Sunday 9 May 2010

Be careful what you wish for (was "FPTP error 404: Government not found")

I was amused by this recent message on Twitter:
HouseofTwits RT @HevM FPTP error 404: Government not found. Please reset your voting system to proportional representation and try again. #dontdoitnick
The "FPTP error 404" line gave be a good chuckle (being a bit of a web geek), but underlying the chorus of calls for proportional representation I'm generally disappointed by the quality of post-election debate, and recall the old saying "be careful what you wish for".

I share the frustrations of many people that our UK voting system means that our government is effectively decided by a minority of voters who are lucky(?) enough to live in so-called marginal constituencies. (Was it really the voters turned away from the polls at 10:00PM in Manchester, Sheffield, etc., who were disenfranchised, or those of us who live in safe seats who are able to vote in the sure knowledge that it makes not a jot of difference?)  Further, I would like to see more consensual, responsive politics with less emphasis on passing laws and imposing dogma, and more on good administration to address problems. And most of all, I'd like to see a reverse in the trend to centralization of all meaningful decision making to an ivory-towered elite who cannot possibly predict or understand the Goodhart's Law effect and unintended consequences of the rules they hand down, and who take to themselves privileges that they deny the rest of us.

And this is where my problem comes with the understandable desire to replace our present electoral system with one of proportional representation (PR). Agreed, PR would mean that my individual vote would count for something, i.e. more than nothing, wherever I may live. But at what cost?

I quaintly cling to the notion that my MP is elected first and foremost to represent the people of my constituency, which includes me. That includes co-operating with other constituencies at a national level, and making some compromises of local interests to support a necessary national executive. When I feel strongly enough about an issue, I write to my MP and I expect a response (accepting that I don't always agree with it, and may change my vote accordingly, as I did over the recent Digital Economy Act). But the party system seems to turn this on its head: it's the national issues that are taken to be of prime importance, and constituency concerns secondary. My concern is that a system of Proportional Representation serves to make the party system yet more entrenched, and further weakens any possibility of direct contact with and influence over "my" representative.

So let's go back to first principles. First, I want my vote to count for something, even when I live in an geographical area that happens to be dominated by a particular share of politics. But I also want a clearly designated representative who I can feel will be motivated to give more weight to my view and less to the received wisdom from party HQ. There are systems of PR that claim to deliver this, but in my view any attempt to match overall party-level representation to votes cast must inevitably weaken the link between voter and individual representative. That statistics demand that it be so.

So are there any other ways? I'm no political theorist, so I'm sure my thoughts can be ridiculed by anyone who is, but I still feel it's worth exploring. Over the past couple a weeks, the following thoughts have occurred to me, all of which are predicted on retaining our first past the post (FPTP) mechanism for selecting a local representative:
  1. State party funding, where every vote cast results in political funding that can be disposed of by the candidate voted for. Thus, my vote for party A in a safe constituency for party B still results in some additional political clout for party A. Personally, I'm not sure that I approve of state funding of political groups - more snouts in the trough? - but maybe more importantly, this might make it harder for new entrants to gain a place in the system.
  2. Allocation of parliamentary time: similar to (1), but instead of doling out money based on votes, use the balance of votes to determine setting of the parliamentary agenda. Thus, if parties A and B both poll the same proportion of popular vote, but party B gets more seats, they still have roughly equal weight in setting the parliamentary agenda. On balance, I think this may not be such a good idea, as I could imagine it leading to underhand abuses of the parliamentary system.
  3. Weighting of parliamentary votes on legislative matters: a candidate who is elected with a massive majority has a parliamentary vote that counts for more than one who gets in on a slim majority when voting on legislation. Thus, if party A has more popular vote, but party B has more seats, then party B may form the executive but party A are still in a position to block any legislation with which they take issue. I personally like this idea. I can see it might be criticized for complicating parliamentary processes, but I don't see that's unmanageable (successive governments complicate the tax system with which we all have to deal without any such qualms).
  4. Fixed term parliaments - this has been widely suggested, and seems as if it could be a useful first step as it would tend to reduce the present bias of power in favour of the incumbent majority party. My one reservation would be: what happens if we get a genuinely "hung" parliament who cannot make any necessary decisions - must we be stuck with it for a full term? I think we could survive (or even benefit from) a stalled legislature, but a stalled executive might be problematic.
But all this is probably pissing in the wind. In part from my reading of work by Stuart Kaufmann (At Home in the Universe) on self-organizing complex systems, I come reluctantly to the conclusion that the system isn't going to change itself:  the only people with the power to meaningfully change it are precisely those who have succeeded under the present arrangements. So why would they? It's like asking the turkeys to vote for Christmas. What we get are a bunch of "leaders" whose primary skill is to play the present system, and for whom good administration and policy setting skills are at best secondary. What we need is a change in the "fitness landscape" for political survival, and that isn't going to come from the top. Maybe there is something the technical community can achieve here, building on initiatives like www.mysociety.org (www.theyworkforyou.com, etc.) and www.opendemocracy.net.

For now, new online tools make it easier to write to my representative on matters about which I feel sufficiently strongly and, having cast my ineffectual vote, I still feel entitled to a response.