Should the left back the alternative vote in the UK?

There’s a couple of links here:

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/2924

I think the long-term consequences of AV are very good for the left. Under FPTP, centre-left parties have to choose between having maximally progressive positions and having maximally electorally successful positions. Or, at least, they think they have to make such a choice. Under AV, you can simply have two parties that take the two different positions. When it turns out that some of the ‘extreme’ positions are actually popular, especially in cities, that can pull political discourse to the left.

At the very least, I think it us good for Australian Labor, and it’s supporters, to have serious electoral pressure from the left. If the same is likely to happen in the UK, then AV will be a serious good. Even better would be if Labour could be the larger and lefter of a dominant centre-left coalition.

The problem with any predictions are we don’t know how boundary changes will fall..it’s going to be hard now to work out who will “benefit” this time around…but that doesn’t mean the benefit won’t switch around in the future.

Who gets a better deal ultimately comes down to the spread of opinion, geographically speaking, and this can change for a whole variety of reasons every 5 years.

Make your choice on what is better for voters, it’s firmer ground to make a decision from :)

One thing I will say though, despite recent indications the Lib Dems tend to be more socialist than capitalist…and their presence splits the left vote down authoritarian vs liberal lines. Tories, on the other hand, only face a challenge for their votes from UKIP, and only then in a few constituencies.

AV will most certainly help ensure that the Left vote isn’t unfairly split…or indeed that any vote is unfairly split, allowing a weaker but more cohesive minority to steal the win.

Now that we only have two political parties of note in England, how much does FPTP vs AV actually matter in the short run?

Even better would be if Labour could be the larger and lefter of a dominant centre-left coalition.

A left-er Labour wouldn’t be the larger of a dominant-centre-left coalition.

This will be familiar to Australians from (for example) the 1977 elections where the Liberals managed a majority of seats with considerably fewer first preferences than Labour and where the coalition of which the Liberals were part got two-thirds of the seats (a landslide) with only a minority of the vote.

I see that Australian Democrats (or whatever incarnation they were then) had 9% of the vote in 1977. Is there any data on how the Australian Democrat voters ranked their subsequent preferences? Because sometimes people can vote against a specific plausible party government as well as for it.

At some level, Westminster systems tend to produce single-winner outcomes; now matter how many parties get in Parliament, usually a government is quite clearly conservative or progressive. Given this, one of the more important tasks is sorting out if the majority of people wanted a (generally) conservative or a progressive government.

My view is that it might be more important to take into account negative preferences rather than positive ones, to avoid firstly what people don’t want to happen, because of intensity of preferences. AV seems capable of accomplishing this goal.

I’m with Pete @6 and to go against dsquared @4, it may be a now or later issue, but in the long run, we’re all dead. Let’s introduce some splintering to the system, ASAP…

As a note on the partisan pragmatic view, it looks like it will at first favour the Tories, but once splintering sets in it will create useful splits between pro and anti EU Tories and indeed Nadine Dorries and other eccentrics and some more normal types.

I basically am deciding it on this basis; given that it’s a clear example of a “now or later” choice

I think this is quite right. The 600-seat House will probably put additional pressure on both Tories and Labour for additional voting reform, as it will feel much less agelessly settled for everybody concerned. Labour is the big winner from the current system, though, so expect them to hang on to any vestiges thereof as if it were their own lives.

and given that the practical effect of it would be to put the Liberal Democrat party in a permanent coalition-kingmaker’s position

Well before the incumbent government they hardly participated in government at all, which is hardly better.

As long as the oligarchies can buy the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, they will continue to give a damn less about how their servants are elected.

Elections don’t mean anything if the elected is sitting in a rich man’s club discussing some of the rich man’s problems.

No way to prevent it except for radical changes in the “laws” written by and for the rich.

In the long run we will indeed be dead, but I very much doubt it will be FPTP that killed us. This isn’t something like a swine flu epidemic or a run on Northern Rock – it’s the epitome of a long-term, non-urgent issue of the kind that makes sense to postpone in order to get it right. If that means implementing it in conditions where it will not be quite so likely to deliver a wholly undeserved oxygen infusion to the Liberal Democrat Party, this is a risk I am prepared to take.

Wait, you dig on AV cause it can be very non-proportional to first preference proportions, but if it’s 40/40/20 first preference for con/labor/lib, but all the cons hate labor and all the labor voters hate the cons, so they all put lib #2, then isn’t the utility maximizing outcome actually to have a parliament very non-proportional to first preferences and with the lib proportion very upweighted?

What I imagine would happen in the UK if we had AV is that the Lib Dems would offer a watered-down version of the Tory manifesto (let us say, both Tories and Lib-Dem stand as anti-welfare parties, but the Lib Dems defend the NHS). Thus it superficially makes sense for a left of centre person to mark their ballot 1 – Labour, 2 – Lib Dem – on the basis that the LDs were just slightly better than the Tories. To ‘defend the NHS’.

The Lib Dems then get a few seats on this basis, take these 2nd-preference votes as tacit endorsement of their anti-welfare agenda, form a coalition with the Tories, and bring in a raft of right-wing policies which the majority of the electorate didn’t want to see. And then, icing on the cake, vote to ‘reform’ the NHS out of existence because ‘we are in a coalition now, we can’t have it all our own way’.

I’m with chris @26. Single-member districts are inherently unrepresentative regardless of how the voting system works in other respects. In the UK you’re fortunate enough not to be hogtied by an archaic written constitution with quasi-religious status, so you always have the possibility of REAL reform. That’s what I’d work for if I were British.

I don’t know why Myles thinks a lefter Labour can’t be the largest party in a majority coalition. A solidly progressive Labour with a vote in the low 30s, with a centrist coalition partner with votes in the mid 20s, seems both plausible to me, and desirable relative to most viable alternatives.

The practical problem is that if you sketched out a normal distribution of voters (which is more plausible than bimodal) you would see that “30’s from the left” is an actually huge proportion of the width of the spectrum, and given that a) most parties don’t ever get much more than 40% at the best of times and b) a good chunk of the 40% comes from the “hump” of a normal distribution, then within that model a 30% left party would be so far up the “hump” that they would really just be a standard centre-left party. One of the things you overlook is that people who have less mainstream, “hump” politics tend to be more motivated to vote, so what you are seeing in terms of numbers is actually an illusion, because such a system would only get a good drubbing from more “hump” voters turning up to vote to turf out the “more-left” or “more-right” parties.

The practical problem is that if you sketched out a normal distribution of voters (which is more plausible than bimodal)

Aside from the problem of representing politics on one axis, why should I accept your subjective plausibility judgments? If the political discourse is shaped by competition between the platform of Party 1 and the platform of Party 2, I’d expect to see a lot of voters clustered around one alternative or the other — especially if they start having partisan media outlets and so forth. (If this effect gets strong enough it can even suck the multidimensionality out of politics as otherwise independent issues are reduced to picking a team.)

If the political discourse is shaped by competition between the platform of Party 1 and the platform of Party 2, I’d expect to see a lot of voters clustered around one alternative or the other—especially if they start having partisan media outlets and so forth.

Because the platforms are not shaped to purely appeal to voters? Remember, party platforms are essentially a balancing act between party loyalists and “hump” voters. Thus, the voters between the two platforms, rather than around them.

Obviously my mind is made up on this one (incremental reform is to my mind better than no reform, and a failed referendum will be used by the Tory Press and the Prescott wing of Labour to declare the issue settled in perpetuity – not that an Ed Miliband Labour govt. would bother its arse about electoral reform any more than Blair did in any case) but I am amused at how the debate has taken place here. While a certain degree of discussion has taken place on the actual merits of reform, Chris et al do seem to be rather more exercised by the idea that they can ‘stick it’ to the ‘vile’ Nick Clegg.

Now to be fair the LDs did go into government with the Tories, forcing significant defence expenditure cuts and replacing the current tuition system with a significantly more progressive one, so clearly they are history’s greatest monsters and anything they supportis almost certainly bad. But it might just be that they are also advancing, (purely by accident because they are all evil of course,) policies that are both progressive and amenable to progressive goals. At that point I believe progressives should probably support them, rather than wringing their hands about whether they might make Vince Cable smile.

a failed referendum will be used by the Tory Press and the Prescott wing of Labour to declare the issue settled in perpetuity

the British Constitution is unwritten, but the implicit theory of who it is that makes the key decisions on electoral reform here seems mistaken to me.

replacing the current tuition system with a significantly more progressive one

Daragh, you’re an intelligent man and you’re talking to intelligent men. You know as we do that all the “progressivity” of the tuition fee changes is at the top end – it makes the whole system more expensive for everyone, but proportionately more expensive for the most wealthy. And then abolishes the EMA. Don’t try to defend the education changes – that really does cross the fine line that divides “trying to put lipstick on a pig” from “pissing down my back and telling me it’s raining”.

Re sticking it to Clegg: I for my part was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and am pretty fed up with him. I was also pretty fed up with both Blair and Brown – maybe more so, only time will tell. I think at least part of the malaise of British politics has to do with an unrepresentative voting and by extension party system and choosing to perpetuate that system out of mere spite would be totally irrational. Of course it would be naive to believe that everything would be better with a proportional representation.

I think the referendum will lose anyway, a majority of Tory supporters and Labour supporters voting it down. The LibDems can then spin the 30% or so yes votes as an moral victory.

Isn’t AV pointless anyway? It seems to produce in Australia a very stable two party systems as stable as any FPTP system. The last election produce a lot of members of the center-right party, a lot of members of the center left party, one green and I think four independents. The UK parliament has actually a lot more third party representation.

So it is not meaningless. Real PR or the system of New Zealand would still be better.

If you’re going to go down the Australian route – go the whole hog. Jettison the House of Lords, a body that can be stacked at the whim of the government. Replace it with real senate. Use proportional representation to elect the senators: set X people to be elected from each region (Scotland, Greater London, etc.)

The result will always be hung, but that’s all to the better. British politics has a big problem with tyranny of the majority. Look at Thatcher or Blair.

Oops, should have looked further: Antoby Green has already written about it:

http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2011/02/does-the-alternative-vote-bring-tyranny-to-australia.html#more

On “oppose AV to bash Clegg”, this seems misplaced. The Lib Dems were faced with exactly three options in Spring 2010: a) force another election b) support a minority Tory government bill-by-bill or c) form a coalition government with the Tories.

(joining a minority Labour government or a coalition with Labour was impossible, as the only way this could have commanded a plurality of non-Tory MPs for English legislation would have been forcing Plaid Cymru and SNP MPs to vote on England-only matters, which would have been an utter disgrace for all concerned).

If the LDs had backed a minority government without bringing it down, I’m struggling to see how this would have been different from the current situation in terms of cuts (except that there would have been no civil libertarian input into anything). And if they’d’ve brought the government down, the polls indicated that a majority Tory government would’ve been likely at the follow-up election, which would unequivocally have been worse from a centre-left perspective than the current government.

On the other hand, if we’d had AV in place for the 2010 election, the LDs would *actually* have been able to choose whether to support a Labour or Conservative government (as Lab+Lib and Con+Lib would *both* have held pluralities). They would have been able to dictate terms, demand concessions, and ensure that the government they formed featured a policy platform which much closer resembled the one they’d been elected on, irrespective of the party that they ended up allied with.

Now, if we have AV in place for 201x, then it won’t help the Lib Dems gain votes from left-leaning voters who think Clegg is EVIL TORY SCUM, because they won’t second-preference them. It will help the Lib Dems gain votes from left-leaning voters who think the Lib Dems have taken the least worst course of action available to them, because they will.

Meanwhile, it will allow left-leaning voters who think that the Labour party remains overly Blairite and hate the LDs to vote for the Greens / SWP / SSP / Respect first, whilst ensuring that their preference vote is for a Labour candidate to defeat the Tory or Lib Dem standing in the seat. The substantial increase in primary votes for minority left parties that this will produce will be a massive bonus to the whole left-of-Labour ecosystem.

It will also allow right-leaning voters who think that James Delingpole is EXCELLENT and that Europe is EVIL to preference UKIP and put the Tories second. This is democratically the right thing to do (and, irrelevantly but pleasingly, will probably cause the collapse of the Tory party in the longer term).

Overall, everyone gets what they want – and if even you’re a leftie who hates the Lib Dems, then this allows you to back an actual left-wing party while still keeping Labour as your least-worst-choice on the ballot paper, which has got to be a win. Opposing it seems simply baffling.

This is democratically the right thing to do (and, irrelevantly but pleasingly, will probably cause the collapse of the Tory party in the longer term).

The Tory party should have collapsed in 1911, but didn’t, and probably would have done everybody a world of good if they had gone ahead and done so.

I think the real needed reform is multi-member districts

But, as I suggested in the most recent Ireland thread, aren’t multi-member districts more resistant to summary turfings-out of a discredited party?

I’m genuinely torn on this, though my political lizard brain dictates that causing Clegg as much fucking grief as possible is the appropriate response. Either way, I think that an election that requires 50 incumbents to give up their jobs — in a relatively fresh Commons, given the turnover in 2010 — is going to create unusual results, especially if AV is in place.

as I suggested in the most recent Ireland thread, aren’t multi-member districts more resistant to summary turfings-out of a discredited party?

I don’t understand why this is a Bad Thing. Either a party’s vote collapses to Monster Raving Loony Party levels, in which case it won’t get any seats in a MMD either, or it remains a party supported by a significant number of people and hence worthy of a voice in parliament more-or-less proportional to its support.

The fact that commentators call such a party ‘discredited’ doesn’t actually mean anything – that’s just commentator-ish for ‘not as popular as it used to be at some unspecified time in the past’.

it only rewards the LDs if their left-leaning 2010 voters don’t now believe that they’re Tories in disguise and that Nick Clegg is a disgrace.

This seems crucial to me. The Liberals were electorally trivial until the mid-1980s, both in terms of votes and seats. Their standing was transformed by i. the merger with the SDP and ii. the emergence of a solid tradition of Anybody but the Tory tactical voting in seats outside the south east where Labour was unelectable. This is how Clegg’s predecessor in Sheffield Hallam, an honourable man who has since left politics in disgust, originally won a seat which had been solidly Tory since God was a lad.

Now there’s a strong argument that given the distribution of seats in 2010, the decision to go into coalition was in the short term the least bad option available to the LDs. However, in doing so, they entirely pulled the rug out of under the ABT cohort (except possibly half a dozen wonks on boards like this), and we can expect massive defections on that basis, both to other parties and to “none of the above”. The feeling in Hallam is that Clegg may very well lose his seat (almost certainly to the Tory) as a result – in which eventuality I hereby undertake to buy Chris Bertram an unprincipled e-drink.

But this sort of defection won’t lead to voters putting them second, it’ll lead to voters putting them nowhere, and it’s not impossible that their share will fall back to mid-70s levels (10-12%). In which case the residual radical base will peel off and leave the Orange Book gang looking like National Labour in the 30s.

So vote your principles on AV. Clegg will get his in any outcome.

Those of you who are arguing for or against electoral reform based on which side it would benefit, are a bunch of fools who deserve the miserable electoral system that kind of thinking will get you.

Those of you who argue for or against electoral reform based on who you think it “rewards”, are if possible even greater fools. Gee, discarding principles in favour of pretending to play Pavlovian Dogs with your politicians has worked great so far!

When a referendum is called, there is just one question you should answer: Is this system in general better at producing government I would want, if I temporarily forget my specific political preferences?

And the answer is clearly yes. Maybe not by a whole lot, but yes.

Harald – I want an electoral system which delivers party representation roughly proportionate to the votes cast for them on a national basis, with particular reference to the representation of smaller parties. Both multi-member STV and mixed-member top-up systems do this. AV doesn’t. I am therefore neutral in principle as between AV and the current system, so I have to make a final decision on other criteria. Clear now?

_since only the LDs are likely to take large number of second preferences from the two main parties._

I’d imagine that both the Greens and UKIP would take a large number of second preferences from the two main parties. But that’s just a guess.

What on earth is “government I would want” if I’m not allowed to consider what this government does?

Quite simply: a government that reflects voter’s preferences – whatever they may be – as closely as possible .

I was thinking “large enough to take any seats”, so I agree with both of you on that point.

And yes, I’m very sceptical about the political impact of ‘wasted’ votes. The BNP got twice the votes of the Greens in the last election, and UKIP got nearly double the BNP vote. If the UKIP and BNP votes start piling up under AV, the prospect of giving a voice to the smaller parties is more likely to be used as an argument against PR than an argument in favour. Also, appearances are powerful – and the appearance will be that lots of people are voting for the extremes, but most of them are only doing it as a bit of self-indulgent expressive voting before knuckling down to their civic duty and giving their second preference to one of the big three. Representation confers popular legitimacy far more than the other way round. In Italy the entire far left has been unrepresented in Parliament since 2008, owing partly to a change in the electoral system but mainly to a hostile manoeuvre by the then leader of the Democratic Party. The result was that the far left was blamed for its own disappearance, in the usual “these silly self-indulgent Trotskyist headbangers” opinion pieces, and then forgotten about until the next election came round – bringing with it opinion pieces on the lines of “will those silly self-indulgent Trotskyist headbangers get it together this time?”. People – political commentators very much included – tend to take the existing electoral system as a given and judge parties by their success or failure in its terms; I don’t think AV would be any different. PR actually lets other parties succeed – that’s why it’s a game-changer.

_In 2010, if you were left-leaning and lived in a Lab/Con marginal, it was your absolute duty to vote Labour, even if your MP was a horrific NuLab creature._

Aside from the difficult my poor brain has with making an absolute duty conditional on a contingent preference, we’ve been here before and no it wasn’t.

Sorry Chris. Hyperbole based on personal preference, not rigorous philosophical analysis.

(tho’ I don’t think “absolute duty based on a contingent preference” is that mystifying. If your viewpoint is “the UK should have the most left-leaning government possible”, then the unequivocally best way to achieve that in the 2010 election if you lived in a Lab/Con marginal was to vote Labour, and I’d deeply question the commitment to that principle of anyone who voted otherwise.)

Is this system in general better at producing government I would want, if I temporarily forget my specific political preferences?

I tried this, but found that once I’d forgotten my political preferences, it was awfully difficult to work out what kind of government I wanted.

I’d imagine that both the Greens and UKIP would take a large number of second preferences from the two main parties

But for a large-party voter under AV, a third preference where the second preference is a Green is basically a second preference isn’t it? Pretty much definitionally, the small parties will have been eliminated before the large-party preferences are taken into account

Chris: OK, I see – so if your MP is Phil-Woolas-But-With-A-Tory-Opponent (sorry, my mental database of Labour MPs who are so unspeakable that it would have been better for the country had a Tory been elected in their place is limited enough that I’m struggling), then removing him from the PLP is better than tolerating his presence. I get that in principle.

The results above are from the 2005 election.

If we’re going to get onto “fairness of the voting system in UK national elections”, it’s worth bearing in mind that national vote share rates are *not directly relevant to anything*.

Imagine two constituencies, Poshton and Chavton. Both have 80,000 voters. In Poshton, the turnout rate is 100%; in Chavton, it’s 50%. In Chavton, 100% of the electorate votes Labour; in Poshton, 100% of the electorate votes Tory.

So the result in parliamentary terms is going to be, completely rightly, one elected Labour MP and one elected Tory MP. Nobody is being disenfranchised, and everything is fair. But if you were to calculate the aggregate figures, then the Tories got twice as many votes as Labour. If you were a partisan tit, you could then whine on and on about how this was unfair.

A lot of whining about ‘Labour advantages’ in UK elections follows this: it neglects the fact that people in Labour constituencies are less likely to vote than people in Tory constituencies. This is in no sense a deficiency in the democratic system; it’s just a loophole that Tories use to try and rig elections in their favour.

The figures for 2010 (excluding sub-national parties) are

Labour: 29% of votes = 39.7% of seats
Conservative: 36.1% of votes = 47.2% of seats
Lib Dem: 23% of votes = 8.8% of seats
Green: 1% of votes = 0.1% of seats

Parties without seats: 5.6%

AV might address that imbalance between the Lib Dem vote and the number of seats they manage to get, and might erode the over-representation of the main parties as a result (although my gut feeling is that the erosion would be asymmetrical: I think there would be more Labour->Lib Dem traffic than Tory->Lib Dem, and more Lib Dem->Tory than Lib Dem->Labour). But it would do nothing for the parties that are currently unrepresented, unless they mounted a localised “you believe in us really“ vote-poaching operation in one or two target seats – and that’s hardly setting the bar much lower than it is now.

OK I phrased that last sentence hopelessly badly; try again.

Anyone who wants their votes not to be distorted or discarded is going to be gaming the system in place: which is therefore never going “reflect” the “preferences” of those who want just to sit back and be “reflected”, by voting and nothing more.

There’s no there there, Harold: your “representative” is the same as novakant’s “reflective”; it’s a mystical numerological abstract. It’s possibly achievable with a lot of priestly tinkering by some directorate of bean-counters — provided they’re left unbothered by all the messy people organising politically out in the active world — but so what? Who gets to choose the directorate? How? “Fairness” isn’t something you can detour round by supplying a chart to read off, it’s the core of the argument.

Hopefully, you want a government that is representative of the people’s interests and values, and what you ask for may indeed be a good way to get closer to the ideal. But that doesn’t mean AV isn’t an improvement over FPTP.

I want a system in which a much wider range of political beliefs gains expression, to the point where it’s impossible to form a government without taking into account some parts of the spectrum that are currently permanently excluded. AV will absolutely not bring that system about, and I don’t believe it will bring it any closer. It is therefore not an improvement over FPTP – at least, the extent to which it is an improvement is small and debatable, and it’s quite legitimate for that small positive to be outweighed by larger and less speculative negatives.

Anyone who wants their votes not to be distorted or discarded is going to be gaming the system in place: which is therefore never going “reflect” the “preferences” of those who want just to sit back and be “reflected”, by voting and nothing more.

I really don’t see how wanting votes to be translated into political power in a roughly proportional manner implies either political naivete or apathy on the part of those proposing it.

Imagine two constituencies, Poshton and Chavton. Both have 80,000 voters. In Poshton, the turnout rate is 100%; in Chavton, it’s 50%. In Chavton, 100% of the electorate votes Labour; in Poshton, 100% of the electorate votes Tory.

This is self-contradictory. 100% of the Chavton electorate votes Labour *and* 50% don’t vote at all? That’s 150%.

If you instead say “50% of the Chavton electorate votes Labour and the other 50% don’t vote” then (as much as I dislike the Tories in the real world) the hypothetical-Tory argument looks pretty convincing — they really DO have more support. Assuming Chavton isn’t being vote-caged somehow, people have the right to leave work to vote, they can reach their polling places, etc., the decision not to vote is a decision, even if it’s sometimes self-undermining, and I don’t see how a supposedly democratic process can just ignore it. Maybe half of them have a “it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference” or “plague on both their houses” attitude (surely that can’t be unique to the US) and not voting is how they express it.

Imagine two constituencies, Poshton and Chavton. Both have 80,000 voters. In Poshton, the turnout rate is 100%; in Chavton, it’s 50%.

Except both manifestly do not have 80,000 voters, as things stand. One constituency has 70,000 voters (or less), and the other 80,000, once you realise that the Labour constituencies have generally been hemorrhaging population.

AV is pretty useless, and its advocates oversell it (you don’t need 50% of votes cast, there can still be tactical voting) and perhaps over criticise FPTP (e.g. people still have 2nd preferences in a FPTP election, just no-one bothers to find out what they are, so we can’t simply say a winning candidate with less than 50% of the vote does not have the support of 50% of the electorate).

On the other hand voting Matthew Elliot is in charge of the ‘yes’ campaign so there’s really no choice.

Matthew has a very good point for any UK leftie activist tempted to side with No2AV to shaft Clegg: M Elliot, of Taxpayers Alliance fame, is far less likeable than Mr C.

(I guess my point is now moot, given that the Commons has been reduced to 600 seats.)

Sorry about the double-post.

Chris – I don’t understand that take at all. Maybe it’s because I studied too much British politics at uni, so it’s drilled into my head that THE CONSTITUENCY IS EVERYTHING. My preferred system would be somewhere that elected the lower house on constituency-based AV, and the upper house on population-wide PR. Oddly enough, and entirely by accident, I seem to have ended up living in such a place.

I should point out that a system which prized constituencies above all is somewhat incompatible with a rigid party discipline, which Britain has, and of which Australia has an even more austere version.

In Australia’s case, the Labor Party has an entertaining ban on floor-crossing in any circumstances whatsoever, thus extinguishing any constituency autonomy. I say entertaining, but of course I mean something more along the lines of absolutely deplorable.

In Australia’s case, the Labor Party has an entertaining ban on floor-crossing in any circumstances whatsoever, thus extinguishing any constituency autonomy. I say entertaining, but of course I mean something more along the lines of absolutely deplorable.

Well, no. I can provide you with a list of links of Unpunished Floor-Crossings In Australian Labor Politics (mildly surprised this isn’t a Wikipedia link already, otherwise I actually would do so rather than pointing out that I can), or I can make the obvious point that in the context of the current Federal government, expelling a member for floor crossing on a vote of deep constituency importance would be, erm, counterproductive. They reserve the right to punish floor-crossers when it isn’t a vote of conscience, but that’s the opposite of the same thing.

Also, you have to bear in mind that Australian Labor was set up by people who were disillusioned and angry at the US Democrats, so it’s not surprising that their rules are pretty much the opposite.

Phil – the point is if you are voting to stick it to someone then there’s a lot more someones on the anti-AV side who need it sticking to than on the pro-side (obv. Nick Clegg has more power than Matthew Elliot, but I suspect he’ll be annoying for less long)

Well, no. I can provide you with a list of links of Unpunished Floor-Crossings In Australian Labor Politics (mildly surprised this isn’t a Wikipedia link already, otherwise I actually would do so rather than pointing out that I can), or I can make the obvious point that in the context of the current Federal government, expelling a member for floor crossing on a vote of deep constituency importance would be, erm, counterproductive.

Ah. I would be quite happy to see such a list, if only to compare it against the Canadian case (quick note: Canada has had a lot more floor crossings given recent minority government).

But my point stands that rigid party discipline is antithetical to the spirit of constituency parliamentarianism. You can either have proportional representation and party discipline, or you can have constituency politics and free votes. But constituency politics and party discipline is basically (in the case of U.K. and Canada, although less so for Oz given the Senate) a recipe for elected dictatorships.

Belle le triste, perhaps a concrete example will help. If tomorrow you woke up Texan and Republican, you would likely think that the voting system in the U.S. was excellent, because you probably would live in a largely Republican district, and you will end up voting for a winner. (Indeed, even your vote in the primary will make a lot of difference to the outcome.) If tomorrow you woke up a Democrat from Texas, you might consider first-past-the-post elections in single-member districts to be a terrible system, because your candidate is almost certain to lose and your vote to be wasted. If tomorrow you woke up among the Greens you would be despondent because there is no Congressional district in the country where a Green candidate can win a first-past-the-post contest.

If there’s jerrymandering (which there definitely is, particularly in Texas), or restrictive laws on who can appear on the ballot, or voter registration laws designed to nullify voters, then who you are and where you live is even more critical to whether your vote counts.

Harold’s point is, and my point is (but Harold said it better), if your opinion on the quality of the voting system depends on who you are or where you live, then the voting system is broken.

Does the AV proposal that is to be voted over in the referendum only include a first and a second preference vote? Although inferior to PR, a more sensible system would be to count all preferences. Something like STV should be possible in single-member constituencies too.

@113: How would single-member AV make them more relevant? Sure, some increased number of people might cast first-preference votes for them, but that doesn’t give them any seats in Parliament. At most, it might reveal how much support they already have among people who are tactically voting for a major party.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be in their favor — minor parties in a system rigged to not represent minor parties can always (and fairly plausibly) claim to have hidden supporters that are voting tactically, although this claim sometimes has a sort of lurkers-support-me-in-email quality. The true thinness of their support might be revealed by a voting system that less strongly encourages tactical voting.

Meaningfulness has to come from your voting bloc and single-member AV isn’t going to give them one.

“They reserve the right to punish floor-crossers when it isn’t a vote of conscience, but that’s the opposite of the same thing.”

This is incorrect. The Labor rule confers no such discretionary right. Except in the case of a declared conscience vote, someone who crosses the floor (even to vote in favor of a commitment made in the party platform and subsequently abandoned by the Parliamentary party) is deemed to have expelled themselves. No hearing, no right of appeal, no discretion.

The conservative parties pride themselves on their independence. Someone who crosses the floor more than once or twice will certainly lose their party endorsement and therefore their seat, but at least in theory they have the option.

Coming back on topic, I can’t imagine Labour giving this more than token support. With the Tories advocating a No vote, and the LibDems polling close to single digits, this proposal has about as much chance as suggesting that the capital of the UK should be moved to the neutral ground of Oodnadatta (not necessarily a bad idea, but …).

Given the inevitability of failure, it makes sense for Labour to reject the legitimacy of the referendum and, as I said above, treat it as a referendum on the coalition (ie on Clegg).

JQ:
1) the most recent example, Amanda Fazio, certainly wasn’t deemed immediately to have expelled herself. Her current status is ‘suspension’, and press reports suggest she’ll be unsuspended after the NSW election. Not sure how that fits with the party’s official laws, but it’s clear that in practice it doesn’t (necessarily) work as you say.

2) thinking of King O’Malley and friends – AIUI Labor was inspired by both the aims and the mistakes of the US Labor movement. I didn’t realise that was even a controversial claim…

john b

I wasn’t aware of Fazio’s case. The last floorcrosser in NSW was George Petersen 15 years ago, who was automatically expelled – presumably the rules now allow a hearing.

King O’Malley was sui generis and I’m not aware that he had any involvement with either the Democratic Party or the labor movement in the US. Certainly, the Australian Labor Party, like the rest of Australia at the time was much more influenced by developments in Britain than in the US. We did copy the US constitution but only in a formal sense – nothing like the Bill of Rights

I’m a bit bewildered as to why we should continue to tolerate a clearly dysfunctional electoral system in order to punish the Lib Dems. Granted their behaviour since the last election has fallen somewhat short of what might have been desired of them. However should AV fall in the referendum the following political parties will be the beneficiaries.

A) The Tories
B) The Labour Party

I’m guessing that most people here aren’t that keen on Mr Cameron so I’m not sure why they would like him to dodge the one bit of the coalition agreement that would genuinely cause him pain if it were passed. The other beneficiary would be the Labour Party. Well, I hesitate to breach the act of indemnity and oblivion that was passed once it became clear that Mr Clegg would form a coalition with the political party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons but I seem to recall that the Labour Party’s performance when it held a parliamentary majority was not entirely stellar. The coalition has been pretty bloody awful but as long as they don’t start an illegal war in the Middle East their moral superiority over the last Labour government seems fairly assured.

Now granted Mr Miliband has been making fairly sympathetic noises since his election as Labour leader (apart from his decision, fleetingly, to appoint Mr Woolas as his spokesman on immigration), however given that Mr Miliband has, by and large, appointed himself the leader of the tendence Dr Henry Jekyll in the party of the Iraq War and Extraordinary Rendition it surely behoves most leftists to support him against the tendence Mr Edward Hyde, represented by such sterling figures as John Reid, David Blunkett and so forth who are campaigning against AV.

To sum up: if the referendum about AV falls the main beneficiaries will be the masterful David Cameron who will have pulled off the equivalent of persuading the Lib Dems to sell their souls and not even get Wales in exchange and the fraction in the Labour Party which thinks that the Labour Party is at its best when it governs as a party of the authoritarian centre right. If the image of Mr Reid and Mr Cameron waving their champagne glasses, arm in arm, at the camera appeals to you when the result is in, then vote against AV. If not, as they used to say in Aragon, not.

If you believe in democracy, surely there is a difference between the type of government you want and the government that obeys all your particular preferences. Which would you think better: a government that follows the popular will, at least generally, or a dictatorship with you at the head? If the former, then you prefer a government that will not follow all your preferences, assuming you sometimes have unpopular positions, which must be true of most everyone.

I don’t believe AV would hurt the Tory Party at all; I think this is a genuine point of principle for Cameron, buggered though I may be if I know what the principle is.

At the last few elections there has always been talk of “keeping the Tories out”, proposals for vote swapping between Labour and Lib Dems, and so on. Whatever you might think of the behaviour of the Lib Dems in the last 9 months, I can’t see Cameron having a warm fuzzy feeling about AV.

Plus, of course, he’s a Conservative. On the subject of their views on constitutional change, the clue is in the name.

Plus, of course, he’s a Conservative. On the subject of their views on constitutional change, the clue is in the name.

I don’t particularly see what’s conservative about an electoral system that in its modern incarnation was set up by the first post-war Labour government, and in any case consistently favours Labour.

From the point of view of anyone born after WW2 (i.e. Cameron and most of the electorate) the current electoral system might as well date from time immemorial. Regarding the constitution, I would expect Conservatives, especially Conservatives of Cameron’s social backgroud, to be, well, conservative.

(Does FPTP favour Labour over AV? I thought “unfairly favouring Labour” was usually brought up in terms of equalising constituency sizes, which isn’t included in the referendum.)

No, I’m suggesting that you can’t only have one side running neck-and-neck.

FPTP, compared to AV, even more drastically under-represents Lib Dem voters

Well it doesn’t, necessarily, because lots of people who vote Lib Dem under FPTP may be voting tactically, where their own favoured party has no chance of winning. (The fact that the Lib Dems spend most of their time appealing for these votes, and the rest of it complaining that “their” vote is under-represented in Parliament, is absolutely quintessential LibDemmery.)

I mean, I just find it really hard to believe that Labour commands the loyalty of 16 million or so votes at every election (that’s Labour + Lib Dem). I find it easy enough to believe that Tories are always unpopular, but the notion that Labour is always ahead by something like 60% is not very convincing.

If by some strange and inexplicable happenstance Lib Dems had 250 seats and Labour 60 tomorrow, I wonder how many people will actually miss the big Labour party, other than very loyal Labour supporters.

Also, this: Bogdanor (David Cameron’s tutor at at about that time, incidentally)

This explains a hell of a lot.

Full proportional representation would of course be more likely to give much more benefit to UKIP and the BNP than AV.

I tend to think that higher turnout is better than lower turnout even if the people who start to turnout are people whom I disagree with

Yep, AV isn’t perfect but it is a MASSIVE improvement on FPTP, which is pretty well guaranteed to create unrepresentative goverments from time to time. Mind you, I think the optional AV system (a la NSW and Queensland) is not as fair as a full system (such as we have here in OZ for our national elections) – it’s basically not a big enough departure from FPTP – but any improvement is better than none and you’ve got to take such opportunties when they come.

Letting your annoyance at its proponent colour your vote in the referendum is extremely dumb. The dynamics are such that you won’t get another chance to change it for decades (at least) if the referendum fails. By then the ‘orrible Clegg will have long faded from memory in favour of some ‘orrible Tory or New Labourite who got there by virtue of the grossly defective and unfair electoral system that kept Maggie Thatcher in power in the early 80s.

The ‘plural left’ arguments for AV are symptomatic of the deflation of ‘Left’ ambitions. So what British socialists want is their own Die Linke? A party commanding ~10% of the vote, which can, at best, participate in center-left governments as a junior partner? It’s as if Engels and August Bebel aspired to building a party that could govern alongside the National Liberals.

@146: I’m not sure I understand your question. They can’t very well expect *more* representation in Parliament than they have support among voters. Expecting to at least not have less is a starting point, and one that gives them a platform from which to argue that more British workers would be better off supporting them instead of another party.

ISTM that the alternative is forming a big-tent party that can get over 50% of the vote in favorable districts and win them even under FPTP, but that requires watering down your agenda nearly to unrecognizability — in the US quite a few leftists are profoundly unsatisfied with the results of such an approach, even when the resulting party wins elections. Britain isn’t encumbered with a Senate, but still, there’s little reason to expect a large coalition party to completely follow the wishes of a group that is a minority even within the party, and when it does so incompletely, much wailing and gnashing of teeth is sure to result.

Ultimately, the fact that a group as small as 10% isn’t going to get its way very often (if you don’t count the issues everyone agrees on) is a necessary part of democracy: if the small party often gets its way, then the larger parties aren’t getting theirs (on issues they disagree on). So the only path to more power is to build more support in the population.

My suspicion is this: after the experience of the 1980s, British leftists internalized the idea that the public rejected Labour for being too left-wing. Ambitions narrowed to realizing their perceived bedrock 10% support in a little slice of parliament — that’s fair and democratic, after all.

My questions are: Isn’t this a naturalization of the left’s current weakness (perhaps thereby feeding back into that weakness)? Did Michael Foot’s Labour fail because it was too left, or because of other reasons (e.g. weak and craven leadership, revisionist program)? Can a political party create majority support through decisive action and strong leadership, or is the function of parties to simply reflect what the electorate has already come to believe? (political causation as unidirectional)

I’m playing devil’s advocate-as-left sectarian, but I do think stuff like the Bernstein-Luxemburg debate is still very relevant.

It’s a no-brainer. The left suffers the consequences of vote-dilution far more than the right does. It makes both Labour and Lib-Dem seats safer. As far as permanent ConDem majorities go, the reality is that, due to the effects of plummeting major party votes and the rise of third parties (this is a trend all round the world, and is accelerating) Britain is now doomed to permanently indecisive elections with the Lib-Dems playing kingmaker. You’ll get LabDem next time round.

I believe that PR would be a good thing because it would bring about (quoting myself) “a system in which a much wider range of political beliefs gains expression, to the point where it’s impossible to form a government without taking into account some parts of the spectrum that are currently permanently excluded”.

Sure, but AV isn’t PR, or even remotely close to it, so isn’t this point a bit off-topic? AV won’t put a single Green in Parliament, let alone a Socialist, unless their supporters are enormously more concentrated (geographically) than I think. As long as Labour > Green > others is a more common preference set than Green > Labour > others, the Green can’t win a single-member district under practically any system.

When factions were synonymous with regions (itself aided by communication limited to the speed of a horse), representation by geography made sense; now it doesn’t so much.

Consequently, single-member constituencies, with a clear link between elector and elected, are a vital breakwater between the frequent horrors of government policy and the nastiest parts of their implementation.

ISTM that multi-member districts would have better constituent service. You would almost always have at least one MP with political leanings favorable to what you want from them (and/or favorable to your own politics), and almost always at least one in the majority (not necessarily the same one, of course). In single-member districts, if your one representative is hostile to your politics or your goals, or just a powerless backbencher from the minority, that’s it; you don’t have any backup options.

But what do I know, I’ve never actually lived under a multi-member district system.

Sure, but AV isn’t PR, or even remotely close to it, so isn’t this point a bit off-topic?

If you scroll back up you’ll see that when I originally wrote that line I was explaining why I oppose AV despite not being a fan of the status quo.