Can Electoral Reform Occur Given Politicians’ Self-Interested Nature?
Part 1: The Problem and a Potential Solution for Canada and Britain
Western politicians frequently talk a big game about democracy, but when push comes to shove, most will almost always prioritize self-interest over principle. This is perhaps most evident to my predominantly left-American audience when the Republicans do things like block DC statehood, which if enacted would help alleviate the Senate’s undemocratic Republican lean (the median state is 6.6 points redder than the median voter). However, I have no doubt the Democrats would’ve done the exact same thing had the two parties’ roles been reversed, as center-left parties pull these stunts all the time.
One prominent recent stunt occurred in America’s northern neighbor. Canada, like the US, uses first-past-the-post to elect its legislature, which means that its legislators are the people who have won the most votes in each single-member district. In a country like Canada or the UK that has more than two political parties, this electoral system results in the biggest parties being overrepresented in Parliament relative to their vote share. This occurs because if you are a small party that receives, for instance, five percent of the votes nationwide, chances are there will be a party that gets more votes than you in almost any given district unless your votes are extremely geographically concentrated.
In this Canadian example, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada (hereafter LPC) had the third most seats in the House of Commons (hereafter HoC) for the first time ever after the 2011 federal election. Naturally, first-past-the-post was not good for the 2011-2015 LPC, which held just 11% of HoC seats after getting 19% of the vote in 2011. Consequently, before the 2015 election, the Liberal Party of Canada pledged to end this system for good. Then, however, the LPC won the 2015 election and “earned” 54% of HoC seats with just 39.5% of the national vote. After the election, the party pretended to follow through on its promise by setting up an electoral reform committee, but it then ignored its recommendation of instituting some version of proportional representation. Under proportional representation, seats are allocated in accordance with vote share, so the Liberals would’ve won ~40% of seats in 2015 instead of 54%, and as a result, the Liberals were not a fan of instituting this system. (Of course, that is not the official reason why electoral reform got dropped off the Liberal agenda, but there is no reason to believe Trudeau’s formal excuse given his inconsistent statements on the matter.) Consequently, Canada is still stuck with first-past-the-post today.
The British Labour Party and American Democrats have been known to engage in similar shenanigans. In the UK, Tony Blair abandoned an electoral reform promise in a manner similar to Justin Trudeau around the turn of the millennium. In contemporary America, meanwhile, the Democrats’ new voting rights bill, HR 1, is weak on the issue of gerrymandering and more general disproportionality because stronger language would result in some Democratic members of Congress losing their jobs in safe blue states where the Democrats hold a higher percentage of congressional seats than their vote share. In my home state of Connecticut, for example, the Democrats hold 100% of the 5 seats despite getting only about 60% of the vote statewide. If the lines were designed in a manner such that seat allocation was roughly proportional, two of the current representatives would have to surrender their jobs to Republicans. Unfortunately, reporting done by Andrew Prokop appears to confirm that these parts of the bill are weak because of representatives’ self-interest.
It seems that there is almost no politician or political party that will sacrifice self-interest to improve democracy. Given that politicians write the laws determining our electoral systems, electoral reform can resultantly seem like a lost cause. However, there may be a solution---at least for two of the three Western democracies plagued by first-past-the-post mentioned in this piece.
The Alberta Model and a Solution
After over 40 consecutive years of Progressive Conservative governance in the western Canadian province of Alberta, some voters were dissatisfied with their center-right rulers and gravitated towards a newer, more conservative party known as the Wildrose Party during the 2015 provincial election. As a consequence of conservative vote-splitting, the center-left NDP (which conveniently dropped electoral reform from their platform right before their first chance of ever forming a government) was able to win a majority of seats in 2015 despite receiving about 41% of the vote. (The conservative parties combined for greater than 50% of the vote in the contest.) After this election, the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party decided to form a united conservative party called, well, the United Conservative Party. Naturally, the UCP won the next election with a majority of the vote.
As the Alberta example demonstrates, in first-past-the-post systems with more than two parties, smaller parties can form alliances or even merge when it is in their self-interest to do so. While parties that opt for the latter option of a permanent merger will acquire incentives to keep first-past-the-post around if they are successfully elected, parties that opt for temporary alliances will not, assuming that they go back to running alone in the next election. Instead, they will face the opposite incentive of introducing proportional representation so that they are represented fairly when campaigning solo. Luckily, the political situations in the UK and Canada are ripe for temporary alliances between certain parties that could lead to just electoral systems coming into being in these nations.
In Britain, while traditionally both major parties have opposed electoral reform in the past, it seems like the days where Labour can win pluralities of the vote are over, at least for now. A recent YouGov poll had the Conservatives at 46% support and Labour at just 28% in Great Britain, which under the current system would mean a huge Conservative majority in Parliament. However, if an election with these polling results was held under proportional representation, Labour would likely become the largest party in a governing coalition, given that the combined center-to-left vote share totalled 50% compared to 48% for the combined conservative vote.* Thus, it is in Labour’s best interest to try to form a temporary alliance with other non-Conservative parties where, combined, they would only run one seat per constituency, thus allowing the bloc to win a majority of the seats. This would then allow the bloc to pass proportional representation and ensure that the Conservatives never win another election on the basis of FPTP again. Fortunately, unlike in Alberta, the differences between the various potential partners are too vast to result in a complete merger. Two of the potential alliance partners, Plaid Cymru (which translates into English as ‘Party of Wales') and the Scottish National Party, are both independentist parties in their respective countries. Meanwhile, the anti-NATO views of the Green Party of England and Wales are likely irreconcilable with the more mainstream pro-NATO position of the Labour Party Luckily, I am not the only person who has had the idea of a British multiparty alliance, and there is currently a lot of pressure on Labour leader Keir Starmer to enact exactly this.
Meanwhile, in Canada, on the federal level FPTP goes against the self-interest of the left-wing NDP and the mostly left-wing Green Party, which unsurprisingly both support proportional representation as a consequence of this fact. A 2019 analysis done by Phillippe Fournier shows that a combined Green-NDP party would hold the balance of power in Parliament, at least based on the polling numbers at the time. It doesn’t seem altogether likely that these parties would want to altogether merge, given the NDP’s muddled oil pipeline policy that tries to appeal to both anti-oil and pro-oil voters. However, a temporary, one-election electoral reform alliance resulting in holding the balance of power could pay big dividends and force the Liberals to hold a referendum on changing Canada’s electoral system.
If the two parties did want to go through with a plan like this, they’d have to pick which election to contest together carefully. (Presumably the two parties would not want to run together multiple times in a row, lest they start to look like one party.) Right now may not be the best time for an alliance, given that the current strength of both the LPC and the Bloc Quebecois means that if an election was held tomorrow, it is possible that the LPC (assuming it wins a plurality, but not majority, of seats) could rely on the BQ for support instead of acquiescing to the Green-NDP demands. Unfortunately, even if the alliance did manage to hold the balance of power after an election, it’s possible that the Liberals could just ignore the Green-NDP demands and wait out the alliance. Because there is basically a 0% chance that the alliance would install the Conservatives in government over the Liberals, its leverage over the LPC would be a bit lacking in this scenario.
More optimistically, it’s possible that a Green-NDP alliance could earn more votes and seats than the Liberals. One of the Liberals’ current advantages over the other two parties is that they benefit from tactical anti-Conservative voters who vote Liberal despite preferring the policies of the Greens or the NDP. This is understandable under a situation like the status quo where the Liberals poll at 34% compared to the NDP at 19% and the Greens at 7%. However, if the NDP-Green vote were to be combined, they’d trail the Liberals by only 8 points nationwide and have a decent shot of winning the most votes in many more ridings than in the present. (Riding is the Canadian term for electoral district.) Consequently, fewer NDP and Green sympathizers would be compelled to vote Liberal, which would push the Green-NDP numbers higher. At that point, the party would be trailing the Liberals by a manageable deficit heading into campaign season, and during campaign season, anything can happen.
In Part 2, I will discuss various problems of America’s electoral system and potential political solutions, ranging from pragmatic to utopian based on which problem that I am attempting to solve.
*I am assuming that post-Brexit, the pro-European centrist Lib Dems will want nothing to do with the Tories (despite having worked with [some might say for] them in the past), which is why I grouped them with the left-wing parties.
Photo via Illinois Realtors
