Written By: - Date published: 4:06 pm, November 12th, 2008 - 117 comments
Categories: Deep stuff -
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[I'll just preface this post by saying I have no love for Winston Peters' politics and I'm happy to see New Zealand First out of Parliament but, then, I would also be happy to see National out of Parliament and, surely, we shouldn't base an electoral system on particular outcomes for particular parties, rather, on morality and justice]
According to the preliminary count, 88,000 New Zealanders voted for New Zealand First this election (the number will be nearly 100,000 once specials are added). There will be no MPs representing those voters’ choice of preferred party in this Parliament. In contrast, 78,000 New Zealanders voted for Act but, despie being fewer in number than NZF supporters, their voice will be represented in this Parliament because National voters split their vote in Epsom to ensure Act won the seat. It is largely due to these two factors, the wasting of NZF votes and the inclusion of the smaller number of Act votes, that we have a National/Act government rather than a Labour-led government.
There seems to me no logical reason why Act voters should get their voice heard but NZF voters shouldn’t. It’s one of these ‘quirks’ of MMP. But it is an unnecessary quirk arising from the fact that we have a 5% threshold. So, why do we have a threshold and why is it 5%?
MMP was introduced in post-War Germany, replacing the pre-Nazi fixed list proportional system. It was felt that a threshold of 4% would prevent extremist parties gaining a toehold in the Bundestag. A sensible, if probably ineffective, precaution in a country that had just been wrecked by the Nazis’ actions. But hardly a reason for us to have it. The Royal Commission that recommended we adopt MMP also said we should adopt the 4% threshold as part and parcel of it. For reasons I’ve never seen satisfactorily explained, that was raised to 5% when MMP was enacted.
Since MMP was introduced, nearly 400,000 votes have been wasted on parties that won enough support to justify at least one seat on a proportional basis and two incumbent parties (NZF and the Alliance) have been knocked out of Parliament in that manner. In 1999, the Greens would have been out of Parliament and 103,000 voters would have lost their representaiton if just 3,300 fewer votes had been received by the Greens. All because of the threshold.
Now, people will say that if we didn’t have a threshold then the Bill and Ben Party would have won a seat last election. To which I respond, not really and so what? If there was no threshold fewer people would make protest votes on joke parties. And if they did and the Bill and Ben Party won a seat, who are you and I to say that is wrong? The day we start deciding that some people’s voice shouldn’t be represented because they’ve made a dumb choice is a dangerous day indeed. If we’re going to start deciding some parties are not ‘worthy’ enough to be in Parliament irrespective of the support they receive, we would have to get rid of United Future for starters.
If there were no threshold, it would not be a free-for-all (not that there’s any reason why a free-for-all would be bad). A party would still need to get 20,000-odd votes to get in and most people would still vote for larger parties. As with the introduction of MMP, removing the threshold would make Parliament more diverse and representive of the opinions of voters – surely good things to have in a democracy.
It is a complete injustice that 88,000 votes doesn’t get a voice just because there weren’t 16,000 more people who agreed with them while 78,000 people do get a voice just because 16,000 voters who support a different party tactically supported one of their party’s candidates.
MMP is a great system, the best I’ve yet studied. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. But to make MMP fairer we should remove the threshold.
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Rex Widerstrom,
We’d go back to one vote, but no vote would be wasted because every vote for, say, a Labour candidate in a safe National seat would contribute to Labour’s overall seat allocation?
Candidates stand in electorates for their parties. Yes, I know they do so now, but now if an electorate candidate loses all votes in support are lost, too. A lot more efficient would be to fuse the two – party and electorate. One tick, not two, as you infer. Yet winner takes the individual electorate ‘seat’ and all votes count towards a national majority (or sum as determined by participating parties). If that’s clearer and/or the same as you describe then so be it..
And that the extra MPs would be chosen from a list, still?
Yes, something suitable to the parties who, with their ‘seat’ winners must allocate according to needs per the summed votes.
Graeme’s example above doesn’t work: plug in any vote values for the party percentages he mentions, say, 404, 4, 2 (the last to cover the .2% remaining).
The first party’s 41st St.L. quotient is then 4.988, i.e., > 4. The party with .4% of the vote doesn’t get its first seat unless parliament expands to at least 51 or 52 seats (depending on how ties are handled)
More generally, Graeme’s ’100% lack of representation shock! horror!’ reasoning does not correspond to St.L. at all: St.L is unbiased between small and large parties, and in two party cases it always agrees with the ’round exact seat shares to nearest integers’ algorithm.(Theorems are available in the usual places) So if you think it’s shocking for a 40.6 exact seats party to get the 41st whole seat (because the 40.6 party will benefit ‘so little’ and the .4 party ‘loses so much’), well, get over it. If parliament has a million+1 seats, then a million+.6 seat-earning party gets all the seats and the .4 seat party none. O the humanity.
St.L. *does* minimize the voter-weighted (squares of) [(allocated seats)÷(party votes)] [total seats÷total votes]. That was the key result of the original 1910 paper. But that doesn’t correspond to Graeme’s gloss – in effect voter-weighted degrees of over-representation in possible allocations are also considered (hence the lack of bias).
St.L’s mathematics benefits small parties on some occasions but helps large parties on others. In 2005 Labour was entitled to (something like) 49.95 seats and got 50. Fine. But if 2000 Maori party voters had spread their party votes evenly between, say, the Progressives and NZ First, and 120 Green voters had voted for Labour, and everything else had stayed the same, then Labour would have been entitled to 49.98 seats but St.L would have given Labour a 51st seat, ’rounding’ 49.98 up to 51. Woo hoo.
swanstep, I think it fairly obvious that I was exaggerating to make the point.
It’s not just an exaggeration. Someone asked above:
‘Say a 2.4 million votes are cast for 120 seats. One party gets 1.2 million, another 1,190,000 and a third 10,000. Surely St Lague wouldn’t have a party with less than half a percent of votes taking a seat away from one of the big ones.’
And you/Graeme replied:
‘I can’t see a problem with this…… The question basically is:
which is the more proportional Parliament?
*the one where Party A gets 60 seats and Party B gets 60 seats, or
*the one where Party A gets 60 seats, Party B gets 59 seats and Party C gets 1 seat
Sainte-Lague says the latter option, and standard indices of disproportionality would agree.’
But that’s false. In the case sketched Party B and Party C have the same 120th St.L quotient,10000. The preference for 60:59:1 allocation over a 60:60:0 allocation is settled by whatever policy one has for breaking ties, and not by St L. itself.
And then you/Graeme suggested that St.L expresses the idea that a small party’s fractional seat shares have more right to be honored than large parties fractions.
But that’s false. Once things are in seats÷votes terms, St.L plays an absolutely straight bat: all fractional entitlements are treated the same way, and no special consideration is given to small parties’ fractions. St.L. is, in fact, the only series-of-divisors rule that is so nicely neutral – that’s a principal reason to use it.
The only point that was needed in the original discussion was the simpler one that half a seat quota often ends up being the effective threshold under St.L.. No judgment about big parties’ half seats vs. small parties’ half seats should have been entered. Sorry to be pedantic. If it wasn’t someone who’s normally v. reliable and careful making the mistake, I wouldn’t bother insisting on the clarification/correction!
Rex: re party political list selection in The Netherlands.
What I could find in a quick search, it’s the party members who order the list ( – in Dutch, unfortunately) but the voters have the opportunity to choose either to vote for the list, or for a candidate on the list so his/her position could move up (so-called preference vote) and get elected at the expense of a higher ranked candidate with fewer preference votes. It’s not a ranking system (you only get one preference vote) but both party members (before the election) and voters (during the election) have influence on which list candidates get in.
I think this would be a a good thing for list-only NZ elections too.
What many parties do is put a prominent person, who is not really into going into politics, at the bottom of their list (the “list pusher”) to attract votes – the party leader at the top of the list is usually called the “list puller”.
The Netherlands have 19 electoral districts to cater for regional parties, but the main parties usually submit the same candidate list to all 19, with proportional seat allocation.
Israel’s electoral system for the Knesset has one electoral district with a 2% threshold, but they have separate a ballot for Prime Minister – which seems to me a silly aspect which we shouldn’t adopt: how would Helen Clark cope as PM with a right wing majority on he House? Or vice versa?
The other tweak I would make to MMP would be to use the German provisions regarding the overhang (unberhang). When there is an overhang the size of parliament increases to both accomodate the electorate MPs and maintain proportionality.
In the case of the Maori Party here, we would end up with a parliament of over 200 members… I don’t see that being acceptable to anyone.
Uroskin – thanks for that. I like the Netherlands method… seems to be the best of everything on face value. I’ll bookmark your comment so I have a starting point for further thinking. Ta
northpaw – also intriguing. With the added value of simplicity (or at least it seems simple to me, so I’m assuming voters would understand it clearly).
Damn, this has got me even more excited about the propects of a proper review of MMP. If only we’d had a more flexible process than the one that brought us MMP, where we were presented with a choice of ready-made systems and asked to pick.
Off-the-rack is rarely as elegant as tailor-made.
Thanks Rex. One more point I’d like to make is that Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium, who all run versions of proportional systems have no trouble with Government coalitions involving both main parties: their current Governments are Conservative/Labour coalitions – and they are not more or less stable than coalitions between one major party and a dog-wagging tail midget.
If the economic situation is going to be dire, it may be an idea to look at that configuration for NZ too, as Fran O’Sullivan has mused on just before the election. But that’s a matter for the political culture instead of electoral systems: she called it a version of a war cabinet, in Europe it’s just one of the run-of-the-mill coalition options.
SP – sorry for the delay replying to your question.
In Germany it’s 5% or 3 electorate seats for State elections, although you’re looking at 598 seats in total (with overhangs of 15-20 seats not being unusual). Their mix is considerably more complex than ours though in that the electoral votes are FPP while the party vote is MMP.
and of course they have a bicameral system.
I agree that a party that doesn’t get over the threshold should get its electorate MPs but no list seats.
One compromise between having no threshold and having a threshold that disenfranchises voters is to have a preferential system for the party vote. This means you list parties in order of preference, but if your first preference party is below the threshold, your vote goes to your second preference party. Of course, if you were confident of your first preference party passing the threshold, you wouldn’t need to even choose a second preference, so it wouldn’t be a lot more work for voters.
I have wondered about the idea of adding extra seats to preserve proportionality in the event of an overhang (but I didn’t know they had it in germany – I thought it was just my own idea). Presumably it would work on the idea that it removes the incentive to create an overhang, so people wouldn’t bother doing it. But you could still accidentally get a dodgy situation where Anderton wins his electorate but only gets one fifth of the number of party votes needed for a seat, so parliament balloons from 120 seats to 600 seats. That’s a silly enough possibility that we shouldn’t do it.
Northpaw:
Your idea of having one vote that functions as both a party vote and an electorate vote is a possibility I wrote an honours essay on in 2000. I concluded that it could be worthwhile for preventing people from creating an overhang to make their vote count twice, but I couldn’t find any historical evidence of this happening. When the Maori Party got an overhang in 2005, I realised its relationship with Labour could easily develop into the sort of thing I envisaged might need to be stopped by introducing a 1-vote MMP system. I’m still not sure if it is going down that road.
The other argument I identified for the 1-vote system was that under two-vote MMP you can vote for an electorate MP from a party you oppose, and you could use that power to weaken the party you oppose by electing an MP who was either incompetent or likely to cross the floor, and that person comes out of the party’s seat allocation. Whether that situation can develop in practice depends on the parties’ candidate selection processes.
caroline,
Thanks for that. I’m almost honored to know that my simple observation on member inequality and political inelegance would otherwise rate “honours essay” status. I hope, however, that your effort gained the tertiary qualification..