First past the post, frustrated voters, and the lowest common denominator

Last week, after making a big speech about the importance of creating a schedule for certain blog posts and sticking to it, I totally failed to write about democracy when Saturday rolled around. I made up for it this week by talking about the House and Senate a bunch of times, but that’s not really the same thing.

I thought I’d get back into it by doing a little more reading. Local Motion seemed like a great place to start; I had a lot of fun at the book launch, and I’ll have more to say about it later. But it’s been a busy week, and I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance to crack the book yet.

Then I thought about getting back into something I’m in the process of reading; and the book I’ve most recently started is Manifesto for Real Democracy. But frankly, I’m just not ready for more of that yet.

So back to The No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy is it. When we last discussed the book, it was as part of a post of low voter turnout and the marginalization of certain types of voters. And since then, we’ve talked once or twice about voting reform, which is where author Richard Swift heads next. So let’s take the ball and run with it.

“Even where people still bother to cast their ballots,” Swift starts by asserting, “they find the political arrangements in place limit their influence and frustrate their intentions. Systems based on the Westminster ‘first-past-the-post’ (FPTP) model (peculiar to the English-speaking world) are particularly bad at reflecting the broad range of political opinions and options. Voters are often caught up in the ‘lesser-of-two-evils’ syndrome.

“FPTP tends to group a couple of large well-funded parties with fairly similar ideologies (in practice if not in rhetoric) which reinforces the general public perception that politicians are ‘all the same’. These parties are often referred to as ‘brokerage parties’ because of their ‘all things to all people’ approach during election campaigns and their lack of commitment to any clear ideology beyond the pragmatism of power… Extreme views, populist impulses, new thinking and idiosyncratic figures are all casualties of a bland sameness that pervades political culture.”

We’ve all seen this in action; we could probably open up today’s paper and find a wealth of examples. Thinking about it like this has a way of making you realize how often the “all things to all people” approach can become more of a “lowest common denominator” approach in practice. There are surely better ways to manage elections and government, and it’s no surprise that a system like this should make the whole idea of participating so unappealing to so many people.

And of course, there’s more:

“Oddly this sameness does not lead to civility in political life: for where real policy differences are absent, politics tends to revolve around personality and endless expensive attempts at proving what a lowlife scoundrel the other guy is. This has been dubbed the silly season of politics that often immediately precedes an election.”

And as we’ve seen, it’s hardly unique to election cycles. In the States, politicians and pundits alike have made the same vulgar, childish oppositional tone the stuff of daily life. And we’re not immune to it here in Canada, whether we’re talking about the press and their readership choosing up sides and battling each other, or a ruling party that spends good money attacking the character of its opponents at a time when there’s no election in sight.

Is the FPTP system to blame for all this? Not exactly, says Swift, but it sure doesn’t help.

“While there is a tendency towards this in voting systems based on proportionality (Proportional Representation or PR is the main system of electoral representation in Europe, Latin America and the former Soviet Union) it is far more pronounced under FPTP. Voter turnout is lower and voter dissatisfaction higher under FPTP. Little wonder when a political party can win a ‘landslide’ mandate with the votes of only forty-odd percent of those who even bother voting, depending how the vote splits.”

Posted in Democracy