Electoral system in desperate need of an overhaul
Mar 20 2009 Agenda by Chris Game, Birmingham Post
I first heard the word ‘hiatus’ in the term ‘hiatus hernia’, and for years got its meaning wrong. I presumed hiatus was the sometimes acute discomfort resulting from part of the stomach sliding through a hole in the diaphragm, rather than the hole itself. From the Latin: hiatus, meaning gaping.
Misusing a word so badly would normally betray the speaker’s ignorance. Had I happened to talk about the Israeli election hiatus, though, I might have got away with it. Because turning votes for the Knesset (Parliament) into the formation of a government not only creates a gaping hole in the country’s political calendar. It is also, for all concerned, not least President Obama and his Palestinian peace plans, a pain in the … well, probably not stomach.
The elections on February 10 were spectacularly inconclusive. Former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima (Forward) party, supporting a negotiated peace with the Palestinians and a US-model two-state solution, won 22.5 per cent of the vote and, through Israel’s highly proportional electoral system, 28 (23 per cent) of the 120 Knesset seats.
Next, with 27 seats from 21.6 per cent of the vote, was Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud (Consolidation) Party, that does not like even discussing a single Palestinian state.
Third came the ultra-right Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home), with 15 seats and a provocative leader, Avigdor Lieberman, who wants Arab Israeli citizens to take a loyalty oath and recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
Nine other parties, including once-dominant Labour, won at least three seats. A further 21 parties are unrepresented, having failed to reach the necessary 2 per cent of the national vote.
Israeli election law provides, though, for just such a hiatus. So, President Shimon Peres picked Netanyahu, with his likely support from Lieberman and other far right and religious parties, as the best placed to form a majority coalition. He was given an initial 28 days, and by the end of today we will know whether he has succeeded or requested a permissable 14-day extension. Should he, even after an extension, fail to form a majority coalition, Livni will presumably have her turn.
Netanyahu’s problem is that the coalition he could get – wholly right-wing, with the polarising Lieberman as a leading minister – is not the one he wants. More pragmatic than is often supposed, he would prefer a so-called unity government, including Kadima – although not sharing the Premiership with Livni, which may be her party’s price.
A unity coalition’s main attraction is that it offers probably the best prospect for progress towards a Middle East settlement. But a significant secondary consideration is that it would also increase the chances of the electoral reform that almost all, apart of course from the small parties, now concede is overdue.
A fundamental step would be to change to a two-tier system, with up to half the Knesset members elected by and accountable to constituents, rather than parties as at present. This would be essentially the Additional Member System that Germany has had for years and that we now use for elections to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Greater London assemblies. Israel is looking for an electoral system similar to at least some of ours.
However, at every Israeli election – and February’s was no exception – we get dire warnings of the reverse happening. That any reform of the ‘First-Past-the-Post’ electoral system we use for parliamentary and (outside Scotland) local elections would mean a proportional system like Israel’s with the associated proliferation of small parties, inconclusive elections, inter-party negotiations behind closed doors and resulting weak government. Which, frankly, is rubbish.
The world’s hundreds of electoral systems can be seen as key elements in one or other of two basic models of democracy: the Westminster or majoritarian model and the consensus model.
For majoritarians it should be government by the majority, which in turn means an electoral system that, wherever possible, produces a result that looks like a majority. For consensus democrats it means government by and for as many people as possible. A majority is only the minimal requirement; it should if possible be maximised.
Our Westminster model concentrates power in the hands of whatever majority a deliberately disproportional electoral system can produce – so that Labour has 55 per cent of seats, enabling Ministers to get almost anything they want through Parliament, based on 35 per cent of the 2005 Election vote, or less than 22 per cent of the total electorate.
To compare with Israel: the Lib Dems’ 22% of the vote, more than Likud received, gave them less than 10 per cent of MPs. Their 6 million votes, instead of buying a major negotiating role in the formation of a government, were, in this sense, wasted. The UK Independence Party, whose 2.1 per cent of the vote would proportionately have earned it 14 MPs, has none.
The consensus model, by contrast, rejects the creation of a ‘false’ majority where none exists. Its electoral systems encourage, rather than discourage, the expression and representation of voters’ views; and constructive bargaining and negotiation by leaders, rather than adversarial ‘yah boo’ confrontation.
Which is why it often inevitably takes time in countries with proportional electoral systems for the make-up of usually coalition governments to be settled – albeit not normally as long as in Israel’s present case.
This is the point: Israel’s is now an extreme system in need of reform. The one system, that Israelis won’t be considering is our First-Past-the-Post, because it too is now extreme and in need of reform.
We need an electoral system that better represents our views and incentivises us to participate.
There’s the Single Transferable Vote now used in Scottish local elections. Or, we could meet halfway with Israeli reformers with an Additional Member System.
* Chris Game is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
