Lee and Sally break down the key issues for the electoral reform referendum in British Columbia
- Posted by Compass Resource Management
- On November 15, 2018
This Fall, residents of our home province, British Columbia, have an important decision to make – whether to keep our current electoral system of First Past the Post (FPTP) or move to a Proportional Representation (PR) system. The decision will be made through a province wide referendum concluding on Dec. 7, 2018.
The motivation for considering a change in BC’s electoral system is that the number of seats that each party wins under an FPTP system is often not proportional to a party’s share of the popular vote. For example, in the last BC election, the Green Party received 16.8% of the popular vote and 3 seats in the legislature. If a PR voting system was used, the Green Party’s seats would be more proportional to their portion of the popular vote – e.g. 15-17 seats.
The choice between FPTP and PR can seem overly complex to individual voters when they listen to the general ‘conversational swirl’ around them and cause the unfortunate consequence of inaction in making their decision to vote. In this news article, we provide a way of thinking through the strengths, weaknesses and uncertainties around FPTP and PR systems that facilitates making stable and defensible decisions. We provide this analysis in our capacity as citizens but also bringing to bear our training in how to approach complex decisions. This is not a definitive analysis on the different voting systems, but it could be a starting point to help people think through this choice and make their own investigations more productive.
What matters in this decision?
The first step of breaking down a complex choice is to identify what matters. One way to do this is to think about the alternatives that you are trying to choose between – FPTP and PR – and identify the important things that could be affected by this choice. From listening to the dialogue around the referendum, we identified six things that repeatedly come up as key considerations in this choice:
- Proportionality of seats to popular vote
- Stability of governments
- Voter participation
- Local representation
- Simplicity
- Down-side risks associated with small parties
To get these six things, we had to peel away a few layers of detail. The public conversation has been complicated by mixing up descriptions of how the systems would work with descriptions of how they would perform. In other words, mixing of means and ends. To really evaluate different systems we need to focus on the few things that really matter in terms of performance, and to get there, we did the “five why’s” thing. That is, we asked “why is that important” a few times until we got to a place where the answer was “it just is”. We think, based on what we’ve heard, that the above list is pretty close to a set of things that just fundamentally matter to most British Columbians. In doing this yourself, you may think only a subset of the above criteria are important or you may think additional criteria should be added. Everyone will have their own take on this. The idea is to be clear on what you think is important.
What are the facts?
The next step is about establishing the facts. It involves characterizing the consequences of FPTP and PR on the criteria to the best of your ability based on the information and time available to you. The challenge here will be in identifying neutral sources of information that are free from personal and political bias.
The table below shows our best attempt at having a neutral characterization of the consequences. An important caveat on this table is that we are not experts in voting systems, and thus have relied on our own judgement in synthesizing what we have learned about the voting systems. Ideally, we would have a panel of experts that could fill in this table for us or Elections BC would be providing well researched information in this way. In the absence of such resources, our goal with this exercise was to do enough research that we are comfortable with making the choice.
| Criteria | First Past the Post | Proportional Representation |
| Proportionality – to what extent does the voting system produce results that are proportional? | Never proportional, often produces majority governments that receive less than 40% of the popular vote. | Will be close to proportional. |
| Stability of governments – to what extent does the voting system produce stable governments? | Tends to produce governments where one party holds a majority of the seats. These governments tend to be stable – governing for 4-5 year terms. Sometimes no one party has a majority of seats and coalitions must form to maintain power. | Tends to produce coalition governments that need to build consensus and make compromises to maintain power and get legislation passed. Little evidence that countries with PR systems have more frequent elections.[i] |
| Voter participation – to what extent does the voting system encourage higher turnouts at the polls? | Turnout in the last three BC elections has ranged from 51% to 58% of eligible voters.[ii] In ridings with long standing records of electing one party, voters with a preference for another party have little incentive to vote. | A comparative analysis of 36 democratic countries found countries with PR systems, on average, have voter turnout that is 7 percentage points higher than in countries with FPTP systems.[iii] |
| Local representation – to what extent are your interests being represented and advocated for by an MLA? | MLAs are expected to represent the local interests of their riding. MLAs in the governing party tend to have more influence in receiving local benefits. | Local representatives still exist. Ridings are larger but there are multiple MLAs representing each riding. With multiple MLAs per riding there is a higher chance that one of those MLAs would be in the governing coalition. |
| Simplicity – how complex is the voting process and how transparent are the results? | Very simple and very transparent. | Depends on which PR voting system is chosen. Some are simple and transparent (e.g. DMP, MMP) and some are more complex (e.g. RUP, STV).[iv] |
| Down-side risks associated with small parties | Small parties do not tend to win seats. Any down-side risks related to small parties is low in FPTP systems. | PR systems generally have more small parties with seats in the legislature than FPTP systems.[v] The current proposal for a PR voting system in BC includes a threshold to guard against very small parties that might have the most extreme views – a party must receive 5% of the popular vote to win seats. |
How to make sense of the facts?
Making an informed choice requires thinking carefully about value-based trade-offs. A trade-off happens when we have to give up something on one thing that matters to achieve something on another. When we evaluate trade-offs, it’s important to consider two things: the inherent importance of each value and the magnitude of the difference in performance across the alternatives. We also need to think about our tolerance for risk. Despite our research efforts, there are still residual uncertainties. So we need to think about which risks we’re willing to take and which we are not.
Here’s our take:
Understanding the difference across the alternatives for proportionality is fairly straightforward. There is little doubt that a PR system will produce results that are close to proportional. The thing to think about is how important that is to the goal of a democratic society. In our view, it seems that getting majority governments with less than 40% of the vote – a common occurrence in BC – is inconsistent with our idea of democratic representation. While we don’t necessarily think we have to achieve 100% proportionality, we think a move toward PR is a good one. We give the edge to PR.
We put a lot of weight on increasing voter participation, as it’s the foundation of a functioning democratic society. The data suggests that PR will improve voter participation. However, that improvement will likely be modest – the voting system is just one factor among many factors influencing voter turnout. Therefore, voter participation won’t be a primary driver of our decision, but would be a co-benefit of a PR system.
Stability of government is undeniably an important objective. We doubt anyone would disagree. The key question is how much a shift to a PR system would degrade stability. Our best read of the evidence, is not much. So while stability is critically important, it’s not going to be much affected and we don’t consider it helpful in making this choice. We’re not going to think much more about this one.
Likewise, all PR systems being considered retain some form of local representation and we don’t see this being degraded under a PR system. Yes, ridings will be larger and an MLA would have more territory to represent, but we think this will be manageable and will be mitigated as PR systems either have multiple MLAs per riding or have ridings that have one local representative and one or more regional representatives. Another consideration is that in a PR system, the governing coalition might end up with a more complete and balanced connection with local issues because there will be a higher probability that a riding would have at least one MLA in the governing coalition. In the FPTP system, we hear about how ridings with MLAs in the governing party get special consideration and benefits for their ridings, which seems inherently unfair to those ridings with MLAs from a non-governing party.
By simplicity, we mean the extent to which people have a clear understanding of how their vote influenced the distribution of seats in the legislature. FPTP is very simple to understand. The simplicity or complexity of PR is heavily dependent on the specific type of system and there are options on the table that are very simple. If PR goes ahead, simplicity needs to be explicitly considered by government along with the trade-offs across PR systems between simplicity, proportionality and local representation. For instance, when moving from a simple PR system to a more complex PR system – the BC government needs to think carefully about how much is gained in terms of proportionality and local representation and whether these gains are worth the loss in simplicity.
Countries with PR systems generally have more small parties. The down-side risks of small parties are often emphasized by people in support of FPTP, who argue that PR systems could give seats to fringe parties like a neo-Nazi party. We think Andrew Coyne makes a good point in a recent article: “The reason so few Canadians vote for the Nazis isn’t because we’ve rigged the electoral system to keep them out. It’s because we don’t like Nazis. We’re Canadian! We don’t vote for Nazis, we liberated Europe from them! The notion that just because you change the electoral system, Canadians would suddenly start voting Nazi en masse is just … well, it’s just embarrassing, frankly.”[vi] It’s also important to note that under any PR alternative, a party must receive at least 5% of the popular vote to get a seat. So a question to think about is whether you consider 5% a fringe or just a minority view.
Another related issue is the extent to which small parties might exercise disproportionate influence on policy. A small party holding the balance of power can unquestionably demand and achieve concessions important to them. Let’s face it that’s why we’re here having a referendum. However, we need to think about whether it’s helpful to try to reach consensus across multiple parties as policy is being developed. On balance, we think seeking compromise in the drafting of policy is a good thing, and might (possibly) even help to prevent the large swings in policy we typically see with a change in government.
After putting some time into examining the possible down-side risks of more small parties in the legislature under a PR system, we assess the down-side risk as low. In contrast, we see up-side potential for having more parties that represent the diversity of viewpoints in society and more incentives to seek compromise across these viewpoints.
In summary, from our perspective, a switch to a PR system will bring benefits for a more democratic society (i.e. more proportionality, better voter participation, equal or better local representation, more compromise and less adversarial politics). And once we looked deeper into the potential down-sides of PR systems, we didn’t find evidence of significant risks. Moreover, let’s not forget, we’re getting a chance to learn and adjust. If a PR voting system is adopted, another referendum will be held after two general elections to see if B.C. wants to keep the new voting system or go back to using FPTP. Our personal conclusion: we think it’s well worth a try.
And if PR does go ahead, the same method that we’ve laid out here can be applied to the choice of which PR system to implement – namely looking at what matters, and then carefully considering both how important those things are and how big the differences are across the alternatives.
[i] Coyne, Andrew. (2016). “No proportional representation would not turn Canada into a dystopian hellhole.” National Post. August 18, 2016. Downloaded from: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-no-proportional-representation-would-not-turn-canada-into-a-dystopian-hellhole. Excerpt from article: “since 1945, Canada has held 22 elections. In only one of the PR countries mentioned [Austria, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg and Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland], has there been more: Denmark, with 26. The average is 20. It is true that the governments that result are rarely, if ever, one-party majorities. But, as you may have noticed, that is not unknown here. Nine of Canada’s 22 federal elections since 1945 have resulted in minority parliaments.”
[ii] McElroy, Justin. (2018). “Big jump in voter turnout for young people in 2017 election”. CBC News. March 12, 2018. Downloaded from: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/voting-turnout-young-bc-election-1.4573414
[iii] Lijphart, Arend. (2012). Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. 2nd Edition. Yale University Press: New Haven & London.
[iv] DMP – Dual Member Proportional. MMP – Mixed Member Proportional. STV – Single Transferable Vote. RUP – Rural-Urban Proportional. For descriptions of these PR systems, see the Elections BC Voter’s Guide cited directly below.
[v] Elections BC. (2018). Voter’s Guide: 2018 Referendum on Electoral Reform. Downloaded from: https://elections.bc.ca/referendum/
[vi] Coyne, Andrew. (2018). “Andrew Coyne chooses proportional representation”. Common Ground. Nov. 1, 2018. Downloaded from: https://commonground.ca/andrew-coyne-chooses-proportional-representation/
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