Democracy? Yes! AV? Hmmm...

Submitted by martin on 6 July, 2010 - 8:55 Author: Martin Thomas
"How to vote"

Discussion article about the Alternative Vote referendum which the Lib/Tory coalition government says it will organise for 5 May 2011.


Labour politicians, and some Tories, have objected to the referendum being set for the same date as local elections in many, but not all, areas of Britain, with the implication that those areas would be given greater weight in the referendum by a larger turnout there.

Tory prime minister David Cameron says he will oppose AV in the referendum, but mildly; Lib Dem leaders say they will not quit the coalition if AV is defeated.

The Labour manifesto in May 2010, and all the candidates for the Labour leadership in 2010, backed AV in general terms, but 114 Labour MPs have come out against it.

The division among Labour MPs cuts across the usual left/right lines. On the left, Katy Clark, Kelvin Hopkins, and Ronnie Campbell, have come out against AV; John McDonnell, for. Jeremy Corbyn has not stated a position yet. Tony Benn, no longer an MP, has backed AV. Hard Labour right-wingers are also to be found on both sides.

Unite and the GMB have come out against AV.

AV means that you vote not just for one candidate but also for second, third, fourth etc. preferences. Preferences are transferred from losing candidates until some candidate, with the help of transfers, tops 50% of the vote.

The broad idea is similar to the two-round voting system in France and other countries, but the detail has important differences. The main country where AV is used is Australia - for the federal House of Representatives and all state elections except in Tasmania.

Some Labour left-wingers fiercely defend "first past the post" (FPTP) as the only system which can produce majority Labour governments. That is doubtful. There have been more Labor governments in Australia, federally and in the states, than in Britain. In any case, to defend a voting system with your main argument being that it helps the result you want is problematic.

FPTP has obvious problems. Minorities are enormously under-represented unless they happen to be locally-specific minorities. That makes it hard for radical left candidates. It would make it hard for a renewed left-wing, union-loyal Labour to avoid wipe-out if the hard Blairites hived off to join with the Lib Dems.

FPTP hugely encourages tactical voting (e.g. Labour supporters voting Lib Dem in large areas of the country).

It artificially skews election campaigning towards a focus on often middle-class "floating voters" in marginal constituencies: voters in safe Labour seats get taken for granted, largely ignored, and effectively encouraged towards political apathy and disengagement.

A suitable variant of proportional representation (PR) would be more democratic, though "for or against PR" is far from being the defining issue of democracy.

Many other procedural reforms would make a bigger difference - annual Parliaments; the right to recall MPs; real control by Parliament over government; even compulsory voting. And all such measures are secondary, as regards the working class being able to achieve any democratic say, to the creation and maintenance of a working-class press and of a political party based on and accountable to the labour movement. (Today's Labour Party is far from that).

What would the effect of AV be? We don't know.

It depends on many details: whether the AV ballot papers will (as in Australia) require voters to fill in all their preferences for votes to be valid, or leave the option of voting only for a first preference; how voters change their behaviour; and, possibly most of all, how the Lib Dems "play" it.

AV would reduce tactical voting. But we do not know how much of current voting is "tactical"; so calculations about, for example, how AV would have changed the numbers of MPs won by different parties in May 2010, are very hypothetical.

On the face of it AV should make it easier for smaller left parties to run candidates, since by pledging second preferences to Labour they can calm fears about "splitting the vote" and letting in the Tories.

In practice it seems to have little effect that way. The Australian non-Labor left's electoral scores have been poor. Both efforts like the Australian Socialist Alliance, currently, and, over history, quite big minority parties - the Communist Party of Australia in its heyday, the Australian Democrats, the Greens, the Democratic Labor Party - have done badly under AV, worse than minority parties in Britain. The Greens, and the Democrats in their day, have depended for their "credibility" on their ability to win seats in the STV (PR) system for the Senate, not in the AV system for the House of Representatives.

In Australia AV tends to push parties into alliances based on agreements to exchange second preferences. At polling booths the parties distribute "how-to-vote" cards advising their supporters how to use their second, third, etc. preferences.

Voters in Australia generally follow that advice: for example, the Democratic Labor Party, a right-wing split from the Australian Labor Party in 1955, was able to take most of its traditionally-Labor voters over into giving second preferences to the Liberals rather than Labor.

On the right, the Liberal Party and the National Party have been in semi-permanent coalition for decades; on the left, the Labor Party and the Greens rely heavily on swapping preferences. Labor lost the 1995 state election in Queensland simply because the Greens, with only 2.9% of the vote, switched their second preference.

Thus in Britain AV might mean the Lib Dems becoming a permanent junior partner of one or another bigger party, and that bigger party (Tories or Labour) remaining in office, in alliance with the Lib-Dems, for a long time, immune to electoral shifts of smaller than earthquake scale. That would mean the Lib Dems being "king-makers" for a substantial period, but maybe also organising their own relegation to permanent junior status and eventual decline.

Or the Lib Dems may calculate that they can be "king-makers" for longer by manoeuvring from election to election, making a preference-swap deal with Labour one year and with the Tories the next.

Or maybe the Lib Dems are strong enough to prosper without any preference-swapping deals, by assuming Labour voters will prefer them above the Tories, and Tory voters prefer them above Labour. The Lib Dems could tell their own voters to choose individually on second preferences, and assume that they will almost always come out with a "third party" score big enough for them to decide what coalition will govern.

Again, that would mean, in the short term: it doesn't matter how you vote, the Lib-Dems' choice still decides the election result, only now it would be the Lib-Dem choice after polling day rather than before.

In either variant, a short period of thriving as a coalition-making "swing-vote" third party might well be short-sighted for the Lib Dems, training the electorate to regard them as only a catspaw for one or other of the "serious" choices, Tory or Labour.

The Australian Democrats used to attempt a version of the "swing vote" stance in Australia. It didn't work: the Australian Democrats were pretty much wiped out electorally between 2004 and 2006, and are no longer a significant party. (10.8% of the Australia-wide senate vote in 1996; 0.6% in 2010).

The Lib Dems could also choose to let each constituency decide its preference-swaps locally. Again, they would probably prosper in the short term. In the longer term, such a policy would be likely to lead the Lib Dems into an effective split into two parties, one tied to Labour in some areas of the country, another tied to the Tories in other areas.

The Lib Dems say that AV, by starting some electoral reform, would open the way for PR to come later. It is more probable that the "sop" of AV would block PR, at least for a long while.

Whether AV is more democratic than FPTP is a question about relative shades of grey. It depends what light you're looking at them in. The outcome depends a lot on the tactical choice the Lib-Dems make about preferences. And that makes it dubious as a democratic reform. Even if all the Lib Dems' possible choices seem to carry a risk of damaging them in the longer term, it is not really a democratic reform to adopt a system which says: in the near future, it doesn't matter how you vote, short of electroal earthquakes the Lib Dems will decide election outcomes.

Another consideration is that the AV referendum is likely to be seen, to some degree, as a referendum on the coalition government.

The Lib Dems are likely to campaign hard for AV: they want to have something to show from the coalition. The Tories will oppose AV, but quite likely in a low-key way. Labour's anti-AV contingent is likely to be more vocal than its pro-AV section.

Comments

Submitted by martin on Sun, 21/11/2010 - 12:21

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