It’s election time again in much of Europe, and if you read much of the tabloid press in the UK, you would get the impression that the continent is about to vote in fascist regimes in France, Germany and The Netherlands. With Geert Wilders’ PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid/Party for Freedom) party recently taking a lead in the polls in the Netherlands, I’ve got a lot of questions from Brits asking if the Anti-Eu, Anti-Muslim, PVV will be taking the Netherlands far off to the right. Everytime I’ve been asked this I’ve had to sit down and explain to the person asking that in the civilised world, it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately, it boils down to voting systems. The UK is unique in Europe (and to be fair, much of the western world), in having a First past the post voting system. A winner takes all system that only works in a 2 party system, and fails epically the moment you add a 3rd party. The Dutch by contrast use a party list system. As a result there are easily 7 parties with a fair chance of being part of a government coalition (I’ll discuss coalitions in a future post) after these elections.
As voting systems go, Party list is pretty good, it gives a nice balance of easy to understand, whilst providing good proportionality (exact proportionality is limited by the inability to subdivide an MP). What this means is that when polling shows PVV as having 28 seats in the Dutch Tweede Kamer, that’s 28/150. Forty-eight seats short of 76 needed for a majority. Given that mainstream Dutch political parties have no inclination to commit electoral suicide by entering coalition with the PVV, their lead in the polls isn’t anything to worry about. Come back when they are predicted more than 60 seats, then we can worry.
What this goes to illustrate tho is the ignorance of many in the Anglophone world about just how unfair their elections are. In the UK Cameron’s Tories got elected with a majority of MPs in the House of Commons, with just 37% of the vote. Let that sink in for a moment. Thirty-Seven percent of the vote means a whopping 63% didn’t vote for them. First past the post is an awful voting system, what ever way you try to spin it, it is not fit for purpose the moment you have more than two political parties, and a two party system is only one party better than a one party system.
Of course in the US, they take everything to the extreme, and not only does the US have first past the post, but they have first past the post squared. CGP Grey has a really good video that explains how you can get elected to the US presidency with just over 20% of the vote. Twenty Percent. Let that sink in. Any voting system that can allow the will of 80% of the people to be ignored is so far from fit for purpose it beggars belief.
In the UK we had a referendum on electoral reform, a referendum that should have been a massive warning that the legislation for UK based referenda is also not fit for purpose, a harbinger of the disaster that the EU referendum became. Alas many saw the AV vote as a vote against any voting reform, when in reality AV is a pretty ropy system too. AV can be a good system, in its multi member form, Single Transferable Vote, where you have large constituencies returning several MPs, the more MPs, the better proportionality (see previous statement about rounding to the nearest whole MP). The ideal here is therefore a constituency that covers the whole country. That’s what the Party list system as implemented by the Dutch delivers. Critics say that you lose the local MP. This is a double edge sword. Some UK MPs do fantastic work as constituent MPs, others are next to useless and leave people with no effective representation. There are ways you can deliver locality to MP’s with the party list systems, you can regionalize the lists, tho the party total count is nation wide ensuring that no vote is wasted.
In terms of equality, party list can also be used to help balance gender in parliament. A party might have a list which goes Female, Male, Female, Male, meaning that to ±1 you will have an equal gender balance (much as in society as a whole). Critics will say that with Proportional Representation then UKIP would have more MP’s. Yep, so would the greens, and the Libdems, and maybe even Labour. That’s the point, representation is proportional.
No voting system is perfect, each one has its faults and each has its benefits, but as with the result of any election the aim isn’t necessarily to get the best, but to get the least worst. Between Brexit and Trump, the time has come in both the UK and the USA for electoral reform to be put front and centre of the national political debate.
Edit: Since I started writing this article a few days ago, polling suggests that the PVV has slumped in the poles from its previous leading position of 28 seats, to 23 with the lead being taken by VVD (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie/Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy) on 26 seats.