Electing for Democracy

Preface

This book, published in 1990, deals with a subject that is once more back on the agenda. I’ve made no attempt to revise or update it, but some typos have been picked up and corrected on the way and the original pagination has been replicated in preparing it for uploading to Academia.

Sincere thanks to Brian Robinson, who selflessly OCRed the text for me.

Richard Kuper London, 12 June 2015

Electing for Democracy

Proportional Representation and the Left

Richard Kuper

Socialist Society 1990

Electing for Democracy Proportional Representation and the Left

ISBN 1 872481 05 1

Cover design by Sandra Buchanan, Graphic Arts, Southark SE1 Printed in Great Britain by Billings & Sons Limited, Worcester

Contents

Acknowledgments / 4 Introduction / 5 1: The Case for the Current System / 7 2: Some European Examples / 21 3: The Effects of PR on Labour and the Left / 26 4: Varieties of PR / 32 5: The Constituency / 43 6: Women and Minorities / 48 7: Recommendations / 52 Appendix - How Various PR Systems Work / 55 A Guide to Reading / 60

Acknowledgments

The ideas expressed here have been developed over a number of years in and around the Socialist Society, the Socialist Movement and the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform. But pulling the threads together into a sustained argument proved harder than I had expected. It wouldn’t have happened without constant encouragement from friends and comrades. In particular I would like to thank Anthony Arblaster, Andrew Coates, Phil Edwards, Greg Elliott, Mary Georghiou, Martin Kuper, Ron Medlow and Hilary Wainwright all of whom read the manuscript in draft. A lunch with Martin Linton raised questions I am still grappling with. And, for heavy duty input, special thanks to Hilary Wainwright for her constant interest and encouragement, Mary Georghiou for her extremely thorough comments on the text and Greg Elliott for his precise editing. The usual caveats apply. While I’ve drawn heavily on the ideas of those around me and the debates on the left, responsibility for the form in which these general arguments see the light of day here must be laid squarely at my door.

Richard Kuper London, May 1990

Introduction

Socialists are normally quick to condemn traditional political institutions, and there is scarcely any aspect of the British political system that has escaped scathing criticism: prerogative powers, the House of Lords, the judiciary. Why, then, is the electoral system immune? The British left is deeply divided on the question of proportional representation. Feelings are running high when left-wing proponents of electoral reform can be variously accused, of encouraging ‘coalitions and deals in smoke-filled rooms’, of wishing to ‘perfect the fraud of bourgeois democracy’, and, until he chose to drown himself, of throwing a lifeline to David Owen. On the face of it, this hostility is surprising. The ‘first-past- the-post’ system is neither self-evidently democratic nor fair. (Even the name is a misnomer since there is no post to be got past!) It originated in pre-capitalist times and was refined in the late nineteenth century in a Liberal-Tory agreement on the new rules of the game before socialist representation was a live issue. Indeed, the Labour Party in its early days was a vigorous supporter of PR. My argument focuses on what many may feel is the narrow issue of forms of representation. A book remains to be written on democracy and socialism, but this is not it (though I will touch on that relationship at many points). Here I examine the unwritten rules and assumptions of the current system. I argue that any socialist support for the current electoral system is misguided, because it is undemocratic and works systematically to the left’s disadvantage. I then look at alternative electoral systems and identify the principles which must underlie any system if it is to enjoy

the support of socialists. What is at stake is our concept of democracy and our willingness to take it seriously, not just as a future ideal, but as a central guiding principle of day-to-day practice. Obtaining proportional representation will neither solve the problems of the left nor provide Britain with a functioning ‘democracy’. It will not, in itself, affect the vast powers concentrated, with minimal democratic constraint, in the hands of the Crown and the executive, the civil service, the armed forces and even the House of Lords - powers which serve, and are buttressed by, the economic might of capital. These need to be challenged through the mobilization of class and popular forces - by definition extra-parliamentary. But the electoral system, and the forms of representation it allows, affects how people mobilize and the long-run effects of such efforts. With a more representative and effective parliamentary system, the impact of action at work, in the community and in the social movements can be all the greater. Proportional representation is not an end in itself, but one (limited) component of the process of democratizing all aspects of social life.

1: The case for the current system

In the absence of a written constitution, it is difficult to know how the political system is supposed to function in Britain. But it is clear that the two-party politics of a first-past-the-post electoral system are supposed to be qualitatively superior to that of any other system. Broadly speaking, the orthodox view may be summed up in three interlinked propositions. First, the system renders the electorate sovereign, providing a choice of policies and governments. Second, it ensures responsible government and accountable members of parliament. Third, it offers strong government, in contrast to the weakness of coalition government. The quality of government it produces is constantly emphasized. Such beliefs are shared by senior politicians across both Tory and Labour parties, from Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell to Roy Hattersley and Tony Benn. There is a deep attachment to arrangements which have arisen out of a unique historical experience. And, very often, this is allied to a feeling that Britain, Mother of Parliaments, remains morally and culturally superior to every other country in the world, even if its economic supremacy is a thing of the past. It is important, therefore, to examine these themes in some detail. How exactly does the system work? How democratic is it? How does it compare with the different west European systems? How do voters fare in other countries?

Sovereignty of the electorate

The first-past-the-post system, it is said, ensures a better expression of the ‘will of the people’ than any other system. It does this

by giving electors a clear choice. You vote for a government and for a mandate. If your party wins you know in advance who will form the new government and what policies it will implement. The theory of the mandate imposes on the winning party not only a right but also a duty to implement its programme. This is contrasted with PR-based systems where no party has a majority. A government emerges that is neither responsible to, nor directly removable by, the electorate. The first thing to be said about this myth is that your choice is only clear if one of the two programmes on offer embodies the values, beliefs and proposals that you support. In practice this is most unlikely to be the case. It is not self-evident that all issues are posed in the form of simple alternatives, nor even that where you support a party on one issue you will support it with equal enthusiasm on the cluster of issues which go to make up its programme. Party programmes are invariably a compromise between different forces within the parties (which are themselves coalitions) and usually include a number of concessions to the interests and hobby horses of particular groups. There is a process of constant negotiation which determines what parties do or, more usually, fail to do, once in office. Much of what governments do is a response to events which were generally unforeseen when they drew up their manifestoes. How many manufacturing industrialists voted Tory in 1979 in the expectation that the government would engineer a massive slump which was to put a fair proportion of them out of business? How many Labour supporters gave Labour its convincing victory in 1966 believing that a wage freeze would be introduced shortly afterwards? Or, looking ahead, how much of Labour’s social programme is likely to see the light of day given the separation of economic efficiency from social justice in the Policy Review? Once priority is accorded to solving the economic crisis before making significant resources available for social needs (rather than attempting to create an economy out of satisfying those needs), whole aspects of Labour’s mandate will necessarily become purely decorative.

None of this is intended to suggest that it is desirable for governments to renege so readily on election promises - or do so many things which are contrary to their pre-election postures. But it is to recognize that the relationship between what parties say and what governments do is infinitely more complex than any simple theory of the mandate might lead one to expect. In the event, pressing problems often find ‘solutions’ precisely by governments rounding on their most avid supporters. It was, after all, de Gaulle who ended the war in Algeria, having been elected to pursue it to a successful conclusion; Harold Macmillan who instigated a serious process of decolonisation; Harold Wilson who first engaged the trade unions in a prolonged period of wage restraint. Underlying the view that the current system renders the electorate sovereign is an extraordinarily emaciated vision of democracy. In it sovereignty is more-or-less adequately exercised simply by choosing once every four to five years between competing teams for government. Democracy is attenuated to mean merely the people’s periodic choice of who is to rule them, and their participation in the process is reduced to this choice. Socialism, by contrast, aims for a society consciously organized to meet human needs and aspirations. That requires democratic institutions at every level of state and society, through which people actively participate in shaping their own destinies. Participation is of value in itself. Without it people are not fully able to even know their own needs or to have the experience and information available to choose among different ways of achieving them. And through it people transform themselves, learning how to live democratically in the process. Democracy is thus both means and end; and while socialism is not reducible to democracy, it is inconceivable without it. Democracy in this broadest sense has informed both the liberal and the socialist tradition. For John Stuart Mill no less than Karl Marx, the aim was self-realization through self-rule. And the socialist movement emerged out of the failure of the bourgeois revolution to live up to its ideals, to carry its libertarian and

egalitarian aims through to a successful conclusion. All this remains to be achieved. The present system offers the individual voter a much more restricted involvement. And even that is largely illusory. It assumes that you, the voter, in exercising your choice and expressing your sovereign independence, affect the outcome in the way you desire. By and large, you don’t, even in these narrowest of terms. And not just in the trivial sense that in an election where millions vote, one vote either way can’t make much difference. Only if you cast a vote for a candidate who wins can you be said to have had an effective say. A large minority of voters in every constituency don’t fall into this category. In addition, many seats are won on a minority of votes cast - some 283 in the 1987 election (including 8 in Northern Ireland) - in which case a majority of voters can’t be said to have obtained satisfaction or to have influenced the outcome. Furthermore, even when your vote helps elect the winning candidate, it is much more likely to have been cast out of general party preference than in support of the individual you voted for. In what sense, for instance, can a left-wing voter in Roy Hattersley’s Birmingham constituency be thought to have obtained representation? The only way the system can be held to be fair (i.e. to have made the electorate sovereign) is on the assumption that for every leftwinger who votes for a right-wing Labour candidate in one constituency, a right-winger elsewhere gets lumbered with a left-wing MP. And every Labour voter in a Tory-held constituency must be compensated for by a Tory-voter in a Labour-held constituency. It’s the invisible hand, operating in a hitherto unrecognised way; what it fails to do in the economic marketplace it accomplishes effortlessly in the political one. And the fact that most of those who vote for other parties are systematically deprived of representation is not regarded as having any democratic significance. There is quite simply no conception of the democratic principle of every vote having equal value, something which was so central to the reform agitation in the nineteenth century. When we see it expressed in South Africa in the form of ‘ one person, one

vote, one value’ we instinctively acknowledge the principle, yet sections of the left accept a system in Britain which operates on its negation.

Responsible government, accountable MPs

Governments are considered responsible partly because they can be held to account over their manifestoes, partly because individual MPs are accountable to their constituents. There is an inherent tension between these forms of accountability. Individual MPs of the governing party are rarely allowed to express their own wishes and interests or those of their constituents where they conflict with the actual policies of the government. Three-line whips see to that. But even if this tension could be handled more creatively, it cannot be eliminated altogether. In any event, how real is the accountability of the individual MP to his (or more rarely her) constituents? Peter Hain speaks for many when, in his Proportional Misrepresentation, he makes great play of the accountability which single-member constituencies afford. For him it is a central feature of democracy, more important than arithmetical fairness in any conflict of principles. Moreover it was one of the central issues in the campaign for democracy in the Labour Party in the seventies and early eighties, embodied in the principle of mandatory reselection of MPs. The present system, Hain argues, provides a strong link between MPs and electors; it does so by being based on relatively small, compact single-member constituencies. Ivor Crewe, among others, has looked at the evidence on this link: it is less than convincing. For instance, Crewe points out, MPs lack any formal position in the administrative structure of the country and have no legal or administrative jurisdiction over the issues their constituents are most likely to want help with. They are often less well placed to help than other agencies - local councillors, advice centres, neighbourhood groups etc. The resources MPs are given to do the

job are small by international standards. Nor are MPs equally diligent in performing duties on behalf of their constituents. But even where they take them seriously, this casework role provides a poor defence of the individual against the overbearing national and local state. And, as with all forms of social work, one has to distinguish between mitigating individual hardship and changing the circumstances which generate it. MPs who love this side of their work are generally reluctant to ask whether this is what they ought to be doing. In any event, this work is only partially related to the notion of accountability. In what sense are the ideas MPs advance in parliament those which their constituents want them to put forward? How easy is it to change an MP whose politics or personal commitment is distrusted? Mandatory reselection has made Labour MPs somewhat more interested in paying attention to their local parties, though the reselection procedure has shown how difficult it is to deselect a sitting MP. What is supposed to bring the recalcitrant MP to heel, ultimately, is fear of dismissal at the next election. But some 70 per cent of seats are generally ‘safe’ and would require electoral swings of a magnitude unprecedented in recent decades. There isn’t even a residency requirement. As Nevil Johnson put it in In Search of the Constitution, Britain has always been ruled ‘by a pre-existing and centrally-based elite in search of localities which its members can then claim “to represent”.’ The record of individual MPs is not, by and large, particularly impressive. The way political patronage operates and careers are made depends not at all on being a good constituency MP. It has been said, slightly cynically, that the MPs who concentrate on their constituents are those who have been passed by for political preferment, and who therefore have time to spend on such things. None of this is to devalue those MPs who concentrate on constituency work. But even then, they are not approached by all members of their constituencies equally. For instance, David Penhaligon, former Liberal MP for Truro, found a considerable discrepancy between the issues raised in his postbag and those of

an adjoining Conservative MP. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. What Labour supporter in Chingford is likely to write to Norman Tebbit for help in a case of unfair dismissal? Or to Margaret Thatcher in Finchley with difficulties over the Poll Tax? Clearly, when someone approaches an MP for help, they want that MP to be in broad sympathy with them.

Who, anyway, is the MP supposed to represent: the party activists, the party members, those who vote for the party, all constituents, the party nationally, or the nation as a whole? And insofar as the answer is ‘some or all of the constituents’ there is the further question as to whether ‘ the constituency ’ should be one of territory or of opinion. Some writers are quite dismissive of any real criterion of accountability at all. S.E. Finer, one of the grand men of British political science, highlights the sharp contradiction between the nineteenth-century democratic concept of the national mandate, and the view of the representative as what he calls, pejoratively, ‘nursemaid’ to individual constituents or sectors. For him the current theory of representation is ‘little more than pious but confused mythologising’, a necessary ‘muddle ’ - ‘ the vital part of the legitimising mythology’. Robert MacKenzie took the argument even further, seeing inner-party democracy as essentially incompatible with democracy in the wider society. Taken to its logical conclusion, he argued, ‘party organs would supplant the legislature and the executive as the ultimate decision-making bodies in the polity.’ It is, however, possible to acknowledge problems in the theory of representation without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater. MacKenzie tries to drive the tension between responsibility to party and responsibility to the nation to its limits. Democracy is reduced to a competition between political elites for the right to govern; thus too much participation by people in shaping the politics of governments becomes a threat to democracy itself. The divorce between democracy and self-government is complete.

We need a completely different conception of democracy - one which encourages popular mobilization and participation and does not restrict itself to the political sphere. But even within the narrowed confines of the parliamentary system, we need to explore improvements by seeing how the tension between representatives and represented can be minimised, if not abolished. Aneurin Bevan put it well in In Place of Fear when he wrote: A representative person is one who will act in a given situation in much the same way as those he [sic] represents would act in the same situation. In short he must be of their kind... Election is only one part of representation. It becomes full representation only if the elected person speaks with the authentic accents of those who elected him... he should share their values; that is, be in touch with their realities. It will be recognised straightaway that such a coincidence of representative and represented is unusual in Britain. The central requirement is for MPs to be in some way responsible to that section of the electorate who are in broad ideological agreement with them. For that to occur, the constituency, which is territorially defined, must be made up of a fairly homogeneous social community and, furthermore, one which is fairly homogeneous ideologically. It is an ideal approximated most closely in the solidly working-class communities of the mining valleys or around the steel mills or the larger concentrations of mass production engineering - the kind of constituency which has been shattered over the last decade. Perhaps the ideal is approximated, too, in some (but by no means all) inner city areas. So while accountability to a constituency might be an ideal to aim at, it can scarcely be said to be embodied in the political system as it has evolved in Britain. The fact that some MPs are good constituency MPs should not be allowed to conceal the fact that the single-member territorial constituency is inherently restrictive in the kind of representation it provides and the kind of accountability it permits. A single MP, elected on a political programme which only a portion of the constituency supports, is somehow supposed to be responsible to all the constituents, many of whom

may have diametrically opposed views and interests. It can’t - and doesn’t - work.

Coalition government

The argument that the first-past-the-post system delivers strong democratic government is generally cast in the form of hostility to proportional representation. PR, it is said, leads to coalition government and coalition government has two defects. First, it is weak; and second, it is a negation of democracy. In casting your vote, you can neither determine which parties will form a government, nor what will be in the coalition programme. Are coalition governments weak?. The history of countries which have them on a more or less regular basis displays a great deal of variation in their strength or weakness. Some cases will be examined later, but it simply makes no sense to refer, say, to the history of governmental instability in Italy under PR and fail to compare it either to a similar history before the introduction of PR, or to the strong and stable social-democratic governments of, say, PR-afflicted Sweden over the last six decades. Strong government, anyway, is a means to an end; its desirability depends on the ends it is used to pursue. In practice it is an epithet invariably used as a judgment on a government’s willingness to do what is necessary to maintain and extend confidence in the economy. And since the economy referred to is either a private capitalist or a ‘mixed one’, strong governments tend to be seen as those that keep wages and inflation down. No post-war government has been described as weak merely because it failed to keep unemployment down. Furthermore, the description ‘strong’ has become so bound up with leadership style that it is in danger of losing all meaning. Is Thatcher a strong leader because she is inflexible? If, taking stock of the havoc and suffering caused by the poll tax, she repealed it, would that make her weak? Sometimes it seems that Conservative lenders are strong when they give their supporters what they want, whereas Labour leaders are perceived as weak in precisely the

same circumstances! Caring, in particular, seems to be part of a ‘weak’ leadership style. It will be objected that when socialists talk of strong government they mean something quite different: a government willing to take on the forces of capital, whether at home or abroad, and govern against the grain, as it were. But in this sense what makes a government strong is quite different. It is essentially the degree of confidence and determination it demonstrates to ride out the objections, active and passive, of the City, industrial capital and the media. And that depends, first and foremost, on the degree of mobilisation of popular forces in support of radical change. It needs that popular support to give itself confidence, democratic legitimacy and power over capital. A good example of how a government becomes weak when it loses confidence in itself is found in the 1945-51 Labour administrations. Here Labour had a clear mandate and enthusiasm for radical social change ran high. Yet, after three years Labour had, by all accounts, lost its way. There was no attempt to maintain and extend popular mobilization and democratic forms of organization and control in economic and social life. Labour’s slim majority of six in the 1950 election was probably a relief. As Ralph Miliband has argued in his Parliamentary Socialism, it would otherwise have had to ‘justify itself as a radical, reforming administration... This government, exhausted politically and ideologically long before it entered its second term, could only endure, to no distinctive purpose, and, by the manner of its endurance, improve the chances of its opponents. ’ Despite all this, it achieved its highest popular vote ever in 1951, and was removed from office only by the quirks of the electoral system.

The second criticism of coalition government is much more important. Can one genuinely speak of such government as a negation of, or at least a significant limitation on, democracy? There is real validity in the view that what is wanted is not choice in the abstract but effective choice; and for that voters must be able to select - or remove - a government. This is really an 16

extension of the point discussed earlier about the sovereignty of the electorate, manifestoes and mandates. But it is necessary to pursue the argument a little further in relation to the problem of coalition government. The first point to make is that there is no simple dichotomy between the majority governments produced by first-past-the- post systems and the coalition governments produced by PR (e.g. in Italy or the Netherlands). All government is in a real sense coalition government in that all parties are more or less transparent coalitions, within which the balance of power is constantly shifting and changing. The Labour Party from the twenties to the fifties was in the broadest sense a progressive coalition of the professional middle class and the unionized section of the working class or, to oversimplify greatly, of Fabians and skilled male trade unionists. Social changes from the fifties onwards transformed both forces in that coalition. The history of the Labour Party ever since can be read as the conflict of various conceptions of who should dominate and what kind of new coalition of social forces is required to form a credible government. The answer to this is, in turn, closely related to the kind of policies to be pursued. All politics, in this sense, is coalition politics. Even those who look to Labour as a pure class party (which it has never been, nor is ever likely to be) have got to answer ‘coalition’ questions. How arc the diverse interests within the working class to be articulated: men and women, skilled and unskilled, black and white, employed and unemployed, etc. First-past-the-post advocates on both the left and the right of the political spectrum see the current electoral system as offering the best possible solution to this problem. It is supposed to do this by forcing the various interest groupings and social classes on each side of a central divide to sort out their differences before an election and to go to the country on an agreed programme which is known in advance. How transparent is this process? And what ‘effective choice’ docs it allow voters? The system puts almost irresistible pressure

on major parties to move to capture the centre ground before an election, secure in the knowledge that their more militant supporters have nowhere else to go. It leads to compromises being sewn up in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms before, rather than after, elections. At its worst it leads to a corruption of the political life and culture of the country and of the labour movement itself. The 1970s and 1980s can be seen as a period when Labour, under pressure from the left, tried to balk this logic; the triumph of Kinnockism as a reassertion of it. The Policy Review, no matter what one thinks of the outcome, provides a clear example of this process in action. Evidence was taken from anybody and nobody, sifted through a process which was neither democratic nor public and a thorough rewrite of Labour policy finally put before Conference on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No amendment was possible and everyone knew that it was impossible to reject the Policy Review as a whole without destroying all hope of winning the next election. But assume for a moment that political life in Britain was conducted according to some ideal, with policy formulation on both sides completely above-board and unmanipulated. It would imply mass membership parties, democratic party conferences, a completely different policy formulation process, and much else besides. Even then, the first-past-the-post system could only produce its desired result if all social groups in the wider society found their interests more or less adequately expressed in two and only two alternative policies. The moment a significant minority doesn’t and a third significant alternative arises, the system risks producing maverick results. This is most likely precisely in periods of deep social and/or structural change - just when a democratic political system should be at its most sensitive. Indeed, in general, first-past-the-post systems have shown themselves extremely poorly equipped to articulate new social interests. This is readily apparent from the period when Labour replaced the Liberals as the chief opposition party. It could be argued that it was precisely the Liberals’ failure to respond adequately to new interests which gave Labour its break (after all, it took some

twenty-five years, from the formation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 to 1918, for Labour to emerge from the shadow of the Liberals). The transition to Labour as a majority party still saw wild fluctuations of government: a majority Conservative government elected in 1922 with under 39 per cent of the total vote (5.5 million to the Liberal’s 4.5 million and Labour’s 4.2 million); two minority Labour administrations in 1924 and 1929-31; a National government with a rump Labour opposition from 1931-35; and finally a Grand Coalition from 1940-45. What this brief history makes clear is that the politics of these times can hardly be characterised as two clearly articulated alternatives being laid before the people, between which voters made their ‘effective choice’. Some might like to see the fifties and sixties as the period in which this model of the political system came into its own. But, even there, we have the supreme irony of Labour winning its highest popular vote ever in 1951, yet losing to the Tories. Insofar as little divided the two parties in the fifties, it might not have mattered all that much. But, if this is the case, the reality of effective choice in this great era of postwar consensus is open to doubt. In any event, the choice was clearly ‘effective’ only for those who chose the existing consensus. It would seem then that when little divides the society or the major political parties an effective choice is not really needed. Nor is choice attainable under first-past-the-post, since a change of government changes nothing much. But a system of government should surely be judged by at least two other criteria: how adequately it prevents a minority imposing its policies against the will of the majority; and how well it allows the articulation of interests and alternatives in periods of more or less rapid social change. Politicians can get tied up in knots trying to answer the first of these questions. In an On the Record interview (7th May 1989), Roy Hattersley talked of a democratic parliament as one ‘which represents majority points of view, majority attitudes, majority programmes, majority belief’. Pressed by Jonathan Dimbleby to deal with the objection that the poll tax and NHS reforms were

being implemented against the wishes of a clear majority by a minority government (i.e. elected on a minority of the votes), he conceded that Mrs Thatcher had behaved in many ways as an elective dictator ‘but within the rules’. What she had done was ‘wrong but not illegal’. Later in the interview he developed his views. The House of Commons ‘is in a real sense an electoral college which decides what the government is. That chamber ought to be elected in our view decisively to give a clear majority to the government of the day without fudging and without forcing it to break the promises it made before the election.’ By now his position has become a clear inversion of the one he started out with: rather than a clear majority selecting a government, the government of the day is now entitled to a clear majority! It was Mussolini who took this idea to its logical conclusion in 1922 when the Italian electoral law was changed to give the party which won the largest share of the vote two-thirds of the seats. It’s not such an absurd idea if you believe that the largest clearly-articulated body of opinion, even if a minority in the country at large, has the right to an unassailable working majority in the House of Commons. And this is a view, which is held not by a few maverick individuals, but which finds its place in all major texts on the British constitution. Executive domination of a legislature with unfettered sovereignty is legitimated by what is normally a minority vote. This, in reality, is the secret of the British constitution.

We have seen that there are serious flaws in the first-past-the- post system of government which has developed in Britain. Some of these are acknowledged by supporters of the system, but they argue that the alternatives suffer from even greater drawbacks. Do they? It is time to take a look at the experience of other countries.

2: Some European examples

Why are the alternatives to majority rule by a single party so abhorrent? One alternative, of course, isn’t - minority government. This has been the preferred solution to the problem of hung parliaments in Britain this century. It’s just that neither the Labour nor the Conservative Party wants to admit in advance that it might not win a clear parliamentary majority. The venom of so many politicians in the major parties is reserved for coalition government. That, they’re generally agreed, makes for weak government and fudged policies. But there are so many varieties of coalition government that it is senseless to generalise about coalitions as such. They can be stable. They may even be left wing or left of centre. It is necessary to look briefly at the very diverse experience of other countries. What emerges is that countries with a multiplicity of parties will have them anyway, whether under PR or a first-past-the- post system. Italy, for instance, is often held up as a model of how PR results in many parties and weak government. But before the First World War, a variant of the plurality electoral system (second ballot in single member constituencies) proved quite unable to produce political stability or encourage parties (as opposed to personal factions) which were real political groups with national programmes. PR was introduced in 1919 and survived only briefly, until Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922. Gaetano Salvemini, a leading historian of fascism, thought PR in no sense responsible for Mussolini’s rise to power. If anything, he believed, it ‘lessened the bitterness of the electoral contest’. The restoration of PR in Italy after the Second World War has been followed by long periods of fairly unstable government. This

is attributable more to the reassertion of traditional patterns of political loyalty and the unwillingness of other parties to allow the Communists to participate in government, than to any inherent defect in PR. Germany offers a parallel. The first-past-the-post system, in use from 1871 to 1914, produced a vast proliferation of parties. There were 16 in the last pre-war Reichstag, excluding national minority parties whose geographical base was removed by the Versailles treaty. So the 10-15 parties represented in the Weimar Republic parliament (elected under a nation-wide PR system) represented, if anything, a reduction in the pre-war fragmentation. It’s often alleged that this system made for the instability which allowed the Nazis to seize power. But no analysis of their rise attributes their initial impetus to the fact that they gained parliamentary representation fairly easily. And by the time they were a mass influence in the streets after 1929 no electoral system could possibly have excluded them. Indeed, a first-past-the-post system would have strengthened their position. At the height of their popularity before they took control of the state, they won 37.4 per cent of the votes and a similar percentage of the seats in the July 1932 election. Simulated elections results suggest that this would have translated into around 60 per cent of the seats had there been a first-past-the-post system in operation. What is really extraordinary is how the number of parties declined dramatically in post-war West Germany, under a new additional member system of PR first used in the 1949 Federal elections. The first election saw 10 parties in the first Bundestag, reducing to 5 in 1953 and then to 3 by 1961, their demise hastened by the 5 per cent threshold for Bundestag representation from the national lists - a provision which was later to delay representation for the Greens. This experience : suggests that, far from a proportional electoral system encouraging fragmentation, it more or less adequately reflects developments in the party system which are in turn related to cleavages in the wider society. The German ‘economic miracle’ and the position of West Germany in the forefront of the Cold War combined to incorporate most political

currents in a fairly tight materially-oriented Cold War consensus. As a result, the expression of political life could for a while be effectively contained within a three-party system. A brief comment on the pivotal role played by the Free Democratic Party is perhaps needed. The FDP is a centre party which gets scarcely more than 5 per cent of the vote, but which has been represented in almost every government in West Germany since the fifties. Roy Hattersley and others make great play with how undemocratic this is. Indeed much of the eighties seems to have been preoccupied with fears of seeing David Owen playing the part of Hans-Dietrich Genscher in any British adaptation of the script. But the truth, alas, is that the German Social Democrats haven’t ever had a radical programme which they’ve then been prevented from implementing because of the presence of the FDP. And while neither they, nor the Christian Democrats, are able to win majority support in the country at large, it is hard to see the justification, on democratic grounds, for giving them unassailable majorities in the Bundestag. The Scandinavian experience points to the same conclusion as the West German: the electoral system does not create party divisions so much as reflect them, more or less adequately. But while in Germany a small centre party emerged which has often played a pivotal role, the pattern in Scandinavia has been very different. There other divisions have overlaid the basic economic cleavage, particularly rural/urban and religious/secular divides. This has resulted in a relatively fragmented centre. The 1920s tended to see minority government, tolerated by a majority in parliament, which gave way in the 1930s to a more stable left coalition between the interests of industrial workers and those of farmers, expressed by a socialist bloc with an annex. In other words, one of the centre parties provided stable support for a left-wing government. In the post-war era this led to a long period of stable, almost 2-bloc politics where the voter, in choosing a party, was in effect expressing a preference for one of two governmental alternatives. Much of the period was characterized by social-democratic hegemony.

The whole system has functioned in a very consensual mode. The Swedish Social Democrats, in particular, who have often been able to govern on their own with (tacit) Communist Party support, have gone out of their way to seek a wide consensus in the legislative process and to carry at least one non-bloc party with them. The whole slow deliberative process of policy preparation facilitates cooperation across bloc boundaries. It is not unusual to have commissions of enquiry with representatives from both government and opposition parties and outside interest groups. The system has also been responsive to new issues or to divergences of interest among bloc partners, since the governing bloc cannot suppress opposition by using three-line whips. In the period 1976-1982, which saw the combined bourgeois party strength exceeding that of the socialist bloc (by 180 to 169 seats from 1976-79, and by 175 to 174 seats from 1979-82), there were four separate administrations. The 3-party bourgeois coalition came apart in 1978 on the issue of nuclear power, which the Centre Party was not prepared to tolerate. A People’s Party minority administration was replaced by a fresh 3-party coalition after the 1979 election, which in turn split in 1981 on the issue of taxation, the Centre Party in particular feeling that the Conservatives plans were too right-wing for them. A second minority administration gave way after the 1982 elections to a Social Democratic government with an absolute majority. What does all this show? Although the examples are selective, some generalisations may be made which would, if anything, be strengthened by reference to the recent history of counties like Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway. First, that where no single party can command a majority in the population, any government has to take account of what other parties are prepared to tolerate. The results suggest that such a procedure generally works in practice. And common sense suggests it is democratic in principle. Second, where coalition politics develop, there are at least two models they may follow: one where the centre plays a pivotal role and another where two blocs emerge. These can have an internal 24

life which is altogether more open and responsive than that found in the British Labour or Tory parties. Third, it is not impossible for a socialist party to win an absolute majority of the seats in parliament - but it needs to do so by winning over a majority of the population to its politics and programme. There is no need for the left to come out ‘in favour of coalition politics. But they, or minority administrations tolerated by other parties, have their place. And it is hard to envisage a coalition government in Britain in the eighties that could have been less democratic or responsive than the regime we have witnessed. It is the present electoral system which has produced eleven years of Thatcherism and its unbridled, despotic one-party government on less than 43 per cent of the popular vote in every election from 1979 onwards. Nowhere else in western Europe saw such a sustained assault on the rights and living standards of large sections of the population, generally those least able to bear them.

3: The effects of PR on Labour and the Left

Predictions about the effects of changing to a PR system are complicated because there is no reason to believe that voters will necessarily continue to vote in the same way under a PR system as they do now. It is one of the great merits of PR that it significantly reduces the factor of tactical voting. Quite simply, there is no need to vote tactically to avoid wasting your vote, because your vote is very likely to count (almost certainly so under a list system, depending on the level at which a threshold is set; and probably under STV - see pp.32-7 below). On this basis we can at least make an intelligent guess as to the likely effects of PR on the Labour Party. First and foremost is the possibility of a substantial increase in its popular vote. The reason for this is simple: there is strong evidence that Labour has lost a significant amount of its support for tactical reasons - support which could be recovered if each vote counted. This loss of support has occurred in two types of seat. In those which have come to be regarded as unwinnable, many Labour supporters switch to voting Liberal. At the same time, in many seats where Labour has massive majorities, supporters seem to have become less likely than they were in previous generations to turn out to inflate the majority further. This development tends to go along with the post-war phenomenon of what has been called ‘party dealignment’ - that is, the growing tendency for voters to choose how they vote less on grounds of traditional loyalty and more on the basis of some kind of rational calculation. The extent of the change can be seen in the decline in the share of the popular vote received by the two main parties, from 96.8 per cent in 1951 to 73 per cent in 1987.

The evidence on this Labour decline has been carefully sifted by Martin Linton in his Fabian pamphlet Labour Can Still Win. He examines how Labour has fared over the last forty years or so in three different types of seat - safe, marginal and unwinnable. There are problems in making these comparisons because of boundary reviews, but Linton has selected a dozen seats whose boundaries make them roughly comparable over the forty-year period. In what were Labour’s 12 safest seats in 1951, its average share of the vote had fallen by 21 per cent by 1987. In what had become the 12 most marginal Tory seats in 1987, Labour’s share of the vote had fallen only 8 per cent. But in the 12 worst Labour seats in 1987, its average share of the vote had fallen since 1951 by a massive 30 per cent. In other words, Labour ’ s share of the vote has declined furthest in those seats which it appears to have no chance of winning and many of its supporters have either abstained or turned to the Liberals. The explanation Linton offers is psychological. In safe Labour seats, Labour supporters abstain because their motivation to vote is low. Similarly, once the Labour vote has fallen, for whatever reason, to a level where supporters despair of ever winning the seat again, support for Labour falls drastically and that for a third party rises rapidly. This is graphically demonstrated by the example Linton gives of four Norfolk seats (Norfolk N, SW, NW and S). In 1959 the first two were held by Labour; in the other two it got 48 and 46 per cent of the vote respectively. Its share held steady into the 1966 election, but in 1970 the Tories pulled away in three of the four seats. Labour’s vote subsequently collapsed in those seats in February 1974; and while it held firm in the fourth seat (Norfolk NW) until the 1979 election, when the Tories pulled ahead, it was followed by a similar collapse in 1983. Indeed, by 1983, Labour’s vote had fallen from around 50 per cent on average in the four constituencies to well under 20 per cent. Labour activists hate tactical voting, but the fact is that it pervades the current system. It won’t go away simply because it

is disapproved of. While it is unrealistic to assume that Labour could simply pick up all the votes it has lost, if there were a PR system in which every vote counted, it would certainly help the argument for voting Labour. This would be particularly true in those constituencies where Labour now comes a very poor third. You have only to look at Labour’s overall position south of the Trent to see the potential difference. In the South West and East Anglia the Tories took just over 50 per cent of the vote in 1987; they hold 44 of the 48 seats in the South West and Labour only one (Bristol South); they hold 19 of the 20 East Anglian seats and Labour only one (Norwich South). Yet in these areas there are still something like a million and a half voters prepared to support Labour candidates. Were a PR system in existence there would, even now, be Labour MPs in what might seem unlikely areas -Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and the like. More to the point, there would be the possibility of reclaiming Labour support which existed less than a generation back. Having no representation at Westminster reduces the local media coverage of Labour’s ideas and erodes the Labour vote at local level. If PR is likely to benefit the Labour Party as a whole, what would its effect be on the left of the party? Some people believe that PR would inevitably split the party. Indeed, many socialists advocate PR precisely on the grounds that it would enable the left to organise independently of the right of the party. Certainly, the existing system works against the left. There are many reasons for this. First, it fosters a narrow focus on parliament, the ‘sickness of moderation’ in Ralph Miliband’s telling phrase. This is once again evident from the 1989 debate on the Policy Review. The need to appear united clearly overrode the inhibitions which many felt about the specific content of the Review. There really was no choice at the 1989 conference. To have defeated the leadership on the Policy Review would have been to ensure defeat at the next election. Second, the left is trapped in the party and has nowhere to turn if it is defeated; the right can always defect- and periodically does so. It is unlikely that Labour would now be saddled with its

ludicrous nuclear defence policy had there been a chance of a serious left alternative picking up the non-nuclear baton. Equally, were the Greens in a position to obtain representation in proportion to their vote, it is inconceivable that Labour would not already have in place a coherent and much strengthened range of environmental policies in order to head off the challenge. Third, neither the Labour Party nor the left are perceived as ‘clean’ in their attitudes to democracy. There are many reasons for this. The left has supported aspects of the internal life of the party which leave a lot to be desired, especially the operation of the trade-union block vote. Equally, it has supported bureaucratic, paternalistic forms of welfare provision and Morrisonian nationalisation which the 1945 Labour government instituted. Generally, the Labour Party has been most reluctant to challenge the unreconstructed British state head on. It is essential that the party is genuine in its commitment to democracy and is seen to be genuine by applying, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, ‘its principles within its own frontiers’. It is even more important for the left. We not only suffer from suspicion on all the above counts, but in addition are all too readily identified with manipulative, vanguardist forms of organisation, and with stalinist forms of social control. The popular uprisings throughout the eastern bloc provide a tremendous opportunity for shaking off the equation ‘socialism = totalitarianism’, but only if we’re seen to follow through the logic of democracy in every sphere, including the electoral. There is, indeed, a rich socialist tradition in Britain stretching back to the early nineteenth century. There are strong libertarian and democratic socialist currents within it, probably more powerful in recent times than ever before. But this left is stifled by the monopoly which Labour possesses on the expression of left opinion. This works in at least two ways. As already mentioned, debate within the Labour Party is curtailed by the need to appear united before the electorate. It’s not so much a question of the leadership manipulating the agenda (though this happens extensively) as the self-policing that subdues so many left-of-centre

Labour Party members. Desperate to have an influence, convinced that ‘politics is the art of the possible’, they fail to see how what is possible is narrowed down before Labour even gets to the starting post. And, in a broader sense, they fail to realize that politics is also the art of redefining what is possible. This stifling of left opinion is institutionalized elsewhere, for instance in the concept of 'balance' used by the media. It’s slightly more complicated than it used to be, when ‘balance’ could be achieved by having one Tory and one Labour spokesperson; nowadays you might add a centre politician or even a green for good measure. But socialist politics are barely part of the range of opinions which have a right to be heard, their legitimacy limited at every point by what the Labour leadership is prepared to accept. The current system works by the progressive demobilization of popular forces as one journeys through the arenas of political representation. It is the precise opposite of what socialist politics, based on self- organization, is all about. A left strengthened by a clearer profile and a clear commitment to thorough-going democratisation, is likely to find its position within the party greatly enhanced. Tens of thousands of socialists who are now passive members (if members at all) could be attracted back into activity. But that would only happen if it looked like issues might be decided on their merit and the degree of support they could obtain, rather than on the basis of speculative electoral gain extrapolated from the odd opinion poll. A new, non-manipulative modus vivendi would have to be struck between the wings of the party, with the balance of opinion in the party reflected in the make-up of its leading bodies (NEC etc). Could this be achieved without splitting the party? No definite answer can be given in advance. An independent socialist party with the potential to win some parliamentary representation would certainly emerge in the aftermath of electoral reform. But the left in the party would have everything to gain by nor using the introduction of PR as an excuse to go off on its own and organise independently. The British labour movement has shown a strong desire for unity throughout its long history, but this unity has all

too often been bought at a price - and women, blacks, unskilled workers, the left have had to pick up the tab. PR would enable this battle to be fought through on its merits and there is no doubt that the left would gain from this. Should parts of the right defect, they wouldn’t be able to take the party machine with them. And anyway, if the experience of the Alliance shows anything, it is that there is not a unified centre in British politics. Indeed, part of the support of both the Liberals and recently of the Greens is gained from that section of society which wants radically decentralised and democratised institutions; a constituency which might be won over to working with a left Labour Party, if not actually joining it. Finally, what of any independent socialist party that might emerge? Such a party, if ecosocialist, feminist and anti- racist, could have a strength considerably in excess of its immediate electoral support It could be a material factor is assisting struggles of workers and oppressed groups in society. It could frame programmes for radical reform this side of socialism and support other parties campaigning for progressive legislation. Its size and importance would depend crucially on how it related to the Labour left. Under a PR system it would not, of course, be in direct competition with Labour. It would be the combined strength of such a socialist party together with the left in the Labour Party which would determine the weight of socialist ideas in the country as a whole. For all these reasons, PR would benefit both the Labour Party and the left, depending on how they responded to the new opportunities it opened up. But the exact nature of these opportunities would depend a lot on the precise form of PR adopted. We need to look at the alternatives.

Section 4: Varieties of PR

Proportional systems of representation may be divided into a number of different categories: the single transferable vote, list systems and additional member systems. There are important variations within these. In addition there are non- proportional alternatives to the present system which need a brief mention.

The Single Transferable Vote (STV)

The main feature of STV systems is that you cast your vote by listing a preference among individuals rather than among parties; in order for this to be effective, you need multi- member constituencies, which usually elect from three to six members. First preference votes are counted and candidates who reach a quota are declared elected. (The simplest quota is given by the number of votes cast divided by the number of seats to be filled. In practice a lower quota is used - see appendix, pp.57) ‘Surplus’ votes (i.e. votes above the quota) are redistributed among the remaining candidates in proportion to how second preferences have been expressed on the ballot papers and any candidates who reach the quota now, after this redistribution, are also declared elected. The procedure then followed is to eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes and to redistribute their next preference votes to remaining candidates. This elimination procedure continues until there are as many candidates left as seats to be filled. If at any point a second vote is for a candidate already elected or eliminated, the next valid preference vote is used. STV is, in the words of the Electoral Reform Society, ‘the unique, British designed’ system. That, alas, is no guarantee of

superiority. Although it is used in Ireland, Malta and Tasmania, there are a number of serious problems with it First and foremost, STV is a system of choosing among individuals, not parties. It makes sense if you believe that parties stand between the voter and an effective choice among candidates; and STV should be seen as a deliberate attempt to undermine the role of party in the political system. But parties, far from being obstacles to democracy, are essential agencies of mass democracy, linking and organising individuals into collective interest groups and mediating their relationship to the wider community. That doesn’t for one moment mean that they don’t need radical transformation, nor indeed, that we shouldn’t envisage democratic parties of a new type. But eliminating parties as such would not make the political process more democratic. On the contrary, it would remove the possibility of drawing up a coherent programme to apply at the national and international level. It would tend to reduce politics to personalities (a tendency already all too visible in the marketing of Neil Kinnock), favouring celebrities and those who could command the best publicity machines. It is true that candidates’ parties are listed on the ballot papers in countries where STV is used. But insofar as voters stick rigidly to party voting its rationale - as a system of individual, not party, preference - is undermined. In these circumstances, STV approaches a straight list system applied in rather small constituencies - not ideal as we shall see when we look at list systems. Nor does STV have the advantage of guaranteeing a proportional result. A high threshold still has to be reached in order to obtain representation. In general, the fewer the number of seats in the constituency, the higher the quota and the greater the degree of discrimination. In the typical example of a five-member constituency the quota - and hence the threshold for representation - is around 17 percent. In other words, very substantial minorities can still be denied representation. Proportionality can be distorted at the national level as well as within each individual constituency, for there is no reason why such distortions should cancel each other out. Even measuring the

proportionality of the result can be a problem. This is generally done by comparing first preferences and final allocation of seats; but comparing final count votes for parties and seats can yield different results. In the Irish elections of 1969, for example, Fianna Fail, with 45.7 per cent of first preference votes and 39.7 per cent of final count votes, got 51.8 per cent of the seats; Fine Gael, with 34.1 per cent of first preference votes and 27.0 per cent of final count votes, got 35.0 per cent of the seats. Some 23.2 per cent of final count votes were wasted - cast either for candidates not elected, or not expressing later preferences for surviving candidates. Such votes were effectively non-transferable. The number of seats in a multi-member constituency is arbitrary, but it can have substantial effects on representation. For example, Alliance proposals for Britain were for constituencies ranging from one member in the sparsely populated outer reaches of the country to eight in an area like Leeds. The Alliance would have held on to the seats it had in the ‘Celtic fringe’ (where the quota is technically 50-plus per cent of votes cast) and could hope to gain seats in the large city constituencies like Leeds where the quota would be a little over 11 per cent. Finally, according to the Electoral Reform Society, a ‘proliferation of small parties is discouraged’. This is really an argument for STV on the grounds of its non-proportionality i.e. an anti-democratic argument. Proliferation is, in itself, an expression of diversity of view; it may well express a genuine diversity in the wider society. If the forces seeking representation are legitimate participants in the electoral process they should have equal access to representation. Of course there are arguments against National Front representation in parliament but these are equally valid whether or not they can surmount any arbitrary threshold. It must be stressed, however, that there is a great deal of difference between using STV to make choices among organisations and using it to order lists within organisations such as political parties. Here we are dealing with voluntary associations formed to pursue common interests, and it is almost entirely bene-

ficial in producing an executive, say, that accurately reflects the diversity of opinion in the organisation as a whole in a proportional way. In other words, it can prevent an organised minority (such as a party bureaucracy) being represented beyond its popular support STV is already used in just this way in many voluntary organisations in Britain, ranging from the Church of England and the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society to the General Medical Council, the NCCL and the NUT. A later preference can’t work to the disadvantage of an earlier one since it can only take effect after an earlier preferred choice has been elected or eliminated. The value of using the single transferable vote in the drawing up of party lists and in internal party and trade-union structures is something the left could explore to advantage.

Party List Systems

The predominant system used in Western Europe is the list system, though there are a great many variations in how it is applied. List systems, like STV, are used with multi- member constituencies, but voting is essentially for a party rather than an individual. Votes in the constituency are totalled and seats distributed among the various parties in proportion to their vote. The actual members elected are taken off a party list which is drawn up in advance of the election, though in almost every case voters have the opportunity of varying the order of the list. Again, a quota is set and parties are entitled to as many seats as the number of quotas they achieve. After allocating seats to each party per ‘whole’ quota achieved, the problem is to allocate any remaining seats fairly. Although this might seem unproblematic, it is not so simple in practice. The ‘obvious’ solution ends up favouring larger parties and different systems are used in different countries to compensate for this (see appendix, pp.55-8). As with STV, the size of the constituency makes a lot of difference. Generally, the larger the number of seats in a constituency, the closer to proportionality the result can be. In practice

there is considerable variation in the size of constituency. Switzerland, for example, basing its constituencies on the cantons, has five single-member constituencies and 21 others electing anything between 2 and 35 members. Other list systems have been tried, and that of the inter-war Weimar Republic system is worth mentioning. A quota (of60,000) was set in advance of the election and each party got one seat per quota of votes aggregated on the national level and one additional seat if its remaining votes exceeded half the quota. This method worked by not fixing the size of the parliament in advance. Finally, most list systems have a threshold - of up to 4 per cent in Sweden and 5 per cent in West Germany - in order to prevent small parties gaining parliamentary representation. Such restrictions are not inherent in a list system and this provision must be evaluated in its own right.

The main criticism made of list systems is the power they give to the party bureaucracies to draw up the list and thus control the selection of MPs. Before taking it too literally, it is worth noting that list systems are sometimes criticised because of the power they put into the hands of activists! That said, the question of how the list is constructed is crucial. There are two relevant questions: the level at which the list operates; and who actually draws it up. The smaller the constituency, the more the drawing up of the list can be devolved to regional and/or local party organisations - but the harder it is to achieve true proportionality because the smaller the constituency, the higher the proportion of votes wasted. In practice, the level at which the list is drawn up is very varied: it can be national (Israel), regional (West Germany, Switzerland etc), or sub-regional. As to who draws up the list, practice is again very varied. The main point to make is that there is no iron logic which determines that this power is concentrated in a few unaccountable hands, be they those of bureaucrats or activists Finally, even after the lists have been drawn up by the parties,

most systems allow the voter some choice among candidates on the party list. There are four types of arrangement found in west European list systems. In the first the elector is allowed only one vote for a single candidate on the list. This system is used, with variations, in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands. In the second the elector is allowed more than one vote, but fewer votes than there are seats to be filled (Italy). In the third the elector has as many votes as there are seats and votes for each candidate are aggregated (Luxemburg, Switzerland). Finally, in Norway and Sweden the electors simply rank candidates in order of preference. In all these cases, the (weighted) voles which each candidate receives is used to determine the final ordering of the list. Only West Germany and Iceland have a ‘rigid list’ system where the voter cannot influence the ordering in any way.

Additional Member Systems

However good a list system at approximating proportionality, the possibility remains that small differences in individual constituencies can cumulate and cause major divergences between the proportions of votes and of seats at the national level. In a number of countries provision is made for topping up the MPs elected in constituencies with MPs taken off a general list in order to ensure that proportionality between parties, as expressed in the total votes cast, is maintained. This is done in both Denmark and Sweden. In Denmark there are 135 seats allocated in 17 constituencies with 40 additional seats to ensure proportionality. In Sweden the figures are 310 seats in 28 constituencies with 39 additional seats. The West German system is also an additional member system and has great practical relevance for Britain. Here voters have two votes, one for an individual candidate in single-member constituencies, just as in Britain, and one for a party. Half the seats in parliament are filled with first-past-the- post victors, and the remainder allocated off party lists so as to ensure proportionality.

These additional members sit as Land or regional representatives, rather than as representatives for individual constituencies. The West German system has proved an effective way of combining single-member seats with an almost perfect proportionality at the national level. It is, however, widely accused of creating two classes of MPs. It’s hard to know where this objection arose, but it has become part of the conventional wisdom about the deficiencies of the West German system. There seems to be no evidence for it. List and constituency MPs are approached about equally for help by voters; and list and constituency MPs are equally well represented in cabinets, caucuses and party hierarchies. Indeed, since competition for a place on the list is fierce, both types of MP have to associate themselves with constituency activities in order to maintain support in the selection process. In 1976 the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government published a report on electoral reform in which a modified version of the West Germany system was proposed. It was designed to get round the problem (or non-problem) of having MPs who had not stood in constituency elections. The solution devised was a parliament in which three-quarters of MPs were elected from single-member constituencies as at present. These would therefore need to be increased in size by one-third on average. The remaining seats would be allocated to parties in proportion to their aggregate regional vote and filled off regional party lists. But these would not be party lists in the normal sense. They would be constructed after the event from defeated candidates ranked in order of votes received. Voters would merely cast one vote. In addition, a threshold of five per cent, to operate regionally, was proposed. This system would not ensure proportionality, though it would go some way towards it. But it has other defects which make it much less attractive than straight adoption of the West German system. For instance, the number of votes candidates receive is not determined mainly by their personal popularity. In a constituency where there are three or four serious parties contesting the election, the votes of all candidates are likely to be lower than in

constituencies where there are only two candidates. Runners- up would inevitably have lower votes in such cases than if there were fewer serious candidates. At the same time, in order to get past the threshold, parties would be encouraged to stand candidates in every constituency, even where they had minimal support, so as to increase their share of the regional vote. Thus more MPs would be likely to be elected on a minority vote. Furthermore, voters who voted for a defeated candidate would find their vote being used to aid another candidate of the same party, but they could not know in advance who that was. No party list system is quite that arbitrary. Finally, top-up candidates for some parties would find themselves elected on a vote which was lower than that of defeated candidates for other parties whom they had stood against. Although there would be a logic to this procedure, it could look grotesquely unfair. Analyses of probable outcomes under such a system were published in the 1970s and they showed that many of the theoretical objections to it were likely to occur frequently in practice. It would seem plainly inferior to the West German additional member system, which must be the favourite candidate if single-member constituencies are maintained.

Non-Proportional Alternatives

Finally, it is necessary to mention a couple of non-proportional electoral systems. Some people, won over to an understanding of the blatantly undemocratic nature of first-past-the-post, are putting forward variants of these as possible alternatives. The Alternative Vote involves expressing a preference for parties in single-member constituencies; the candidate/party who receives fewest votes is eliminated and second preferences transferred. This process is repeated until someone receives 50 percent of the votes cast or until there are no further candidates to eliminate. This system is used in elections to the Australian House of Representatives and has been popularised as a system for use in

Britain, by Peter Hain in particular. It amounts, in fact, to an STV system in single-member constituencies. The two advantages claimed for the Alternative Vote are, first, that it ensures that the candidate elected has obtained a majority of the votes cast and second, that it eliminates tactical voting. But the first point is not necessarily true, since it assumes that voters actually express second and third preferences. If every voter were to do so, it is most likely to favour the centre parties in a society like Britain where one dimension of political cleavage (left-right) dominates all others. Any Tory voter’s second preference is likely to be for a centre party over Labour; any Labour voter’s second preference for a centre party over the Tories. And the second point, about eliminating tactical voting, is again only partially true. It is your second vote which becomes tactical, being used to keep out the party you most dislike. Above all else, AV does nothing to ensure proportionality. While AV in Britain would have reduced the size of the Tories’ majority in 1983, a computer analysis reported by Peter Kellner in the New Statesman showed that they would still have had an absolute majority of seats on around 42 per cent of the first preference votes on any reasonable assessment as to the split of Alliance second preference votes. And there is always the experiment with AV in Alberta where one party swept the board, taking every seat with only 58 per cent of the vote! Another system which attempts to deal with the fact that, in a multi-party society, successful candidates are often elected on a minority of votes, is the second ballot system. This is currently used in France. All parties who wish to may stand for election in the first round but only those who get a certain proportion of the votes cast (currently one eighth) may stand again in a run-off ballot held the following week. This second ballot is final. The victor may still be elected on a minority vote but, with most candidates dropping out of the second ballot, the winners generally obtain over fifty per cent of the votes cast. Such a system seems to have no great advantages over AV and the definite disadvantage of expecting voters to turn out twice in two weeks.

Thresholds

There is one question which all electoral systems have to confront, implicitly or explicitly. At what level of support does the right to representation begin? Some form of threshold exists in every system discussed. First-past-the-post systems have a very high threshold - 50-plus per cent if only two candidates are standing. STV advocates, as already mentioned, often justify their favoured system on the grounds of the very high threshold it imposes -around 17 per cent in five-member constituencies. And even in systems which strive for proportionality relatively high thresholds often (but by no means always) exist - five per cent in West Germany and four per cent in Sweden. Are these necessary or desirable? Israel is sometimes cited as a case where political fragmentation undermines democracy and which a high threshold for representation would put right. The spectacle of small religious parties attempting to impose their bigoted views on everyone else is certainly not edifying. It is obviously true that they exercise an undue influence in the political process. But it is unlikely that a high threshold (whether within the present electoral system or under a radically different one) would have much effect on the underlying problem. The real crisis in Israel is not so much about politics within the boundaries of the state but a disagreement about what those boundaries should be. The problem of effective government in Israel really relates to the relationship of the large political formations to one another, not to the smaller parties on the fringes. The real purpose of a threshold, I believe, has been less to do with effective government and more to keep certain forces out of the political arena altogether. Indeed, the argument is sometimes heard on the left that the present system at least keeps the National Front out of parliament. I think on balance that is a risk we have to take in any reform of the electoral system. The ultimate answer to the poison of the National Front is to out-argue and out-organize them, on the one hand, and to develop effective anti-racist, welfare

and employment policies, on the other, so as to undermine their distorted appeal. We should not allow them to limit the contours of the democratic system we work within. What would the effects be of having a minimum threshold in Britain, i.e. one that is no larger than the vote required to secure a single seat in parliament if all votes were aggregated and divided by the number of seats in parliament? With parliament at its current size and based on the number of votes cast in the 1987 general election, a party would have to obtain somewhat over 50,000 votes. Contrast that with a five per cent threshold. The number of votes required for national representation would soar to over one-and-a-half million and a party reaching this threshold would move from having no representation at all to suddenly having thirty-two MPs. It is an absurd jump in both votes and seats and suggests some problem in the concept of the threshold. (It is also, incidentally, the number of votes Labour obtained in 1987 in East Anglia, the South West and South of England excluding London, an area in which it has a mere two MPs.) Even a one per cent threshold would mean a national vote of over 300,000 and a leap from no MPs to six. That, too, seems difficult to justify.

5: The Constituency

It is clear that an important feature of the various electoral systems is the nature of the constituencies they’re based on. It is worth taking a closer look at how the constituency system has arisen in Britain and how it compares with arrangements in other countries, particularly those of western Europe. Single-member constituencies have not existed here since time immemorial. While the victors have almost always been determined by a simple plurality of votes (i.e. getting more votes than any other candidate), there has been great historical variation in the types of constituency. For most of the nineteenth century and prior to it, constituencies existed as entities independent of the electoral process and were represented as such. There was communal representation, though the communities represented were generally territorially defined, unlike say in estates systems elsewhere in Europe where they were categories of person (nobles, peasants etc). But there were significant exceptions to a simple territorial definition: the universities (where electors were graduates of some, later all, the universities, wherever resident); the City of London (whose MPs came increasingly to represent those who had businesses there); and districts of burghs - collections of small towns, sometimes far apart Before 1832 the norm was for every constituency (borough, county, university) to have two MPs, regardless of size. The main exception to this was the single-member representation of the less populous Scottish burghs and counties. The 1867 Reform Act, while greatly extending the franchise, left the electoral system broadly intact except for the introduction of some treble member boroughs or counties where the limited

vote was used (i.e. electors had fewer votes than the number of seats to be filled), as in the 4-member City of London constituency. It was the reforms of 1884-85 which first introduced the single-member constituency system which has come to be regarded as so quintessentially British A hundred years later, it is still not entirely clear why the transition was made. Certainly, it represented a private compromise between Prime Minister Gladstone and Tory leader Lord Salisbury in a situation where both parties were divided internally on the complex and interlinked questions of extension of the franchise to the bulk of the male rural working class, the voting system itself, and the need for redistribution from declining rural areas to the growing industrial ones. Single-member constituencies were introduced everywhere except for the City of London, the universities and boroughs of between 50,000 and 150,000 inhabitants which remained intact, with double-member representation. At one level this merely brought Britain into line with Europe where, by the mid-century, most countries had moved to single-member constituencies of more-or-less equal size. It is hard to credit it now, but Gladstone and Salisbury both believed that one effect of the new system would be to ensure the representation of minorities (Gladstone, in particular, looking to it to obtain a diversity of representation). Many MPs were unhappy about giving up the principle of community representation, for the inevitable effect of single- member constituencies of more-or-less equal size was to fragment the cities. And the anticipated gain of a diversity of representation proved a chimera. The rise of party and the need to organise the vote in increasingly populous constituencies soon put paid to that. Despite one or two moments where electoral reform was seriously considered (1908-10 and 1929- 31), the ensuing century saw a consolidation of the single member, more-or-less uniform and contiguous territorial constituency with the final exception to it -the Stirling district of burghs - being abolished as late as 1983. It is curious that, as Britain moved towards the continental

system, changes in the rest of Europe were propelling country after country to systems of proportional representation based upon multi-member constituencies. By 1918 Britain stood alone in Europe with its single-member, first-past-the- post system. It is a system which flourishes today only in countries which were once subject to British rule - and only in some of those.

Why did the countries of Western Europe generally change electoral systems in the period from 1890 to 1920? In almost every case it was because heterogeneity of population (ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity coupled with increasing social differentiation as industrialisation proceeded) produced results which were manifestly unjust in any winner-takes-all system. Thus, in Switzerland severe Catholic-Protestant divisions were inevitably exacerbated by a first-past-the-post election system. Loss of life in the 1889 Ticino cantonal election (where the Conservatives won more than twice as many seats as the Liberals on a 51-49 per cent split in the vote) prompted a change. PR was introduced first at the cantonal level, in Ticino, then in Geneva and other cantons with similar communal problems, before finally being extended to the federal level in 1918. In Belgium the linguistic division between Flemish and French speakers was exacerbated by the electoral system, with Flemish-speaking Flanders electing only Catholics, and French-speaking Wallonia only Liberals or Socialists. PR gave representation to the significant minorities in Flanders and Wallonia. In Scandinavia the decisive cleavages in society which led to the adoption of PR were more socio-economic than religious or linguistic. The rise of working-class parties, threatening to make election results arbitrary (as well as posing a great danger to the Liberals), helped to propel the change. The systems introduced, though very different in many respects, were all based on multi-member constituencies of varying size. In Sweden the constituencies first introduced in 1921 largely follow the boundaries of the 24 lan (counties). Three of these are subdivided on an urban basis with some cities or city regions forming

separate constituencies; and one is subdivided geographically, making 28 constituencies in all. In this respect Sweden provides a model followed in many other countries: a constituency system based on administrative districts, but making adjustments where appropriate. In Switzerland the basic federal constituency is the canton, or half-canton in the case of the larger cantons. Following the decennial census, the number of members is automatically adjusted to reflect population change. There are currently 5 single-member constituencies and twenty-one electing from 2 to 35 members each. In Austria, in 1919, the country was divided into 25 constituencies electing from 4 to 13 members each. This was altered in 1971 to constituencies based on the nine Lander. Clearly, the larger the constituency the more nearly proportional the allocation of seats to votes. Even so, some countries, as already mentioned, have introduced a small number of additional seats which are allocated after the constituency seats to ensure greater proportionality at the national level. And West Germany (see pp.37-38) combines a system of single-member constituency seats with an additional member system operating at the level of the strong regions which exist there. These are all ways of combining the principle of equality of representation with representation of community and opinion, by having a system in which numbers of representatives are varied in response to shifts in population. There is certainly evidence to suggest that variable-size constituencies make for more balanced, more loyalist and more real community representation than do single-member ones. In Britain we do things differently. Almost alone, the British system solves the problem of equality of representation by redrawing the constituency boundaries themselves. There are a number of important results. First, constituencies are relatively unstable entities, subject to more-or-less radical restructuring or even elimination after every boundary commission. Second, very few ‘natural communities’ are represented. Ivor Crewe puts it at no more than 10 per cent; typically, the self-

contained medium-sized town surrounded by a rural hinterland, with its own daily paper and local radio. Just taking occupational and residential interests into account, much larger constituencies would generally be required to get them to coincide for a significant proportion of electors. Third, women’s representation (and, by extension, ethnic minority representation) is abysmally low. And it is impossible to operate quotas to improve such representation without giving the national party the right to impose candidates on the local constituencies. Perhaps none of these, in itself, is a sufficient reason for abandoning single-member constituencies. But each should give pause to the single-minded and uncritical support for the existing system which is so widespread on the left. Constituencies of around 90-100,000 are, it is often argued, as large as is manageable. Any larger would make MPs unacceptably distant from their constituents. No doubt similar arguments were advanced in 1867 when the average number of electors per MP was 1,923! (Nor, by the way, do people respond well to any proposals which might improve constituency-MP relationships by altering the House of Commons. It too, by a curious quirk of fate, is now just about the right size!) What is clearly at stake is not absolute numbers but quality of representation and, as is glaringly obvious, large communities and currents of opinion are at present denied effective representation.

6:Women and Minorities

One of the most persistent - and oppressive - aspects of apparently democratic political systems is their imperviousness to the claims of women and ethnic minorities. It is of course true that the prevailing culture and climate of opinion is very important in maintaining various forms of oppression. But political and social culture is itself grounded, materially and institutionally. Part of the process of changing attitudes involves challenging how existing institutions are structured. It is worth looking at the effects of different electoral and constituency systems in this light. The moment there is more than one place to be filled, parties can nominate candidates who complement each other by appealing to different sections of the electorate. Indeed, failure to do so is likely to lose them support from any significant group which considers itself neglected. Evidence from various countries using different electoral systems bears this out. For instance, while women are severely under-represented in all national legislative bodies, it would appear that the existence or non-existence of PR is the single most significant factor in accounting for differences in the severity of that under- representation. Multi-member constituencies act as a multiplier: culturally similar countries with sizeable multi- member constituencies have a higher proportion of women in parliament than those with single-member seats. Many political scientists might dispute the size of the multiplier, but its existence is not in doubt. The recently published study by the Hansard Society, Women at the Top, affirms: It is the unanimous finding of all studies of the legislative representation of women that systems of proportional representation favour the election

of women... [Furthermore, it is] the multi-member and/or party list element that favours women. In single-member constituencies, selection committees often hesitate to choose women candidates, while in constituencies with more than one member or a party list, there will be a concern to secure a “balanced ticket”. The absence of a woman from a list is seen as likely to cause offence and narrow the party’s appeal. Labour’s record on selecting women candidates in winnable seats is abysmal. There were only 21 women out of a total of 229 Labour MPs elected in 1987. This just equalled Labour’s 1945 record - though it did represent a significant increase in percentage terms; and since then two more women have been added at by-elections. More telling, however, is the fact that in the 1989-90 reselection campaigns, despite a widespread desire for change both in the leadership and the party as a whole, women’s gains were fairly limited. When the chips are down, even those constituencies which are actively in favour of equality in general seem to find good local reasons for not choosing a women candidate in their own particular case, or at least not in winnable seats. It is clear that women do better in countries with list systems than in those (few) using STV. While the political culture in Ireland, say, or in Malta lends itself to an easy discrimination, the actual voting system only makes its slightly easier to challenge than it is in Britain. Selection still takes place in small constituencies and the very high thresholds make it difficult for pressure to be exerted effectively. Even so, there would seem to be some constituency effect: in Ireland such women’s representation as there is tends to come from the slightly larger 4- and 5-member, rather than from the 3-member, constituencies. List systems offer qualitatively different possibilities - and results - as Jackie Roddick of the Scottish Greens has shown in an analysis recently published in Radical Scotland. In West Germany it was the Greens who first took advantage of the electoral system by placing women in positions where they were bound to get elected if the party passed the 5 per cent threshold. Other parties were forced to respond and the percentage of women in the Bundestag (the lower house) rose in the eighties from 8 per cent

to close on 16 per cent. Around 3 in 4 of these women MPs are list members, rather than individual constituency MPs, which gives an indication of how much more rapidly social change can be reflected with multi-member rather than single- member constituencies. The Social Democrats have responded to the new situation by committing themselves to 40 per cent women on all party lists - and 50 per cent in winnable places - by 1998 (25 per cent by 1990 and 33 per cent by 1994). Norway’s record is the best in Europe - currently over 36 per cent of MPs are women. How was that achieved? Norway had a flexible list system in which voters could vary the order of the list or even write in new candidates. This was used to dramatic effect in the 1971 municipal elections when a variety of feminist and other women’s organisations mobilized. In the event, women took a majority of seats in three cities, including the capital Oslo. One result was the tightening up of the electoral system to strengthen party control! But at the same time the parties were forced to respond to this new social force. The Labour Party now guarantees that 40 per cent of its candidates will be women. The Left Socialists and the Liberals require that women make up40 percent of all internal party committees. Iceland, like West Germany, has a rigid list system. Existing parties did not in practice put women candidates high on their lists. Following a successful ‘women’s strike’ in the late 1970s a Women’s Alliance was formed. It successfully stood candidates in 1983, obtaining 5.5 per cent of the national vote and three MPs out a total of 60. While its strength increased, and the number of MPs it obtained rose to six in 1987, its effect on other parties was even more dramatic. The number of women candidates rose to 46 per cent in 1987 and, although they were not generally in winnable seats, the number of women MPs increased substantially nonetheless. A further seven women were elected, bringing the total percentage of women MPs up to 21 per cent. These examples reveal forms of flexibility which can be worked into list systems. Parties must of course be won over to support fair representation for women and ethnic minorities. But once they

have been, or once new forces seeking such representation have emerged, such a commitment can be translated fairly rapidly into reality. It is quite otherwise with the British electoral system. Quotas have been seen as the most effective way to improve the position here, but it is hard to see how they can be effectively implemented in a single-member constituency system without giving unacceptable directive powers to the central party apparatus. Even if constituencies were starting from scratch, it wouldn’t be acceptable to single out named constituencies and instruct their CLPs only to consider women candidates. In reality, of course, constituencies don’t start from scratch. A high proportion of winnable constituencies will, by definition, have male MPs seeking reselection. It is inconceivable that they could be prevented from standing and, on current experience, an overwhelming majority could expect to be reselected. Similar conclusions hold for ethnic minority representation. It is extremely difficult to see how Labour can ever hope to field a balanced parliamentary group while selection is performed at the level of single-member constituencies acting in effective isolation. The more seriously oppression of disadvantaged groups is taken, the more the efficacy of the first-past-the-post system is called into question.

7: Recommendations

It is time to pull some of the threads of the argument together. While no electoral system is perfect, the first-past-the-post system is perhaps the least acceptable of all. It urgently needs replacing. At the same time, we should recognize that a system which works perfectly adequately in one country might not be as suitable in another with a different history and political culture. That said, electoral systems have to be seen for what they are - institutional arrangements to achieve certain goals - and not somehow engrained in the character of nations or peoples. We have to be prepared to experiment and to adjust any new system in the light of experience. I believe that any socialist approach to the question of electoral reform should be based on the following considerations. First, on simple democratic grounds, every vote should count as nearly equally as possible. That can only happen under some kind of list system. With first-past-the-post, the Alternative Vote or STV, a large proportion of votes are inevitably wasted. At the same time, these systems do not produce proportional results. Second what kind of list system is best? As discussed earlier, a list system can be operated in multi-member constituencies or be combined, as in West Germany, with single-member constituencies. A system in which multi-member constituencies are based on regional units of government is particularly effective. Its weakness in Britain would be the lack of structures of regional government to which constituencies could be tied. The demand for electoral reform thus dovetails neatly with that for regional assemblies and a real devolution of power. But it is not clear whether such constituencies should be introduced as part of the

move towards regional government or whether they should wait until such structures have been seen to work effectively. A version of the West German single-member system, while less satisfactory, would still be perfectly acceptable. There are pragmatic reasons for supporting such a proposal. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are unlikely to vote themselves out of a job en masse, MPs display an extraordinary commitment to the single-member constituency system. And it is they who would have to vote in any new system. Such a system can be improved by using party preference voting (AV) in the single-member constituencies. Its adverse effects are neutralized by the topping-up element which ensures proportionality. (AV should definitely not be considered on its own - see pp.39-40 above). Third, lists must be drawn up democratically, whatever version of a list system is selected. The ‘natural’ units to which these lists relate will be regions, whether economically or administratively constructed, but there is every reason for constructing regional lists from candidates selected by much smaller groupings of the current constituencies. Fourth, the framework for any list could be set by national and regional priorities e.g. a certain percentage of women or ethnic minority candidates on it. Within that framework, the order of candidates on the list would be best decided by all eligible party members, by means of the single transferable vote. Even then, the electorate should have power to vary that order. Finally, there is the question of a threshold. I believe, quite simply, we should make a presumption in favour of democratic diversity. An argument has yet to be made for a threshold in the British context and the onus for proving its necessity rests on those who want one.

To return to my starting point. Obtaining proportional representation will neither solve the problems of the left nor provide Britain with a functioning ‘democracy’. The state is not neutral, and capitalism will not collapse as a result of reforming the electoral

system. But, as I have argued, we can improve the terms on which we engage in the struggle. A more open parliament, an arena in which the forces for radical change in Britain find a clearer, more immediate expression, can help in that process. More important even than that is the adjustment of focus which support for PR implies. There has, for too long, been an attitude of mind on the Labour left which Neal Ascherson characterized well in Games with Shadows as a kind of debased economic Jacobinism: 'One day, the unreformed electoral system will deliver another huge Labour majority in parliament, which will use centralized state power to redistribute wealth.’ I leave readers to decide for themselves how plausible such a scenario is. But if that were in fact the programme, socialists should be there - not cheering our benevolent (Labour) rulers on, but arguing that an egalitarianism imposed from above is built on shifting sands. The only secure guarantee for a socialism worth the name is not a packed parliament or reform imposed from above, but a mobilization of class and other social forces, a majority of the population, in a genuinely popular alliance for radical change. Support for PR is increasingly taken as an indicator of how serious socialists are in their desire to listen to and work with others. It is also a good measure of our willingness to break with any lingering vestiges of the old authoritarian style.

Appendix: How Various PR Systems Work

All electoral systems have to decide how many votes a candidate must obtain in order to be elected and all have different methods of doing so. Simplest is the method used in the first-past-the-post system in single-member constituencies. To get elected you need merely obtain a simple plurality of votes (i.e. more than any other single candidate standing for election). If there are only two candidates, nothing could be fairer: the candidate with more votes wins. But with more than two candidates, the system can become messy. For instance, with three candidates and a vote roughly equally shared among them, the winner will only have received a little over a third of the vote. And although such an extreme result is not common, it is by no means unusual for candidates to be elected on less than 50 percent of the vote. In the 1987 General Election, as previously mentioned, 283 seats were won on a minority of votes cast, and the Tories remained in office on a clear minority of the national vote. The claim that under first-past- the-post the winning candidate has at least obtained a majority of votes cast is increasingly untrue and the results in constituencies with significant third or even fourth forces can become increasingly maverick. The Alternative Vote is often advanced as a solution to this problem. By voting for the parties standing in order of preference you can ensure that if your first choice is eliminated, a subsequent preference can still affect the result. If most voters did this, it would at least ensure that the winning candidate had, after transfers, received a majority of votes cast. The French System of holding a second ballot in single- member constituencies achieves a similar result. Any candidate who on the

first round gets more votes than all other candidates combined is declared elected. Otherwise a second ballot is held a week later in which only candidates who got more than an eighth of the votes cast in the first ballot may stand. Generally, people only stand a second time if they have a reasonable chance of winning; if only two candidates stand, the winner, by definition, will receive a majority of votes cast.

Proportional systems deal with representation differently. The task is not to construct a system in which the (single) winner gets more votes than anyone else but one in which all significant fractions of the votes cast are represented. In STV systems the Droop quota (named after the English barrister Henry Droop) is generally used. It is given by the number of votes cast divided by the number of seats to be filled plus one, rounded up to the next whole number. The reason for this formula is simple, as an example will show. If 10,000 valid votes are cast and there are 5 seats to be filled, a successful candidate needs barely more than 1/6 of the votes. That is, the Droop quota would be 1,667 (10,000 divided by 6 is 1,666 2/3, which rounded up gives 1,667); if each got a minimum of 1667 votes (i.e. 8,335 in all) only 1,665 votes are unaccounted for and no other candidate could reach the quota. In party list systems a similar quota system is used. It is simple to allocate seats to parties for each whole quota received. The problem lies in dealing with leftover votes and seats. It is easier to understand why this is a problem when one sees that two possible solutions give rather different results. The first approach is to use the ‘largest remainder’ system, i.e. to allocate the next seat to the party with the highest number of votes unused, and to continue in this way until all remaining seats are allocated. The second is to allocate the next seat to the party which, after the allocation, still has the ‘highest average’ vote per seat (i.e. has had more votes cast for it per seat obtained than any other party), and so on. On the face of it, both seem reasonable ways of proceeding. Clearly, a party should get a seat if it has more unused votes than any other party. Equally clearly, there can be a

problem if a party needs on average fewer votes than another party to obtain its seats. Unfortunately, these two notions of democratic fairness can’t always be applied at the same time. A simple example will show how these methods work and the potential problem. Assume 3 parties are contesting a 3- seat constituency, party A receiving 8,000 votes, party B 7,000 and party C 3,600 votes. The total of votes cast is 18,600 and the Droop quota, 18,600 divided by 4, plus 1, is 4,651.

Party Votes Quotas Remainder A 8,000 1 3,349 B 7,000 1 2,349 C 3,600 0 3,600

Since C’s remainder of3,600 is larger than the other remainders the third seat would be allocated to C and each party would have won a seat. But A has needed more than twice as many votes as C to get a single seat. So this method of allocating remainders is often held to favour small parties unduly. If seats were allocated on a highest average basis, we would have the following:

Party Average vote per seat if the party wins

Party 1 seat 2 seats 3 seats A 8,000 4,000 2,667 B 7,000 3,500 2,333 C 3,600 1,800 1,200

Each successive seat is given to the party which, after the allocation, would still have the highest average number of votes per seat. So the first seat goes to party A, with an average of 8,000, the second to B, with an average of 7,000 and the third to A again, with an average now of 4,000 (still higher than the 3,600 votes which C obtained). This presentation of results in the form of a table setting out the average number of votes per seat for each party, corresponding to

the successive number of seats which the party may gain, is known as the d’Hondt system after the Belgian, Victor d’Hondt, who first popularised it. It is based on the same principle and gives exactly the same results as the ‘highest average’ method. It has the advantage that you can identify a quota from the tables (anywhere between 3,600 and 4,000 in the above example) which will allocate as many seats as there are to be filled. When you are dealing with constituencies where there may be 30 or more seats this can be a great advantage. But the d’Hondt system is criticised for favouring larger parties. Is it fair, in the example above, that party C does not get a seat, though it has more unused votes than any other party after an allocation by quota? This situation is easily remedied by playing around with the divisors in the table. If, instead of using 1,2,3 for example, as in the ‘highest average’ calculation above, you were to use alternate numbers only (1, 3, 5 etc), you would have the following result: :

2nd 1st seat 3rd seat seat Party divisor divisor divisor =1 =5 =3 A 8,000 2,667 1,600 B 7,000 2,333 1,400 C 3,600 1,200 720

So the third seat would be allocated to C with its 3,600, rather than to A with its 2,667. This set of divisors produces what is known as the Ste-Laguë system (divisors 1, 3, 5, 7 etc). Other systems followed: the modified Ste-Laguë used in Sweden and Norway (with divisors of 1.4, 3,5, 7 etc) and the Danish system (with divisors of 1.4, 7, 10 etc). The rationale for varying the divisors used hinges on our notion of proportionality and how to measure deviations from it. The absolute difference between 3 and 4 seats, say, is smaller than that between 75 and 80, but the relative difference is obviously greater. It is clear that an extra seat makes a relatively greater difference

to a small party which might otherwise have very few or even no seats at all than it does to a party with many tens or even hundreds of seats. The largest remainder system, i.e. using divisors of 1,2, 3,4 etc favours larger parties; the Danish divisor series of 1,4, 7, 10, 13 etc is somewhat biased in favour of smaller parties. Somewhere between them lies the golden mean and the modified Ste-Laguë divisors of 1.4, 3, 5, 7, 9 etc is found to give a close approximation to the mathematically optimal set. One of the reasons for abandoning the ‘largest remainder’ system is that there are circumstances in which a change in the number of seats can lead, despite an increase in a party’s vote, to a decrease in the number of seats it obtains! This is possible because the remainder is an artefact of the method chosen to fix the quota; it bears no fixed relationship to the number of votes given to each party. Far from being an academic question, the issue actually arose in the USA as the ‘Alabama paradox’. After the census of 1880, it was found that increasing the size of Congress (in which states are allocated seats in proportion to population) from 299 to 300 seats would reduce Alabama’s representation by one. So the largest remainder system was definitively abandoned in 1910 and various divisor systems used instead. The allocation of seats to every state after the first seat (to which each is constitutionally entitled) is best achieved by what is called the method of ‘equal proportions’, devised by E.V.Huntington and eventually endorsed by the US National Academy of Sciences as the only truly unbiased system! It uses the divisor series √1X2, √2X3, √3X4, √4X5 etc, (i.e. 1.41, 2.45, 3.46, 4.47...). This series can’t be used to allocate seats directly in a list system because it doesn’t produce a first seat (since √0X1 = 0), but its allocations after the first gives results against which other systems can be measured. Both the St-Laguë and the Danish systems come off well in this comparison, the former slightly favouring larger parties, the latter slightly favouring smaller ones.

Guide to Reading

Anyone interested in keeping abreast of developments in the campaign for PR on the left should contact the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, P.O.Box 11, Guildford GUI 3QN. It’s a broad-based grouping which has been instrumental in generating support for PR in the labour movement in recent years. It publishes newsletters, reprints articles of interest, provides speakers and generally promotes the campaign. The work done by its chair, Jeff Rooker MP, on how Labour will lose around 20 seats after the next boundary review without a single vote being changed has alerted many to the absurdities of the current system and his broadsheet, Beaten by the Boundaries, is available from the LCER. While the LCER has decided to remain agnostic as to the system of PR it prefers, the Electoral Reform Society has as its principal object to promote the adoption of STV for elections. Its former director, Enid Lakeman, has written extensively and informatively on the subject. Her most recent, and most easily available publication, Power to Elect (Heinemann 1982), provides an overview of systems in use in the various countries of the European Community, Australia, Canada and elsewhere and a range of arguments about the merits of various systems of PR. Peter Hain is one of the few on the left to have produced a book on the subject. His Proportional Misrepresentation (Wildwood House 1986) is a stimulating, though often infuriating, read. He comes to the frankly extraordinary conclusion that AV, by requiring winning candidates to secure a majority of votes provides ‘a major if not compete step towards meeting the criticisms made by PR supporters’. I’ve yet to meet the proportional representation

supporter who bought such a frankly and avowedly non- proportional system. Vernon Bogdanor has undoubtedly been involved in the production of more useful material than anyone else in the general area over the last decade. The three collections he has edited, Coalition Government in Western Europe (Heinemann Education 1983), Democracy and Elections: Electoral Systems and their Political Consequences (Cambridge University Press 1983 - jointly edited with David Butler) and Representatives of the People? (Gower 1985) are particularly useful. The latter contains essays by Ivor Crewe, ‘MPs and their constituents in Britain: How strong are the links?’ and Michael Steed, ‘The constituency’ on which I have drawn extensively in Section 5. Vernon Bogdanor’s own introductions and conclusions provide carefully weighed evaluations of the issues at stake. In addition, his own book, The People and the Party System (Cambridge University Press 1981), contains both the history of the parliamentary debates about electoral reform (and the referendum) since 1831 and a careful evaluation of the effects of different systems of proportional representation. His Multi- party Politics and the Constitution, (Cambridge University Press 1983) shows how many of the conventions of the Constitution are in reality conventions of the two-party system and looks at ways in which they might change in a multi-party system. Finally, there is his What is Proportional Representation? A Guide to the Issues (Martin Robertson 1984). One first-past-the-post government which has taken the issue of electoral reform seriously in recent years, at least in principle, is that of New Zealand. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System, subtitled ‘Towards a Better Democracy’ (Auckland December 1986), evaluates a wide variety of systems in terms of ten criteria: fairness between political parties, effective representation of minority and special interest groups, effective Maori representation, political integration, effective representation of constituents, effective voter participation, effective government, effective parliament, effective parties and legitimacy. It comes down convincingly for what it terms a Mixed Member

Proportional System - the West German system under another name. As an introduction to the various technical questions relating to list systems, there is nothing to compete with Andrew McLaren Carstairs A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe (Allen & Unwin 1980). On the question of women’s representation in various systems, the most recent and helpful contributions are from the Hansard Society Women at the Top (Hansard Society 1990), and Jackie Roddick’s ‘Women and Voting Systems’, Radical Scotland, No. 42, Dec 1989-Jan 1990. Moving away from the nitty-gritty, the British Constitution remains as elusive as ever, though Charter 88 has done a certain amount to pin it down. Nevil Johnson’s In Search of the Constitution (Pergamon Press Oxford 1977) is at least as good a starting point as the more usual government textbooks. So too is Ian Harden and Norman Lewis, The Noble Lie: The British Constitution and the Rule of Law (Hutchinson 1986) Few of the books or articles in the various collections mentioned above are written from a socialist perspective. Political life and government institutions in particular have been regarded as too superstructural to merit attention until very recently, though an immediate exception must be made for Tony Benn. His consistent radicalism, expressed in practical exposure of how the system works, and wide-ranging proposals for reform, is marred only by his continued commitment to the existing electoral system. Arguments for Democracy (Jonathan Cape 1981 and Penguin 1982) and Parliament, People and Power (Verso & NLB 1982) are both well worth reading. Tom Nairn’s writing is always stimulating and iconoclastic. His two major works are The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (NLB 1977) and The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (Radius 1988). He is in broad agreement with Neal Ascherson (Games with Shadows, Radius 1988), that the institutions of the British state are in terminal decay, and that some

agreement on a republican replacement for it is a precondition for economic or social progress. There are a number of important studies of the Labour Party from a left perspective and I would particularly single out, in addition to Ralph Miliband’s classic Parliamentary Socialism (Merlin 1973), Leo Panitch, Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy (Cambridge University Press 1976) and David Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (Cambridge University Press 1975). Hilary Wainwright Labour: A Tale of Two Parties (Chatto 1987) takes the story up to the mid-1980s and' gives some indication of the radical forces in and around the Labour Party which by and large no longer find an official voice. On a broader level there are a number of helpful publications, in particular Raymond Williams Towards 2000, Penguin 1983, especially the brief section ‘Democracy Old and New’ (pp.102-127), Colin Leys, Power in Britain: An Introduction (Verso, 2nd edition 1987), Ralph Miliband, Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Oxford University Press 1984), and the Socialist Society’s manifesto Negotiating the Rapids: Socialist Politics for the 1990s (Socialist Society 1989). Anthony Arblaster’s Democracy (in the Concepts in Social Thought series, University of Minnesota Press 1987), provides a thoughtful analysis of radical democracy and its preconditions. And Michael Rustin’s essays in For a Pluralist Socialism (Verso 1985) are an attempt to think innovatively and critically about a range of practical issues including PR. 63

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