The new government’s commitment to a referendum on the Alternative Vote system means that the question of electoral reform may be about to receive the kind of sustained national attention it has not enjoyed since the early 1980s. But before we sink without trace into the technical details of AV or other systems, it’s worth standing back and asking a prior question about the very point of elections. We may think we all agree on that but on closer inspection we don’t.
One prominent view holds that the chief purpose of elections is “to create a government”. Advocates of this view, in parliament, the City and the media, are easy to spot. They get very agitated at the prospect of elections producing “hung parliaments.” They warn of weak, unstable government, wracked by chronic indecision and vulnerable to minority sectional demands. They predict market collapses. They mention
On this view, elections are instruments of effective governance. The very term “hung parliament” – only recently adapted from the American term “hung jury” – connotes failure: the people couldn’t make their minds up, delivering an ambivalent outcome ill-suited to an adversarial political culture which, in spite of its shortcomings, “has served us well”.
A very different view is that the defining purpose of elections is to represent the people’s views. The primary concern is not with the output of elections but their input – how they express the range, diversity and complexity of the people’s views. They too are easy to spot. They get very cross about how the current first-past-the-post system generates a scandalous disproportionality between votes cast for parties and seats won. They run around brandishing incriminating statistics about how many more votes it takes to elect a Liberal Democrat or Green MP than a Labour or Tory one. They demand something called “fair votes”.
I am unhesitatingly in the second camp. If what we want is an efficient method of “creating a government”, we don’t really need elections at all. We could simply have someone appoint our governors for us – a monarch, for example, or an expert commission – or we could select them by lottery. But elections aren’t a mere instrument of effective government, they are the most important constitutional process by which governments become “representative”, and so – in a democracy – legitimate.
But what exactly should be “represented” in an election? The current system represents locality, but the particular interests of medium-sized pieces of territory within a nation (or rather, within the four nations of the
The only way to ensure that these are faithfully represented in parliament is to allow a broad enough diversity of political parties to emerge which mirrors people’s actual convictions. Many voters – Christians included – found themselves seriously vexed on May 6 at having to vote for a “least-worst” party which held many views they deeply opposed. Enabling more parties to exist allows voters to select a party which much more precisely reflects the real balance of their convictions. It makes honest voting possible, and, via parliament, conveys the true balance of the nation’s political mind to whatever government is in office.
The only way to get such a party system is through a much more proportional electoral system. AV will not secure it but may pave the way for it in future. And there are proportional systems which also retain a link between MP and locality, satisfying the legitimate concern with place.
Under PR, coalition government would certainly become the norm as it is in continental
Jonathan Chaplin is Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics and the author of Talking God: The Legitimacy of Religious Public Reasoning (Theos, 2008).
An AV – Alternative View – to this article will be published next week.
