Mark Pine

As I write this, news organizations in Britain and America are reporting the no party has succeeded in winning a majority of seats in the British parliament. Gordon Brown, the incumbent, may try “to stay as P.M. for now” and try to form a coalition, according to a report on C-SPAN at 10:30 am ET. To do so, he has offered the Liberal Democrats, a potential coalition partner, the possibility of reformation of the electoral system.

David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives, who won the most seats, has also extended an offer to the Liberal Democrats of consideration of a change of the voting system.

Why change the voting system?

The BBC reports the following percentages of the British popular vote by party: Conservatives – 36%; Labour – 29%; Liberal Democrats – 23%. But because of the British voting system, the resulting allocation of seats in the 650-member parliament differs significantly from the popular distribution. The electoral results for seats in Parliament is: Conservatives – 305 (47%); Labour – 258 (40%); Liberal Democrats – 57 (9%).

It’s obvious that the Liberal Democrats would want to change the electoral system to one that would more closely reflect their party’s true proportion of the popular vote. And that’s why both the leaders of Labour and the Conservatives are offering the prospect of voting reform to win over the Liberal Democrats to support their premierships.

What would reforming mean for elections in Britain?

The Financial Times has published a summary on several possible voting systems.

The present UK system is called “first past the post.” The seat goes to the candidate with the most votes, even if no candidate wins a majority. When two candidates run, the system results in the winning candidate achieving a majority. But if more than two candidates run, then the winner may not receive an absolute majority. Clearly, the system works best when two parties are dominant, as is true in both the UK and the US.

Another system called “alternative vote plus” was proposed in the Jenkins Report of the British Electoral Reform Society to the British Academy. In that system, voters would rank the candidates. If none of them wins a majority, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated and his/her second preference votes are redistributed to the other candidates. The process continues until one candidate reaches a majority.

In third system called “single transferable vote,” each party selects a slate of candidates for the ballot in each voting region, and each region elects a required number of candidates. Voters rank all the candidates on the ballot or as many as they wish. Any candidate who achieves a pre-determined quota of votes is elected. Then the number of his or her votes that exceed the quota is redistributed to other candidates, based on the distribution of second preferences. The process is repeated until the required number of candidates is elected.

A fourth system called “regional list” uses proportional representation. As with single transferable vote, each party selects a slate of candidates for the ballot in each voting region, and each region elects a required number of candidates. The proportion of the popular vote that each party receives determines the number of candidates from the slate of each party who are elected.

Comparing the systems, the FT analyzed the outcome of parliamentary election of 2005, which used the established first-past-the-post system. The results were recalculated for the other voting systems. The analysis showed that the alternative-vote-plus system produced an outcome resembling the actual outcome, but with a bit more representation for the third party, the Liberal Democrats. The single-transferrable-vote and proportional representation systems yielded outcomes that reflected the actual proportions of the popular vote for each party and would have doubled the representation of the Liberal Democrats.

Numerous other voting systems are possible. In the case of voting systems that use a slate of candidates, it is possible that the nation as a whole could constitute the voting region. One such a system, called “national list,” works as regional list does, but for the nation as a whole.

In 2004, Scientific American published an excellent comprehensive review of voting systems, assessing them according to criteria of fairness.

In my view, the US should take a cue from the UK and also consider alternative voting systems. Our nation, like Britain, seems to be experiencing a paralysis of politics. Americans are disgruntled by the inability of our national government to meet the grave social, economic, and environmental challenges we face. Commentators on British politics appear to feel similarly. Two parties have long dominated both our nations’ national governments.

Replacing our current electoral system, which is like Britain’s first-past-the-post voting, might permit other political parties to gain footholds in Congress and even to elect a president. Politics could be come more fluid, and votes in Congress might less often follow rigid party lines. As occurs so often now, members of one party experience enormous pressure to vote with their party en bloc, so as to maintain a unified opposition to the other party. But if some members of Congress were elected from third and fourth parties, they might form temporary coalitions and shift more easily between parties, depending on the issue at hand. Politics in Congress might become less rigid, partisan and divisive and more solution-oriented.

Also, it’s worthwhile to consider how a system in which voters ranked candidates would affect an American presidential election. Voters might rank all the candidates running for president in order of preference. If no candidate achieved a majority based on first preference, then the lower-preference votes of the candidates would get added to the candidate’s tallies. The system could be designed so that the winner received the highest total preferences of a majority of voters. Such a system would prevent the possibility of electing a president who did not receive the highest preference of the majority of people voting, as occurred in 2000.

Mistrust of government was the topic this morning when William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar, appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. He discussed his opinion piece in the Financial Times on Wednesday.

Galston wrote and spoke about the attitude of Americans toward their government, as reflected in a CBS News/New York Times poll in February. In the FT article, he commented:

Only 19 per cent of respondents – near the record low – said they trusted the government to do what is right all or most of the time. Only 29 per cent thought they had much influence on what the government does, while 78 per cent believed the government to be run by a few big interests, not for the benefit of the people.

Suspicion of government goes back to the founding of the Republic, Galston said. But in the era that began with the New Deal through the early Johnson administration, trust of government was high, reaching 76% in 1964. Then, the government enacted large programs, including social security, banking regulations, civil rights, and Medicare for older Americans. But following the Vietnam War and Watergate, trust in government plummeted to 36% in 1974 and stood at just 17% when President Obama took office.

This morning the callers to the C-SPAN program confirmed the abysmal assessment of our government. Few spoke on behalf of government; most spoke very skeptically, and some decried it with vitriol.

Although Galston didn’t make precisely this connection, I think it’s almost certain that distrust of government is the major cause of political polarization and impotence in Washington and the nation at large.

Deep distrust of what government says and does causes uncertainty and confusion. Lacking leaders whom they believe, people turn to their predispositions and biases, especially the most strident and partisan. Polarization and dissension grow and the ability to compromise—and enact compromises—fails. Impotence and paralysis take hold, as the government loses the ability to govern.

Last month Fareed Zakaria, the CNN commentator, spoke about the huge financial challenges facing the country. He used the counterexample of one official who acted decisively and restored some trust in government. Paul Volker, the former Fed chairman, carried through the deeply unpopular tightening of credit that curtailed inflation in the early 1980s. Zakaria spoke about a similar need to enact “deeply painful” measures to fix the nation’s current economic woes, like raising taxes and limiting entitlement benefits. He asked whether politicians today were capable of taking necessary difficult, unpopular positions, as Volker did.

Government will not be able to carry out essential changes without holding the trust of the people. And trust will not come unless government carries out essential changes. It is a desperate cycle that the leaders of our nation must break. They must act and succeed. The people cannot do it themselves. Only when our leaders succeed in achieving what they must, will they merit the confidence that Paul Volker once earned.

Whether we trust them or not, our fate now is in the hands of our leaders and our government.