Author Archives: Christopher Kam

I posted yesterday of my plan to write several blog post on the Liberals’ plans for electoral reform and Senate reform. My focus is going to be on the strategic and tactical aspects of the government’s initiatives in these areas, and on how we might expect the opposition parties to react. I’ll start today by discussing electoral reform.  I am having trouble developing a coherent model of the politics of electoral reform, and so I’ll content myself by posting a series of rambling observations.

What the Liberals probably want to achieve

While the vague nature of the Liberals’ promise to reform the electoral system theoretically allows them to choose among a wide variety of alternative electoral systems, their choice is essentially over three three key aspects of the electoral system: 1) the district magnitude (i.e., the number of seats available in the district), 2) formula (i.e., plurality, majority, or PR), and 3) ballot structure (preferential or simple). The general effect of altering each of these dimensions is as follows:

• The larger the district magnitude, the more political parties one can expect to contest elections and win seats. Specifically, if we denote the district magnitude as M, we can expect M+1 parties to contest elections (Cox 1997).
• Proportional representation facilitates the electoral success of smaller parties, especially ones with with well-defined ideological niches. The propensity of PR to favour smaller parties is contingent on the district magnitude, however. The lower the district magnitude, the less proportional the translation from votes to seats, and the less “friendly” the electoral system is to smaller parties.
• A preferential ballot structure favours centrist parties (and their candidates) because they can reasonably expect to be the second preference of many voters who prefer the more extreme parties to the left and right.

We can safely assume that the Liberals prefer to replace FPTP with an electoral system that reliably provides them with 1) at least a plurality of parliamentary seats such that they 2) regularly participate in government. To achieve this, the Liberals must choose an electoral system that simultaneously 1) prevents the Conservatives from capitalizing on the divisions between the Liberals, NDP, and the Greens and yet 2) still ensures that the Liberals are the dominant left-wing party.

List-PR, especially in large multi-member districts, is unlikely to achieve these ends. As a larger party, the Liberals benefit from electoral disproportionality. The risk inherent in adopting a highly proportional electoral system—such as list-PR in large multi-member districts— is thus that it would reduce the Liberals to just one of three fairly co-equal left-wing parties.* If this happened, the Conservatives might be able to form minority governments on a regular basis in a mirror image of the historical Swedish pattern, where a lack of coordination among three right-wing opponents often allows the left-wing Social Democrats to form single-party minority governments. This line of analysis suggests that the Liberals prefer to keep the district magnitude low. In this respect, the Liberals’ interests dovetail with those of the Conservatives, the other large party, and clash with those of the Greens and the NDP.

It’s unlikely, of course, that the Liberals would champion list-PR as the alternative to FPTP. Instead, they are likely to take their cue from recent electoral reform efforts in Ontario and BC, where voters were asked to consider replacing FPTP with mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) or the single-transferable vote (STV), respectively.  Both MMP and STV would do a better job than list-PR of protecting the Liberals’ position as the dominant left-wing party in Canadian politics. Under MMP, the Liberals could confidently predict to win large pluralities of district seats. This would leave them as obvious formateurs of any left-wing coalition government. STV could be applied in multi-member districts of, say, 3 seats. This would generate sufficient disproportionality to ensure that NDP and Greens could not eclipse the Liberals as the dominant left-wing party. In addition, the Liberals could expect to be the main beneficiary of NDP and Green voters’ second preferences.

The main problem with STV and MMP (especially) is feasibility. Both STV and MMP would require effecting a country-wide redistribution of riding boundaries. This would be hard to do given the Liberal’s self-imposed time frame of 18 months to introduce the necessary legislation. (Presumably that legislation will have to include district boundaries.  Of course, given their penchant for setting arbitrary deadlines, and then screwing the pooch in an effort to meet said deadlines, the Liberals might not give a damn about rushing through a country-wide redistribution – damn the torpedoes – before the next election.)

Such considerations leave STV as a dark horse alternative IMO, but they do not make it a non-starter.  The problems confronting MMP run much deeper, however. MMP is likely to find itself in tension with the “senatorial floor” clause in of the 1867 Constitution Act. This clause guarantees each province at least as many seats in the House of Commons as it has in the Senate. The need to respect the senatorial floor clause will in my view mandate that any MMP system operate on a provincial rather than a national or regional basis, unless the Liberals are willing to substantially increase the size of the House to accommodate the list-tier seats (and this is probably a non-starter).**  The huge variation in the size of provinces would then generate wide variation in proportionality across provinces.  I could see this as fertile ground for legal challenges.*** While the courts have generally granted Parliament wide latitude in structuring the electoral system, any law suit would eat up limited time.  I just can’t see the Liberals fighting in the House, the media, or the Courts for MMP: MMP just doesn’t give the Liberals’ sufficient electoral return to justify all the potential trouble.

I don’t think the above is especially earth-shattering, but it does help establish the Liberals’ preference orderings over electoral systems:

It’s not exactly clear to me how the Liberals value STV relative to FPTP. My thinking is that there’s a district magnitude above which the Liberals prefer FPTP.

In the next few posts, I’ll consider electoral reform from the Conservative and NDP, Green & Bloc perspectives.  This will help to identify potential coalitions for the various alternatives.  I’ll then consider how it all might go pear-shaped for each of the parties.

1. Double the size of the HOC.  PEI would then retain its 4 district seats – and “presto”, problem solved.
2. Use provincial lists (as in Germany).  This is far more likely.  Of course, it’s less desirable from the perspective of the NDP and the Greens (especially) because smaller lists (especially in Atlantic Canada) will preserve some disproportionality. This will favour the Grits and Tories.

***In Germany, for example, small parties successfully litigated the practice of the larger parties retaining their überhängmandaten; this violated the guaranteed of proportionality, they argued.  I could see similar arguments being made if the Liberals worded the legislation so as to require the electoral system “make every vote count”  (the phrase employed in their platform).  Of course, this problem dogs FPTP due to malapportionment across provinces (also a function of the senatorial floor), and several groups have tried to litigate against FPTP on these grounds.  The difference is that litigants will now be able to ground their challenges on a specific piece of legislation as well as the Charter.

Follow

I was hoping that the last election would return a minority government – so much more interesting than a majority government.  Well, it was not to be, and now The Spaniel heads a majority government.  But this government seems dead set on being incredibly activist in reforming Canadian political institutions.  The government has put electoral reform and senate reform high on their agenda.  The two issues are linked because the Tories hold a Senate majority, which they threaten to use to derail the Liberals’ legislative program.  This might be a bluff, but the Conservatives’ demand that Liberals put electoral reform to a referendum has a populist appeal to it — and I suspect the Grits know that.  This might be enough to embolden the Conservatives to block electoral reform in the Senate.

The difficulty that the Conservatives confront is that Harper left 22 Senate seats vacant (a bit of an oversight that); fill these seats with Liberals appointees and the Conservatives’ majority in the upper house disappears.  Complicating things even further is that The Spaniel cast Liberal Senators out of caucus this past term.  Theoretically, then, Liberal Senators (or are they now Senate Liberals?) are independent of party discipline.  And to top it all off The Spaniel promises to filter senate nominees through a non-partisan committee.  It would sure be embarrassing if every one of the The Spaniel’s “non-partisan” senate appointees voted the Liberal line vote after vote.   (Does anybody else have the sense that Canadian politicians are sort of making this up as they go along?)

Anyway, over the next couple of blog posts, I’ll consider the strategic implications of electoral and senate reform.  Should be an interesting 5 years.

Follow

It takes about 15 minutes after the outcome of an election held under FPTP for the rumblings for electoral reform to start.  A great deal of nonsense follows, much of it from my putative colleagues in the discipline who ought to know better. (I’m sure The Spaniel will contribute his share of this nonsense in due course.)  I am going to write extensively on the topic in a day or two. (Indeed, I’ll make this a topic for my POLI 310 students.)  But before I do that let’s correct several misconceptions:

1.  Strategic voting occurs only under FPTP. Uh… no, that’s just not true.  All voting systems save majority vote under two alternatives admit strategic behaviour.  This is the central message of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem.  This is not merely a theoretical proposition: Gary Cox (1997) demonstrated that desertion from “2nd loser” to the “1st loser” (consistent with people ditching their most preferred but hopeless option to defeat their least preferred option) under a wide variety of electoral formulas.  The limiting factor appears to be district magnitude (i.e., seats per district): after M>5 this behaviour becomes harder to effect.  BUT there other forms of strategic voting nonetheless emerge under various forms of PR even when M>5.  For example, voters try to gauge if they should stick with their preferred party and risk it falling under the threshold or defecting to a viable coalition partner. Or voters may try to balance coalitional blocs (as Kedar suggested). Why one form of strategic voting (e.g., trying obtain a certain coalition) is normatively better than the sophisticated voting we observe under FPTP is beyond me. Strategic behaviour is simply part of human nature IMO – ever notice how even young kids try to play one parent off against another?  Heck, even chimps are strategic! We are strategic, folks… deal with it because there’s no getting rid of it.
2. FPTP produces “false majorities.”  That’s another old chestnut that gets dragged out after the election of every majority government. A less pejorative term is “manufactured majority,” but that’s actually tangential to a more fundamental point:  there are no “true” majorities in the sense that a majority necessarily reflects a transitive social ordering (save in the case of majority rule over 2 alternatives).  That’s one implication of Arrow’s Theorem.  What do I mean by that?  Well, imagine three options, say, Liberal, Conservative, and NDP.  It may well be that if we constructed a pairwise competition we’d have L>C, C>N, and N > L.  So each option is majority-preferred at some stage.  Which of these majorities is false?  Well, in a sense none and all. To even label majorities “true” or “false” is utterly jejune.  Look, any time we have more than 2 options and are voting over more than 2 dimensions (e.g., economic and social policy), we cannot rule out that there exists a voting cycle, and that the majority that emerges is pretty much a function of the agenda / voting system.  And even if the majority were independent of the electoral system we used, we’d never know it.
3. “If we’d held the election under PR, this is what the result would have been…”  These sorts of simulations drive me nuts: they are beyond naive. Look, voters’ preferences are endogeneous to the voting system in place; so too are politicians’ actions.   What do I mean by this?  If we adopted medium-to-large-M PR, for example, our larger existing parties would quickly splinter as ambitious politicians defected to start their own parties (see New Zealand for a case study).  Then, given the new options and availability of new voting strategies, people would vote differently.  So the idea that you can hold voters’ revealed preferences (i.e., their votes) constant while you simulate outcomes under different voting systems is naive to the extreme. The confidence bounds on any such exercise are essentially unbounded, and the assumptions, unfounded.
4. “Under FPTP, many people’s votes don’t count / are wasted”.  This is another bromide.  A vote is said to be “wasted” when it does not elect a winner.  So you’ll often hear advocates of electoral reform talk about adopting voting systems under which all votes count. they’ll say.  I can only infer from such claims that the speaker thinks that every vote cast under their preferred system will go toward electing a candidate, ergo, no votes will be cast for losers.  But here’s the thing:  Logically, we could only achieve this if we guaranteed ex ante that every candidate who ran would win.  I can see only two ways to achieve this: a) ensure that only as many candidates are nominated as there are seats in the House of Commons, with all candidates elected by acclamation; or b) expand the House of Commons so that everyone who wants to be an MP gets to be one. (It would be even better, right, to have winners who did not even need votes?) Seriously, the first option (dictatorial control of the menu of options) is normatively undesirable, and the second is infeasible.  Any time you have more candidates than seats, it will be that case… hold tight here… that some candidates will lose!  I know, it’s shocking, but it gets worse: some people may actually vote for those losing candidates.  This is true under any electoral system.  It’s just that by layering on tiers and effecting panachage, various quotas, etc. some electoral systems obscure this fact.  But, really, you can’t escape the plain fact that if you have more candidates than seats, some candidates will lose…(really, they don’t all get seats, no, no, not even in the Netherlands), and that is, in fact, healthy for representative democracy.  (Aside: Are these the arguments you get, when people grow up having won participation trophies for everything? No losers here, we’re all winners!  Even my 6-year old knows this is a charade.)
5. “Proportional representation is fair.”  I guess if you equate fairness to proportionality that’s true in a tautological sense. To me proportional representation implies no more or less than  proportionality between parties’ vote shares and seat shares.  Nothing wrong with that. Equally, nothing special about it.  Here’s my issue with focussing disproportionately (ha!) on votes-seats proportionality:  what we actually care about in Parliament are majorities, mainly on the floor – because that determines if the cabinet has the confidence of the House or not – but also in committee where many rules and policies are fine-tuned.  Majorities (neither true nor false, note) are constructed by and reflect parties’ bargaining power.  So if we have a single-party majority, one party has all the bargaining power; if we have a minority situation, then bargaining power is distributed among the parties – which could construct majority coalitions, allow a minority government to operate, etc.  The point being it’s all about bargaining power.  If you are truly committed to the idea of proportionality, it strikes me that consistency requires you to advocate for proportionality in bargaining power… because that’s what really counts. A few elementary examples show that the mapping from seat shares to bargaining power is incredibly erratic. E.g., let A have 40% of the seats; B have 35%, & C have 25% — and let’s assume this is all perfectly proportional to the parties’ respective vote shares: all 3 parties have equal (normalized Banzhaf) power  of 1/3. Now add a fourth party that draws seats about proportionally from A, B, & C: A=31%, B=28%, C=22%; D=19%:  the (normalized Banzhaf) power scores are .417, .25, .25, and .083, respectively. So A lost seats but gained power; whereas C and B lost seats and power, and D’s power is nowhere near proportional to its seat share! Let’s not even discuss parties’ ideological positions and how that might compress or expand the uncovered set. No magic here, just some elementary math and game theory, but it suffices to show that votes-seats proportionality doesn’t guarantee any sort of proportionality in bargaining power. (I am sure that some crazy mathematician genius has a voting system to ensure bargaining power proportionality.  Bring it on, I say.) You might retort that, regardless of disproportionality in bargaining power, anything is an improvement on concentrating all power in one party.  Perhaps, but not only does that exaggerate the situation (recall all those SC cases Harper lost – that was the court effectively checking the executive, no?), but it comes at the cost of some obvious off-setting perversities, e.g. non-monotonicity in power (lose votes, lose seats, gain power! I’m looking at you, Party A).  (P.S.  If A & B formed a coalition, it’s no “truer” or “falser” a majority than if B, C, and D got together.)

None of the above is an argument in favour of FPTP as such.  It’s a plea for some coherent arguments predicated on logic that can withstand some cursory examination. This is evidently a high bar. Sigh.

Follow