These notes were the basis of a presentation given by Lee Naish,
member of the Victorian branch of the
Proportional Representation Society of Australia
to the Tax Reform Association on 8th November 1995.
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
by Lee Naish
Why do we want Representation?
Making decisions for large groups is very difficult.
Should all the tax payers in the country collectively decide how the
money is to be spent? Could they collectively decide?
Should all members of the PR society collectively decide that the
secretary's most recent postal expenses be reimbursed? Would they want to?
Or would the members prefer to delegate this responsibility to their
representatives?
Making decisions in small groups is easier. Most people prefer to
delegate some decisions.
Why do we want Proportional Representation?
There are many ways representatives can be chosen:
members of rich and powerful families, military leaders, etc.
The underlying principle of democracy is that decisions that
affect the people should largely accord with the will of the people.
One way to improve the prospects of this is for representatives to be
elected. The basis of representative democracy is that the
collective views of the representatives reflect the collective views of
the people. Proportional Representation is simply a more precise
statement of this ideal: the proportion of representatives who hold a
particular view should be roughly the same as the proportion of the
people who hold that view.
Note that if there is only a single representative this is impossible.
Proportional Representation must be based on a corporate body of
representatives.
How can we achieve it?
Many systems that look democratic on the surface do not
result in fair representation.
Voting is not sufficient
Sadaam Hussein won an overwhelming percentage of the votes in a recent
election in Iraq. Was this a triumph of democracy?
As well as voting we need
an environment free of harassment,
a reasonable range of candidates with access to the media and
universal adult suffrage.
In the 1995 Queensland State election in Australia the ALP won government
though it received significantly fewer votes than the Coalition.
As well as voting we need a good electoral system.
Marking X is not sufficient
If voters only indicate their first preference there is simply
not enough information for a good selection of representatives.
Votes may be split across several candidates with similar
views, leading to all those candidates losing while another candidate
with opposing views wins with fewer votes in total.
Votes for candidates who are not successful must be wasted
since there is no indication of the voter's second and subsequent
preferences. Systems that lead to votes being wasted encourage
insincere voting: rather than waste a vote on the genuine
first preference who may be unlikely to be elected, the vote is cast for a
lower preference who has a chance of getting elected. Often this
results in people voting for the "lesser of two evils" and makes it very
difficult for smaller parties to gain ground. Systems based on
marking multiple X's do not solve the problem and sometimes make things
even worse.
Proportional Representation relies on the order of preferences being
specified.
There are two forms of Proportional Representation corresponding to
two ways in which preferences are provided.
The first is the "party list" form where voters vote for a party and it
is assumed that their preferences are identical to the preferences of
the party.
The second form allows voters to indicate their preferences explicitly;
this has many advantages for the voters and is advocated by the
Proportional Representation Society.
Single member electorates are not sufficient
If each electorate returns a single member then with an even
distribution of voters, a group with the support of 50.5% of voters will win
100% of the seats and 49.5% of the votes will be wasted.
The collective views of the representatives clearly
do not reflect the views of the people.
With a different distribution of voters (or electoral boundaries)
the group with 49.5% of the votes can win 99% of the seats!
For example, assume there are 100 electorates, each with 10000 voters.
One electorate has only voters from the 50.5% group, the other 99
electorates all have 5001 "49.5%" voters and 4999 "50.5%" voters.
Deliberate adjusting of the size and shape of electorates to achieve a
desired outcome is called Gerrymandering. Unfair results can also occur
quite by chance, as happened in Queensland in 1995.
The Quota Preferential system
The Quota Preferential system (also called Single Transferable Vote or
STV) is a method of counting votes designed to
result in proportional representation.
Enhancements
The Australian Capital Territory has adopted three enhancements which
complement the Quota Preferential vote counting system. The first two
have been used successfully for many years in Tasmania, where the system
is known as Hare-Clark.
Rotation of ballot papers
Instead of all ballot papers being the same, different ballot papers
have the candidates' names and affiliations listed in different orders.
Each candidate will appear near the top of some ballot papers and near
the bottom of others. This virtually eliminates the effect of the
"donkey vote".
Filling casual vacancies
Casual vacancies are filled by re-counting the ballots that were used
to elect the vacating candidate. This preserves the wishes of the voters
and avoids costly by-elections and divisive undemocratic party
appointments.
Entrenchment
The major electoral provisions of the ACT have been entrenched by
requiring a referendum or 2/3 majority in parliament.
A government can no longer tinker with the electoral system to further
its own dubious motives.
Advantages
There are a great number of advantages of proportional representation.
Here we list a few of them.
There are no safe seats
With single member electorates safe seats are common.
Political parties generally put most of their efforts into trying to
please the minority of voters that are in marginal seats. With
multi-member electorates every seat is marginal and the parties must take
more interest in the views of all voters. Voters also tend to take more
interest in politics if their vote is more likely to actually change
something.
Voters have more choice
Major parties endorse several candidates for each multi-member
electorate. Voters can choose between parties and between different
candidates from the same party. This contrasts with single member
electorates (and party list PR) where the parties and the factions
within parties have much more control over who is elected.
The elected body is more representative
This is obviously a good thing for democracy, whether the elected body
is the parliament of a large country of the executive of a small
organisation.
Lee