For the first time in a while I have decided to not just begin, but finish a note about voting systems. I have not done this because it is a breathtakingly exciting topic. Indeed, it is academic and dry. Rather, I wish to address what I regard to be some misapprehensions about the subject.
When approaching the issue, most people divide it into a debate between two broad categories of system: Majoritarian, and Proportional Representation. One of these categories is too vague, the other too specific; for the roles most people cast them in.
What people normally mean by majoritarian systems is systems which often grant a majority to the “winning” party, rather than a system of majority rule. These are usually single-member systems such as First Past the Post (FPTP, used in Britain), Alternative Vote (AV, used in Australia) or a two-round system (France). Other systems exist, such as Block Voting, but these are rarely used and for the sake of simplicity we will not focus on them.
Single-member systems do not always grant a majority to the party with the most votes. Indeed, they occasionally grant a majority to the 2nd party (cf. United Kingdom general election, 1951), and extra seats won by a party depend very much on the votes won being in the right areas. For example, in 1992, John Major’s Conservatives lost 40 seats despite only losing a net total of 0.3% of the vote, from the previous election.
This is because the basis for single-member constituencies is Direct Representation (DR) – it is not actually to provide a majority for the winning party. However, these systems most often provide excessive swings for any party that secures a significant lead over its rivals, so the description is fair, if not entirely accurate.
However, when people use the term Proportional Representation, the problem is the opposite: that they are using a specific term to describe a broad variety of systems, some of which are not actually PR in the slightest. One of these is a favourite bugbear of mine: the Single Transferable Vote (unfortunately abbreviated to STV).
Those of you who have heard me on this subject know that I do not consider STV to be PR. I am increasingly of the opinion that it is unhelpful to regard it so.
This is because STV elects individuals, not parties. And the moment the electorate decides to stop voting on party lines, any semblance of party proportionality will be lost.
And if there is one thing common amongst all true PR systems, it is that they must elect parties. As for a system to deliver truly proportional outcomes for parties, then parties as institutions must drive the process. It is for this reason that analyses have found AMS to be far more consistently proportional than either STV, or even any List system which utilises smaller multi-member constituencies. For any form of local or individual basis for a voting system is liable to frustrate the noble ideals of proportionality, because PR is an inherently anti-individualist theory of representation.
What STV actually sets out to achieve is to elect representatives that reflect the broadest possible range of opinion in a community, and minimise so-called “wasted votes”. It must be said that certainly from a mathematical point of view, it does this very successfully. But this theory of representation is certainly nothing to do with parties as institutions, and would be more usefully termed “Moderate Representation”, or MR.
To those who think that this is only an academic point, a technicality, I ask you to take a look at this survey: http://www.democraticaudit.com/download
/mvc.pdf. In 1997, Labour would not only have still gained a majority on a minority of the vote (admittedly reduced to 44) under STV, but the Conservatives would have won even less seats – compared to the current system, which they were already under-represented by! This struck many people as a surprise, because they had been led to believe STV to be PR – but as STV is actually nothing of the sort, the widespread unpopularity of the Conservatives party and the widespread consensus that Labour was the preferable alternative, even amongst non-Labour voters, conspired to deliver something that was not even vaguely describable as PR.
Thus we have at least three schools of representation that lie at the basis of voting systems, DR, which seeks to elect representatives that directly represent localities, MR, which seeks to elect representatives that broadly reflect the range of opinion in a community, and PR, which seeks to elect party representatives.
Some systems fall into more than one of these categories, and some frustrate all of them. Borda Count is a Direct Representation system that seeks to elect the most consensual candidate, to the extent that a candidate with a majority of first preference votes can be defeated – the only system I know of which can do that. Such a system could be said to be both Direct Representation and Moderate Representation. On the other hand, Block voting is a multi-member, winner-takes-all system which is certainly not MR, and is arguably an example of a more true majoritarian (or more accurately pluralitarian) system.
So it is clear that these categories are inadequate, but this method of analysis already serves us better than the old binary, divisive method, as it looks at the basis of each voting system as well as its outcomes. It is clear that for the sake of accuracy, it is in need of qualification; but I believe that this is a good place to start from when assessing the most common modern voting systems, as it shows somewhat more clearly the variety and range in need of consideration.
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