PR: The fearmongers debunked

...we are told that changing the system will result in chronic instability, a series of minority governments, one falling after the other; or else that it will lead to chronic gridlock, a legislature divided into dozens of smaller parties, some extremist, who would use their bargaining power to hijack the political process, demanding that one or other of the mainstream parties adopt their agenda in return for their support....On the surface, the new electoral system proposed for Ontario would look a lot like the current system. The vast majority of members of the provincial legislature -- 90 out of 129 -- would be elected in the same way as they are now: in local ridings, by the first-past-the-post method. The other 39 members would be elected provincewide on the basis of a party’s share of the overall vote, from lists of candidates drawn up by the parties for this purpose. Hence the name: mixed-member proportional (MMP).

For voters, likewise, things would look much the same. You’d mark one X for the candidate you prefer in your riding, as you do now, plus another X for your choice of party. Where the number of members a party elected in the ridings was less than its share of the party vote, the list members would be used to bring it up to par. If, say, the NDP won 15 of the 90 local ridings, but had 20% of the vote -- entitling it to 26 seats overall -- the top 11 candidates on the party’s list would also get seats.

So in one sense, little would change. But in another sense, everything would. No longer would parties win massive “majorities” with a minority of the vote. No longer would a vote for one party count for three or four times as much as another. No longer would new parties with wide support be shut out, in favour of parties with a narrow regional power base -- though they would have to win at least 3% of the vote provincewide to be eligible.

Indeed, apologists for the status quo have more or less given up arguing for first past the post on its merits. The pretense that it delivers “stable majorities” can no longer be sustained: recent elections in Ontario have produced, in order, NDP, Conservative, and Liberal governments, none with a majority of the votes, yet each interpreting the support of its own minority as a mandate to impose a succession of radically different policy regimes on the rest of us.

So instead first-past-the-posties have focused on raising fears about the alternative. These fall into two broad categories: fears about proportional representation in general, and fears about mixed-member proportional in particular.

So, to take up the first, we are told that changing the system will result in chronic instability, a series of minority governments, one falling after the other; or else that it will lead to chronic gridlock, a legislature divided into dozens of smaller parties, some extremist, who would use their bargaining power to hijack the political process, demanding that one or other of the mainstream parties adopt their agenda in return for their support. The spectres of Israel and Italy are often invoked, as if to cinch the argument.

We can dispose of the last easily enough. One: Israel and Italy are uniquely divided societies, and were long before they adopted PR. Two: Neither country has ever used anything like the mixed system proposed for Ontario, but rather adopted much more extreme forms of PR, with no threshold for support.

As for the more specific fears, they would perhaps be more tenable were we the first country ever to try proportional representation -- were it not already in use, in one form or another, in most of the democratic world. But in fact it is, and in no country have any of the scare stories come to pass. 

Germany and New Zealand both use MMP. Their parliaments typically produce between four and eight parties, none of them extremist, with two large centrist parties as anchors. The same pattern is observed in other PR countries: Ireland, Australia, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all currently have seven parties in their legislatures.

It’s true that these systems do not typically produce one-party majority governments. Rather, they tend to be led by multi-party majorities: stable coalitions, that together command the support of a majority of the legislature -- and, unlike the current system, a majority of the voters. We associate this sort of government with instability only because of the incentives under FPTP, which encourage parties to trigger an election at the first spike in the polls, betting that a 2% rise in support can translate into a bushel of extra seats. Under PR, there’s no such payoff.

As for the prospect of extremist hijackings, that is supported neither by experience nor common sense, depending as it does on a number of increasingly unlikely conditions: that the extremist party has just enough seats to hold the balance of power; that none of the larger parties’ members break ranks, but rigidly vote the party line; that, likewise, the mainstream parties are incapable of voting with one another to defeat the extremists; and, most importantly, that none of the parties, large or small, pays any price for their behaviour with the electorate. 

That’s not what happened in New Zealand, for example, where the New Zealand First party (better described as eccentric than extremist), having made what were regarded as extravagant demands, was thrown out of the governing coalition -- and thumped at the next election. Or Germany, where the Social Democrats and Christian Democratic Union opted to form a grand coalition in 2005 rather than share power with more radical parties.

So weak are these general arguments against PR that opponents have lately shifted their focus to the alleged failings of the mixed-member system. I’ll deal with these next time.