Representation by accident

Two weeks after Germany’s indecisive election, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder and Christian Democrat Angela Merkel are still wrangling over which of their parties should lead a coalition government, oblivious to the coming Nazi takeover of their country. Nazis, or maybe Communists.

It’s possible you were oblivious to this as well. I know I was. But that was until I read Lawrence Solomon’s piece in the Financial Post the other day, warning that this was, if not inevitable, certainly probable, the product of Germany’s foolish, 60-year experiment with proportional representation.

That’s because proportional representation, which typically denies any party a majority of the seats, forces the parties to bargain with each other for support, putting small parties in the role of kingmakers. Small, extreme parties. Small, extreme parties like, you know. As Larry puts it, “the German system delivers threats to democracy by empowering political extremists on the left and right.”

That is, unless the extremists are shut out of power, in favour of a Grand Coalition of the two mainstream parties, as looks likely to be the result in Germany. But that’s even worse. “The last Grand Coalition, in the late 1960s, formed when neither major party was strong enough to lead a government on its own, led to public disenchantment, a parliamentary neo-Nazi movement and, on the left, the terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang. An earlier Grand Coalition, in the late 1920s, likewise strengthened the extremes, with both the Nazis and the Communists gaining seats at the expense of increasingly weak centrist parties.” And you know what happened after that.

Granted, “this is exactly how Hitler started” is not ordinarily considered a terribly persuasive line of reasoning, but in this case I can see Larry’s point. By the same logic, I am expecting the Progressive and Creditiste parties to stage a comeback in Canada, since these were features of minority parliaments in, respectively, the 1920s and 1960s. That is, unless you’re going to tell me that the rise of these parties was due to special historical factors unique to the time, and not to any particular electoral system.

But that would be a historic error. After all, if there’s one thing we know about proportional representation, it’s that it leads to political instability. As Jeffrey Simpson writes in the Globe and Mail, whatever government emerges in Germany, it will likely be “weak, unstable and incapable of making difficult, unpopular decisions.” Mind you, I had thought the weakness of PR was supposed to be that it led to entrenched dynasties, permanent coalitions, since it takes very large swings in voter sentiment to force a corresponding change in government. That’s the thing about PR: when it’s not leading to instability, it’s leading to stability.

Sort of like... our own system, known as first-past-the-post. If it’s instability you want, we’ve got that here, and are likely to for some time. Why? Because first-past-the-post disproportionately rewards parties that concentrate their vote geographically, like the Bloc Quebecois -- or the Conservatives, or indeed the Liberals. The result is a parliament made up of what are essentially three regional parties, plus the NDP, with no one able to form a majority.

On the other hand, if it’s entrenched dynasties you want, FPTP can give you that, too, as Canadians know first-hand. Why? Because in anything but a two-party system, the random accidents of split-votes mean a party doesn’t have to get a majority of the vote to get a majority of the seats: it can do so with as little as 17% of the vote, theoretically, and has done so with as little as 37%.

The fundamental difference between the two systems, then, is not which one tends to produce majority governments and which to produce minorities, but on what basis either result occurs. It is true that first-past-the-post is more likely to produce majority governments -- or as Larry calls it, clear winners. But this “clarity” is obtained at the expense of accurately representing what people voted for -- or, if you like, democracy.

Simpson-Solomon types tend to sniff at this as a sort of pedantry: PR advocates, Simpson writes, are obsessed with “strict representation,” at the expense of “effectiveness.” All right, I’ll play along. Instead of strict representation, we’ll have sort-of representation. It won’t be quite what the voters wanted, but it will be sort of what they wanted: maybe a majority of the voters didn’t prefer the party in power, but 37% did. It won’t be the government they voted for, but the government they voted … at.

But then on what basis does the winner claim democratic legitimacy? If the allocation of seats among the parties does not reflect the distribution of votes among the public, what principle does it reflect? If some foreign presidente were to declare, after an election, “I am not going to ask the party with the most votes to form a government, I’m going to hand power to another party with fewer votes,” I think even Simpson-Solomon would object. But let the same result emerge from the funhouse rules of first-past-the-post, and it’s holy writ.

Maybe you find the sight of all those German parliamentarians haggling over power unseemly. But if you’ve noticed, that’s what ours have been doing, too. The difference is that in Germany, the parties’ relative bargaining positions are decided by the voters. Here they’re decided by chance.