Far be it from me – a supporter of proportional representation and even, I confess, compulsory voting – to throw shade on the first Prime Minister in my lifetime to commit to electoral reform. But before we get carried away, we should perhaps remind ourselves that in real-time, real-life politics there is many a slip twixt cup and lip.
When we talk about electoral reform, we are inevitably talking about a series of sometimes less-than-uplifting compromises cobbled together by historically situated actors pursuing their own best interests in conditions of greater or lesser uncertainty. As a result, anything can happen – and, as they say, probably will.
Proportional Representation – ideals vs reality
Scrapping first past the post FPTP in favour of a potentially more proportional system (PR) has been something of a pipedream for so long: the 2011 referendum doesn’t count since it was on the Alternative Vote – a non-proportional system that Nick Clegg himself had previously called “a miserable little compromise”? As a result, we have got into the habit of considering reform at a fairly lofty level of normative abstraction, revolving, for instance, around discussion of what would be the fairest way to, say, improve representation, extend participation and promote greater openness – all without sacrificing strong and stable government.
It’s therefore been easy to forget that, as soon as it becomes a serious prospect, reality and human creativity are likely to interfere with the wishes of those seeking the fulfilment of their cherished ideals. Fortunately, perhaps, it can also mess with the best laid plans of those who seek to control the process and the outcome to their own advantage.
The likeliest means by which those managing that process will try to ensure they end up as its beneficiaries (or, at the very least, not its victims) will involve, first, deciding the terms of reference and the composition of Burnham’s putative National Commission.
The fact that the Conservative Party has decided not to take part will admittedly make it harder to argue that there is some kind of consensus around whatever it recommends. But it should make it easier for those parties who do get involved to ensure its recommendations, even if they don’t do them as much good as they’d hoped, don’t actively harm them. While Reform UK seem to have gone cold on PR recently, they might therefore want to think again before they join the Tories’ boycott.
Once the process begins, parties that do agree to take part will, fairly obviously, push for whichever system that they believe will favour them, be it non-proportional (essentially AV or SV) or proportional (essentially List, MMP or STV). Then, depending on their size, they will also start lobbying for whichever “electoral formula” (essentially, the equation used to allocate seats to parties after votes are cast) tends to advantage either smaller or larger parties.
Once the system is decided upon, however, (and assuming, if only for the sake of argument, that it is a variant of PR) the biggest battle will likely be over the threshold which Parties are required to cross in order to be awarded seats in Parliament: if you go low (as in the Netherlands) you may see even more parties represented at Westminster than is already the case; if you go high (like Germany) you’ll probably get fewer. Indeed, even the most hardened Tory opponents of PR might be reconciled to it if they could only be made to realize the extent to which proportionality can be eroded via the ‘right’ decision on a percentage of the vote required to entitle the recipient to seats.
Reformers can game the system – but they can’t guarantee the outcome
For all that the process of reform can be manipulated, however, the good news is that experience the world over suggests that whatever emerges from it is unlikely to turn out quite as those doing the manipulation had hoped. Whatever system is adopted, reality has a nasty but nonetheless welcome habit of ensuring that electoral engineering is not an exact science – nor one that can completely take the politics out of democracy. Eastern Europe in particular is littered with the bodies of parties that, in the years that followed the coming of democracy after 1989, sought to establish and then tinker with electoral systems in order to promote their cause and hurt their opponents.
The bad news, though, is that the very process of electoral reform, because it’s often a messy, less principled and more prolonged affair than its proponents assume, doesn’t necessarily help reconnect the public with their political representatives in the way that reformers hope it will. Indeed, it may even alienate them still further – particularly if, following a less than uplifting reform process, the party they vote for in the election that either fails to make it into the parliament because of thresholds or, if it does so, still ends up being marginalized and ignored.
Reformers then should welcome Andy Burnham’s words. But, in the end, it’s deeds that count.
Originally published at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/burnhams-proposed-electoral-reform-could-have-unpredictable-effects/
