democracy – politicians want to give the executive power a clearer mandate by changes to the election system

Fiddling with democracy doesn’t help

While the British have doubts about their district system, the Dutch are actually flirting with the idea.

Per last week, Great Britain has a vice prime minister with one important task: reform of the election system. It is one of the many ‘revolutions’ that took the British democracy by storm in the past few days. The country smoothly moved over from one-party government to coalition in the British manner – stoic and with a quip. But that is only the start of the British revolution – at least when it’s up to vice PM Nick Clegg.

The leader of the Liberal Democrats has taken on a task with low sex appeal, but a highly explosive content. He is going to ask the British to voice their opinion in a referendum on the topic of changes to a constitutional system that has given good service for centuries and has been copied in large parts of the world. Clegg is not only proposing to tinker with British Heritage, but also with the powerbase of some 646 parlementarians, the majority of which he can’t count as his friends. A new design for the Union Jack seems more simple.

Clegg wants to change an electoral system that Dutch politicians have been flirting with for decades. While he was campaigning for electoral change in Britain this spring, old CDA chairman Marnix van Rij and former VVD minister Hans Hoogervorst held pleas for a kind of district system in the Netherlands.

“The background of the discussion is the same in both countries”, says political scientist Kees Aarts of Twente University. “Close ties between the traditional parties and the voter are gone.” In Great Britain that translated itself in crumbling support for Conservatives and Labour. The Dutch debate resurfaced after the municipal elections had shown that the electorate is fragmenting even further. “With changes to the election system, politicians want to give the executive power a clearer mandate.” But according to Aarts it is very much in doubt wether the problems of a modern democracy can be solved in this way. Scientific research is inconclusive on this. “Experiences are tied to the specific circomstances of a country, and it is hard to judge what happens when changes are put to practice. We speak of ‘electoral engineering’, but ‘tinkering’ would be more appropriate.”

In the debates two archetypes of parliamentary democracy collide: the district system and the proportional representation system. In the district system, where parliamentarians have strong roots in the local community, the government usually consists of one party. On paper this results in energetic governments, close ties between voter and politicians, and an outspokenly militant political culture. But minorities have it hard and votes for any smaller party are lost. Clegg received 57 seats for 23 percent of the votes. His new boss David Cameron got 306 seats for 36,1 percent.

In the “Dutch” system of proportional representation, where votes are translated directly into seats, the focus is on an as true as possible reflection of the political landscape. No votes are being lost, minorities have access to parliament. But forming a coalition is laborious, and the voter doesn’t have his own man in the far-away The Hague. (smile, you there in the three-timezone country)

To soften the downsides of both these systems, there have been experiments with mixed forms since 1945. “The past decades, interest in mixed systems has grown.” syas Paul Guerin, head of the election sytem department at IDEA, a consultancy in Stockholm, which mainly has young democracies as their clients. “People are now more interested in advanced election systems that leave room for nuance.”

The two archetypes each had their triumphal march around the world. The Commonwealth adopted the British system, Latin America and French Africa have types of direct representation. The Netherlands abolished the district system in 1917. After the nazi catastrophe, the young German state of 1948 opted as one of the first for a combination of district system and proportional representation. The new German democracy was safeguarded with a voting threshold of 5 percent and a part of the Bundestag representatives is chosen by way of a district system. In the early nineties, New Zealand exchanged its British variant for the German one.

Clegg’s referendum will be about a modest amendment to the district system. By giving voters the option to rate candidates as first, second or third choice, votes will no longer be lost, the system becomes less unfair, and the districts, that exist in Britain since the Middle Ages, are kept intact. With this, Britain would adopt the system of its former colony Australia.

It is far from certain that Clegg would win such a referendum, says Cuerin. “The large parties don’t really want those changes, and it’s fairly possible that the public also can’t be bothered to discard an old habit.” Even if the British would have had the new system in place last week, Clegg would only have had 22 seats more, by calculations of the Stockholm office.

And, says Aarts, there is no proof that system changes make democracies more resilient. In New Zealand, the change didn’t result in problems, but voter attendance did not rise either. He’s also sceptic on the subject of any Dutch change. “I agree with the theorem that this country is on the road to become ungovernable, but the question remains whether a district system would be able to change that. It’s more of a hope than a real expectation.”

Rotterdam, 14 may 2010 / Michel Kerres
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