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Well, for someone who's not going to vote in the forthcoming election, I've seen a fair bit of the local politicians - I talk to our local Conservative Party candidate most days of the week, and on Saturday I was round at the house of our Green Party candidate, cooking English steak on his barbecue in honour of St George. Let nobody say I'm not engaged with politics!
I'll probably say more about the party politics for this election at a later date when I've had a chance to read the manifestos - so far the only one I've read in its entirety is the SDLP's, strangely. The prospect of a hung Parliament is an interesting one, though. One interesting aspect of having a result that more proportionately represents the 'will' of the people is that you trade one type of 'unfairness' for another type - fewer people are completely disenfranchised, but the degree to which the others are enfranchised drops similarly. Instead of your party failing to get in and someone you don't like implementing policies you disagree with, the party you do like gets in and implements policies you don't agree with in order to prop up the coalition. If we don't trust politicians now, I expect we'll trust them even less after a few years of that sort of thing.
One argument against the current system tends to suggest that "if 66% of the population votes against the Conservatives and is split equally, the Conservatives still typically get in and that's not fair". The main error here - and one arguably made by Johann Hari's widely circulated essay recently - is that this characterises all votes as being either for the Conservatives or Anybody But The Conservatives - this may be true for a lot of people, especially younger voters I expect, but not all: in particular a sizeable number of Lib Dem voters would choose Conservative over Labour if the Liberals weren't likely to win in their area. Not the majority by any means, but a significant minority, enough to show it's not a simple Left vs Right issue, nor a case of 'splitting the Left's vote'. (In particular, talking about the 'liberal-left' is misleading anyway. Labour are Left but not very liberal, the Lib Dems are liberal but not very Left. Many key policies of the Left are fiercely illiberal anyway, in the classical sense.) Still, a three party system does always run this risk.
The second problem is when you take the share of the vote to represent a mandate to govern. The leader of the Liberal Democrats has been arguing recently that the party that comes 3rd in terms of the share of the popular vote has no such mandate - which is distinct from saying that the party placed 1st definitely has that mandate - a convenient distinction as he is reasonably hoping to lead the 2nd placed party. Why is 2nd ok but not 3rd? In countries with 4 or more major parties it's easy to see that the 3rd placed party might legitimately rule a coalition acceptable to the public: imagine an election where the results were Fascists 26%, Conservatives 24%, Social Democrats 24%, Communists 26%. The two middle parties working together could probably command a wider consensus than either of the extreme parties, despite individually polling fewer votes.
But given that we accept the share of the popular vote is important, if one party gets 49% support and the two others muster 26% and 25% between them, is it right for the latter two to form a government to implement a small subset of policies agreed on by 51% rather than a large set of policies agreed on by 49%? In practice this is unlikely to happen, but something with broadly similar proportions could. Is it more acceptable if the ratio was 47 / 27 / 26? What about 45 / 28 / 27? Or 41 / 30 / 29?
And no matter which voting system we might use to select our representatives, none of the ones currently on offer impose any sort of obligation on those representatives as to which people they form a governing coalition with. There's a lot of talk of a Liberal/Conservative coalition at the moment, mostly because Labour have treated the Liberals poorly over the last 13 years. But what of the roughly 50% of the Liberal voters who prefer Labour to the Conservatives - some of them might prefer to keep Labour in if that is their only way of keeping the Conservatives out. But they don't get a direct say in that, no matter whether we use First Past The Post, Alternative Vote Plus, or a fully proportional system. We know they prefer Liberal Democrats to Labour and Labour to Conservatives but we don't know the relative magnitudes of those preferences and the systems don't capture them. For those people, arguably their best option in each case is to vote tactically for the party most likely to beat the Conservatives, and that works best in the system which allows them to nullify as many Conservative votes as possible - ie. First Past The Post. So, if reflecting their wishes is how we judge fairness (and a wish can be as much about which policies you want to avoid as much as it is about who you wish to govern), under certain circumstances First Past The Post can actually become the most fair option. All ranking systems are flawed in some fundamental sense, and party politics bring this to the fore.
And even if we get past all this to forming a coalition that most people are not completely discontent with... chances are high that it'll fall apart before too long, as happens in Belgium every year or so (including last week). So maybe all this is irrelevant. :)
I'll probably say more about the party politics for this election at a later date when I've had a chance to read the manifestos - so far the only one I've read in its entirety is the SDLP's, strangely. The prospect of a hung Parliament is an interesting one, though. One interesting aspect of having a result that more proportionately represents the 'will' of the people is that you trade one type of 'unfairness' for another type - fewer people are completely disenfranchised, but the degree to which the others are enfranchised drops similarly. Instead of your party failing to get in and someone you don't like implementing policies you disagree with, the party you do like gets in and implements policies you don't agree with in order to prop up the coalition. If we don't trust politicians now, I expect we'll trust them even less after a few years of that sort of thing.
One argument against the current system tends to suggest that "if 66% of the population votes against the Conservatives and is split equally, the Conservatives still typically get in and that's not fair". The main error here - and one arguably made by Johann Hari's widely circulated essay recently - is that this characterises all votes as being either for the Conservatives or Anybody But The Conservatives - this may be true for a lot of people, especially younger voters I expect, but not all: in particular a sizeable number of Lib Dem voters would choose Conservative over Labour if the Liberals weren't likely to win in their area. Not the majority by any means, but a significant minority, enough to show it's not a simple Left vs Right issue, nor a case of 'splitting the Left's vote'. (In particular, talking about the 'liberal-left' is misleading anyway. Labour are Left but not very liberal, the Lib Dems are liberal but not very Left. Many key policies of the Left are fiercely illiberal anyway, in the classical sense.) Still, a three party system does always run this risk.
The second problem is when you take the share of the vote to represent a mandate to govern. The leader of the Liberal Democrats has been arguing recently that the party that comes 3rd in terms of the share of the popular vote has no such mandate - which is distinct from saying that the party placed 1st definitely has that mandate - a convenient distinction as he is reasonably hoping to lead the 2nd placed party. Why is 2nd ok but not 3rd? In countries with 4 or more major parties it's easy to see that the 3rd placed party might legitimately rule a coalition acceptable to the public: imagine an election where the results were Fascists 26%, Conservatives 24%, Social Democrats 24%, Communists 26%. The two middle parties working together could probably command a wider consensus than either of the extreme parties, despite individually polling fewer votes.
But given that we accept the share of the popular vote is important, if one party gets 49% support and the two others muster 26% and 25% between them, is it right for the latter two to form a government to implement a small subset of policies agreed on by 51% rather than a large set of policies agreed on by 49%? In practice this is unlikely to happen, but something with broadly similar proportions could. Is it more acceptable if the ratio was 47 / 27 / 26? What about 45 / 28 / 27? Or 41 / 30 / 29?
And no matter which voting system we might use to select our representatives, none of the ones currently on offer impose any sort of obligation on those representatives as to which people they form a governing coalition with. There's a lot of talk of a Liberal/Conservative coalition at the moment, mostly because Labour have treated the Liberals poorly over the last 13 years. But what of the roughly 50% of the Liberal voters who prefer Labour to the Conservatives - some of them might prefer to keep Labour in if that is their only way of keeping the Conservatives out. But they don't get a direct say in that, no matter whether we use First Past The Post, Alternative Vote Plus, or a fully proportional system. We know they prefer Liberal Democrats to Labour and Labour to Conservatives but we don't know the relative magnitudes of those preferences and the systems don't capture them. For those people, arguably their best option in each case is to vote tactically for the party most likely to beat the Conservatives, and that works best in the system which allows them to nullify as many Conservative votes as possible - ie. First Past The Post. So, if reflecting their wishes is how we judge fairness (and a wish can be as much about which policies you want to avoid as much as it is about who you wish to govern), under certain circumstances First Past The Post can actually become the most fair option. All ranking systems are flawed in some fundamental sense, and party politics bring this to the fore.
And even if we get past all this to forming a coalition that most people are not completely discontent with... chances are high that it'll fall apart before too long, as happens in Belgium every year or so (including last week). So maybe all this is irrelevant. :)
