The Post is wrong on PR
Well, that's only the most extraordinary flourish in a piece that careens from one train wreck to another of muddled thinking and clichéd wisdom. Unable to decide whether PR would lead to fragmentation and division or consensus-driven conformity, the editorial opts for both. The problem with PR, it reported, is that small parties “breed like rabbits.” Politics becomes a matter of “jostling and shifting” among “special interest parties” with “their own parochial agendas,” such that “governing along any steady course becomes difficult.”
That is, unless it leads to too much steadiness. The problem with PR, the same editorial reports, is that it leads to “government gridlock” in which “a real change of government becomes unlikely.” Rather, it is dominated by “the same group of consensus politicians.” (The ones with the parochial agendas?) But hold that thought, because “too much consensus is not the only peril.” There’s also the peril of too little consensus. “A really destructive faction can manipulate PR disastrously, as the Nazis did in Weimar Germany.”
The editorial acknowledges this is “a peculiarly horrific example,” but it seems to think Israel and Italy are representative examples: the two countries with, historically, the most extreme forms of PR on Earth (Italy’s has since changed). You’d never know that PR is also in use in dozens of other countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries: comparatively stable, well-governed places, most would agree.
All this angst, over a proposal that amounts to a fairly minor patch on the present system. Under the Citizens’ Assembly model, Ontarians would elect 90 members to their provincial parliament by exactly the same method as they do now. Another 39 members -- just 30% of the total -- would be elected by PR, topping up the distribution of seats thrown off by the “first past the post” system so as to produce something a little more in line with what Ontarians actually voted for.
But then, to devotees of FPTP, that’s a failing. Put another way, the strengths they associate with the present system, notably its tendency toward majority governments, are only achieved by misrepresenting voters’ true preferences: It delivers, not what the voters want, but what its proponents prefer they should have. Or as the Post puts it, “our system permits majority governments to emerge even from closely contested elections,” that is, from elections in which no party has the support of a majority of the voters, but only a plurality -- sometimes not even that.
The Post laments that, under PR, “Margaret Thatcher could never have become prime minister.” I might agree that would be an unfortunate result: others might view it as a plus. In the same way, I might point out that under PR, the Parti Québécois could never have won a majority or held a referendum. We can all point to results we might like or dislike under either system, but a democracy, surely, is concerned with what the voters like.
The distortions of first-past-the-post are too well known to require much recounting here: worse even than the phoney overall majorities are the phoney regional majorities (the Post, bizarrely, cites the Bloc Québécois as an example of the dangers of PR, when it is the present system that has rewarded it with 60% of the seats from Quebec with 40% of the vote), to say nothing of the discrimination against new parties: the Green Party, with more than 660,000 votes in the last federal election, got zero seats. The Bloc, with barely twice as many votes, got 51 seats.
But perhaps its worst effect is to produce the very instability its proponents fear. In recent years, Ontario has veered wildly, from the Rae NDP to the Harris Tories and back to the McGuinty Liberals, on the basis of relatively minor swings in voter support. The instability we associate with minority governments is likewise entirely a product of the “winner-take-all” mentality the system engenders: parties are encouraged to pull the plug on a government the minute they gain a lead in the polls, in the belief that they can collect a majority. In a system where minority governments -- coalitions, in other words -- are the norm, the incentives are far different.
“Breed like rabbits”? Take a look at the German parliament, elected under a system with a much higher degree of proportionality than is proposed for Ontario. At present, there are six parties, of which two, the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, function effectively as one. For much of its post-war history, it has had three, or one fewer than our own Parliament. Those are some awfully sleepy rabbits.
4/18/2007
