that at least one of the your local MPs will be from the party you consider most representative of your own views. Thus Tory voters can call on their local Tory MP, Labour voters the Labour one, etc.
No system is perfect, though, and Renwick also points out that STV can make MPs all too responsive to the will of their local constituents. This happens in particular if parties put up more candidates per constituency than there are winnable seats in it, meaning that candidates within the same party are competing against one another for the available seats, rather than just against representatives of other parties. This can be a good thing for voters, because it allows them to select the particular candidates they like from their favoured party, rather than only having options which a party selection system has presented to them. But it also makes all seats inherently marginal, and gives MPs a very strong motivation to make sure that they please their own contituents above all else - including party whips trying to get them to support unpopular measures. In Ireland, which uses STV, it's arguable that these sorts of factors recently caused MPs to avoid tackling their national debt for all too long, thus leading to the country requiring a bailout package. Clearly, that wasn't the only factor, since Ireland is far from the only country which has suffered from a banking crisis in recent years. But it's a sobering example of how that sort of problem can be exacerbated by an electoral system which mitigates against making decisions which are necessary in the long term but which will be unpopular in the short term.
Obviously, it would probably have been helpful if I'd got round to reviewing this book a little earlier than 10 days before the referendum, so that anyone interested in reading Renwick's views for themselves could have had time to buy their own copy and read it before putting their cross on the ballot paper. But thankfully, Renwick's views on AV specifically are readily available online in the form of this briefing paper produced for the Political Studies Association. I can recommend it very highly to anyone wanting a properly balanced account of the arguments. Like the book, his assessment of the various strengths and weaknesses of AV as compared to FPTP in the paper is balanced, nuanced and objective. But the fairly clear conclusion to me is that AV is a small but measurable improvement on FPTP - and therefore worth having.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
no subject
no subject
I have a post planned to explain STV and AMS, but I'm not posting it until after the AV referendum, because the waters are muddied enough.
no subject
There are several voting systems which have you voting by party. In fact the one I was getting confused with was PR by party list (of which there are several sub methods) -- it's actually quite widely used. I've looked it up on wikipedia rather than rely on some mismatch of my misremembering and you correcting me one what you think it is I'm misremembering. :-)
There is Proportional Representation as a general system of which the major subtypes are AMS, STV and Party List (these subtypes have different sub-subtypes). Of these STV and Party List are the multi-member constituency varieties. In fact world wide it appears Party List is more used than STV and much more so than AMS.