2011-04-10 AV Referendum
Duration: 00:14:50
Transcript
David Deutsch
The referendum on whether Britain should change its voting system to the alternative vote system, called AV, is now approaching. And I’m worried that in the debate about this, the criterion that seems to me to be the decisive one in choosing a voting system isn’t even being mentioned by either side in this debate. But first, why is this issue of what is a better or a worse voting system, why has that come up at all? As opposed to debates about which policies and which politicians are better, which is what political debate is usually about in an advanced democratic political system. Well, it’s come up because the existing voting system, which is usually known as first past the post, has a strong tendency to give the two most popular parties a larger proportion of the seats in parliament than the proportion of the votes they get in the country as a whole. And correspondingly, the smaller parties all get a lower proportion of seats than their proportion of the votes. This non-proportional response of the first past the post system is deemed to be unfair and biased by some people. And the point of AV is to reduce this bias, this supposed bias, against the smaller parties. But even aside from that, a lot of the debate has involved the two sides talking completely past each other on that issue, what you might call the arithmetic of fairness. The AV side, as I’ve just said, it says, look, the existing system isn’t proportional and so it’s biased against the smaller parties. And the proponents of the existing system point to a completely different issue, which is also about arithmetical fairness, namely that the AV system and actually any system that is any more proportional than first past the post gives the smaller parties and especially the third largest party a disproportionate political power, even though it gives it a more proportionate number of seats. And the reason that happens is that, well, in any system it’s very rare for one political party to be the favourite party of more than 50% of the electorate. And so any system that reduces this alleged unfairness to the smaller parties will statistically tend to prevent any party from having an overall majority of MPs either. And so it will prevent them from forming a government and so they will have to form a coalition with other parties, usually the third largest party. And that is what gives the third largest party in particular enormously disproportionate political power. That happens in two ways.
The first way is that that party then chooses who is to be the Prime Minister, because the leader of the third largest party can choose either the largest party or the second largest party to form the government with. And there’s nothing in AV or in any other system that will make the leader of that third largest party lean in the same direction as the electorate leant. So the third party leader can choose to put the second party leader into office as Prime Minister or the leader of the leading party. So it’s the kingmaker. And that power of the third largest party leads to another disproportionate power that it then has, which is that it can make conditions for whom it will pick to put into government. And through these conditions it can insert its own policies into government policy, no matter how unpopular those policies are with the electorate. Now, I should say that even the existing system, the first past the post system, does produce hung parliaments and therefore coalition governments every so often, every couple of decades. And so by this criterion of arithmetical fairness, that it shouldn’t give disproportionate political power to the smaller parties, even our existing system is actually biased towards the third largest party. And on that view, AV would do nothing except exacerbate what is already quite a serious injustice in the system. Instead of just doing so occasionally, it would put the third largest party into government in most future elections forever. And in that case, there would be almost nothing that the voters could do to reduce that power of the third party to override their wishes. For instance, let’s suppose that the third largest party leader is in a coalition and is therefore in charge of some ministry or other, and is doing things that you consider to be bad as a voter.
Well, at the next election there’s no way you can deploy your vote to remove that person from power. You can vote against them as much as you like. In fact, in that situation, most voters are already doing that. They’re already voting against the third largest party. But whether you cast your vote for the first party or the second party in your protest against what the third party is doing in government, that minister will probably still be in office after the election, whether the first two parties or the electorate like it or not, because that will be the price of joining any coalition. The third largest party just isn’t going to join the coalition unless it gets ministerial jobs as a result and policy as a result. So, as I said, both sides in the referendum debate are focusing on different aspects of arithmetic fairness, and that they’re talking completely past each other, and neither of them is addressing the issue that therefore logically comes up of what criterion should be used to distinguish between good and bad political institutions. Well, fortunately, this issue has been addressed by the great philosopher of reason in the 20th century, Sir Karl Popper. And his solution comes in two parts. The first part is to avoid a certain irrational fantasy, namely that there exists some way of setting up a government that knows in advance what is right, that will not enforce mistakes and bad laws and impose incompetent leaders on people, because it has knowledge in advance of what will work, what will be right, and what will not.
Now, this is the fantasy which in times past put aristocracies or hereditary monarchies into power, like the rule by the best is what aristocracy literally meant, and it is the fantasy that has often put dictators into power, and it is just impossible because mistakes are inevitable. Mistakes are the human condition. Mistakes are legion. The difference between a rational political system which is capable of making progress and irrational systems that are not capable of making progress is entirely in their ability to correct errors that have already happened, not in some magical ability to prevent errors from happening at all. And therefore, Popper’s criterion for political institutions is this. A rational institution of government, and that includes electoral systems, is one that makes it as easy as possible to remove bad policies and bad rulers without violence. OK, so how do First Past the Post and AV fare when they are judged by Popper’s criterion? Well, transferable vote systems, including AV, have the following argument that they can make in that regard, in their own favour. Suppose that in a particular constituency there is a consensus that the sitting MP is either incompetent or is going to vote for very bad policies in Parliament. And suppose that there is also a consensus that a particular rival of that MP would actually be unequivocally better. The constituents needn’t agree that that rival is the best candidate, but just that that candidate is better than the incumbent.
If there is such a consensus, then in an alternative vote system they can all put that candidate as second choice, and then, if they’re lucky, the arithmetic will work out in such a way that the second choice votes will add up enough to remove the incumbent MP. The trouble with that is that a system that, even if it can eliminate a particular legislator who is deemed to be either incompetent or have bad policies and so on, that system is completely ineffective if it adds up to a system which, at the level of what laws are actually passed, can’t correct errors. If it can’t correct errors at that level, then it doesn’t make any difference whether one can eliminate particular legislators who are deemed to be bad. And it is at that level of lawmaking and choosing leaders that all systems other than first-past-the-post fall down badly. Their effect is to entrench the third party in power. The leader of the third-largest party doesn’t fear the electorate, nor the first two parties or their supporters. He or she may fear the rise of the fourth-largest party, but that is a really bad tail by which to wag the dog of the policy of the entire country. In fact, if I were a supporter of the third party, and therefore if I was tempted by the prospect of my party being put permanently into government by an electoral system, nevertheless I would fear this even more, because as stultifying as the AV system would be for the country, it would be a catastrophe for the third party itself, which would then have no incentive to create political knowledge, create better policies.
Its entire functioning would be in wheeling and dealing for a fixed set of policies for a fixed constituency to influence the other parties, regardless of the wishes of the electorate. A rational political system, therefore, is one in which the politicians in power are constantly afraid that if they don’t put things right, the electorate will put them out. Conversely, we need to avoid systems like AV in which politicians can more easily relax about how the electorate feels, because if they’re the third party, they know that it would take enormous unlikely swings in opinion to force them out, while the two top parties know that even if they lose some significant support among the population, provided they make the right deal with the minority parties after the election, they can still stay in power. In fact, this almost happened even under the existing system at the last British election. Under AV, it would practically be a fixture, and that would be a catastrophe for political progress.
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