There's a delightful interview in last weekend's Sunday Business Post with Tom Garvin, Professor of Politics at UCD. Garvin at his most enjoyable, as anyone who has ever had the pleasure of his company will testify, combines great erudition with a certain bibulous conviviality. He's damn good in the lecture theatre too. I learnt more about political science and a good deal about other subjects talking to Tom and reading the many books he kindly lent me than from anyone else. His latest book Preventing the Future has just issued in paperback and it's vintage Garvin. I can hear his voice when I'm reading it. In fact Gill and Macmillan have just reissued all his previous books in paperback and at €12.99 a pop they're excellent value. Buy 'em all!
At one point in the interview Garvin says that the hands of our politicians are tied by "an extraordinarily populist" electoral system. He means the single transferable vote system of proportional representation or PR-STV. While most democracies use some form of PR, the only lower house to be elected by STV is the Irish. The key feature of this system is that it allows voters to vote across party lines. Therefore it means that candidates of the same party must compete with each other as well as with candidates from other parties. This encourages an intense localism as candidates of the same party cannot compete on the basis of policy and instead urge the voters to, in effect, shop local.
Garvin's solution is to have two votes for the Dáil - one for a constituency as at present and the other for a party list. I have believed for some time that this would be of great benefit to the political system. I have never been bothered by the actual size of the Dáil and cannot see much merit in the argument that say having 80 seats would somehow make for a better legislature than one composed of 166 members.
Having half of the Deputies elected from party lists would have two positive effects: it would insulate some deputies from constant direct local or clientelist pressures and allow them to carry out their role as national legislators; a different kind of politician might emerge through the lists. Establishing a reputation for "getting things done" in local areas places great restrictions on the routes of entry into the political system. There must be many people who could ably serve in the Dáil but who are put off by the localistic and clientelistic nature of our political system. If we want to broaden the social composition of the political class then list systems are the way to go.
I don't think that the issue is the "extraordinarily populist electoral system" - for example, Denmark also has a system of multi-seat constituencies where voters can choose between a number of candidates from the same party. Malta also uses STV for its parliamentary elections and there are virtually no transfers between candidates of different parties.
As regards electing 50% of TDs from a party list as in Germany, that sort of system can be manipulated by a combination of the largest party and a small party. The largest party takes most of the constituency seats and the smaller party's list vote is inflated by supporters of the largest party. You could not devise a combination of parties more able to manipulate such a system than FF and the PDs.
If you want to encourage party solidarity in elections, it might be worth trying a simple reform of the ballot paper to list candidates in party sequence rather than by surname.
Posted by: Ciaran | October 28, 2005 at 09:51 PM
I gotta hand it to whoever wrote this, you've really kept me updated! Now, let's just hope that I can come across another blog just as interesting :)
Posted by: Term papers | November 05, 2009 at 06:36 AM