Darren Kramble writes to ask:
As a Canadian ex-pat, I know that the Tories currently have a minority government, but I have no idea how that is going. Anyway, I live in the UK, and the country seems to be freaking out at our hung parliament, as if it is the end of the political world. I’m fairly happy with it, as Labour is now out, as they inevitably would be, but the Tories don’t have a majority that would allow the more batshit crazy things they might want to try. So, any advice to the UK? How is having a minority government working?
Short version: not very well.
Longer version: In the past, Canada’s had very productive minority governments. Lester B. Pearson, for example, gave us major policy changes with a minority government, which included universal healthcare, armed forces unification, and our new flag. There’s nothing in a minority government that inherently says that they have to be unproductive or bad.
However, our recent minority governments, while certainly not outright disastrous, is less than satisfactory. There’s a few reasons for this, some of which are specific to Canada and some of which I’m pretty sure are universal.
What’s specific to Canada is that here, our parties have become regionalized to a certain extent – the Liberals in the eastern half and more urban areas of the country, the Tories in the western half and more rural areas, the NDP competing mostly with the Liberals for space. There’s less incentive to cooperate because excacerbating cross-party and therefore regional tension is, frankly, better for your electoral prospects. (In a UK context, this seems like it could potentially be an issue, given that Labour and the Tories have their regional strongholds to an extent.)
What’s not specific to Canada is this: in a minority government, somebody has to take power. This seems like it’s not an issue, but it is because the minority government, Parliamentary power or not, is in charge and therefore can determine when an election takes place, either by calling one or by putting forth a bill which gets defeated.
This seems like a precarious position, but in practice it isn’t, because in Canada the Tories have figured out something which is obvious on its face but which has no real applicable context beyond a minority government position, which is this: the electorate mostly doesn’t like elections. Which isn’t surprising, because elections tend to be vast resevoirs of bullshit expunged forth combined with general nastiness and pettiness, made even less pleasant thanks to the omnipresence of mass media. (This is my general theory as to why electoral participation has steadily trended downward in most democracies over time.)
So if voters don’t like elections, what do they want? As few elections as possible. But what do minority governments generally guarantee? An election sooner rather than later. So whenever the minority threatens to bring down the government over an issue, you get the endless caterwauling about “endless elections” from both the citizenry and the media willing to complain about it (and they are more than willing, believe me). Which in turn means that the minority is generally blamed for the extra elections which come with minority governments, even when that doesn’t actually make sense given the track record. (Note that the 2006 and 2008 federal elections were both called by the party in power trying to seize electoral advantage; the former failed for the Liberals, the latter succeeded for the Conservatives.)
So there’s essentially a built-in political downside to forcing an election if you’re in the minority. What happens? Well, in Canada we mostly have feckless dipshits for political leaders (really – David Cameron looks good in comparison), so their natural political cowardice combines with the disincentive to call a federal election and thus you have a minority government more or less governing as a majority government, which just pisses off and disenfranchises everybody who didn’t vote for them. (Which, in Canada, right now means more than 60 percent of the country.) This just perpetuates the vicious cycle: voters are disillusioned by their lack of control over political process, so they don’t vote, which results in them having even less control, and so on and so forth.
In short: first-past-the-post systems are terrible for minority governments. A proportional system like Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems want is much better for producing responsive minority governments because they basically require cross-party cooperation to work in the first place; that’s what you want.
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…wait, what? Elections happen when the sitting government calls them? I thought elections happened at regular intervals (most often 4 or 5 years, we in Sweden used to have a 3-year period but they decided it was to short, EU parliament is every 7 years I think…)
Ok, MGK I’m in Ontario, and I have to ask – why then do older folk (especially pundits, etc) resist a proportional system?
I remember specifically going to vote in the provincial elections specifically so I could vote on the referendum for a more proportional set up.
something which is obvious on its face but which has no real applicable context beyond a minority government position, which is this: the electorate mostly doesn’t like elections.
Actually, this suggests that the US would be better off increasing the length of terms of elected officials. (Something reasonable like House->3 years, Presidential term->6 years, Senate->9 years.)
Not that I think that an amendment doing that could actually get passed.
Tetris@1: Elections happen when called by the government, or when the government loses a Vote Of No Confidence, and *must* happen at least every 5 years.
There are no “scheduled” elections. The Interim Placeholder Government promised to make set election dates a fixture, but then ignored that completely when they saw a chance to call an early election and grab seats.
Elections for the European Parliament are held every 5 years.I think that’s about the maximum time you should have between elections: politicians shouldn’t get to comfortable with there seats in parliament. That’s just asking people to become corrupt.
That Guy,
Every system has a flaw that eventually the corrupt will figure out how to exploit and proportional would be no different. So it’s more of a devil you know over the one you don’t.
I am mildly disconcerted that it is possible to make David Cameron look good in comparison.
That Guy:
As a 23 year old Scot, I could tell you why I don’t want PR. At the moment, it’s very very easy to articulate.
As you’ll remember, the Green party just got
their first MP. In the same general election, the actually-not-hyperbole fascist BNP polled more votes.
It’s worth remembering that, historically, PR was one of the reasons for the rise of the National Socialist Party in the Weimar republic. [If I don’t say the words, Godwin can’t be invoked, right?]
Changing the electoral system, I’m totally behind. I just think that using the AV system instead is a lot more reasonable. It retains a link between locality and MPs, and ensures that, by a reasonable metric, accounting for all votes, a majority (over 50%) is behind, to some extent, the winner.
MGK: Labour and the Tories don’t just have strongholds, the country is seriously divided. In Scotland, the tories haven’t managed to get more than one MP since before Blair’s 1997 landslide, when they lost all representatives. They honestly seem to have forgotten, and don’t seem to target the area.
South England is Tory heartland. Inner city London returned a lot of Labour MPs.
I’ve been saying that since Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems are about the only party with appeal throughout the entire country, they would do well as a figurehead PM of a joint cabinet to deal with the current crisis.
A great irony, of course, is that with Brown’s resignation today, we may have a new PM, as the result of our first election with TV debates, who didn’t participate.
You’re not taking into account the disincentives to vote Green and BNP. The disincentive to vote Green is that if you’d consider voting Green, you’d also probably consider voting Labour or Lib Dem or some other vaguely left-ish party, and most of those have a better shot at getting into power in a first-past-the-post system than the Green candidate you’d be voting for does. The disincentive to vote BNP, on the other hand, is that you’ll look like a racist bigot.
Proportional voting empowers smaller left-wing parties. Now, granted, the BNP might get a few more votes in a proportional system, but firstly probably not much more because there aren’t that many people voting Tory who’d secretly rather vote BNP, and secondly, if people want to vote for racist bigots, then frankly they should have the right to vote for racist bigots; that’s what representative democracy is ultimately all about.
As an American, all parliamentary systems sound weird to me. Having the same people in charge of th Executive and the Legislature just sounds like a recipe for disaster. To ensure freedom, wouldn’t you want most bills to fail? I would think a minority government sounds like the best thing to have in such a a system.
I’ve never understood why anybody would want proportional representation. It sounds so undemocratic. If people aren’t electing the MPs directly, then they’re being chosen by the parties, right? And parties have way too much power already. I would think you’d be looking for a system that would weaken parties, not strengthen them.
Admittedly, I’ve only lived under our system, and US news doesn’t report much about other countries’ politics, so I am aware that there’s a lot I don’t know.
In the same general election, the actually-not-hyperbole fascist BNP polled more votes.
If we made it so that it was illegal for political parties to obtain funding from foreign organisations and individuals the BNP would cease to exist (they get the money to campaign on a national level due to being able to obtain funding from far right american evangelical groups) and even if they didn’t… that wouldn’t be that bad a thing, as it’d provide an incentive for the other mainstream parties to deal with the problems that produce support for the BNP – as it stands the main parties can ignore the issues that underpin and enable their support. It’s better to shine light on how fucked the country is before you start trying to fix it
PR also splits up the racist dickhead vote from the Tories and Labour so they couldn’t pander to it in the hope of picking up racist tactical voters anymore – so the BNP and UKIP would end up erasing the total effect dickhead racists can have upon running of the country, whereas the tories and labour have been shamelessly pandering to tactical voting dickhead racists and thereby empowering them to a degree that has been beyond ridiculous for decades now.
Adela, that sort of thinking is too close to a slippery slope arguement to really stand up, though not many people will divorce thier feelings or intuition when confronted with something that to them is new. But I think it really does summarise the basics of it, thanks.
Johnny K, I really don;t think the Weimar comparison holds up, especially as according to the wiki search I can do here at work Israel uses Proportional representation. And even if one poor choice gets a seat, it’s still a decidedly minor component. True, the proportional system was used in that historical situation, but that does not mean the system lead to or was the cause of it.
What I was really trying to figure out is why it’s seen as something to resist, rather than embrace. If it more accurately shows the expressed wishes of the electorate, why fight it?
That Guy: I’m not arguing that all PR leads to extreme parties running things.
That said, Israel is one of the worst possible examples you could pick for that point. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/israel-proportional-representation There’s a guardian article on why Israel’s PR fails: you can easily find similiar articles from your right-wing rag of choice.
Party lists are an incredibly bad idea, yet we have them in Scotland. I’m enough of a cynic to not really believe Labour and Tories will accept non-listed member systems.
I am not claiming PR is a definitely bad system which is totally wrong. I’m just answering why I prefer AV to PR; there is potential for it to be horribly undemocratic. Worse, for those in power: it makes it a lot harder for them to get things done.
@Mary Warner: how does ensuring legislation fails give greater freedom? Surely the job of a good government is to govern best, rather than be stopped from doing good.
Civil Partnerships would have been unthinkable a short time ago, now they’re an accepted fact of life. For all of New Labour’s failings, they did a lot of good in government. The NHS is brilliant.
Speaking as a born-and-raised Aussie, I’m constantly surprised that other ‘Western’ democracies still use something as clunky and broken as a first-past-the-post voting system.
And why go with Proportional Representation when you can just actually ask the electorate what they want with either Preferential Voting, or a Single Transferable Vote system? (Yeah, complex, but I’d love to hear a good argument against them other than that.)
Of course, being an Aussie I also think compulsory voting is a better idea than voluntary voting, but I acknowledge that makes me a bit of a heretic to some folks.
JonnyK – the system the Lib Dems want is *nothing* like that in Israel. PR covers a *huge* number of things, and what the Lib Dems want is actually STV – which is AV but with multi-member constituencies. Still no danger of letting the BNP in in any numbers, no party lists, more power to the voters but no huge power to the extremists… it’s the same system they use in Ireland and Australia, rather then the horribly flawed one in Israel and the European elections.
If the Liberal Democrats actually want to use the Australian system, why do they keep calling it ‘Proportional Representation’? All that does is conjure up images of European-style pseudodemocracy.
I would still prefer to see an electoral system that refuses to recognise parties.