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Between Formal and Substantive Legitimacy

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Between Formal and Substantive Legitimacy ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Between formal and substantive legitimacy A comparison of two electoral systems ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN Vol. 49, Issue No. 19, 10 May, 2014 Arvind Sivaramakrishnan is with the editorial team of The Hindu newspaper and also teaches at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. The simple majority or the First Past the Post system extant in India suffers from a number of flaws, even if some of them have been mitigated by the nature of political contestation and the social upsurge in the country. Primarily these flaws have to do with lack of substantive “representativeness”, possible issues with accountability among others. A proportional representation system with the provision of a single transferable vote could be a better alternative to the FPTP system. There is no doubting the legitimacy of elected assemblies in India, from panchayats to the Rajya Sabha. Yet the First Past the Post electoral system (FPTP, also known as the simple majority system), which is used in all elections except those to the Rajya Sabha and the presidency, gives rise to several questions. One is about the composition of the assemblies. Another is about the representative character of the elected assemblies, and which could potentially weaken their substantive legitimacy. A third is about the relation between voters and their elected representatives. I shall explore the first two here, and will touch upon the third. With examples from a range of countries besides India, I shall try to show that a proportional system based on the single transferable vote offers considerable advantages over the FPTP system, which for its part creates several problems, as follows. Disparity between vote share and seat share There is no direct relation between a party’s vote-share and the number of seats it wins. Assemblies elected under FPTP do not reflect the spread or range of voter support across all parties, and significant third or even fourth parties are severely underrepresented. One example is that of the 15th Lok Sabha, which has just concluded its term. Figure 1 shows its composition by party after the 2009 election. Pre-election alliances whereby parties agree not to field candidates in particular constituencies, so that an alliance vote is not split, mean that the figures are indicative rather than precise. Table 1 Indian General Election 2009: 543 seats in the Lok Sabha; 272 needed for a majority ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Congress BJP Third Front Seats 262 159 79 Seat Share 48% 29% 15% Vote Share 37.22% 24.63% 21.15% Under- or over- +60 representation in seats +25 -36 relative to vote-share (Adapted from Wikipedia) Graphically, the position looks like this: Figure 1: Under - or over-representation in number of Lok Sabha seats 2009 In proportion to its share of the vote, the third party–in this case the Third Front–is substantially underrepresented. Had seats been allocated according to vote-share, the composition of the Lok Sabha would have been significantly different: Figure 2: Lok Sabha seats 2009 under a hypothetical proportional system ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Congress would have had 202 seats, the BJP 134, and the Third Front 115. The disparities caused by FPTP are even more obvious in respect of the 2012 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. I use UP as an example to show the disproportionality between vote-share and seat-share in the SM system. This disproportionality is an inherent feature of the SM system. Caution would, however, be needed in drawing any blanket inferences about the scale or extent of it in, say, all elections in India, because pre-poll seat-sharing arrangements or similar deals are not as common in UP as they are, for example, in Tamil Nadu. In the latter case, a claim could be made that such deals facilitate some representation for social groups which might otherwise go unrepresented. I address some of those issues in passages below on how a proportional system would provide a more accurate reflection of the range of voter preferences than the FPTP system does. As it happened, in the 2012 UP assembly elections the Samajwadi Party won heavily, taking 226 seats in the 403-seat assembly; its nearest rival, the Bahujan Samajwadi Party, won 80 seats, just under 40% of the winners’ tally. The distribution of seats was as follows: Table 2: The 2012 Uttar Pradesh State Election ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Figure 3: UP Assembly results 2012 Under a proportional system, the SP would still have won, but only just, as the vote-shares show. Table 3: UP 2012 Vote-shares by party ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Secondly, the assembly would have looked strikingly different from the one actually elected: Figure 4: UP assembly 2012 under a hypothetical proportional system ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Table 4: Hypothetical seat-shares in the U.P. assembly under PR in 2012 ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 The SP would have been 109 seats down on its actual performance and that would have left it 85 seats short of an absolute majority, and the BSP would have done much better than it did, winning 104 seats. Swing in Voter Support In the 2009 Indian general election, the Congress vote-share rose by 3.96 percentage points, but the party gained 44 more Lok Sabha seats to finish with 262, when it had won 218 in 2004; that amounted to 17% more seats. Similarly, the BJP’s loss of 4.88 percentage points cost it 22 seats, or 12% of its 2004 total. Parties can win huge majorities on well under 50% of the vote. In the U.K. in 1979, the Conservative Party won a majority of 43 seats on a vote-share of just under 44%, but raised this to a 144-seat majority in 1983, even though the party’s vote- share was down to 42.4% (Boothroyd nd). The results of the 1997 and 2001 British general elections also reveal a striking disparity between vote-share and seat-share. In 1997, Labour won by a huge margin, taking 418 seats, or 63% of the 659 in the Commons, on a vote-share of 43%; the Conservatives got a vote-share of just under 31% but won only 165 seats, or 25% of the Commons; the overall Labour majority was 177. In 2001, Labour won a 165-seat majority on a vote-share of 40.7%, but as the turnout was down from 71.5 to 59.4%, they won with the support of just under a quarter of the total electorate, or only a slightly larger share of the total electorate than the Conservatives had got in their crushing 1997 defeat–namely about 22%. Winners with Small Percentages Of The Vote In the 2012 UP assembly elections, only 16 of the 403 winning candidates got 50% or more of the vote; the majority of the winners had less than 40%, and 117 winners had less than 30%. This is also a feature of recent British general elections; in 2005, only two candidates gained over 40% of the vote in their respective constituencies. Another won a seat with the votes of 18.36% of the constituency electorate. In the 2010 election, 433 MPs, or two thirds of the Commons, did not get 50% of the turnout vote, and the current House has the lowest share of majority winners in any British parliament since at least the 1920s; in fact a record number, 111 MPs, won their seats on a vote-share of under 40% (Electoral Reform Society 2010). Unrepresented voters In effect, substantial proportions of voters in most constituencies go unrepresented. Even going by turnout figures alone, it is not unusual for 60% of those who voted to be unrepresented, because only one candidate is elected to represent the constituency. ‘Wasted’ votes ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 The votes cast for all except the winner are wasted in that they had no effect on the result, but in fact the figure for such ineffectual votes is even larger, because a plurality of only one vote is needed to win a seat under the FPTP system. Any more votes cast for the winner are superfluous; one estimate for the 2010 British general election is that 71.1% of votes, or 21.1 million of the 29.7 million cast, had no effect on the composition of the House of Commons (Rallings and Thrasher 2010: 2). Tactical voting This is quite common in FPTP systems, with voters opting not for their preferred candidate but for an alternative so as to keep a third candidate out. This often happens in seats which are “safe” for particular candidates and therefore votes for all others except a likely runner- up are useless. Targeted campaigning This is widely used under the FPTP system, because small swings can decide large proportions of seats. In some countries, “swing” voters form only about 5% of the electorate. In India, as candidates sometimes admit privately, campaigns are often aimed at particular castes or communities. Post-election policies may then favour the swing voters who may have decided the outcome. Targeted campaigns can be effective; in the UK in 1992, the Liberal Democrats won 20 seats on a vote-share of 17.8%, but in 1997 a campaign targeted on the seats where they had the best chance won them 46 seats on a lower vote-share, namely 16.8% (Tall 2012). The representative becomes the sole gatekeeper The fact that FPTP provides only one representative per constituency means the winner becomes the sole gatekeeper, that is, the only person constituents can approach with their concerns. If the elected representative belongs to a party which opposes whatever the constituent seeks (or is hostile to the constituent for any reason), then the voter has nobody else to approach.
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