The case against first past the post

 

There is a growing movement on the left for proportional representation for national and local elections. When I question people as to why they want PR I’m inevitably told two things. The first reason is that it is a means to get the Tories out. Now I hate the Tories as much as the next socialist but if, as is usually assumed, they have the electoral system sewn up why would they change it? But, the second reason, which seems to me to be stronger, is that PR would replace a system that is inherently unfair.

Is first past the post inherently unfair? It’s a reasonable question given that in the U.K. it is a system that seems to disproportionately favour one party and that party is the Conservative Party who have formed the government in 77 out of the past 100 years. It is a virtual Tory hegemony that leads people to the conclusion that an alternative system must be ‘fairer’ and the most fair alternative is proportional representation.

The assumptions underpinning the claim that PR is, by definition, fairer need some unpicking. Anybody who reads my blog regularly will know that I am no supporter of the Conservatives. Indeed it should be fairly obvious to even a casual observer that I favour the total transformation of capitalist society into something I make no apologies for calling socialism.

Fairness

It is sometimes asserted that first past the post (also referred to as winner takes all) must be less fair because only the U.K. and Belarus use it. However, this is both untrue and, in terms of fairness, irrelevant. A system is not fair simply because it is popular, it is fair if it satisfies some independent criteria of fairness. Imagine for a moment that only one country in the World was genuinely socialist (some might make that claim for Cuba, for example) would that mean that by definition it was unfair. 

It is worth pointing out though that according to FairVote whilst PR is the most popular form of electoral system for national elections it is only used in 89 of the 174 democracies they surveyed. Winner takes all is used in 64 countries including USA, India, Ethiopia and Canada as well as the U.K. 

In fact, it is only recently that the majority of the World have lived in anything resembling a democracy. Indeed, 2002 was the first year when there were more democracies than autocracies. 

But, even in those countries that are, theoretically at least, democracies there is evidence of growing dissatisfaction with the way the system works. The Pew Research Centre 

surveyed 34 ‘democracies’ and in almost all of them dissatisfaction with the system was high. In Greece, 74%, the U.K. 69%, the U.S. 59%, France 58%, and Japan 53% express dissatisfaction with how democracy is working in their country. What they don’t ask, unfortunately, is what exactly they are dissatisfied about.

They did ask what aspects of democracy people supported. Here there was a noticeable difference between countries but a fair judiciary was first or second choice in almost every country. Free religion tended to top the poll in the remaining countries but was least popular in the other countries. It was most popular in Nigeria, South Africa, Israel, India, Kenya and Turkey. The 34 countries did not include the majority of the Muslim World presumably because most of them would not be considered democracies by the Pew Research Centre.

Dissatisfaction - with what?

Being dissatisfied with a system, and bare in mind that the majority of countries surveyed use some form of PR, is not the same as saying that people want a change of system. It is certainly not the same as advocating any particular system. Did people express more dissatisfaction in systems they considered unfair? It’s a fair question given that PR advocates are placing considerable emphasis on fairness. What we would need is to map dissatisfaction against fairness to see if there actually was a relationship.

Nobody seems to think constructing an index of fairness is a worthwhile exercise. But, we do get an index of happiness. Let’s make a massive, and quite possibly flawed, assumption. People who live in fairer societies should be happier. The U.K. which uses FPTP comes 34th in the World Happiness Index. Costa Rica which tops the Happiness Index uses PR. Ipso facto, as they say, PR must be fairer. Mexico, which is 2nd, has a Presidential system which uses a mixture of electoral systems, including PR. So far, so good, PR, it could be argued, makes people happier. It must therefore be fairer. 

Not to pour water on PR enthusiasts but whilst the U.K. is 34th with its highly unfair, allegedly, FPTP system. Jamaica, a constitutional monarchy (like the U.K., not surprisingly given its the same monarch) and a 2-party system comes in 10th on the HI. Perhaps the truth is elections play so little role in most people’s lives most of the time that they make no impact on their happiness.

In the 2019 Hansard Society report into political participation over one-fifth of people in the U.K. say they do not engage in any political activity at all. Almost half (47%) say they do not feel they have a say in decisions that affect them. 

Reprentative democracy

So,  whilst this is all interesting it does not help answer which system of democracy is most fair. For that we need to think of what the possible systems are because too often the choice is reduced to FPTP or PR. But that assumes representative democracy is the only form of democracy worth arguing about. Whilst you would expect liberal parties (ie all of them) to not see anything wrong with a system that provides them with a livelihood, it is a little surprising, and perhaps just a bit disappointing, that people who situate themselves on the left seem to lack either the imagination or the commitment to argue for a more inclusive form of democracy. 

Of course we consider democracy an important part of liberalism because achieving anything resembling universal suffrage was such a battle. It was only in 1832 that the Representation of the People Act extended the suffrage to men, but not women, who satisfied a property qualification, a rental of £10 per year. Remember at this time many people were on tithe property which meant they paid no rent. In 1867 the vote was extended to working class men. Women were still excluded. It was not until 1918 that the vote was extended to women over 30 who satisfied a property qualification. To summarise, liberal claims to be the epitome of democracy have to be tempered with the knowledge that the elite who controlled that democracy opposed, at every step of the way, any extension of the franchise. As Anthony Arblaster has noted “..’bourgeois’ democracy has proved in more than one respect to be a false dawn, realising only a part of the promise sought by so many of those who struggled to achieve it.” (Arblaster, 1993, 97) He cites the Chartists and the Suffragettes both of whom sought far more than the vote and whose struggles for equality were, in some respects, derailed by obtaining the vote.

But let’s stop this dance. Whilst we are busy skipping round the pole with democracy on it, and thinking all we need do is shape that pole, we are failing to notice that buried beneath it is real democracy. We can only really understand what it is we have lost (indeed most of us never had in the first place) by stepping back and surveying the scene. Instead of asking whether this or that system of representative democracy is fairer, we need to ask what is democracies purpose? Is it, as it is in virtually every so-called democracy of the liberal World a system to allow a small elite to secure well paying prestigious jobs every four or five years? Or, does it have some deeper meaning?

Judging democracy

Robert A Dahl, considered by most who know about these things as one of the leading theorists of democracy makes the point in his excellent (and mercifully short) book Democracy that an ideal democracy is concerned with how to make decisions, not simply how to elect an elite to make decisions for us. He argues for five criteria by which we might judge democracy. They are:

1. Effective participation
2. Equality in voting
3. Gaining enlightened understanding
4. Exercising final control over the agenda
5. Inclusion of adults

By any fair assessment it is hard to think that all citizens can effectively participate in our democratic processes when a handful of billionaires control the majority of the means to shape the debate. I do not disagree that there is inherent unfairness within FPTP as practiced in the U.K. Tony Broomfield’s excellent review of post-war democracy leaves little doubt that the system is rigged. My contention is not that FPTP is fair but rather that PR would be no fairer. It is the notion of representative democracy that is at the root of the problem and finding new ways to choose representatives is simply rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship, except in this case the ship is not actually sinking because those of us who should know better are keeping it artificially afloat.

Robert A Dahl makes the following observation: “..representative government originated not as a democratic practice but as a device by which non democratic governments - monarchs, mainly - could lay their hands on precious revenues and resources they wanted, particularly for fighting wars. In origin then, representation was not democratic; it was a non democratic institution later grafted on to democratic theory and practice.” (Dahl, 1998: 103)

Proving your point

But, I hear the PR advocates, as they continue their gaze on FPTP, cry “we just need a fair system and we will have a democracy, the history does not matter”. Quentin Quade, an American political scientist makes what I think is a valid point about advocates of PR. That is that they “..typically describe it as more "fair" and more "just." ..In fact, each of these good words applied to PR begs a question and calls for a rarely given philosophical argument to establish a meaning for "fair," "just," "representative," and so on. ..The only thing certain about PR is that it will tend to re-create society's divisions and locate them in the legislature. That is its purpose, logic, and result.” In other words, according to this critic of advocates of PR they are looking in the wrong place, make vague and unsubstantiated claims for its efficacy and make logical leaps to make societies ills a result of various voting systems rather than anything else. Referring specifically to Britain he notes: “attempts to attribute Britain's relatively pallid economic record to its majority-forming system are entirely unconvincing. Britain has performed poorly by comparison to some other countries--a weak showing that is traceable in part to poor decisions and not just difficult circumstances. But wise decisions are not guaranteed by any political system, and the impact of unpromising circumstances should not be underestimated.”

So, where does this get us? Advocates of PR can’t realistically claim it is fairer unless they define fair which mostly they don’t. Their argument consists of telling you that an alternative system is not fair and leaving you to draw the conclusion that what they propose is therefore fairer. My advice, though if you are committed to PR you will ignore this, is not to fall for that trick. If the goal of democracy is to enable decisions to be made that have the consent of the majority then it is clear that neither FPTP nor PR work. The fact is that in delegating your responsibility for decision making to somebody else you undermine your own claim to be an equal citizen. As the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau put it in 1762: “..yet it may be asked how a man can be at once free and forced to conform to wills which are not his own.” The fact is he can’t and to bring this up to date, neither can a woman.

When I last wrote about PR I was accused by one person, who probably never read what I said, of seeing the demand for PR as a liberal plot because I noted that in the widely quoted Electoral Reform Societies arguments for PR all the systems they proposed resulted in the balance of power being held by the Liberal Democrat’s. But, in reality it matters little who holds the balance of power the result remains that the decision making in society remains in the hands of a minority elite who are not only rarely challenged but have shown in their treatment of trade unions and of Jeremy Corbyn that there is no depth too low for them to plummet in pursuit of maintaining their political, social and economic superiority. As Quade says PR is not a system which can, or intends, to challenge inequality, poverty or injustice, it simply makes sure that those maintaining that system can claim a legitimacy for doing so. 

The clamour for PR, once the preserve of the Liberals, has now been joined by some big hitters of the left including John McDonnell and Clive Lewis. It’s advocates include Owen Jones Evolve Politics and the Greens. But beyond pretending that it would get rid of the Tories the claims for PR tend to rely on the emotional appeal of “fairness”. If the left want to make a statement about democracy it is not to continue to prop up a system that disenfranchises the vast majority of the people for all but one day every two or three years, but start a conversation about how we develop systems that would enable all of us a genuine say in the decisions that affect us. A conversation that would include our pitiful education system, the ownership of the mass media and the low standard of political representation that we are having to endure. But, let’s be clear those people on the left who are telling you that PR is part of that conversation are modern day snake oil sellers. By definition, a capitalist political system favours the capitalist class and their acolytes. The conversation needed is about replacing that system. And, if I’m honest, the revolutionary situation that could presage that conversation is not upon us. Yet

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