Sellout blog

Didn't this happen last year?

2008-09-25T06:25:47Z

UPDATE: Bob Jonkman kindly agreed to record upcoming all-candidates meetings on the Fair Vote Canada website: http://www.fairvote.ca/en/WaterlooRegion#All-Candidates_Debates . You can refer others to that page for update info; I will not be updating this page.

So in addition to getting arrested and charged for theft under $5000 today (sigh. No I didn't do it, and I am unarrested now), I discovered that the Record had its Kitchener-Waterloo debate yesterday. And guess where they held it? That's right! RIM Park -- a (partially lit?) jaunty 1km walk from the closest bus stop.

What's different from last year is that the Record has not bothered posting any of its all-candidates meetings to its website. Thanks for the community service!

Here are the debates I know about, all gathered from Green party websites, because only the Greens (and NDP for one debate) seem to care about publicizing debates on their websites. (Feel free to correct me if you want. I looked for an hour and couldn't find anything as of tonight.)

Kitchener-Waterloo:

From http://www.votecathy.ca/content/upcoming-all-candidates-debates

Mon Sept 29, 7pm, WLU Social Work campus, 120 Duke St E.

Thurs October 2nd, 2-5pm, St. John's Kitchen, 97 Victoria St. North (sponsored by the Social Planning Council)

Kitchener-Consestoga:

From http://www.freewebs.com/kitchener-conestogagreens/events.htm

Tues Sept 30, 6:30pm, St. Agatha Community Centre, 1793 Erb St W

Thurs Oct 9, 7:00pm, New Hamburg Community Centre (Sponsored by the New Hamburg Board of Trade)

I know there are more forthcoming -- the Record has two more, and the universities usually schedule something. If you want, feel free to add a comment and I will try to keep a page (maybe not this one?) updated.

Also, three of these websites are kind of the same:

http://www.haroldalbrecht.ca/

http://www.peterbraid.ca/

http://www.garygoodyear.com/

http://www.stephenwoodworth.ca/

Good branding or the sign of an iron fist? You decide!

Thus ends my election coverage, unless I decide to embarrass myself further by writing more garbage.

Rapid Transit Consultations

2008-01-17T04:50:48Z

On Tuesday I went to the Region of Waterloo's Rapid Transit Environmental Assessment public consultation at St. Andrew's church. They are asking for public input as to the best routes to use for the new transit system. There is another consultation happening at First United Church (beside Waterloo Town Square) from 2-8pm tomorrow (Thursday Jan 17). Comments are due for January 31. The proposed alternatives and comment sheets are available on the website.

This is big stuff. I think that rapid transit in the region could either be a great boon to the region or it could be a big expensive infrastructure project that nobody uses. At this point it is not clear which way the project will swing: the planners are clearly more interested in using the project as a planning tool than they are in actually making sensible transit for the region.

For example, I was shocked to see that building good links for transit to other cities (Guelph, London, and Toronto being three prominent examples) is explicitly not a design goal for the environmental assessment. This all comes from Regional Council (and in particular Ken Seiling's) fear of turning Waterloo Region into a "bedroom community", but it is stupid, cognitively-dissonant nonsense, and it does not bode well for making the transit system a success. For some reason it is okay to build more highway exchanges and to rebuild Highway 7, but it is evil to give us good public transit options so people could get out of their cars when going to Toronto. There is one option (out of five, I think) for putting a rapid transit stop at the Weber and Victoria bus station, but that route is totally bogus because it does not stop in downtown Kitchener. It's as if they are trying to sabotage the process.

Overall I get the impression that this proposal is being put together piecemeal, without a lot of coordination or unifying vision as to what this system is supposed to do or how to get it passed politically. One planner told me that there would likely be greatly reduced service down King street even if they route the RT line through the University of Waterloo instead of taking King. Another planner (this one with GRT) said that transit frequency down King would have to remain high. Who is right? When I expressed my concerns about connecting to the train station, somebody proposed moving the train station to King -- but the train station is owned by VIA Rail, not by the Region. It is not clear how the feeder buses will work with the proposed stops (and this is apparently GRT's responsibility, not the Rapid Transit planners').

It also distresses me that we don't have more actual transit users participating in the process, and that the planners designing the system probably do not suffer through the system now. If they did, maybe they would be interested in fixing obvious problems with the existing system (such as the route 7 and iExpress buses being scheduled five minutes apart). Why should we trust people who don't take the bus (a group which includes me, incidentally) to design a new transit system for the region?

Most importantly, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) was chosen as one of the two feasible options for the rapid transit system. (Light Rail is the other.) I am hoping that BRT is a straw man option, because the planners must be on drugs if they think we can sell a multi-million dollar BRT option for the spine of K-W. I can picture the papers and radio station personnell wetting their pants in derision now: we are going to take a bus-based transit system, sink millions and millions of dollars into buying up land and building dedicated routes, and end up with... a bus system?

This issue is not technical. It is not even related to cost. In purely rational terms, buses may be better than rail for our transit corridor. But sociologically we think of trains as cool and buses as ugly stinky vehicles that are full of poor people and teenagers. Overcoming that impression (if it deserves to be overcome) would be a huge barrier, and selling this system to a bunch of taxpayers who live in the suburbs is going to be hard enough already.

I don't know whether comments will make any difference. Most government projects that seek public input don't seem to use that input for much more than public relations. But I intend to fill out my sheets anyways, and if this topic interests you maybe you could as well.

Stuck

2007-11-19T04:38:49Z

Wow, I'm unhappy. If you saw me you wouldn't think I was acutely
unhappy (and I certainly am not as unhappy as I have been) but I'm
pretty damn unhappy.

For one thing, I am strongly feeling that I have run (or am running)
out of reasons to live. I am sure there are lots of great reasons for
struggling on, but I am having trouble getting in touch with them.
For another, I get to do two of my least favourite tasks -- looking
for work AND looking for housing -- both at the same time. As my
personal confidence and mental stability are not so high right now,
this is a dangerous combination at best. And let's not get into the
status of past/present life projects.

This post has been brought to you by emo, squandered opportunities and
the number 7.

29 Days Later

2007-11-08T21:40:50Z

So how did the referendum go?

It would have been hard for us to do worse. But democracy triumphed.

Whose fault was it?

Ours.

Is the issue dead in Ontario?

Yes.

Is the issue dead federally?

Probably.

What about Saskatchewan?

It's either idiocy or another nail in the coffin.

I feel post-referendum guilt. What can I do to help the
cause?

Observe, observe then document.

MMP 102: Why vote for MMP?

2007-10-09T00:05:16Z

Despite the many negative things I have written about MMP, I continue to think that there are come compelling reasons to support it in the referendum. Here are some of the things that speak most strongly to me.

Party Competition

In FPTP, two parties (or two and a half, depending on how important you consider the NDP) have a stranglehold on power. These parties compete with each other to run the government, but they are free to ignore voters in favour of their lobby groups and power bases.

With MMP, I predict five or six parties will be able to compete for seats. Voters will have meaningful opportunities to vote for smaller parties. This changes the entire political game. It means that the big parties suddenly have to demonstrate that they are worth voting for, rather than merely mudslinging their opponents.

Furthermore, voters now will be able to meaningfully vote against both big parties. That is a huge win even for voters who support one of the big parties, because the threat of difficult coalitions will encourage these big parties to listen to their constituents.

Greater Inclusiveness

Increased voter choice also means that parties will not be able to write off large swaths of citizens the way they do now. Nobody cares about those living in safe ridings; under MMP the people who don't vote for the "safe" party suddenly become valuable. Similarly, niches will open up for parties to target populations that the big parties don't particularly care about -- poor voters, for example. Even if this does not increase voter turnout, it makes politics more inclusive and thus brings more legitimacy to the process.

Better Use of Information

Yes, this is the "wasted votes" thing. In FPTP, any vote cast for a candidate that does not finish first does not help elect anybody, and in fact does not contribute to the outcome of the election. About half the votes cast in Canadian elections are wasted in this way. That means that half of the people who bother to get on the voter's list, learn about the issues, make the effort to vote in advance or get to their polling booth, and then cast a ballot are ignored when results are calculated. This is what causes the huge vote vs. seat distortions in our current voting system, but more importantly to me it is a huge waste of potentially useful information.

MMP does not solve this problem directly -- local riding MPPs are still elected under FPTP, which means that many votes will continue to be wasted -- but by adding the party vote we introduce a second piece of information that is used very well. Most people who cast ballots in MMP will have some influence in the outcome of the election. In my view, that serves the spirit of democracy much better than FPTP does.

Power Decentralization

I am not as confident of this outcome as I am of others, but based on the experiences of other countries I think it is plausible that MMP could break the extreme concentration of power that the premier, his cabinet, and his (unelected, appointed) policy advisors enjoy today. If nothing else coalition governments mean that the smaller coalition partners need not toe the party line of the big party, so they will get some influence. In the best case we will see committees get stronger (as they are in New Zealand and Germany), which will distribute the power away from cabinet and towards the backbenchers.

I don't think MMP will give us the populist utopia of constituent control over politics. Other mechanisms (such as voter recall) may be necessary for that.

A Strong Message

If nothing else, voting for MMP sends a strong message that we are unhappy with our current political system and we want some kind of change. The worst outcome of this referendum would be for voter turnout to be abysmal for the referendum; the politicians will twist such a result to serve as an indication that most voters are happy with the status quo, and that only a small vocal "special interest group" is squawking about electoral reform. The second-worst result is that MMP is defeated badly, which sends the message that we are perfectly content with politics as usual, and that they need not make any changes.

That's why I would err on the side of MMP. Did you want a different voting system? Voting for MMP helps win that system easier than voting for FPTP. Are you more concerned about other parliamentary reforms such as free votes or politician recall? Voting for MMP sends a strong message that we are unhappy with what we have, which makes it more likely that the politicians will listen to you when you go through the organizing and advocacy necessary to further your position. (Instead, most of the above-mentioned people are going to vote for FPTP because they want change. Holy Moses.)

Better Opposition

One of the most important impacts of MMP has nothing to do with fringe parties like the Family Coalition and NDP. It has to do with the two big parties -- namely, the big party that does not form the government. The opposition's job is to watch the government and criticise everything it does. Sometimes those criticisms are stupid (cue "promise breaker" meme here) and sometimes they make a lot of sense (such as pointing out pork in the budget). Unfortunately, under FPTP the winning party gets a huge boost in seats, which deprives the opposition of the MPPs it needs to effectively shadow cabinets and scrutinize the government in power.

MMP would give the opposition party its fair share of seats. If the resulting MPPs helped identify (and thus eliminate) even a small fraction of wasted money in the government budget, the 22 additional MPPs could pay for themselves. (June MacDonald estimated the cost of an additional 22 MPPs to be $9.6 million a year, which is a lot of money but not that much compared to the $61-95 billion Ontario budget.)

Policy Diffusion

Already we see some shifts in policy when big parties feel threatened by little ones. Federally, Jim Flaherty stole the NDP idea of eliminating ATM fees. Similarly, every party is stealing as much as they can from the Green Party because Al Gore made a movie. Under MMP small parties with good ideas will constantly threaten the hegemony of the big parties, so those big parties might be more inclined to steal the sensible policy points from their competitors. Although this will make the small parties feel bad, I think it would be a great way to improve the quality of our government overall.

Conclusion

Not everything is perfect about MMP. But even with its faults I think we're much, much better off with it than without it. I only wish the rest of Ontario agreed (which, admittedly, is partially my fault).

MMP 102: Things that will annoy you

2007-10-04T01:19:35Z

Although overall I think we would probably be better off with an MMP system than to keep FPTP, it is foolish to hope that life under MMP will be kittens and fuzzy bunnies. I expect that MMP will have some consequences that annoy us greatly. Here are some (mostly unjustified) predictions:

Wrong Coalitions

One of the reasons MMP got off to such a poor start in New Zealand was that voters despised the initial coalition that was formed. According to the literature people were ticked off that the elections of 1996 resulted in a coalition between National and New Zealand First. Most people had expected New Zealand First to pair up with Labour, and it didn't. In the next election, voters did punish Winston Peters and New Zealand First (they went from 13% of the vote to 4%) but by that time voters had already lived through three long years of an unpopular government. (Karp Bowler 2001, p. 61)

In MMP (and really any other system where you cannot expect single party majority governments) your vote helps determine how much power each party gets. It does not determine which parties form the governing coalition. I predict that occasionally unnatural bedfellows will share a pillow, forming governments that surprise and displease voters.

The other aspect that could frustrate voters is if the same political parties get into coalition term after term after term. Supporters of the National Party in New Zealand are likely feeling that frustration now, partially because Labour leader Helen Clark has proven more adept at building coalitions than her National competition. Similarly, Conservative voters will feel alienated if we were to end up with endless NDP-Liberal coalitions in Ontario. I continue to believe this scare story is exaggerated (lately I think it is more likely we will get a Red Tory party that sits in the middle of the Liberals and Conservatives), although we will certainly get Liberal-NDP coalitions sometimes if the NDP doesn't implode.

Slow Coalition Formation

Another unsavoury aspect of life under proportional representation is that we won't necessarily know the composition of our governments until after the election, because parties will have to negotiate with each other to form coalition agreements.

Sometimes coalition building will be easy: parties will declare their intended coalition partners during the election campaign, and the winning coalition will earn a majority of seats in legislature.

Sometimes coalition building won't be so easy: voters will punish both big parties, making smaller parties stronger. In this case negotiations can take a long time: first the big parties have to find partners that will support their government, and then they have to negotiate agreements, often from a weaker position than they would normally have.

Slow coalition-forming has happened a few times in New Zealand. In the first MMP election of 1996, it took almost two months -- from October 10 to December 12 -- for the ruling coalition to be announced, and in 2005 it took exactly a month -- from September 17 to October 17. (NZ Herald 2006-10-11) (zBerry 2005-10-22)

Despite their engineering prowess and long experience with MMP, the Germans also occasionally deal with prolonged coalition-building exercises when voters do not give political parties the results they want. A notable example of this was in 2005, when neither large party (the SPD on the left, CDU/CSU on the right) managed to win enough seats to form a stable coalition with its usual coalition partner. It took three weeks for the big parties to work out a solution -- rather than risking a three-party coalition, they agreed to form a "grand coalition" with each other. That coalition has not been able to pass highly controversial legislation (especially with respect to business protection) but is making progress in other areas such as climate change. (Dempsey 2007-08-23)

I am pretty sure that prolonged coalition negotiations would sometimes occur in Ontario under MMP, and that the "news" media will howl about the inefficiency of coalition government the entire time. However, I don't feel as negatively about coalition negotiations as others do. Although somewhat perverse, long coalition agreements demonstrate the degree to which voters control which parties get power. Under MMP voters can leave parties in situations they don't expect, and then it is the jobs of the parties to figure out how to organize themselves into a coherent government.

The other aspect to remember about coalition formation is that these negotiations represent one of the primary ways smaller parties can influence government policy. Ideally, the policy concessions negotiated by the smaller coalition partners represent the interests of the voters that elected them -- interests that presumably differ from the mainstream. Coalition negotiations represent the willingness of mainstream to incorporate new and different ideas into their governing structure and priorities. In this light, it should not be too surprising that this process can take a while. In the meantime you'll be growling and gritting your teeth.

Of course, life is not always ideal, and nothing guarantees that little parties really will negotiate strictly on behalf of their voters. They will certainly negotiate more sugar for themselves. But even these perks usually have something to do with party platforms. Winston Peters may have held out for a senior portfolio in 2005 because he wanted power, but his desire for the Foreign Affairs portfolio has a lot to do with New Zealand First's anti-immigration stance.

Incompetent Politicians

I am quite certain that under MMP you would see some new names and fresh faces get elected to legislature. Many of these new people will have had no prior experience in elected office -- particularly among smaller parties that elect their members via party lists. These new people will make more mistakes than their experienced counterparts, and you can be sure that the "news" media will enthusiastically report each misstep and scandal. Being a responsible citizen, you will follow the "news" media and correspondingly lower your opinion of list MPPs and the benefits of smaller parties in legislature. Meanwhile, the "news" media will enthusiastically ignore the quiet ways in which list MPPs and small parties improve legislature, because such stories are not newsworthy.

Tarnished Party Images

It's easy to root for small parties until they earn power and have to deal with the compromises involved when governing (Hello Bob Rae!) I have a feeling that once some of these smaller parties earn political power, they will lose some of their ideological purity, which will frustrate you and stomp out whatever remaining hope you had in politics (Hello Green Party!).

The real question in my mind is whether we can expect parties to maintain some principles and focus, or whether they will adopt any position to hold onto power. My feeling is that under MMP there exists a niche for smaller principled parties; any small party that tries to compete with a big-tent party in terms of "flexibility" will get squashed like a runty piglet at the feeding trough. As Prime Minister Helen Clark wrote for the New Zealand Herald: "For the smaller parties working with Government, brand differentiation and policy delivery is critical to avoid being swamped by the larger party's brand and presence." (Clark 2006) The Maori, Green and New Zealand First parties have done this; other parties have not.

Compromises and Broken Promises

Related to the above point, coalitions involve compromise, which gives parties yet more excuses to avoid carrying out the promises they make in elections. Under FPTP, the usual trick is for the opposition to make grandiose promises, get elected on the basis of those promises, take a look at the books and exclaim "Oh no! That previous government left us with a much bigger deficit than we expected! We're sorry, voters. We can't afford to keep the grandiose promises we made!" It's a tired trick, but one that voters fall for time and time again. (In a recent debate Louise Ervin claimed that the McGuinty government has closed this loophole by forcing audits six months before elections. I will believe it when I see it.)

Under MMP, transitions between governments tends to be smoother, so the trick switches from "we can't afford our promises" to "those nasty coalition partners won't let us implement our promises!" Either way, parties will make promises they know they cannot keep. (Then they will wonder why our faith in democracy has decreased.)

Boston et al (Boston Church Bale 2003, p. 19) claim that the situation is not as bad as I would have you believe. Under MMP in New Zealand, political promises have apparently become more statements of policy direction and less statements of specific actions. If this is true, then it would mean that parties could have a harder time avoiding their political promises: if all parties in a coalition promise similar directions in policy, then the resulting government had better keep to that path.

Nonetheless, I suspect parties will pull out the "incompatible coalitions" excuse quite frequently, and that we will fall for the excuse and blame MMP accordingly. Meanwhile, you won't know which party to blame in particular, because all parties will be pointing fingers at each other.

Slowness in Passing Legislation

One of the great hopes I have for MMP is that it will reduce the authoritarian power that the premier and cabinet have over legislation. In New Zealand it appears that MMP has strengthened the role of committees in drafting and examining legislation (McLeay 2000), Boston Church Bale 2003, p. 13). Germany also has a strong committee system (Stratmann Baur, p. 6). If this pattern holds true in Ontario, then we might see legislation drafted with more consultation and review than what happens now.

Unfortunately, consultations take time, which means legislation would take longer to pass than it currently does. In some cases this is okay, but in others it is an excuse for procrastination: if the government is reluctant to deal with some troublesome issue, it can initiate the legislative process late in its mandate and conveniently let the proposed bill die on the table come election time. If some legislation you care about meets this sad fate, you would likely get annoyed and blame the increased delays on weak coalition governments and their compromises.

Difficulty in Punishing Parties/Individuals

One of the bigger conceptual hurdles to leap when talking about MMP is that you almost always vote for somebody, rather than vote to keep somebody else out of power. In FPTP, you have a limited set of candidates in your riding, and you know only one of them will win. So if you don't like candidate X, you might vote for candidate Y instead in the hopes of keeping candidate X out of power. You might like neither candidate X nor candidate Y very much, but cast a ballot for the "lesser of two evils".

Things work differently under MMP, largely because of the party vote. The party vote is counted proportionally, which means that casting a vote for party A doesn't really "cancel out" your friend's vote for party B. Rather, you and your friend strengthened the positions of both party B and party A at the expense of other parties. This means it is difficult to engineer results like the 1993 federal election, which wiped out the Progressive Conservatives federally. Under an MMP system the 16% of people who voted PC would help get Conservatives elected no matter how much everybody else hates the party. I expect that this alone will frustrate voters, but the frustration will be compounded if approximately the same number of people vote for the same parties election after election, resulting in the same coalitions and the same government.

The party vote has another effect which will likely annoy you. Thanks to the party vote, most parties will get at least a few seats from the list. In some places "vulnerable" incumbents who end up in close races often receive high positions on party lists. (Pekkanen Nyblade Krauss 2006) (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006) One of those vulnerable members might be an unpopular local politician running in your riding. If you and all your friends cast your candidate vote against this person, he or she still might win a list seat even after losing the riding. And once again, the "news" media will jump all over the story, crowing about how the unpopular election was "appointed" against the wishes of local voters. In fact, that politician was elected by virtue of party vote -- if few enough people voted for the party in question, the politician would not have received a list seat.

There's more to the story: under MMP list seats are not very safe; if the unpopular politician remains unpopular he or she might face demotion in the following election. Furthermore, in New Zealand it appears that turnover of politicians on the list is pretty high. (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006) But most people will be unaware of these things, and they offer cold comfort to a populace which has to deal with the unpopular politician for another four years.

Lack of Review

We can already predict some of the weaknesses the OCA proposal suffers from. If we have the courage to vote MMP in, then other weaknesses will no doubt make themselves apparent.

Unfortunately, as far as I know there is no scheduled review period after MMP is implemented. It is not clear to me whether the OCA would have had the mandate to dictate the timeframe for review, but I think people would feel better about MMP if they knew we would revisit the system after a few elections. Certainly, if there is no review than the annoyances of the system are going to become more and more acute until people start demanding that we scrap the system entirely.

In New Zealand, a Royal Commission held a review of MMP in 2001, five years after the first election. (MMP Review Committee 2001) They noted a number of problems with the system, but recommended few changes. Now ten years have passed, and some people (many of whom don't like MMP) want to see the system reviewed again. Unfortunately, there appears to be no mandate for doing so. (Nicholle 2006). Given the outcry over the one-seat threshold for electing list members (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006), it might be wise for New Zealand to put the system up for review again, lest it lose MMP entirely.

Conclusion

Let's face it: we like to complain, and MMP will definitely give us some things to complain about. If we do adopt MMP, you can be sure the system will be put under the microscope, and you can be sure that we will find flaws.

And if the referendum fails? It is possible that the referendum will spark a lasting discussion of voting systems, which might draw attention to the many deficiencies of first past the post. But thus far we in Ontario have been largely oblivious to the effects of our voting system, and if the referendum fails by a wide margin there will be few incentives for the mainstream media to revisit the topic. FPTP will continue to rob us of our democratic voice, but it is quite possible we won't notice.

References

(Boston Church Bale 2003) Jonathan Boston, Stephen Church, Tim Bale. "The Impact of Proportional Representation on Government Effectiveness: The New Zealand Experience", Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol 62 no 4, December 2006, p. 7-22.

(Clark 2006) Helen Clark. "Helen Clark: Reasonable way to govern", New Zealand Herald, October 12 2006.

(Dempsey 2007-08-23) Judy Dempsey. "Merkel's coalition puts stability before change", International Herald Tribune, August 23 2007.

(McLeay 2000) Elizabeth McLeay. "Parliamentary Committees in New Zealand: A House Continuously Reforming Itself?" In ASPG Parliament 2000 -- Towards a Modern Committee System 2001. Published for the Australasian Study of Parliament Group conference in Brisbane, 2000. Available from http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/aspg/conferences.htm.

(MMP Review Committee 2001) Rt. Hon Jonathan Hunt, chair. Inquiry into the Review of MMP: Report of the MMP Review Committee, New Zealand House of Representatives, August 2001.

(Nicholle 2006) Brian Nicholle. "Brian Nicholle: Put MMP to the vote", New Zealand Herald, October 12 2006.

(NZ Herald 2006-10-11) "A decade of MMP: 1996 election left country hanging", New Zealand Herald, October 11 2006.

(Pekkanen Nyblade Krauss 2006): Robert Pekkanen, Benjamin Nyblade, Ellis S. Krauss. "Electoral Incentives in Mixed-Member Systems: Party, Posts, and Zombie Politicians in Japan", Amercian Political Science Review, vol 100, no 2, May 2006, pp. 183-194.

(Stratmann Baur 2002) Thomas Stratmann, Martin Baur. "Plurality Rule, Proportional Representation, and the German Bundestag." Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Working Paper Number 650 (2). January 2002.

(Vowles Banducci Karp 2006) Jack Vowles, Susan A. Banducci, Jefferey A. Karp. "Forecasting and Evaluating the Consequences of Electoral Change in New Zealand", Acta Politica, vol 41, 2006, pp. 267-284.

(zBerry 2005-10-22) Ruth zBerry. "Voters give MMP the thumbs down", New Zealand Herald, October 22 2005.

UW Debate

2007-10-04T01:03:14Z

I attended the Kitchener-Waterloo debate at the University of Waterloo yesterday afternoon. Unless Fair Vote campaigning forces me to, I don't intend to attend any others; they are getting repetitive and (unlike the municipal debates, where people actually needed to learn about the candidates running) nobody appears to be googling to find out more information about candidates. (What's that fairy tale, NoMMPers? Oh! Right! Parties are a fiction and we vote for the best candidate independent of party!)

In attendance were the usual suspects: Louise Ervin (Liberal), Judy Greenwood-Speers (Green), Catherine Fife (NDP), and Elizabeth Witmer (PC). Once again absent was Lou Reitzel, whom I have never seen at a debate (and he ran in 2003 as well). I confirmed that Reitzel had been invited to the UW debate (twice, in fact), so I conclude he is not serious about running and therefore does not deserve anybody's vote.

The format of the debate was interesting: the Feds people had been collecting questions for the debate all week, and they used a selection of those questions for the "prepared" part. Most questions were directed at a single candidate, who had 60 seconds to respond. The other candidates then got 30 seconds to rebut. Thankfully, the timekeeper was pretty good at his job, so the debate covered quite a bit of ground.

As usual in university debates, most of the candidates emphasized the importance of education: accessibility and tuition and funding and so on. Fife said the NDP will freeze tuition; Greenwood-Speers said the Greenies will cap university tuition at $3000 and college education at $700; Ervin veered all over the place, mostly crowing about how much the Liberals have spent on universities, but promising a tuition freeze by the end of the debate; Witmer criticized "ad-hoc" freezes and promised some kind of stable accessible funding so all qualified students could attend university. Yawn. Only Greenwood-Speers broke out of the education mold in her opening statements, leading off with doom and gloom stories about the environment and climate change.

In the open Q&A one person asked each candidate directly how they would vote in the referendum. Fife and Greenwood-Speers repeated their answers from the Record debate. Ervin's handlers must have been at work; she scrupulously avoided talking about system details. She praised a citizens' group for coming up for a recommendation, said the Liberals would abide by the referendum results, and then complained about appointed MPPs, which goes to show how much she values the judgement of that citizens' group. Witmer gave the most interesting answer because -- once again -- she blatantly refused to answer the question. Instead she complained about the education campaign and said that the end results would not reflect the actual wishes of voters. I find her fence-sitting fascinating; I'm wondering if she actually supports MMP and is afraid of saying so.

Another person re-asked the "If you could keep one broken promise what would it be" question, and again Ervin ducked the question entirely, blaming the deficit instead. Does she not realize that she loses credibility by not tackling the question head on, and that she gains credibility by giving some answer, however spun?

The biggest gaffe of the afternoon was courtesy of Ervin and Witmer. One of the prepared questions asked about encouraging campus sustainability, and how the Liberals dropped this commitment in their latest book of promises. Ervin either misunderstood or ducked the question, talking about tuition and university operating costs. Witmer followed suit. Then Greenwood-Speers called them on it, reminding them that the question was about environmental sustainability. To her credit, at the end of the question Ervin pulled out of the tailspin by linking financial stability to campus sustainability (if universities are not funded, they won't build green buildings) but she had been looking rather foolish for a while.

I sound as if I am beating up on Ervin a lot, so let's talk about Elizabeth Witmer. I continue to be flabbergasted at the way she campaigns. She does sometimes spin issues in a PC way (talking about tax incentives rather than handouts, for example) but she goes on an on about issues that she had the ability to deal with when she was in cabinet. Most infuriatingly, she trotted out the old donkey of recognizing foreign credentials faster, saying that (somehow! some way!) she would work to get foreign doctors recognised. She talked about reducing poverty through affordable housing, improved education, community access centres -- when her government did its best to cut funding for all of these initiatives. She talked about making schools community hubs, when her government cut extra-curricular funding and antagonized teachers. It would be one thing if Witmer was some anonymous backbencher. But she was a high ranking cabinet minister who had the portfolios of the environment, of health and of education. She had a lot of power and she did not use it for much (although she did take credit for shutting down the Lakeview coal-powered generation station). Now that John Tory has taken the party in a more moderate direction, she's totally changed her tune (or maybe she hasn't -- I could easily believe that she has always campaigned from the left).

Here's my question: where's the local accountability? A steady stream of Young Conservatives smugly asked me how list members in MMP would be directly accountable by name to a group of voters. Of course, when framed in that sense MMP looks bad, because there is no local accountability by name -- only accountability by party. But these young PCs don't want their MPPs to be personally accountable to voters. They want me to choose between the Liberals and Conservatives. Riddle me this: if I am unhappy with both my Liberal and Conservative candidates, how can I express my dissatisfaction with both under FPTP? I can waste my vote by selecting a candidate who is not going to win (sorry Catherine Fife. Sorry Judy Greenwood-Speers), or I can decline my ballot and have those numbers ignored, or I can hold my nose and vote for one of the big parties hoping to punish the other one. What kind of accountability is that?

Let's make one thing perfectly clear: this is exactly the decision mainstream Kitchener-Waterloo voters faced in 2003. They had to decide between kicking Witmer out or punishing Sean Strickland (who was fleeing Waterloo City Council in the wake of the RIM Park scandal). I am certain that voters wanted to hold both of these candidates accountable, but they couldn't, so they swept away Strickland along with the rest of city council. That in itself was unusual (and perhaps I shouldn't even bring it up) because it was evidence of voters selecting candidates rather than parties, but you can be certain that Witmer would have had a much harder time keeping her job in 2003 if she had been running against somebody else (even Louise Ervin). Our candidates have little personal accountability to us because we tend to vote for parties rather than candidates, and on the odd occasion when personal accountability does come up, our options are incredibly limited. This is the utopia that FPTP defenders want us to live in for the next 20 years. MMP does not fix this problem on a local level, but at least I would have the option of expressing my dissatisfaction on a party level in some meaningful way.

MMP 102: Are people happier under MMP?

2007-10-01T02:29:01Z

Here's the entry I don't want to write. It asks a simple question: are citizens happier with MMP than they would be with FPTP?

As usual, I offer a long and complicated answer, focussing on three situations: the world at large (courtesy of Arend Lijphardt's well-known research), New Zealand (one of the few democracies that has made an explicit transition from FPTP to MMP), and Wales and Scotland (both of which use FPTP nationally, but adopted MMP when devolution came into effect in 1999).

General Comparisons

The Fair Vote freaks like to point to Arend Lijphardt's 1999 book Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Patterns in Thirty-Six Countries, which compared so-called "majoritarian" and "consensus" democracies. I still have not been able to get my grubby hands on a copy of Lijphardt's book, so like many others I have been depending on a summary prepared by Fair Vote Canada.

The summary highlights a number of findings, all of which just happen to favour proportional representation. Among the most interesting for me: a study which found that citizens in consensus (more proportional) systems rated satisfaction with democracy much higher than those in majoritarian democracies (p. 3). Lijphart also reports that those who voted for "losers" in consensus democracies tended to be more satisfied with democracy than their counterparts in majoritarian systems.

Other papers I have read support this idea that proportional systems result in governments that are more in tune to voter wishes. A (somewhat sketchy) paper by Bengtsson (Bengtsson 2005) looks only at proportional and semi-proportional systems, and finds that voters appear to rate inclusiveness (characterized by proportionality) over accountability (characterized by single-party governments) when ranking the efficacy of governments.

In contrast, a paper by Blais and Bodet (Blais Bodet 2003) finds that proportional systems are no better and no worse than majoritarian systems in electing governments that reflect voter views: in majoritarian systems like FPTP, all parties tend to be centrist, so they start out not that different from the median voter. In proportional systems the parties that form government tend to come from a wider distribution, but on average they reflect the views of the median voter well. (Again, I find this paper sketchy because it assumes that only the median voter matters, without taking into account distribution of voter views.)

Overall, the cross-country literature seems to indicate that governments in proportional systems tend to be more responsive to their voters, and that voters feel they are happier with democracy overall.

So far so good, but the picture gets a lot less rosy when we focus on New Zealand's public perceptions.

New Zealand

New Zealand adopted MMP in two stages. In 1992 the government held a referendum which asked voters two questions: whether they wanted to replace FPTP, and which of four alternatives they preferred the most: MMP, Single Transferable Vote (STV), a parallel system, or Alternative Vote (AV). 84.5% of voters recommended replacing FPTP, and 65% chose MMP as their favourite system. In 1993 the government held a second referendum which pitted FPTP against MMP directly. MMP again proved victorious, but this time only 54% of voters selected it over FPTP. (Nagel 1994)

It appears that MMP continued being more popular than FPTP until the first election under MMP, held in October 1996. This marked the first rocky and unpopular National-New Zealand First coalition. From late 1996 to 1999, MMP lost its favoured position: support for MMP hovered around 30%, while about 50% of those polled favoured FPTP instead. (Karp Bowler 2001, p. 24). Although I have not been able to access consistent polling data since then, a few snapshots indicate that support for MMP has remained low since then.

A 2001 government inquiry into MMP examined voter attitudes into MMP in some depth. It found that opinions towards MMP have been volatile: when politics is going smoothly support for the voting system goes up, and when governments get into trouble (as they did in 1997 and 1998 when the National-New Zealand First coalition was breaking apart) people tend to despise the voting system.

Two sets of polls conducted in 2000 and February 2001 show some of this volatility. In 2000 27% of respondents had a positive view of MMP and 44% had a negative view; by 2001 this had eased slightly to 32% positive and 43% negative. The committee also found that FPTP was ranked higher than MMP in all but one survey survey from late 1996 to 2001. The exception was in December 1999, when MMP was preferred to FPTP by a margin of 45% to 43%. In contrast, support for FPTP vs. MMP has been as high as 59% to 29% in November 1998. (MMP Review Committee 2001, p. 77).

The latest snapshot I have found comes from the 2006 paper from Vowles, Banducci and Karp that I cite incessently. They say that MMP was favoured by a "small majority" after the 2002 elections, which suggests that a majority of citizens did not support MMP before or since. (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006, p. 282)

Case closed, right? Certainly, I was not very happy to learn these results, and I am sure my friends on the NoMMP side will be all over these numbers if they bother reading this blog post.

In fact, I think there may be more to this story. Even people who support FPTP over MMP don't advocate ditching MMP entirely. In the February 2001 set of polling, respondents were asked whether they should leave MMP as-is, whether they should keep the basic structure but make some changes to how MMP operates, or whether they should change to another electoral system altogether. Here are the results (MMP Review Committee 2001, p. 78):

Option	Overall	Support MMP	Support FPTP
Stay with MMP as-is	17%	36%	Not reported
Make some changes	47%	57%	35%
Switch to another system	31%	Not reported	53%

Some caveats: the paper did not include some numbers, and the authors noted that some of the ways in which people would have "modified" MMP were infeasible (such as eliminating list MPs). However, this does demonstrate that support for FPTP (or hatred of MMP) is not as clear-cut as it may appear.

One striking example of this comes from the National party, which has not formed a successful government under MMP and for the most part despises it. The National party wants to hold another referendum on electoral reform, but they do not recommend a return to FPTP: rather, they propose using a parallel system instead. (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006, p. 282)

Even more striking is the following statement from Brian Nicholle, who was campaign manager for the pro-FPTP side in the 1993 referendum (Nicholle 2006):

Ten years on since the first MMP election on October 12, 1996, it's time that the people had the chance again to vote in a referendum to either retain or reject MMP.
FPP is a relic of the command and control economy but the SM (Supplementary system) which contains a measure of proportionality combined with FPP) would be the system to go head to head with MMP in a referendum.

Even the campaign manager who defended FPTP in 1993 is willing to call that system "a relic of the command and control economy", and to advocate a "supplementary system" (which I am pretty sure is a parallel system, aka MMM) in its place.

Why? I think the reason is simple: New Zealand voters like some aspects of MMP, even if they dislike the system as a whole. When polled for the 2001 review, lots of New Zealanders felt that MMP had been successful at getting more women into power (50% felt it had been successful as compared to 17% who felt it was unsuccessful), getting more Maori into power (49% successful, 18% unsuccessful), and creating a parliament that was more representative of all New Zealanders (45% successful, 27% unsuccessful). (MMP Review Committee 2001, p. 80)

Similarly, New Zealanders seemed to appreciate the increased choice of the new system. 62% agreed that MMP made it easier to vote for the best local candidate in a riding (vs. 19% disagreeing) and 54% agreed that it gave voters more options (vs. 21% disagreeing). (ibid, p. 83) Given this taste of increased representation and choice, it should come as no surprise that even MMP opponents like Brian Nicholle propose a system that keeps some elements of voter choice (albeit diluting it considerably).

There is another intriguing aspect to the New Zealand experience: even though support for the proportional effects of MMP remains low, overall citizen attitudes towards their government appear to be improving. Take a look at the following NZES data, reproduced from (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006, p. 278). The table shows some statements about democracy and government, and then the percentages of people who agreed with that statement each year:

Statement	1993	1996	1998	1999	2001	2002
MPs out of touch	61	53	76	52	56	49
People like me have no say	63	57	--	55	--	46
Politicians do not care what people think	66	57	--	55	--	50
Government run by a few big interests	60	54	--	50	--	42
Satisfaction with democracy	--	73	45	57	60	67
Trust government to do what is right	31	30	26	36	47	44
Trust in a political party (**)	44	54	--	59	--	65
Trust in the Labour Party	13	23	--	36	--	42

(**) Trust in a political party was gauged by asking the question "Would you describe $party as trustworthy or untrustworthy?" where $party took the value of established political parties in turn. The set of parties varied from survey to survey -- it looks like they asked the question for all parties that won seats.

There is no question that this data is frustrating in many ways. All but the 1998 and 2001 data were collected immediately following an election, when election results (and the associated campaigning) is fresh in people's minds.

Some of the missing data is infuriating (why wasn't satisfaction with democracy recorded for 1993?!), but maybe most importantly this snapshot does not include enough years worth of data. I personally crave more data from the pre-1993 era -- 1993 in particular represents a high point of dissatisfaction with FPTP, since the referendum pitting MMP against FPTO was held that year. In particular, I wish available data stretched back to the mid 1970s or earlier, since New Zealand experienced its first of two second-place majorities in 1978.

Accepting these severe limitations, I still believe we can draw a few conclusions from this data. Firstly, public attitudes in certain areas are volatile, and tend to change with current events. Overall satisfaction with democracy tends to go up and down, as do public attitudes towards their MPs.

The responses on other questions may indicate more stable trends. I find it interesting that three of the most clear trends have to do with questions related to government responsiveness: the "people like me have no say", "politicians do not care what people like me think" and "government is run by a few big interests" questions. I would like to assign credit for these improved attitudes to MMP, but there are many other possible explanations: the Labour government that won the election in 1999 remained fairly popular throughout the polling period (and won re-election in 2005); and the economy was pretty good throughout this period. When governments face fiscal crises and have to cut services and jobs, I am willing to bet that citizen impressions of government responsiveness declines dramatically.

If nothing else, we might say that citizen satisfaction with democracy is improving despite MMP. However, I would like to believe that MMP has contributed to these improved perceptions, even as citizens dislike MMP by name.

The 2001 review suggests that citizens do acknowledge that proportional representation leads to more responsive governments, and although limited the table above does suggest some upward trend.

Scotland and Wales

Determining how happy the Scots and Welsh have been with their regional voting systems has been tough. Scotland and Wales are not considered their own countries, so they are not included in international survey data. Furthermore, Scotland and Wales did not move from FPTP to MMP; they introduced MMP right off the bat with their regionalized government.

However, some survey data is available, and both the Scots and Welsh have familiarity with different kinds of voting -- both locations suffer from several levels of government elected in different ways. For example, Scotland uses STV for municipal elections, MMP for Scottish Parliament, FPTP for the UK parliament, and list PR for European Union elections.

This gives us a rough means of gauging how much the Scots and Welsh approve of MMP as compared to FPTP: given their experience with proportional representation, ask the people whether they would switch other institutions over. The Arbuthnott Commission reported on this issue using data from the 2003 "Scottish Social Attitudes" survey. The Scots were asked whether the UK should introduce proportional representation for the UK House of Commons, which uses FPTP now. Over 50% (it's hard to tell from the provided graph, but it looks like about 53%) agreed that the UK house should move to some form of PR. A little less than 30% felt neutral, and only 10% strongly disagreed. (Arbuthnott 2006, p. 7) None of this directly comments on Scottish views of MMP, but if Scots were deeply unhappy with their proportional voting system you might expect the percentage of people resisting change for the UK house to be higher.

The Richard Commission in Wales reviewed MMP for that region. In addition to asking whether the UK parliament should be elected via PR, it also asked the question for local government and for the National Assembly of Wales itself. Here are the results (Richard Commission 2004, p. 42):

Response	UK Parliament	National Assembly of Wales	Local (municipal) Goverment
Strongly Agree	20.2	19.1	18.6
Agree	33.6	39.4	38.4
Strongly Agree + Agree	53.8	58.5	57.0
Neither Agree nor Disagree	31.0	27.8	28.1
Strongly Disagree + Disagree	15.2	13.7	14.8
Disagree	10.7	9.7	10.8
Strongly Disagree	4.5	4.0	4.0

The trend is pretty clear: the Welsh appear to have a good deal of soft support (and some strong support) for PR across the board. To the degree that the Welsh are aware of their MMP system (which, as I have noted before [URL], appears to be limited) it seems they are reasonably happy with proportional representation.

My thinking is that if the Welsh and Scots were as acutely aware of their voting system as New Zealanders appear to be, these numbers could be drastically different. But as it stands these two countries demonstrate that MMP needn't be a public relations disaster.

Data Sources

Finding good data about public attitudes towards democratic institutions has proven to be surprisingly difficult (and I would appreciate any pointers you have).

The good news is that political scientists do care about studying voter attitudes towards politics. The bad news is that data for the countries I care about tends to be missing and inaccessible.

Many countries participate in a standard survey, and those results are supposed to be compiled into a dataset called the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). As it appears some raw data in this set can be had free of charge (albeit with registration), a responsible blogger would have downloaded the data, figured out how to read the SPSS format, and run some analysis on long-term trends of voter satisfaction in FPTP vs MMP systems. Unfortunately, in addition to being irresponsible I am also incompetent, and I doubt I will get around to this task by the end of the campaign. However, if somebody else wants to carry out some of this analysis I think it could be useful and interesting.

One rationalization I used for my laziness is that the Canadian component of the CSES data seems to be poor. The only survey that appears to be present is from 1997, which is pathetic given that it looks like the Canadian group has been collecting data after every federal election. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find downloadable datasets from the Canadian group online, although it might be available on request.

The New Zealand Electoral Studies (NZES) folks publish their data, but I did not look at it directly. Rather, I have relied on several academic papers that summarize the data nicely. I sincerely hope that similar data has been collected in Ontario; if we do adopt MMP I expect there will be a rich publishing niche in comparing pre-MMP attitudes to post-MMP ones.

For Scotland and Wales available data is even more piecemeal. There is a set of surveys known as the "Scottish Social Attitudes" surveys which apparently asks some questions about citizen attitudes towards democracy. For Wales the Richard report lists four possible survey sources: a 1997 Welsh Referendum Study, a 1999 Welsh Election Study, a 2001 Wales Life and Times Study, and a 2003 Wales Life and Times study. I have not tracked any of these sources down. It looks like they may be summarized in a paper by Scully and Wyn Jones (Scully Wyn Jones 2003).

Overall, I have found the UK Electoral Commission to be a good source of information.

References

(Arbuthnott 2006) Commission on Boundary Differences and Voting Systems (chair: Sir John Arbuthnott). Putting Citizens First: Boundaries, Voting and Representation in Scotland. Edinburgh: The Stationery Office. ISBN 0-10-888179-2. (Gah! It looks like they took the website down!)

(Bengtsson 2005) Asa Bengtsson. "Inclusiveness or Accountability: What brings about the most responsive system?" Prepared for the Nordic Political Science Association (NOPSA) conference, Aug 11-13 2005, Reykjavik, Iceland.

(Blais Bodet 2005) André Blais and Marc André Bodet. "Does Proportional Representation Foster Closer Congruence Between Citizens and Policymakers?", Comparative Political Studies, vol 39 no 10, p. 1243-1262.

(Karp Bowler 2001) Jeffery A. Karp and Shaun Bowler. "Coalition government and satisfaction with democracy: An analysis of New Zealand's reaction to proportional representation. European Journal of Political Research, no 40, p. 57-79, 2001.

(MMP Review Committee 2001) Rt. Hon Jonathan Hunt, chair. Inquiry into the Review of MMP: Report of the MMP Review Committee, New Zealand House of Representatives, August 2001.

(Nagel 1994) Jack H. Nagel. "What Political Scientists Can Learn from the 1993 Electoral Reform in New Zealand", PS: Political Science and Politics, vol 27, no 3, Sept 1994, p. 525-529.

(Nicholle 2006) Brian Nicholle. "Brian Nicholle: Put MMP to the Vote". New Zealand Herald, October 12 2006.

(Richard Commission 2004) Report of the Richard Commission: Commission on the Powers and Electoral Arrangements of the National Assembly for Wales. Spring 2004. Available from http://www.richardcommission.gov.uk

(Scully Wyn Jones 2003) Scully, R and Wyn Jones, R. Public Opnions, the National Assembly and devolution -- briefing note on the latest evidence. Dept of International Politics, Aberystwyth 2003.

Another step towards perdition

2007-09-30T02:30:23Z

Sept 29, 4am: Apprehended under the Mental Health Act. 2+ hours in handcuffs; 5+ hours incarcerated at GRH.

Kitchener Centre Debate Fiasco

2007-09-28T20:43:13Z

For me, the Kitchener-Waterloo debate at Grey Silo golf course on Thursday was a disaster. First of all, it was held at a golf course. Although I was able to bike to the location, it appears I was the only person to do so -- everybody else drove. Taking public transit was not a feasible option -- the nearest bus stop was a full kilometre away, was serviced once an hour (with service ending at 9pm or so), and involved a long walk along an unlit path (way to make women feel safe, debate organizers!).

Of course, that did not stop the Record and Rogers from patting themselves on the back about their friendliness to women. Not only did they crow about a "full slate of women candidates", but they boasted of their all-female media panel. Excuse me. The slate of candidates was not all women, unless Lou Reitzel (representing the Family Coalition and mysteriously missing from the debate despite the fact I am pretty sure I saw his car while biking to the golf course) is not as male as his name and picture would indicate. The number of women candidates in the riding was not a fluke (the parties are trying to dethrone Elizabeth Witmer, after all) but nobody blinks an eye at the all-male slates of Kitchener Centre.

That wasn't the disaster. The disaster is that my guerilla tactic of putting literature at the literature table was soundly denied. Fine, but the reason they offered me was idiotic: I was not allowed to put out my literature because it was partisan and they only wanted neutral information there. Excuse me? They only wanted neutral information at a debate? Since when is that standard practice? Some group with "I am a voter" stickers was allowed to put out their stickers, but there was no room at the table for actual partisan discussion about the referendum. Thank God the rep from Referendum Ontario was present, or there would have been no referendum information allowed at all. (Mind you, unlike the KPL debate the referendum officer was not allowed to address the audience beforehand, and I know that she asked to do so.)

In fact, after denying me the privilege of leaving my literature out, they confiscated the referendum literature that Judy Greenwood-Speers left out on her table -- namely, the black OCA pamphlets that Judy had ordered for her campaign. That is the degree to which the Record and Rogers television wants you to "understand the question" -- they want you to rely on neutral information that is handcuffed from either explaining the system clearly or answering any of the questions that Ontarians are most interested in. For example, the Referendum Ontario officers are not allowed to show the sample MMP ballot published in the OCA materials. They certainly don't link to either Vote for MMP or the NoMMP campaigns, and last time the referendum officer checked their only link to the OCA materials was buried deep in a FAQ section.

Meanwhile, when asked about the referendum in a question from the media panel, Louise Ervin flubbed basic information about the referendum proposal. On the one hand she claimed to have studied the proposal "throughly", and in the next breath she stated that she did not like MMP because there would be 30 (sic) appointed MPPs, because rural areas and the North will lose (as if they don't already), and because she feels list MPPs won't open constituency offices. Good grief. If she's going to trot out hoary old fairy tales about list MPPs, it would help her credibility if she actually got the number of list MPPs in the propsal correct -- there are 39, not 30. I am pretty sure this is not a slip of the tongue, because she repeated the number 30 twice. That's right. One of the candidates in the debate can't even get basic details about the system correct, but in response to my angry question about publicizing the referendum she had the audacity to say that the Referendum Ontario information was adequate.

The other candidates at least acknowledged the importance of the referendum, although none of them had any answers as to how we get the word out in two weeks. Greenwood-Speers claimed she spent a third of her war chest on referendum advertising before Sept 10 (which is true -- they bought radio advertising), Catherine Fife spun some story about how the referendum was designed to fail, and Elizabeth Witmer tried to defuse the situation by congratulating "my group" for being out at festivals. (Thanks, Ms Witmer. But I don't need congratulations. I need to get the word out, and it is blatantly obvious that even the Record has no intention of letting us do so.) In other words, not one of the candidates had any good information about how we address the 47% of people who claim to know nothing about the referendum, and how to address the 41% who say they know only a little. (These numbers were froma recent Globe and Mail poll.)

Not surprisingly, Greenwood-Speers and Fife came out in favour of the referendum (although Fife certainly has not been emphasizing it much in her campaign), while Witmer came out decidedly neutral. She would not answer whether she would support the proposal (a theme of the night), and she told all of us to go out and learn as much as we could before Oct 10 (and how do you propose we do that, Ms Witmer?). Later it came out that Witmer is a member of Equal Voice, a multipartisan group that is strongly in favour of MMP. So I can see how she might have been in a bind -- her party does not want to openly support the proposal, while an advocacy group that is important to her does.

In other news, the debate was stuffed. Every party did its best to get members at the debate, and a long lineup of planted questions formed almost immediately. However, there was a twist -- Catherine Fife's team seemed to have done the most stuffing, so she got a lot of attention. Her group of applauders applauded the most loudly, and many of the early planted questions were softballs lobbed solely in her direction. It's a shame. Fife has the most well-organized (and maybe the best-funded) campaign. She is a reasonably good and experienced candidate. And I am fairly certain that not only will she lose the riding, but that she won't even come in second. Feel free to dream the dream if you wish. I'm through with those fairy tales. I have been burned by an abundance of lawn signs too many times before.

To the degree I could stifle my fuming enough to pay attention to the debate, Fife again had a strong debate. She did not hit as many home runs as she had in the "Children First!" one, but she also wasn't in her home turf. She parrotted the NDP policy, waffled on several issues without giving specifics (for example, to a softball question about people at NCR losing jobs, she couldn't do any better than to call for a "jobs commissioner" and to "look to the community for solutions"), and spent quite a bit of time criticizing the Liberals (although thankfully she did not sound like as much of a broken record as Rick Moffitt does). She tended to put a little more content into her responses than Witmer or Ervin (for example, in response to emergency room closures she noted that 40% of health care goes to seniors without seniors having a health strategy) but that is not saying a whole lot.

Meanwhile, the weakest candidate of the night was the one most likely to finish second in the riding -- Louise Ervin. She read the same opening comments that she had for the KPL debate, with the same bait and switch budget excuse. She had a few good points to make (she noted that we are getting 26 doctors in the region, for example) but she was not good with the tough questions. She couldn't tell us why the coal plants were not closed, and instead blathered on about wind turbines. She accused the NDP of supporting "private religious schools" in her closing remarks. She also refused to answer a question about what two Liberal broken promises she would have kept, a question that John Milloy was willing to answer in the Kitchener Centre debate. Meanwhile, when asked about why people should cast votes for candidates from smaller parties, she lost my vote for good when she said that strategic voting was just fine, and had a legitimate role to play in democracy, and that everybody can vote as they please so democracy is okay. (Yes, strategic voting will continue under MMP, and yes, it is unavoidable to some degree. We should still be working on ways to let people vote more honestly.) Time and time again she revealed herself to be a tool -- when asked to reconcile an article she wrote endorsing religious schools compared to her party's platform, she sided firmly with her party's platform. As far as I could remember she did not offer one innovative idea not from the party platform, but in her closing remarks she claimed to be a fresh voice with new ideas. Whatever.

Greenwood-Speers also cited her party's platform, but she again came out strongly as an individual with her own ideas. She had the most personal insight to offer in the debate, and I am pretty sure she had the best hit rate for answering questions head-on. Given that Greenwood-Speers openly supports the referendum (and had the guts to pass out books when she found out that hers had been confiscated) you folks aren't going to believe anything positive I have to say about her, so why don't I tell you how she lost my vote. First of all, she came out with a particularly obnoxious answer when asked how her party supported women. Instead of recognizing systemic barriers for women, she related her own bootstrap-pulling rags-to-riches tale of how she rose through the ranks at K-Mart, then rose through the ranks as a nurse, then rose through the ranks of the Green Party. She then told all the girls in the audience to aspire to the same. On one level I can agree with her response -- we have a personal responsibility to struggle against the barriers we face. On the other hand pretending that everybody is as strong as she is and therefore no explicit supports are necessary for women to succeed is gross. I admire Greenwood-Speers a lot, but I did not like this answer much at all.

I could have lived with that answer. Where she lost me once and for all was when somebody asked the sensible question of why people should vote for her small party when it would support her enemies (the same question in which Ervin defended strategic voting). Did Greenwood-Speers acknowledge electoral reality to any degree? Nope. Just like all the other candidates, she claimed that she could win the riding. In fact, she said that she was not out to split the vote, but to get all of the vote. In other words, she gave us a baldfaced, grandstanding lie, and furthermore it was the same lie that I hear each and every election coming from the smaller parties. I'm sorry. I am through with supporting candidates who make such statements, no matter how strong I think they are in other areas.

That leaves Elizabeth Witmer, who added to my bad mood in a big way. She was polished and knew her stuff, which is not surprising given that she has been in power since 1990. But several statements coming out of her mouth defied explanation. Witmer was a Minister of Health under Mike Harris. She had all kinds of opportunities to improve health care in Ontario. And she has the audacity to complain about the number of doctors leaving Ontario for other provinces and the United States? She complains about how long it takes to train foreign doctors? I don't have it in my notes, but I think she was even railing against wait times in emergency rooms. When she had the authority to do something about these things, she fell down on the job. Then she goes and blames the Liberal government.
She spent a whole lot of energy blaming the Liberals, but when criticized about her own government she said that we should not dwell on the past, or fight the election of 2003 again. What?! She has a longstanding record that she proudly outlines in her campaign literature, but she doesn't want us examining her on that record?

One questioner complained that her newspaper advertisements did not outline her policy support or campaign promises. The questioner blamed Witmer for expecting people to dig deeply to find out what she stood for. Witmer's response? The questioner wasn't looking hard enough. If only the questioner would dig a little deeper, she would find all of Witmer's policy stances. In my view, that was outright arrogance.

There's no question that Witmer knows her stuff. She has been in power for 17 years -- she had better know her stuff. She even has some reasonable ideas (whether from her Big Book of Tory Promises or from her own head) of what changes to make in the near future. But the dissonance between what she says and campaigns about as compared to her actions as MPP are enormous, and she doesn't want us looking too closely at them. But what else do you expect when there is a two-party stranglehold on power?

To my knowledge, there are two debates left. I will be attending the UW one for certain, partially because I know that we will be allowed to have our literature there. But personally I think I am pretty sure how I plan to use my vote in this election. I'm going to decline it, just as I did in 2003. Why? Because as this debate demonstrated, we're looking at the same old tired story. I was hoping the story this election would be different -- that we as citizens would come together to change things for the better by taking an interest in the referendum. I was wrong. The politicians tell us the same lies election after election after election, and we are perfectly content
to let them get away with it.

In other news: I have a few MMP 102 pieces queued up. I may publish them, but I need to polish them and cite my references and stuff.

KPL Debate: Children First!

2007-09-27T21:13:07Z

I attended Wednesday's debate at the Kitchener Public Library somewhat reluctantly. I had been under the impression that the debate was for Kitchener Centre only, and I had already gone to one debate outside my riding. Somebody had to stuff the literature table with Fair Vote advertising, however, so I skipped gardening and made the trip. To my surprise, I discovered that candidates from both Kitchener-Waterloo and Kitchener Centre were on the panel.

This debate was entitled "Children First!" and it was put on the Child Care Action Network of Waterloo Region (CCAN), an advocacy group obsessed with daycare.

The Kitchener-Waterloo panellists consisted of: Louise Ervin (Liberal), Catherine Fife (NDP), Judy Greenwood-Speers (Green), and Elizabeth Witmer (PC). Absent was Lou Reitzel (Family Coalition), who also ran for the Family Coalition in 2003.

The Kitchener Centre panellists consisted of: JD McGuire (independent), John Milloy (Liberal), Rick Moffitt (NDP), and Bill Bernhardt (Family Coalition). Daniel Logan (Green) and Matt Stanson (PC) were conspicuously absent.

I was surprised to see the high turnout of panellists, because this debate was being held concurrently with another one put on by Faith FM. It is possible that the candidates that did not attend this debate attended the other one.

Before the panellists started Don Heroux from Referendum Ontario did give a quick speech about how important the referendum was and how everybody should vote. He did not actually explain either of the options, but at least he passed out the green brochures and raised some awareness that the referendum was happening.

Given the narrow focus of the debate I was surprised to see that many of the candidates had expertise in the area. Milloy and Witmer knew a fair amount as incumbents, and Witmer has been a public school board trustee in the past. This debate was on Fife's home turf, as she has apparently been active with CCAN as a school board liason. Greenwood-Speers claimed to have two sisters-in-law who are early childhood education workers, and Moffitt is a schoolteacher. Ervin and Bernhardt expressed less knowledge of daycare advocacy, but they both knew their talking points. Only JD McGuire seemed totally out of place.

Much of the debate focussed on how to spend taxpayer money: a $97 million infusion from the federal government that may or may not have been misplaced, and a $300 million commitment to daycare that the McGuinty government promised and may or may not have delivered on. Other issues that came up included special needs children (which veered into a discussion of autistic kids), salaries for Early Childhood Education workers, and a Liberal promise to introduce full-day Junior and Senior kindergarten, as well as some kind of full-day preschool program. Given that I neither have nor want children (sorry Bill Bernhardt) I can't say that I know a whole lot about child care nuances, so it was harder for me to pick out the good answers from the lousy ones. At the same time, it provided me a good opportunity to see these candidates in a different light.

Oddly enough, people were throwing around the M-word in the debate: minority, as in minority government. Should I believe that this is a possibility? I am inclined not to.

After watching Matt Stanson in the last Kitchener Centre debate, I worried that Louise Ervin could be another throwaway candidate. Although Ervin is certainly not as polished as her competition (all of whom are seasoned politicians or activists) she did not come across as being a terrible candidate. She did spend her time reciting Liberal promises and talking points, and she did read her opening and closing remarks from written comments, but she also brought up some points not from her notes. She mentioned the Early Childhood Educator (ECE) program at Conestoga College, and praised the past federal Liberal program on child care championed by Ken Dryden. When attacked about the Liberal government suing parents of autistic kids, she deftly blamed the previous PC government for initiating the court cases. She also championed more men entering the field, but her reasoning was iffy: she claimed that there were too many single moms raising children without a male role model, and that some of these educators could help fill that role.

To her detriment, right at the beginning of the debate she pulled out the tired old argument that the Liberals broke their promises because the Conservatives left them with a surprise deficit. Every government pulls this bait-and-switch, and I am sick and tired of it. You can be sure that if the Liberal lose this election their successors will take a look at the books and exclaim that -- horrors! -- those irresponsible Liberals left the financial books in terrible shape, and -- gosh! golly! gee! -- the new government would have to put their promises on hold as a result. And you wonder why we don't trust politicians?

Moving on, Catherine Fife knew her stuff. She did recite NDP platform promises a few times, but most of her responses dealt with the specifics of child care. She was strongly in favour of fully-funded child care spaces and early childhood education, claiming several times that institutionalized programs helps kids do better. I remain skeptical, but Fife did bring up one factor that was somewhat convincing -- Waterloo Region accepts the fifth-highest number of immigrants (in Ontario? Canada?) and those kids might benefit from ESL at an early age.

Fife also used her knowledge to poke holes in the claims other candidates made. For example, when Milloy claimed that the eligibility rules for child care were changed to make it more accessible to the middle class, Fife rebutted that funding had not gone up accordingly, and that child care centres had to go crawling to regional government to make up the shortfall. She also emphasized capital cost funding as being crucial to getting new daycare spaces built. While everybody else made claims that ECEs should be paid more, Fife noted that the existing educators have problems getting enough shifts to make a living wage. It's perhaps not surprising that she did well in this debate; I'm curious to see how well she does when asked about topics she's not so involved in.

Greenwood-Speers represented her party well. As Daniel Logan did in the Record debate, Greenwood-Speers frequently recast questions in a different light. When the subject of autism came up, she talked about pesticide bans preventing autism. I don't know (and would tend to doubt) whether the relationship between pesticides and autism is well-established, but it shows the typical Green strategy of casting issues in terms of prevention. Similarly, her opening remarks focussed on increasing wages for people to Low Income Cut Off levels as a way of helping families raise healthier kids. Again, I am ambivalent of such promises, but it does recast the issue in a broader light.

Greenwood-Speers also showed guts in taking a number of stances that were probably unpopular with the crowd. Her verbal slugging match with Rick Moffitt impressed me most; she maintained that full-day Junior/Senior Kindergarten was a lousy idea for two reasons: kids need flexibility in their learning and kindergarten teachers are expensive. Moffitt countered by saying that kindergarten teachers were qualified and that kids "deserved the best", and Greenwood-Speers slugged back by saying that ECEs were qualified enough, and that it would be more cost-effective to pay $40K/year for such workers than $70K/year for kindergarten teachers. If nothing else, this exchange did show that Greenwood-Speers understands that taxpayer money is a limited resource, which seemed to be largely missing from this debate (and her promises to increase income levels for everybody). Greenwood-Speers took another gutsy position in sticking with the Green promise to eliminate the Catholic school board, which she claimed would save $500 million a year. I question whether her math always works out (and that bothers me) but overall Greenwood-Speers did show a fair amount of insight into the issues of this debate.

I appreciated that Greenwood-Speers devoted a fair chunk of her closing comments to the referendum, urging people to vote in favour of MMP. I am also glad that she limited this topic to her closing comments; there is no point in pushing the referendum if you don't also have good insight into the other issues at hand (otherwise, why would you even vote Green?).

In terms of Kitchener-Waterloo, that leaves Witmer (who for some reason was seated apart from her competition). Given the nature of her responses, I am surprised that Witmer is a Conservative, never mind that she was a cabinet minister under Mike Harris. She came out strongly in favour of additional daycare centred around public schools. In her final comments, she outlined her priorities for daycare: better wages for daycare workers, additional training for these workers, and for all levels of government to work together to fund these spaces. Earlier she promised to eliminate (at what cost?) the waiting list for autistic kids.

This is a conservative? About the only ways in which she came across as representing her ideology was an insistence that parents be allowed to choose their daycare provider, and a call to investigate where the $97 million dollar federal contribution for day care went.

Like several other candidates, Witmer related her own personal frustrations in seeking child care when she decided to go back to work. Maybe one reason she is so strongly in favour of regulated care is because she needed to depend on babysitting when she pursued her career. In any case, this is one area in which I would not expect a male Conservative candidate to share her perspective.

Not surprisingly, Witmer also knew her issues. She boasted of achievements in newborn screening for diseases, and refuted Ervin's claim that suing the parents of autistic children was all the Conservatives' fault -- she claimed that the McGuinty government appealed a Supreme Court decision on funding autistic kids, and then he dragged Shelley Martel into court when she investigated the issue. Again, I don't know how true these claims are, but she clearly has some sense of developments in this area. Whether she should be trusted to back up her promises is another story -- she's been in power for a long time now, and it would appear that she has largely gone along with whatever her party elites want her to.

In terms of the Kitchener-Centre candidates: JD McGuire has a miserable outing. He did not offer one good answer in the entire debate. He made promises to learn about the issue, but did not demonstrate that he actually did any learning before walking into the room. If he wants to be taken seriously as an independent he has to do better than that.

Milloy again showed skill in this debate, but I realized that many of his defences (in this debate and the last) consist of telling us how much money his government spent on this and that. He occasionally showed good insight into issues (for example, he noted that special needs funding is a bigger issue than just daycare, and that organizations like KidAbility have a role to play in addressing this need) but I do not think he had as in-depth an understanding of the issues as the other candidates. Too often his responses would consist of relating how much taxpayer money he spent on an initiative, then a vague assertion that "we need to do more" without elaborating on what "more" would look like. For example, he did not offer a lot of innovative ideas in dealing with funding issues -- he basically told us that we need to pressure the federal government to pay for things.

On the other hand, I do find one aspect of Milloy's debating style very impressive: he doesn't shy away from questions. Even when other candidates take the discussion on tangents, his tendancy is to answer the questions that are posed directly. If nothing else, that demonstrates that he is paying attention and can stay focussed on the issue at hand.

Moffitt came out looking much better in this debate than he had in the last one I attended. He still harped on McGuinty's broken promises, but he toned the cheap political shots down enough to make some reasonable points. He rattled off lots of statistics of waiting lists and spaces that were available both locally and provincially, and held up Quebec's $10/day universal childcare system as a standard. He too was a strong advocate for nonprofit daycare programs run through schools. He too related a personal history of childcare: making a decision between sending his son to a daycare space out of his neighbourhood (so his son would be isolated when going to school) vs. staying local and struggling to find childcare at all. This helped bring his own emphasis on childcare issues into perspective. He did demonstrate some understanding of local issues (for example, that regional council picked up the funding slack from the provincial government for daycare, a point Fife also made) but his knowledge of local conditions did appear weaker than some other panelists. Given this, he did a reasonable job of defending his party's views.

Then there's Bill Bernhardt, who stuck to his guns and stuck out as the only fiscal and social conservative on the panel. He repeatedly asserted that it was foolish to expect governments to spend their money on child care instead of supporting parents to stay at home and raise their children well. Instead of advocating salaries for early childhood education workers he advocated training courses for parents, and unlike every other candidate he complained that we are institutionalizing kids in schools at an earlier and earlier age. He also criticized the divorce rate (which made me somewhat uncomfortable) and the way we let men impregnate their girlfriends then running away to let the mothers be single parents (which I claim the fifth about). Clearly he did not tell the audience what it wanted to hear, but I for one appreciated (and found myself agreeing) with a lot of this perspective (please don't flog me).

Although Bernhardt stuck to his values, he wasn't totally dogmatic about doing so. He stated that special needs kids do deserve government support, and he admitted that his ideal of stay at home parents was a long-term goal to be worked towards, leaving open the possibility of some government funding for daycare in the meantime.

Thankfully, I can genuinely say that I'm not a Family Coalition convert yet. Bernhardt fretted quite a bit about the low birth rate, which seems silly to me because there are lots of people in the world and we can get lots of immigrants (even Christian fundamentalist ones if Bernhardt wants) to move here just by increasing our quotas. Similarly, I was a bit uncomfortable with the degree to which he associated juvenile deliquency and drug use to public schooling.

Of course, Bernhardt's focus on family values meant that most of his comments seemed out of place in the debate. He clearly did not have a great understanding of the $97 million federal funding or the $300 million promises, or of wait lists and spaces available locally. Even opponents of childcare should know the facts, and Bernhardt didn't. Overall, though, I think that Bernhardt showed quite a lot of courage in showing up to this debate at all.

Canadianism has gone too far!

2007-09-26T00:58:08Z

From ca.yahoo.com, advertising its mail service:

"Kiss the storage metre goodbye!"

Please, won't somebody think of the children?

MMP 102: Glossary (aka Lazy Entry)

2007-09-25T04:27:30Z

Here are some definitions for the terms I have been throwing around in this boring series of posts:

AV: AV stands for "Alternative Vote", a non-proportional system. In AV, an area is divided into single-member ridings, and voters rank the riding candidates in order of preference. The most unpopular candidates get dropped from consideration and their votes are distributed to the remaining candidates until one candidate gets over 50% of the votes. Liberal opponents of MMP love alternative vote because it eliminates small parties and favours centrist ones (who are almost everybody's second choice). AV is used in Australia's lower house, and is sometimes known as "preferential ballot". The STV system resembles AV because both require voters to rank candidates, but the two systems differ in some important ways.
Closed List: A closed list system is a party-list system in which voters do not get to influence the ordering of candidates on the party list. Contrast this to "open list" systems. Ontario's proposed MMP system uses closed lists.
FPTP: Stands for "First Past the Post". In this system, a territory is divided into single-member ridings. Each riding runs some candidates. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins the riding. Whichever party wins the most ridings forms the government. Other people abbreviate this system as "FPP". It is also known as "Winner Take All". The technical abbreviation for FPTP is "SMP", which stands for Single Member Plurality.
List Free MMP: This variation of MMP (or parallel systems) uses the local candidate vote to create an implicit ordering of candidates to fill list seats. Candidates from the same party are ranked according to their performance in the local vote; those that do best in their ridings but fail to win a seat are first in line to get list seats. This system is also called "best loser" or "next past the post". It is used in the German province of Baden-Wurttemberg, in Japan (maybe optionally?) and apparently in the Italian senate. I have noticed that list-free MMP seems to have a lot of traction in Ontario, but Ontario's proposed MMP system is not a list-free system (the change to a list free system is not large, however).
List PR: Sometimes referred to as "Pure PR" or just "PR", List Proportional Representation systems allow voters to select parties in some way, and then award seats proportionally to each party's share of the popular vote. In list PR systems there is no concept of ridings which associate MPs to geographic areas on a 1-1 basis; rather several MPs are all responsible for some geographic area. List PR systems may be "open list" or "closed list"; in either case, the voter ultimately selects a party. List PR is one of the older forms of PR. It is used in many western European countries.
Majority: Majority means "above 50%". Contrast this with plurality, which means "more than the competition."
Majoritarian: AV and FPTP are considered majoritarian systems because they are non-proportional. The name is somewhat misleading: in FPTP candidates need not have a majority of votes in order to win ridings, and in neither system do parties need a majority of the votes in order to form government.
MMD: Yet another acronym that starts with "M", MMD stands for "Multi-member district". Unlike a riding (known as "single member district" or SMD by academics) a MMD assigns several MPs all to the same geographical area. In Ontario's MMP proposal, we can think of the 39 list members as being selected to a very large MMD -- the entire province. Scotland and Wales, on the other hand, divide their areas into smaller regions. Each region is then an MMD that houses 4-8 list MPs.
MMP: Stands for "Mixed-Member Proportional". The system is "mixed" because there are both riding MPs and list MPs. The system is proportional because the party vote percentage determines the total percentage of seats a party gets in parliament. (Contrast this to a Parallel System). MMP is known as AMS (Additional Member System) in Scotland and Wales, and is sometimes referred to as "Personalized Proportional Representation" in Germany.
MP: Stands for "Member of Parliament". I use this term to refer to the people who hold seats in an electoral system. In Ontario MPs are called "MPPs" for "Member of Provincial Parliament". In Scotland they are called "MSPs" for "Member of Scottish Parliament". I try to normalize the terms for clarity.
Open List: Open list systems refer to party list systems where voters have some influence over the ordering of candidates on their ballots. Many European countries use some kind of open list. FPTP defenders love to criticise Ontario's proposed MMP system because it uses closed lists and not open ones; the disadvantage to open lists is that they make the ballot very long and somewhat complicated. For this reason, most countries that use open lists give their voters a closed-list option of voting only for the party (which, it appears, most voters take advantage of). This is called a "flexible list" system.
Parallel System: A parallel voting system is one in which there are riding MPs and list MPs, and the party vote is used to determine the total percentage of list MPs only. Contrast this to MMP, where the party vote is used to determine the total percentage of MPs overall. This seems like a small difference but it has big implications; see this overly long entry for details. The academic name for parallel systems is "MMM", which stands for "Mixed-Member Majoritarian". Parallel systems are mostly used in formerly communist Eastern European countries, as well as Japan. I have also heard this system referred to as a "supplementary system", which should not be confused with "supplementary vote".
Plurality: Plurality means "more than the competition". In an election race with many contenders, the contender that got the greatest share of the vote is said to have a plurality of votes. Contrast this with majority, which means "over 50%".
PR: PR stands for "proportional representation". It refers to a voting system in which the total power each party gets is proportional to its share of the popular vote. There are many different families of proportional voting systems; MMP is just one of them. The phrase "PR" alone or "Pure PR" is sometimes used to indicate the "List PR" system.
Riding: When I use the word "riding" I am referring to a (single member) electoral district. I use this term because I grew up using it and I believe most Canadians understand what it means better than "electoral district" or "constituency". The proper term in Canada is in fact "electoral district". In academic literature ridings are referred to as "SMD"s -- single member districts.
STV: STV is a proportional system that stands for "Single Transferable Vote". The basic idea is that instead of single-member ridings an area is divided into MMDs. Voters then rank candidates in order of preference. Each spot in the MMD requires a "quota" of votes in order to be filled. If no candidate reaches quota, the most unpopular candidate is dropped and his or her votes are redistributed (sometimes with less weight) to other candidates according to voter rankings. Interestingly, once a winning candidate reaches quota his or her extra votes are also redistributed, so votes for very popular candidates can help elect somebody else. STV is used in Malta, Ireland, some municipal elections (for example in Scotland) and Australia's Upper house (although in the latter most voters treat it as a list system, voting for a party instead of ranking candidates). It is the system proposed by the British Columbia Citizen's Assembly. It used to be used in Alberta and Manitoba for some municipal elections from the 1920s to the 1950s, but apparently was dropped because it was electing too many Communists.
Supplementary Vote: This system occasionally comes up as an alternative to proportionality. This system uses single-member ridings where voters rank their candidates preferentially. If one candidate gets a majority of the votes, that candidate wins. Otherwise, all but the top two candidates are dropped, and the votes for "loser" candidates are given to the top two people according to the ranking. Contrast this with alternative vote, where "loser" candidates are dropped one at a time and their votes redistributed. (I have also seen the term "supplementary system" being used to refer to parallel systems in New Zealand.)

MMP 102: Contradictory Arguments

2007-09-24T00:21:23Z

To my relief, the blogosphere has finally started picking up on the topic of the Ontario referendum. Although I firmly disbelieve that the blogosphere reflects popular opinion to any significant degree, I am hopeful that these online conversations will prompt some offline discussion and debate over electoral reform.

Of course, Sturgeon's Law applies to the Internet as much as to anything else, so many of the arguments online (including, no doubt, many of mine) have been nonsense: unfounded opinions, parrotted talking points, screeds for or against proportional representation that reflect deep misunderstandings about the basic mechanics of the two voting systems at stake. To some extent this wrongness is both predictable and good: electoral reform takes a while for people to digest, and publically displaying your ignorance to the entire Internet is a fine way to work through the issues. At the same time, some of this argumentation has been bugging me, so in this entry I'll publish my own ignorance by attempting to point out some of the sillier arguments.

My goal in this entry is to focus on contradictions: statements that have some merit individually but which make little sense when taken together. At the risk of academic dishonesty I will (sometimes) refrain from naming names; many of these talking points are made several times in the echo chamber that is the Internet, and I deliberately paraphrase many of the arguments I hear.

Also keep in mind that my readings have been focussing on blog posts against MMP, and thus many of my criticisms will sound like MMP defences.

Now that everybody's good and bored, let's dive in:

Open and Closed Lists

"This argument that closed lists are transparent is hollow. How can we trust the media to examine these lists and point out deficiencies in gender, geographic and ethnic representation? We should use open lists instead so that voters -- not parties -- get the final say in representation."

On the one hand, you claim that the media will be too lazy to examine the closed lists parties publish before the election, but on the other hand you expect every single voter to understand list compositions well enough to rank candidates for their chosen party?

I don't trust the media that much, but I do know that it is easier for the media to make list compositions an election issue than it is to expect the average voter to do a lot of research into candidates before voting. I also know that there are many possible eyes that could be examining these closed lists; if nothing else there are tonnes of bloggers around who have nothing better to do than pore over party lists and blog six times a day about them.

Cross-Country Comparisons

"Ontario is not Europe or New Zealand, and it is foolish to think that their experiences will apply to ours. Therefore I reject data coming out of studies from these countries, and rely on my doomsday predictions and thought experiments instead."

Have you ever considered that people in these other countries have made the same thought experiments as you did?

I agree that we need to be careful about overlaying the experiences of other countries onto Ontario. But at least the experiences in other countries give us some examples for what actually occurs in practice, and whether the worst-case scenarios we dream up are that likely.

The problem with thought experiments is that there are too many variables at play. Time and time again I have been surprised to see that my predictions of how MMP works do not hold up under closer scrutiny. In that sense I am much more likely to trust actual data over hypotheses.

Selective Cross-Country Comparisons

"It is foolish to overlay results from other countries onto Ontario. We have no way to predict what is going to happen under MMP. Why, we could turn out like Russia, which is so corrupt that they sell list seat placements to fundraise money!"

If you reject any predictive power to Ontario, why do you raise scare stories about worst-case scenarios from other countries?

Although I believe that we cannot put a lot of confidence in results from other countries, I reject the assertion that the experiences of other countries give us no predictive power whatsoever. I also find it strange that many of the same people who offer the conservatism argument have no problems with the implementation of scientific discoveries, liberalization of global finance, or other radical changes that have had huge impacts on our lives.

I think the key to wise use of cross-country data is to put cultural and social information in context. For example, in many ways New Zealand is similar to Ontario, so I feel okay about trying to predict Ontario under MMP using New Zealand as a model. However, there are some areas in which New Zealand and Ontario differ considerably -- our fiscal attitudes are one, and our history and treatment of aboriginal relations are another. It would be nice to predict the same kind of financial surpluses or strong aboriginal representation in Ontario that we see in New Zealand, but these are likely foolish predictions. On the other hand, New Zealand and Ontario are both unicameral governments with strong party discipline coming from a Westminister parliamentary history, so other predictions are more likely to hold.

Promises to Redo the Process

"I know you don't like FPTP. I don't like FPTP either. But if you vote for FPTP, we can redo the process and get the electoral reforms we want."

Oy. So answering "first-past-the-post" to the question of "Which electoral system should Ontario use to elect members to the provincial legislature" is actually a vote that you don't support FPTP?

Oh! I get it! You're telling me that you support FPTP more than MMP! Okay! I'm sure that future politicians that win their landslide "majorities" under FPTP will totally agree with your interpretation. If we get a referendum result that is 35% in favour of MMP and 65% in favour of FPTP, politicians will clearly interpret the result as resounding evidence that we want to revisit the electoral reform issue again and again and again until we get the result we want.

I can't predict the future. Maybe there will be a groundswell of support for electoral reform even if we lose the referendum. But losing a referendum (especially if we lose with less than 50% of the vote) gives politicians a huge cudgel they will gleefully use to beat us over the head every time we complain about FPTP in the future. We'll just be another special interest group out of tune with the wishes of the electorate, "as the 2007 Ontario Referendum results clearly demonstrate".

Look. If you genuinely like FPTP better than MMP, then vote for FPTP. But when you do so, be prepared to live under FPTP for a good long time. If you actually like MMP better but are voting for FPTP because you are holding out for something better, then you are shooting yourself in the foot. If nothing else, countries have demonstrated a (somewhat disturbing) tendency to revisit electoral reform once they have made an initial change.

One final comment about this hoary old argument: people have different tastes. Many other people have a favourite system that is different from yours. If you honestly believe that the intrinsic superiority of your system is going to carry a future referendum past a 60% threshold, then you should get your meds checked out.

Party Power vs. Lists

"You should oppose MMP because it gives parties more power -- namely, the power to select list members."

This argument underlies a lot of the uneasiness people feel about MMP. Certainly, I am sympathetic to the sentiment behind the argument: like many others, I too am wary of making political parties (and in particular party elites) stronger at the expense of voters -- that's one of the main reasons I got into this sordid business of electoral reform. But -- compelling as it is -- the argument above is näive and misleading.

There is no question in my mind that closed lists do give parties more control over the list nomination process. Like other MMP advocates, I don't think this level of control is all that different from the control parties and their hacks can (but don't always) wield in the riding nomination process. For the sake of argument, let's assume the worst case scenario: party leaders and hacks will have total control over the list nomination process in a way that lets them appoint all kinds of syncophantic puppies to the list positions. I still claim the argument is näive and misleading, because it ignores the big picture: under MMP parties get weaker, not stronger.

The reason for this is simple: MMP is a proportional system. That means voters have several viable political parties they can choose on their ballot -- not just the 2.5 options we get now. That means the existing parties cannot afford to be as arrogant as they are now, because voters have realistic options to take their party votes elsewhere. In turn, this means that parties have to be more responsive to voters during the election, which reduces their autonomy and puts power back where it belongs.

Furthermore, once the election is over parties will usually need to put together coalition governments. A single party government can concentrate its power in the hands of the premier, the cabinet and the party hacks who pull the strings. In a coalition setting, that power can't help but be distributed, if only because there are multiple party leaders to contend with. As I have argued earlier, in other countries it seems that power gets distributed even further, to backbenchers and committees.

There's a tradeoff here. We are giving party hacks more explicit control over the nomination process for list candidates, and in return we give the parties some real competition and the voters some real choice. We can argue whether the cost of list MPPs outweighs the benefits of greater party competition and voter choice, but painting MMP as a slam-dunk win for party hacks is totally wrong. If it really was a win for party hacks, then you would expect that the party hacks of Ontario's two biggest parties would be staunchly in favour of MMP. Instead, it looks like many of them are totally opposed and running scared.

Parliamentary Reform

"We shouldn't be concentrating on electoral reform. Parliamentary reform is more important."

Dude. You can do both. Unless you show me how adopting MMP makes parliamentary reform harder/impossible, I'm not buying this. In particular, please demonstrate how a premier and cabinet that already has power centralized in its hands will be persuaded to give that power to backbenchers.

And hey! You want parliamentary reform? Go for it! Once this referendum is over, please demonstrate comparable effort to reforming parliament that Fair Vote Canada has demonstrated to electoral reform. I have been donating energy to this cause for a year and a half now; other people have been working a lot longer and a lot harder. What? You think political reform is easy?

Reduced Representation

"Despite all published evidence to the contrary, I refuse to believe that list members will serve as local representatives. Therefore, we will be going down from 107 MPPs to 90. That's unacceptable!"

The OCA report states that with 107 seats there would be about one MPP for every 114 000 people. The next worst ratio is Quebec, which has one MP for every 60 000 people. If we assume that your incorrect argument is sound and list MPs don't give us any representation, then we get about one MP for every 135 000 people.

Now it's your job to explain why 107 seats (or 103 if you prefer the original terms of the Fewer Politicians Act) is the right number for Ontario but 90 is not. We're already so much worse than every other province. Just to get to Quebec's levels of representation we would need 201 ridings. Are you advocating that we should have 201 ridings? More? What is the right number and why? Are all the other provinces overrepresented?

And before you pull out the argument that it's vitally important that we keep our riding boundaries synchronized provincially and federally: you're begging the question, because Ontario is underrepresented by population federally as well. We will probably stay underrepresented in federal legislature because the other provinces don't want a Canada dominated by Ontario. That's fine, but those arguments don't apply to the provincial legislature, and it is totally unclear to me that the financial savings from synchronizing boundaries outweigh the representative losses of carrying over federal political compromises to the provincial level.

Incidentally, we could have had 107 ridings. The OCA considered a system with 107 ridings and 46 list seats, for a total of 153 seats. (OCA long, p. 118) This system even went to secret ballot, and lost. Why? My feeling is that it is precisely because people would gripe about all of the extra salaries. And even 153 seats gives us a worse representation ratio than any other province.

Kitchener Centre Record Debate

2007-09-21T19:04:18Z

I attended the Kitchener Centre debate last night. I don't live in that riding anymore, but I was (and am) pretty much stressed to the breaking point, and I needed something to relax and entertain me. In addition, I infiltrated the literature table and snuck in some referendum literature.

The contenders were: J.D. McGuire (independent), Rick Moffitt (NDP), Matt Stanson (PC), Daniel Logan (Green), John Milloy (Liberal), and Bill Bernhardt (Family Coalition). All six contenders were white men, although two (McGuire and Logan) were younger than the archetypal politician. I am sure nobody really cares, although you can bet there will be all kinds of commentary on how the leading four contenders for Kitchener-Waterloo are women.

This was the third debate these folks had conducted, so they knew each other's talking points (and a few of them were willing to steal policies from other parties, which is what I like to see).

McGuire ran in the Kitchener Ward 2 elections last year against Len Carter and Berry Vrbanovic. He ran on a platform of independence from political party discipline. As such he tried to point out the misleading statements and empty slogans of the other politicians. However, he was fairly weak in exactly the area independents need to shine: offering creative ideas that differ from the traditional political parties. All too often he fell back on the old "I'll listen to what the voters want" excuse when stumped by questions. I don't think he's a joke candidate -- he's running on principles, not pragmatics -- but he himself claimed after the debate that only one independent has won office since 1934 (!) in Ontario. (Hey NoMMPers! Would you like to reconsider that "voters vote based on their local representative" fairy tale?) I definitely have to look that statistic up, but it demonstrates fairly clearly McGuire's chances.

Moffitt ran as a Kitchener regional candidate last election. He impressed me then with his knowledge of local issues and willingness to proposed unorthodox solutions. He was much less impressive in this debate. In addition to echoing the party line insistently (which pretty much every candidate did), his entire focus lie in accusing the Liberals of breaking promises (which, come to think of it, is also the NDP party line). Hearing him accuse the Liberals in response after response got tiring, and became particularly ineffective when Milloy zinged him with a "magic wand" accusation: the NDP likes to make promises, but when they had the opportunity to keep some of the same promises they accused the Liberals of breaking, the NDP fell through.

Moffitt did let a few shards of independent thinking filter through. He had some pragmatic insights on amalgamation (almagamating services has worked well in the region), and proposed indexing minimum wage and welfare rates to inflation (which is in the Green platform but as far as I know not in the NDP one). He also knew his talking points on the NDP platform, as well as the stats and figures about various issues (such as family farms and the negative income most farmers report). But he was a lot weaker in terms of local knowledge than I would expect, and all too often he spoke in vague generalities (for example, promising to use nurse practitioners more without stating how). In his favour, he was one of the more assertive and articulate speakers.

I was totally disappointed by Matt Stanson. In my opinion, he was by far the weakest candidate. His debate strategy consisted of reading from the Big Book of Tory Promises verbatim. To his credit, he's a good reader -- I did not fully realize that he was reading until quite late in the debate. That's okay, I guess. Although effective public speaking is a definite asset in a politician, it is probably good that polished extemporaneous oration does not override all other values. But for the life of me I had a hard time finding any other reasons to recommend him as a candidate either. When asked questions that he could not answer by reading the Big Book of Tory Promises (and/or accusing the Liberals of promise-breaking) he readily admitted defeat, even when asked basic questions about how to improve the education system. Much worse than this, he blatantly flubbed or ignored questions that were inconvenient -- the worst example being a question that asked "What was your government's biggest mistake when in power". Stanson spent his entire minute blaming the Liberals and accusing them of breaking promises, while both Moffitt and Milloy had the nerve to offer some kind of answer (Moffitt: electing Bob Rae, not indexing welfare to inflation; Milloy: underestimating the depth of need in Ontario).

Stanson did offer a handful of reasonable answers. He found a modicum of passion when discussing apprenticeship programs, because he got started in business through apprenticeship. He offered one good idea from a farmer's organization that was not in the PC platform: labelling foods from point of origin so consumers can choose to eat locally more easily. He also noted that 2/3 of Ontario's health budget goes to chronic disease, which is a good talking point that should be brought up (but may have come from the Big Book).

The most frightening thing about Stanson is that -- unless I am wrong and Kitchener Centre really is a Liberal stronghold -- he stands a pretty good chance of winning the riding. (Hey NoMMPers! What's that fairy tale again?) Let's hope he's got some strengths that are not readily apparent.

Dan Logan recited the Green Party platform fairly well. He did a much better job of relating Green policy in unorthodox ways. For example, one of the first questions had to do with the tradeoff between coal and nuclear power. Logan hit the home run by framing the question as one of conservation, stating that an investment in lower-energy appliances would cost less than building new nuclear reactors and would compensate for the 1/3 power that nuclear generates. Similarly, he reframed a question about developing the greenbelt into one about commuting and local job creation. Reframing questions is the Green Party's niche, and if nothing else Logan demonstrated some aptitude for identifying opportunities to his agenda.

Logan also showed some aptitude for thinking on his feet: he could not give specific recommendations for amalgamation, but did note that amalgamation did not work so well in Ottawa and Toronto. He did flub some questions and clearly did not know the issues as deeply as some of the other candidates, but overall he did a reasonable job. I would have liked to see a stronger knowledge of concrete steps to implement policy, as well as a stronger ability to relate local issues and concerns to provincial jurisdiction.

Where Logan fell down was in his election messaging. He reiterated the tired mantra that this would be the year that the Green Party would elect somebody, and that it might as well be in Kitchener Centre. Meanwhile, he did not raise the issue of the referendum once (which he later admitted was a mistake -- he said that in past debates somebody has raised the issue of a question, and he thought it would happen again).

In my opinion, John Milloy won the debate hands down. I know saying that reflects poorly on my character (am I turning into my parents?), but I came out of the debate with a lot more sympathy for the Liberals than I had going in. Milloy had a definite advantage in the debate -- incumbents always have more knowledge of what is going on, and they almost always express their talking points articulately -- but Milloy also had to defend his government's actions. Unlike all the other candidates, he couldn't rely solely on criticizing the records of other candidates. Furthermore, for the most part Milloy actually did attempt to defend his government's record instead of blaming it on Mike Harris and Bob Rae (although he contrasted the records of his government to these ones fairly often).

Milloy also pulled in a lot of local data in his arguments. He had no compunctions about pointing out all the pork he had brought in from the region -- the affordable housing, large donations to the Catholic Family Counselling centre to combat domestic violence, provincial funding for Highway 7 and the LRT, even the McMaster medical school. But it was also clear that he understood some of the subtleties of local concerns fairly well. For example, on the issue of amalgamation he said that the government would not stand in the way of grassroots recommendations. I don't know if I believe this, but it does show an understanding of the issues. He even had the guts to state that greenbelts were an effective defence against the Ontario Municipal Board, which demonstrated some understanding of one of the biggest barriers to land conservation in the province. (Mind you, he didn't offer to reform the OMB, but at least he understood the issues.)

Having said that, I am sure glad I don't live in Kitchener Centre, because under FPTP there is no way for me to distinguish my appreciation for John Milloy with my distrust of the Liberal government. Unlike many others I think that this "Fibber McGuinty"[0] strategy is dumb (I don't like the Ontario Health Premium either, but unless we make some hard decisions we have to accept that healthcare is expensive and could bankrupt us) but I have found that the government has been rather sneaky with respect to several issues I care about -- most notably energy policy and electoral reform.

If appreciating John Milloy's performance sullies my character, I'm pretty sure my opinion of Bill Bernhardt's performance ruins it completely. Bernhardt was the least showy candidate, but he did a good job of expressing his socially and fiscally conservative platform. Even more shamefully, I found myself agreeing with several aspects of Family Coalition policy. One question asked the candidates to extend kindergarten to a full day, and Bernhardt clearly stated that it would be better for those kids to stay at home. He took a page from the Green party in discussing energy policy, stating a preference for local, decentralized energy production. I even found myself intrigued by his suggestion that maybe welfare should be merged with Family Services. Mind you, he also complained about the low birth rate (1.6% and falling!) and stated his party's preferences on marriage and family, neither of which I support. But I am pretty sure that finding any common ground with the Family Coalition is grounds for ostracization and maybe even public flogging, so I am glad nobody reads this far into my blog posts.

In addition to sticking to his values and articulating them clearly, Bernhardt demonstrated an ability to express himself concisely. On a few occasions he finished his responses well before the 1 minute limit. That flustered the moderator, who was used to every candidate using up the maximum amount of airtime possible. On the downside Bernhardt got into few specifics and demonstrated little local knowledge of situations, but at least he knew how to shut up when he ran out of things to say.

Occasionally Bernhardt also showed an ability to think on his feet. On at least one question he admitted that the Family Coalition did not have a clear policy (I think it was for apprenticeships), and then proceeded to suggest a policy that he thought would be in line with Family Coalition values. That impressed me a whole lot more than being able to orate from the Big Book of Tory Promises.

A few other notes about the debate: the backdrop for the candidates consisted of some curtains with the word VOTE stitched very faintly into the fabric. Maybe this was intended to be subliminal?

Overall, I was rather disappointed by the format. The televised portion of the debate consisted of five questions from the "media panel" and a single question from the audience. There's your democracy for you. It should come as no surprise that the Record happens to be ignoring the referendum in its debate series -- we wouldn't want the people to express themselves effectively, now would we?

After the debate some reporter asked me for my opinion. I stated outright that I thought Milloy won the debate, and if anything I bet that is what would get printed. But then she made some comment about this demonstrating the success of the democratic process, which I denied vehemently. But instead of recording my opinion faithfully, the "reporter" stated that we would have to agree to disagree, and did not write a single word of what I said. Since the reporter has no compunctions about twisting my words, let me state my position clearly: as an entertainment spectacle, Milloy won the debate. But as a democratic exercise the debate was an utter failure. Only two candidates -- Milloy and Stanson -- have any chance of taking this riding, which is a travesty given how weak a candidate Stanson is. Pretending that we somehow "served democracy" because every candidate got to express their opinion is obscene.

[0] Are the Tories and NDPers actually channelling the old Fibber McGee radio program with this nickname? I guess it's possible. I first learned about this program while listening to rebroadcasts on nostalgia radio stations; I suppose others might do the same.

Local Candidates Meetings

2007-09-20T17:09:00Z

FYI: I will be publishing all of the candidate meetings I know about for Cambridge, Kitchener-Waterloo, Kitchener Centre and Kitchener-Conestoga to our Google Events Calendar. The focus is on referendum stuff but we are trying to keep track of as many election events as we know about.

It looks like I can't make many of the all-candidates meetings, but I may write about the meetings I attend.

In other news, it is vaguely embarrassing doing LJ using a graphical browser -- especially at the library.

Becoming what we despise

2007-09-15T17:03:00Z

You know what frustrates me? I feel I can't talk openly about my actual feelings surrounding the referendum. Even the posts I am posting feel treacherous, particularly since the opposition is making no such missteps.

And it's working! In the latest polling 33% support FPTP and 26% support MMP. (Neither of these systems wins the plurality vote, however; 38% polled were unsure of how to vote.)

You know what else frustrates me? I must be spending 70% of my waking cycles working on referendum stuff, and I feel that
a. I'm getting nothing accomplished and spending most of my time thrashing
b. It doesn't matter what I do because the Referendum Ontario education drive will win or lose the campaign, not me
c. Nobody seems to think this is important enough to devote effort to, so I keep thinking the weight is on my shoulders.
d. When I do get the word out to somebody, the uniform response is "Why didn't I hear about this before?" followed by "you should do this and that and this other thing!"

Well, I'm a wimp. My shoulders can't take the pressure. I'm sorry I'm doing such a terrible job; I'm sorry that I am not perky enough to win a campaign; I'm sorry I have such a hard time telling people the sweet nothings they want to hear. And yes, I am quite aware that I'm not doing enough. But what do you expect when you leave the campaigning to incompetents who can't hold down real jobs? If we want effective democracy then we've got to pitch in to make it happen.

Sigh. Somebody call a Waaamulance.

MMP 102: What do List Members Do?

2007-09-07T21:11:48Z

Perhaps the least understood aspect of MMP in Ontario has to do with the role of the list MPPs. Coming from a FPTP system, we are used to our riding representatives having a distinct, well-defined role: they represent their party in legislature, and represent the interests of their riding at home. In MMP, we add list MPs to this mix. It is pretty clear that they represent their parties in legislature (after all, that is why we elect them) but what else do they do? Do they sit at home and eat bon-bons while their fellow riding MPs are pounding the pavement doing constituency work and kissing babies? Or do they serve some potentially useful role? Furthermore, how does the public react to the existence of these other MPs?

As usual, we might look to other countries for insight and inspiration. It appears that Germany, Scotland, Wales and New Zealand all deal with list MPs somewhat differently. However, there are some broad roles that list MPs take on in these countries:

One common practice is for list MPs to "shadow" their riding counterparts, serving as a second (or third, or fourth) contact point for constituents in some geographic area. In some places list MPs shadow a single riding; in others they take on larger regions.

Some MPs explicitly represent concerns that do not fit neatly into a region. For example, some MPs in New Zealand take on the task of representing concerns of the Pacific Islander and Chinese minorities.

A few list MPs are specifically recruited for that role because they are experts in some field. These MPs may be placed high on party lists and not contest ridings at all, and serve as policy advisors for their area upon election. From the literature I have read, this is the closest we see to ``party hacks'' getting ranked highly on party lists.

Sources: (Cody 2003, p. 40; McLeay Vowles 2007, p. 86)

In many ways all of the above countries consider list and riding MPs to be equivalent. For example, they sit together in legislature, their base pay is the same, they have equivalent voting power, and they all participate in committee work. (Massicotte Long 2004, p. 61) (Bradbury Mitchell 2007, p. 119) The differences have to do with the way list MPs are perceived by the public, the duties they are (implicitly or explicitly) expected to carry out, and the relationships and tensions between list and riding MPs. In these areas the political cultures of different countries differ quite a bit.

Germany

By most accounts, the Germans accept their list MPs most readily, and the roles of list and riding MPs differ the least. "Shadowing" is both prevalant and widely accepted -- citizens tend to take their constituency work to MPs based upon party affiliation and values as much as geographic considerations. (Massicotte Long 2004 p. 61-62, Lundberg Perceptions 2006 p. 64)

A paper by Patzelt (Patzelt 2007) classifies list MPs as those from small parties, those who wanted to win ridings but failed, and those who were "unexpected" list MPs -- people who did not contest ridings, but ended up in power despite being low on the list. He suggests that the incentives to shadow depend on the classification of list MP: most MPs from small parties pose no real threat in winning ridings. Although they do some constituency work they focus their attention on special interests and pleasing their party elite. The other two classes of list MPs invoke more conflict from their riding counterparts. Would-be riding MPs want to contest (and win) ridings in subsequent elections. "Unexpected" MPs realize that their status as riding MPs are vulnerable because of their low rankings. Thus these groups work harder at being visible to the voters. (ibid, p. 65-66) Both these groups threaten the dominance of their riding counterparts, but the riding MPs accept this as "part of the game". Interestingly, Patzelt does not include list MPs selected for their expertise as a category in Germany; list members are either from small parties or somewhat uncomfortable being on the list.

It is not clear that this multi-fronted outreach does a lot of good in Germany, however. Patzelt also publishes a scary table (ibid, p. 63) that indicates that 45% of Germans couldn't name a member of their federal parliament, and 73% of respondents felt it was "rather difficult" or "nearly impossible" to get to talk with a member of their federal parliament! (It is not clear whether this included East German respondents; in most of this paper Patzelt focuses on the Western German politicians only.) Lundberg found that overall both riding and list members of the German parliament placed less importance on constituency work than their Wales and Scottish counterparts. (Lundberg Perceptions 2006, p. 71)

In terms of workload distribution, it appears that list and riding MPs do fairly similar work. Patzelt reports that riding MPs (both federally and in the Lnder) tend to favour constituency work and local activities more than their list counterparts, but the differences are small. Similarly, a paper by Stratman and Baur (Stratman Baur 2002) find some weak evidence that federal German riding MPs tend to join committees that benefit their local constituents, while list MPs tend to join committees that are affiliated with special interest groups that are not focussed geographically (such as Family/Child/Elderly matters). The time estimates in Patzelt's paper do seem to suggest that list MPs do less work than riding MPs overall, however.

It is interesting to note that riding MPs tend to have more status than their list counterparts. For example, if list members and riding members have the same affiliation, the riding members are considered the "boss" (Patzelt 2007, p. 66). It is also the case that list MPs shadow their riding counterparts -- not only because the parties expect this behaviour, but because they want to contest riding seats.

It is not immediately obvious why this should be the case in Germany. Firstly, there is a 50-50 split between riding and list seats. Secondly, Germany used a pure list system in the Weimar Republic, so the country has some experience with list MPs. Nonetheless, riding MPs feel decidedly more secure about their chances for re-election than list MPs (ibid, p. 51). My guess is that incumbent bias might remain a factor, although I don't think it explains everything.

Massicotte (Massicotte Long, p. 61-67) goes through a detailed analysis of list vs. riding MPs, concentrating mostly in Germany. He notes that list and riding MPs in Germany get equivalent pay and allowances. He finds that more heads of state and cabinet ministers tend to be riding MPs, but that is because the big-tent winning party tends to win a lot of ridings. He takes the view that there are no major differences between list and riding MPs in Germany.

Wales and Scotland

Of the countries I have been focussing on in this series, list MPs have had the roughest time in Scotland and Wales. Most of the literature I have read claims that tensions run high between riding MPs and their list counterparts. (Lundberg Competition 2006, Bradbury Mitchell 2007) This is especially interesting in the case of Scotland, which is the only country that provides explicit guidelines for the duties of its list members. Scottish List MPs are supposed to distinguish themselves clearly from riding MPs, and they are supposed to serve regional concerns. (Bradbury Mitchell 2007, page 119) In both Scotland and Wales, regions are well-defined by the voting system. Each country is divided into regions, and party votes are tallied regionally, with no considerations for overall proportionality. This results in some vote distortions (especially in Wales, which has five regions and twenty list members in total) but it gives list MPs a strong geographical focus.

Scottish guidelines do not define "regional concerns" very tightly other than to say that list MPs should be active in more than one riding. In practice this does not always happen; many list MPs will either focus on their "home" riding or a riding where they think they could win the next constituency race. This was especially prevalant in the Conservative party, partially because list placement in that party depends on riding performance. However, Plaid Cyrmu members (from Wales) and members of both the Scottish Nationalists and the Liberal Democrats (in Wales) also admitted to shadowing with the hopes of contesting future nominations. (ibid, p. 131) Given the gains made by Plaid Cyrmu and the Scottish Nationalists in the 2007 elections, my guess (which I have not analysed at all) is that it may have worked.

Bradbury and Mitchell found that Scottish list MPs were slightly more likely to deal with groups and organizations rather than individual constituents; overall attention was balanced except in the case of the Scottish Green party, which focussed on groups and organizations (ibid, p. 133)

In contrast, Lundberg (Lundberg Perception 2006, p. 66) found that riding members tended to spend more time than list members helping constituents, and that this gap grew from 2000 to 2003. In 2000 riding MPs who responded to Lundberg's survey claimed to spend 17.5% of their time helping constituents, as opposed to 15.4% estimated by their list counterparts. In 2003 the estimates were 21.1% of riding MP time, vs. 13.7% from list members. Although I am skeptical of the numbers themselves (they are self-reported and reported at too high a precision) it seems clear that something changed between 2000 and 2003. If nothing else, MPs in 2003 had changed their perceptions of how much constituency work they needed to do in order to be considered respectable.

Some of the reaction to MMP in Scotland and Wales is influenced by the circumstances under which MMP was adopted. Unlike New Zealand and Ontario, voters did not vote in referenda dedicated to the adoption of a new voting system; rather, MMP was part of a larger package called "devolution". Devolution was intended to create distinct parliaments for Scotland and Wales, thus giving them somewhat more autonomy over their politics (and appeasing Scottish and Wales nationalists in the process). In Scotland the referendum for devolution passed with 74.3% support; in Wales the referendum squeaked by with 50.3% support. (Alvarez-Rivera 2007) Devolution resulted in the creation of two new assemblies: the Scottish Parliament (SP) and the National Assembly of Wales (NAW).

Because MMP was part of a larger package, it is not clear that the Scots and Welsh wanted a new voting system as much as they wanted some additional power; in particular it looks like the Welsh are not so enthusiastic about having MMP imposed on them -- voter turnout in Welsh elections are abysmal. (Electoral Commission Wales Facts 2007, p. 4)

Another big factor for Scotland and Wales has to do with the Labour Party, which tends to dominate politics in both these regions. Until the 2007 elections, the Labour Party won the vast majority of ridings (and almost no list seats) in both Scotland and Wales. This has given the riding seat/list seat controversy a distinctly partisan spin, and the Labour Party has done whatever it can to make life hard for list MPs. The Scottish guidelines distinguishing riding and list member roles is one manifestation of this. Another is that list members in Scotland get smaller office allowances, supposedly because list members are expected to share "regional" office space with each other. (Bradbury Mitchell p. 119) In practice, list members complain that the smaller allowances mean they can do less constituency work, which suits riding members just fine.

The practice of shadowing annoyed the Labour Party in Wales so much that they attempted to ban dual-candidacy in 2004, and finally succeeded in 2006. This means that politicians in Wales have to decide whether they will run for a riding (possibly challenging the Labour incumbent) or whether they will opt for the greater job security of the list. In my view this move is a pretty blatant sign that riding members in Wales were feeling the heat. Overall, dual candidacy is widely permitted in almost all MMP and parallel systems: according to Lundberg (Lundberg Competition 2006, p. 113) the only places that ban it are the Ukraine, Thailand and the Palestinian Council. In addition, Mexico limits the number of dual-candidates to 60 per party.

One negative side to shadowing expressed by MPs is that constituency work becomes politicized. List and riding members fight for the more glamourous constituency cases, and citizens choose the MPs that share their ideological views in the hopes of getting a more representative audience. This erodes the perception of constituency work being nonpartisan, where a Conservative MP will work just as hard on behalf of an NDP voter as a fellow Conservative. (Lundberg 2006 Perceptions, p. 72-74)

I have not been able to find a lot of public opinion studies on the support of list members in Wales and Scotland. Some focus group work conducted in Wales indicates that knowledge of electoral systems there is pretty low. Only five of 70 focus group participants identified their MMP system (called the "Additional Member System" or AMS there) by name. (Electoral Commission 2006 Wales, p. 41) Although focus group participants knew that they were represented by multiple MPs at the National Assembly of Wales level, "only a minority" of participants knew there were two types of MP (ibid, p. 35). Similarly, the issue of dual-candidacy barely registered with focus group participants, coming up in only two of the eight focus groups (ibid, p. 44), and not receiving much attention even there. As a whole, Welsh focus group members did not feel much connection to any of their National Assembly of Wales MPs, and felt that on the whole the Assembly was ineffective. (ibid, p. 31, 35) Given these perceptions of irrelevance and overall ignorance of MMP mechanics, it is perhaps not surprising that there are no large public outcries against list members. What is surprising is the huge disconnect between the strong feelings for list MPs among the political elite compared to the incredible disinterest in the issue among the Welsh voting population.

Although the Scottish people appear to have a better opinion of devolution, a lot of confusion about the differences between list and riding MPs remain. The Arbuthnott Commission studied Scottish boundaries and voting systems. In their 2006 report, they indicated that instead of tensions between list and riding Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs), there was more confusion between the roles of Westminister MPs and MSPs, and that people tended to take their local concerns to their local council members and their bigger concerns to their Westminister MPs. (Arbuthnott 2006, p. 59) As in Wales, few people knew their regional MSPs (Electoral Commission Scotland 2006, As in Ontario, it is clear that people do not like closed lists very much: in 2003 surveys, about 45% of people disagreed that parties should be able to choose the lists, and about 40% agreed that some form of open list system would be better. The Arbuthnott Commission ended up recommending open lists, although I don't think this recommendation was carried out. (ibid, p. 33, 45).

Overall it appears that Scots value their Scottish Parliament more than the Welsh do theirs. More people know that the Scottish Parliament exists, and they feel that the parliament represents them and is more approachable than Westminister MPs. (Electoral Commission Scotland 2006, p. 22, 23, 32) But there is so much confusion between the many different levels of government in Scotland that not too many regular people seem to care about the differences between list and riding MSPs.

New Zealand

It appears that public perceptions of list MPs has been changing as New Zealand adjusts to MMP. Early perceptions of list MPs were rather negative, in part because a list MP (Alamein Kopu) decided to quit the Alliance Party and sit as an independent (LCC 2004, p. 157, footnote 22), This combined with the New Zealand First debacle of 1996 gave MMP in general and list MPs in particular a black eye. (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006, p. 41) In polling done for the 2001 Review of MMP in New Zealand, 61% agreed that list MPs are not as accountable to voters as electorate MPs, and only 15% disagreed. Associated with this were some calls for open lists, although the Review Committee did not recommend this. (MMP Review Committee 2001, p. 85)

List MPs have continued to be perceived more poorly than their riding counterparts, although neither class of MP earns a lot of popular support under MMP. In 1999 17% of those polled for the New Zealand Election Study stated that they approved of riding MPs in general, compared to just 6% who approved of list MPs in general. By 2002 this had gone up to 22% who approved of riding MPs in general, compared to 10% who approved of list MPs. There is an important caveat to these dismal results, however: people's approvals of specific MPs (especially MPs they have had contact with) is much higher. In 2002, those who recalled the name of their riding MP supported those MPs at a rate of 56%; those who recalled the name of a specific list MPs gave 49% approval of that list MP. Those who actually had contacted their MPs was even higher: in 2002 71% of people who contacted their riding MP approved of him or her, and 75% of those who contacted a specific list MP approved of him or her. (McLeay Vowles 2007, p. 84)

What message can we draw from these strange results? First of all, those who are politically aware enough to be able to name specific MPs tend to have higher approval of MPs in general, and people who are not politically engaged look down upon all MPs. Those who contact list MPs probably have some sympathy for those list MPs to begin with, so maybe it is not surprising that the (many fewer) people who approach list MPs for help tend to appreciate those list MPs more.

New Zealand does not formally mandate roles for its list MPs. Quite a bit of shadowing and local representation does occur, although the number of list MPs opening local offices declined between 1999 and 2003. In 1999 every list MP was assigned to shadow one or more ridings (some MPs had up to nine ridings to look after!).

It appears that shadowing went down as the years passed. By 2003 only 74% of list MPs had opened some kind of constituency office, with some list MPs sharing offices with their riding counterparts. (McLeay and Vowles 2007, p. 82) As in Scotland, list MPs receive less money for local offices than their riding counterparts get, which again limits the amount of constituency work that list MPs can take on. (ibid p. 74). Unlike Scotland and Wales (but like Ontario) the voting system does not create natural "regions" that list members can claim as their own. McLeay and Vowles found that members of smaller parties had fewer hopes for winning riding seats, and thus had less incentive to focus on casework. In contrast, list MPs from bigger parties (which had more realistic hope of winning ridings) still saw constituency work as important. (ibid p. 87) There is evidence that some list MPs -- particularly those from ethnic minorities -- took on the role of serving as ambassador for that ethnic group (ibid, p. 89)

Overall, McLeay and Vowles found that riding MPs tended to do more casework than list MPs, and that the amount of casework riding MPs took on went way up after MMP was introduced. There are two explanations for this: after MMP the number of ridings was reduced, and most people chose to take their concerns to riding MPs over list ones. (ibid p. 85)

One of the more intriguing consequences of list MPs comes from a paper by Heitshusen, Young and Wood. They conducted surveys of MPs from six different houses: MPs from Canadian legislature and British House of Commons (elected using FPTP); the Irish Dail and Australian Senate (elected using variations of Single Transferable Vote, a proportional system); the Australian lower house (elected using Alternative Ballot, a non-proportional system); and the New Zealand legislature (elected using MMP). They asked members of each of these houses to assign priorities to a set of job responsibilities. They then determined how highly each class of MP valued constituency work as compared to their other duties. This helps correct for self-reporting inflation.

The results are striking. A majority of constituency-based MPs (in Canada, New Zealand riding MPs, the Australian lower house, and Britain) ranked constituency work higher than their other responsibilities. In contrast, only 1 of the 30 New Zealand list MPs interviewed did, and no Australian senator did at all. 71% of the New Zealand riding MPs ranked constituency work as their highest concern -- much higher Canadian MPs, which finished second with 57% of MPs rating constituency work highest. (Heitshusen Young Wood 2005, p. 39) McLeay and Vowles argue that some of this is due to New Zealand culture, which places a high value on constituency work. That alone does not explain the behaviour of list MPs, however. Heitshusen, Young and Wood offer four other hypotheses (ibid, p. 40):

riding sizes went way up after MMP was introduced, so riding MPs had to put in more effort to deal with the extra constituency work.

MMP fragmented the party system and made fewer seats "safe seats".

List MPs shadowed riding ones, making the riding MPs feel less secure in their jobs.

New Zealand ridings tend to be more rural, and for some reason rural ridings foster closer MP-constituent relationships than urban ones do.

Which of these hypotheses is correct? It is hard to say. Evidence suggests that MMP actually makes ridings safer than they are under FPTP, because people can vote for incumbent they like independent of party affiliation. My guess is that MMP has something to do with this dramatic jump in the priority of constituency work for riding MPs. Even if list MPs themselves do not work as hard in ridings as they should, their presence may encourage their riding counterparts to work harder. The downside to this is that one of the basic criticisms of FPTP defenders is correct: it does appear that there are some important differences between being a list and riding MP in New Zealand.

Conclusions and Predictions

Predicting the future is dangerous business, especially in political science. There are too few countries and too many variables to foresee consequences with a lot of confidence.

The job of trying to predict the roles of list members in Ontario is even harder than usual, because perceptions and roles for these MPs vary widely between the countries under examination. Nonetheless, I tentatively offer the following predictions.

It appears that to some extent shadowing of riding MPs happens everywhere. The tradition is strongest in Germany, and tends to be more pronounced in situations where the list MPs hope to become riding MPs one day. Because Ontario uses a province-wide list for list MPs, those MPs do not have natural regional boundaries in which to concentrate their efforts. Thus, I expect that although there would be some shadowing in Ontario, it would be practiced mostly by members of the bigger parties.

I do see some list MPs (particularly in the Greens and other ideologically-focused parties) acting as ambassadors for their causes. I could definitely see this happening in Northern Ontario. I do not forsee as much ethnic advocacy as we see in New Zealand; their history with respect to minorities and especially aboriginal relations is quite different from the Canadian experience. Unlike other MMP advocates, I doubt that we will develop the cultural convention of assigning list MPs to regional issues.

I think that we would avoid the problems Scotland and Wales have of a partisan split between riding and list seats, because we have at least two parties in Ontario that can win both ridings and list seats.

I do think that list members would suffer from a poor public image in Ontario. If nothing else, so much of the current referendum campaign has focused on the deficiencies of list MPs that the deck would be stacked against them right from the start. I think that list MPs would attempt to be visible in the public eye (via constituency work and photo ops) but nonetheless most people would not be aware of the list representatives assigned to shadow their ridings. As in New Zealand, I think disapproval for list MPs would be high except among those who seek out interactions with their list MPs.

I think there could be a lot of confusion over the proper roles list MPs are supposed to play, and that this would confuse and frustrate both list and riding MPs during the first few years. However, I do not think that list MPs will be quite as lazy (or as sycophantic) as FPTP defenders would have you believe. Certainly in legislature work they will work just as hard as riding MPs, and although they will have fewer constituency duties I expect most of them will have some presence in their communities, if only to demonstrate that they (and their associated party) deserve re-election.

References

(Alvarez-Rivera 2007) Manuel Alvarez-Rivera. "Election Resources on
the Internet: Elections to the Scottish Parliament and the National
Assembly of Wales". http://electionresources.org/uk/sct-wls/
May 15 2007, accessed July 31 2007.

(Arbuthnott 2006) Commission on Boundary Differences and Voting
Systems (chair: Sir John Arbuthnott). Putting Citizens First:
Boundaries, Voting and Representation in Scotland. Edinburgh: The
Stationery Office. ISBN 0-10-888179-2. Available from http://www.arbuthnottcommission.gov.uk/FinalReport.htm

(Bradbury Mitchell 2007)
Jonathan Bradbury and James Mitchell. "The Constituency Work of
Members of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales:
Approaches, Relationships and Rules.
Regional and Federal Studies, vol 17, no 1, 2007, pp. 117-145.

(Cody 2003) Howard Cody. "Early Lessons from Mixed-Member
Proportionality in New Zealand's Westminister Politics", The New
England Journal of Political Science, Vol 1, No. 1, 2003, pp.
34-51.

(Electoral Commission Wales 2007) The Electoral Commission. The
National Assembly for Wales elections 2007: Facts and Figures.
Available from http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk"

(Electoral Commission Scotland 2006) The Electoral Commission.
Scotland -- Poll Position: Public attitudes towards Scottish
Parliamentary and local government elections. ISBN 1-904363-83-0.
Available from http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk"

(LCC 2004): Law Commission of Canada, Voting Counts: Electoral
Reform for Canada, Queen's Printer of Canada (2004). ISBN
J31-61/2004E (and available online).

(Lundberg Competition 2006) Thomas Carl Lundberg. "Competition
between Members of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly:
Problem or Virtue?", The Political Quarterly, vol 77, no 1,
January-March 2006. p. 107-117.

(Lundberg Perceptions 2006) Thomas Carl Lundberg. "Second-Class
Representatives? Mixed-Member Proportional Representation in
Britain.", Parliamentary Affairs, Vol 59, No 1, 2006, pp.
60-77.

(Massicotte Long 2004) Louis Massicotte. In Search of a
Compensatory Mixed Electoral System for Qubec,
Gouvernment du Qubec, 2004. ISBN 2-550-43379-3.

(McLeay Vowles 2007) Elizabeth McLeay and Jack Vowles. "Redefining
Constituency Representation: The Roles of New Zealand MPs under MMP",
Regional and Federal Studies, vol 17, no 1, 2007, pp. 71-95.
DOI: 10.1080/13597560701189628 .

(MMP Review Committee 2001) Rt. Hon Jonathan Hunt, chair. Inquiry into the
Review of MMP: Report of the MMP Review Committee, New Zealand
House of Representatives, August 2001.

(Patzelt 2007) Werner J. Patzelt. The Constituency Roles of MPs at the
Federal and Lnder Levels in Germany",
Regional and Federal Studies, vol 17, no 1, 2007, pp. 47-70.
DOI: 10.1080/13597560701189610 .

(Stratmann Baur 2002) Thomas Stratmann, Martin Baur. "Plurality Rule,
Proportional Representation, and the German Bundestag." Center for
Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Working
Paper Number 650 (2). January 2002. Available from http://papers.ssm.com/abstract=301069

(Vowles Banducci Karp 2006) Jack Vowles, Susan A. Banducci, Jefferey
A. Karp. "Forecasting and Evaluating the Consequences of Electoral
Change in New Zealand", Acta Politica</a>, vol 41, 2006, pp.
267-284.

MMP 102: Party Hackery in Three Paragraphs

2007-09-01T19:53:24Z

Others worry about creating two different classes of MPPs: the 90 members who are tied to a riding, versus the 39 others who, they say, will need to curry favour with the leaders in order to be as high up the party list as possible, thereby improving their chances of winning a seat.

"I believe in parliament and the current party system," says Mac Penney, long-time backroom strategist for the Ontario PC party. "This is a jury-rigged solution."

-- Steve Paikin, "Oct 10 election is about more than who will govern the province", Barrie Examiner, Aug 31 2007.

This reveals the essence of the "party hack" criticism of list MPs: if introducing lists will make party hacks so powerful, why are the cabals within the big parties so dead set against MMP?

Freeshell woes

2007-08-28T20:46:39Z

Well, so much for that experiment. Freeshell appears to be dropping my e-mails without warning yet again. Earlier this year my e-mail was practically unusable for two or three weeks.

If you sent me mail over the last little while and I did not respond then maybe you want to send it again. My yahoo.ca account is paul_nijjar and my gmail one is paul.s.nijjar .

This really really sucks. Really. I sincerely do not want to be storing my private data with Google, and Yahoo! is only less threatening because I get the impression it may not be competent enough to mine all my personal information.

MMP 102: A Tired Rehashing of Identity Politics

2007-08-25T20:23:55Z

I have a feeling this entry is going to make me look rather sexist and racist. I want to assure you that this is not the case. I have nothing against white men. Some of my best friends know white men. For all intents and purposes, I am a white man myself. And yet for some reason I remain unconvinced that all of our politicians should be white men. Furthermore, I find it odd that the people who disagree with me are so often the people who advocate for strong free markets.

Why do free markets work better than centralized communism? I think one of the primary factors has to do with information. It takes a lot of information to run an economy effectively, and even the smartest bureaucrats can't keep all that information (or even all the important information) in their pointy heads. In fact, bureaucracies don't even have the resources to collect all the necessary information, although goodness knows that Statistics Canada tries the best it can. In my uninformed view, free markets work better precisely to the extent that they distribute the information needed to run an economy amongst all the market participants. Everybody knows their local situations and needs, and they interact to get those needs met. It is by no means a perfect system, but it works a lot better than having Central Headquarters attempt to run everything itself.

In the same way, I believe that representative democracies work better when they accurately represent the people they are governing. Consider a random sample of white men who get elected as politicians. If we believe that this random sample is likely to accurately span the views, priorities and experiences of all citizens these white men represent, there is no problem and the bleeding heart liberals are crying wolf again. On the other hand, if you feel that a more diverse sample of politicians is likely to have a wider range of views, priorities and experiences, then the more diverse sample is likely to be more inclusive (and thus do a better job of representing constituents) than the exclusively white-male set, even if all the politicians act primarily in their own self interest. Maybe the sample of white males could do as good a job if they could somehow prioritize the same views, priorities and experiences of the non-white-male politicians, but that is like saying that centralized economies could work just as well as free market ones if the bureaucrats could access all the information that is distributed in the lives of the wider populace.

Note that my argument is different from that of standard affirmative action. I am not that concerned about giving those who are not white men jobs. I am concerned that the politicians elected to represent us do their jobs better.

There are many limitations and problems with this argument, of course. One of the most insidious is tokenism: the belief that single members of some "exotic" class represent the full range of views, priorities and experiences of that class. This is where our pal statistics comes into play. I would not expect any single white man to encompass the experiences of all white men, and I would not expect any single woman (or any single minority member) to encompass the experiences of their designated groups. In fact, there are built-in biases against this kind of broad representation, because in order to be elected as a politician one has to act more like a politician and less like a human being. Despite this, on average we can expect random samplings of people from "exotic" groups to come closer to representing the experiences faced by people of that group. This is why electing one token from each group is a bad idea: those tokens might be outliers. To get better representation we want larger samples.

Furthermore, the populations we expect our "exotics" to represent might surprise us. For all intents and purposes I am a white male, so hiring me to represent the views of recent immigrant populations who share my skin colour is a bad idea. I might end up being a reasonable representative for other groups of interest, however -- say second-generation Canadians who consider themselves white.

Another big problem is that we are not collections of identities. I may be a second-generation Canadian who considers himself white, but I am also a depressive, an excommunicated environmentalist, an unemployed burden on society, a Linux user, and several other things. Pretending that I could represent one of these facets to the exclusions of all others is kind of foolish. That is one reason I prefer diversity initiatives to be implicit: instead of assigning a bunch of slots to be filled by those who are sufficiently minor and/or diverse (leaving the remaining slots reserved for white men) we attempt to design systems that naturally reward diversity. Our hope is that the closed lists of Ontario's MMP proposal is one such mechanism; there are probably others.

Even this implicit diversity is not enough, however. To say the least, I sympathise with the following sentiment by Richard Gwyn, although I disagree with the conclusion:

But the representation from those groups most in need of being represented -- the poor, the homeless, the undereducated, the mentally disabled -- won't improve one iota.

-- Richard Gwyn, "Electoral Reform won't fix the real political problems", The Record, May 22 2007

I don't think we will see many poor or homeless or undereducated or mentally disabled MPPs under MMP, with or without closed lists. That makes me sad, but unless we move to a randomized jury-style of democracy I don't see how it will change. However, I think that the conclusion that representation for these groups "won't improve one iota" is absolutely false. Under FPTP parties can't get elected by advocating for our most vulnerable -- just look at how the NDP platform has shifted from homelessness and supports for the mentally ill to reducing gas taxes and ATM fees. Under MMP advocates for the vulnerable -- those who work with vulnerable populations and care deeply for their well being -- have a much better chance of mobilizing support across the province to get some MPPs elected. That's not as good as electing members of vulnerable populations directly, but it is a whole lot better than choosing exclusively rich people who isolate themselves in their office buildings and suburbs and can scrupulously avoid contact with the unwashed classes.

This brings me to my final caveat. There is a fine line between recognising that people from diverse groups have different views/priorities/experiences and absolving our politicians of their responsibility to represent all of their constituents -- whether those representatives share the same labels as their constituents or not. We have this miguided cynical perception that it is okay for our elected representatives to serve their own partisan interests at the expense of everyone else. Partisan hackery can and does happen, but it is our responsibility as citizens to make sure that the actors involved don't get away with it. There is no question in my mind that it is better for us to have more diversity in our legislatures than less, but the reason we want this is so that our representatives can articulate a diversity of concerns relevant to their communities, not so they can practice shallow exclusionary identity politics.

MMP 102: Why Closed Lists?

2007-08-23T02:45:29Z

At this point, it appears that the majority of criticism levelled against Ontario's proposed MMP system has to do with party lists, with fears about coalitions and "permanent minority governments" coming in second. People do not like the idea that parties -- not voters -- get to choose who fill the list seats. Some critics take this so far as to label list MPPs "unelected". It is true that parties have to disclose how they selected list candidates before each election, but based on my advocacy so far, this does not reassure people much.

The Ontario proposal uses what is called a "closed list" system, which means voters have no say over the composition or order of the list candidates. There are other alternatives. In "open list" systems, voters have the option to influence the ordering of list candidates somehow. One possibility is to rank the candidates; another is to select a single preferred list candidate from the possibilities. There are several pure list-PR systems that use open lists (Sweden, Brazil, and Slovakia come to mind (IDEA 2005, p. 84)) but from what I know only the German Lnder of Bavaria has an MMP system that uses open lists. (Massicotte Long 2004, p. 53)

A third possibility is to use a "list-free" MMP system. This system avoids explicit lists entirely; the "list" seats are filled by the "best losers" of riding competitions ridings -- namely, those candidates who did well compared to their partymates, but did not win their ridings. In explaining MMP to people, I am surprised at how often people bring up the idea of selecting list MPPs using a list-free method. Mind you, I am biased; I proposed a list-free method in my written submission to the OCA. List-free MMP certainly has its issues (primary of which is how to compare candidates who run in different ridings appropriately) but the more I speak about the OCA proposal the more I think that a list-free system would have been an easier sell to Ontarians than a closed list. As far as I know, list free candidate selection is only used in the German province of Baden-Wrttemberg, the Italian Senate, and Japan. (Day 2004) (Massicotte Long 2004, p. 69) (Pekkanen Nyblade Krauss 2006)

Why did the Ontario Citizens' Assembly choose closed lists for their MMP proposal? The first reason has to do with conservatism: closed lists are used in pretty much every MMP system, whereas open lists and list-free MMP are very rare and not understood as well as closed-list systems are.

The second reason is simplicity. Open list ballots end up listing hundreds of names on each ballot, because each party has to publish its list of candidates for ranking or selection. Closed list MMP simply lists party names and local candidates, which is simpler and does not appear dramatically different from the FPTP ballots we know and love.

Open list ballots also tend to put more of a cognitive burden on voters, especially when voters are expected to rank candidates. Having struggled to select four candidates from a pool of 13 in the last municipal elections for regional councillor, I can attest that evaluating multiple candidates is not so easy (and I only had to find four good candidates, not rank them!). Choosing a single list candidate from a party's pool is easier, but many voters avoid even this. In Sweden, voters can select a party only (allowing the default ordering for the list) or select a particular candidate from the open list. Apparently, over 25% of voters take the open-list option (IDEA 2005, p. 84) but that leaves 70-odd percent who are either happy with the default listings or who cannot be bothered.

The desire to keep the ballot simple eliminates open lists, but it leaves list-free MMP as a possible alternative, as the ballot can be identical for both of these systems. This is where a third criterion comes into play, which is championed by Fair Vote Canada and Equal Voice, but does not appear to be a priority for Ontario voters: the promotion of women and minority candidates. (OCA Background, p. 109)

Fair Vote Canada doctrine states that closed lists help to promote women and minorities via guilt. Namely: if voters/parties have a single position to fill (as happens in riding vacancies) they will tend to vote for white men because that's the demographic that is most electable. On the other hand, if parties have to fill eight positions, they are unlikely to choose white men for all positions, because they don't want to look sexist and racist. So they will choose a few women and a few minorities to feel better about themselves and possibly appeal to a bigger demographic. This gives women and minority candidates opportunities to demonstrate they are as qualified as white men, thus earning voter trust in future elections.

This doctorine appears to be correct. As circumstantial evidence, here are some comparisions of women in legislature between FPTP and closed-list MMP systems. It shows the number of women in legislature following the results of elections.

Election	% Women	System
Wales 2007	47%	MMP
Scotland 2007	33%	MMP
New Zealand 2005	32%	MMP
Germany 2005	32%	MMP
New Zealand 1993	21%	FPTP
Canada 2006	21	FPTP
UK 2005	20%	FPTP
US 2006	16%	FPTP

p> Sources: (IPU May 31 2007), (Vowles Banducci Karp 2006), (Engender 2007), (Wales Electoral Commission 2007) </p>

These numbers do not prove anything definitively -- there are several MMP-type systems (e.g. those in Venezuela and Hungary) where not many women get elected, and Rwanda elects more women than anybody ~~using a FPTP system~~ [0]. But for countries with similar political cultures (as all the anglophone jurisdictions listed above have) the evidence is reasonably convincing.

The New Zealand figures are moderately misleading: the percentage of women elected in New Zealand had already been going up for years before MMP was adopted. But after the first MMP election in 1996 the percentage of women jumped by almost 10%, and it has hovered there ever since.

Apparently, closed lists have a definite advantage in this respect: open lists give voters the opportunity to rank women lower, and in Bavaria it appears that voters do this (Massicotte Long 2004, p. 57). This renders the "promotion of women" argument curiously undemocratic: even though including more women in legislature can improve representation, voters cannot be trusted to elect more women on their own.

I don't know where I stand on this. I can see arguments for both sides. However, there is no question that the promotion of women rankles against voters who disapprove of tokenism and/or affirmative action.

I think the situation for minorities is different. Certain minorities (in particular natives, but also blacks and even East Asians) remain embarrassingly underrepresented. It looks like that -- in urban areas at least -- the number of brown people competing for seats is increasing on its own. One danger is that we will lump all minorities together and then just promote the election of brown people who would have been elected anyways.

None of this would be much of an issue if voters cared a lot about getting women and minority candidates elected. Unfortunately, I don't get the sense that this issue is even on the radar for most voters. That's a big problem. It means those of us trying to sell MMP have to handwave away the limitations of closed lists without being able to leverage its biggest advantage in a way that is meaningful to voters.

Perhaps the most convincing argument I have been able to make in defence of closed lists so far is that we won't necessarily have to live with them for long: it is reasonably easy to move from closed-list systems to list-free or even open-list MMP. In fact, a trick of interpretation might allow for optional list free MMP already: if parties are allowed to submit partial orderings of candidates to Elections Ontario, then they could give all riding candidates the same ranking. They could then say that ties between riding candidates are broken according to their performances in local ridings. My understanding is that this trick is used in Japan, there is a chance it could be used in Ontario as well.

On the other hand, trying to get an open-list or list-free system in Ontario by starting the electoral reform process from scratch seems highly improbable unless we are willing to wait a few decades for the sting of losing this referendum to pass.

[0] Oops. It looks like Rwanda doesn't use FPTP to elect seat members; it actually uses a list-PR system. They still have the highest percentage of women elected, though.

References

(Day 2004) Wilf Day. "A Mixed Member Proportional Model for Canada". Available at http://www.wilfreddaylawoffice.com/MMPFEDERALMODEL.pdf".

(IDEA 2005) Andrew Reynolds, Ben Reilly, Andrew Ellis. Electoral Systems Design: The New International IDEA Handbook. Sweden: Trydellis Tryckeri AB, 2005. ISBN 91-8531-18-2. Available online

(Massicotte Long 2004) Louis Massicotte. In Search of a Compensatory Mixed Electoral System for Qubec, Gouvernment du Qubec, 2004. ISBN 2-550-43379-3. Available from http://www.institutions-democratiques.gouv.qc.ca/publications/mode_scrutin_rapport_en.pdf

(OCA Background 2007) The Ontario Citizens' Assembly Secretariat. Democracy at Work: The Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electorial Reform. Queen's Printer of Ontario, 2007. ISBN 978-1-4249-4435-4 (PDF). Available online: http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca/assets/Democracy%20at%20Work%20-%20The%20Ontario%20Citizens%27%20Assembly%20on%20Electoral%20Reform.pdf

(IPU May 31 2007) Inter-Parliamentary Union. Women in National Parliaments: Situation as of 31 May 2007. Available at http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm. Accessed 2007-07-21.

(Engender 2007) Engender. Where are the Women? Historic election returns men in grey suits. (Press Release). Available from http://www.engender.org.uk/Docs/Election%20press%20release.doc, accessed 2007-07-23.

(Wales Electoral Commission 2007) The Electoral Commission. The National Assembly for Wales elections 2007: Facts and Figures. Available from http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk"

MMP 102: Party Life Cycles

2007-08-18T02:14:38Z

In our last episode, I argued that medium and small parties are electable, and therefore these smaller parties can effectively compete against the big-tent parties for votes and seats. In this entry, I want to explore just how effectively the smaller parties can compete.

My original hope was that MMP would support a "party life cycle". As they gain trust and experience, little parties could grow into bigger and more powerful ones, and challenge the big-tent parties for dominance. In response, the big parties would have to fight hard to maintain their status, which might reduce big-party arrogance and stagnation. Given Ontario's proposed system, are these hopes
realistic?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. Small parties can gain seats and grow to some extent, but the chances of small parties actively challenging the big-tent parties for dominance appears slim.

The evidence from New Zealand and Germany (courtesy of Wikipedia) offer the first clue. In New Zealand the two big-tent parties (National on the right, Labour on the left) have remained dominant. It's the same story in Germany: in every election, the two big-tent parties (CDU/CSU on the right, SPD on the left) have been the top two parties since MMP was introduced in 1949.

Certain properties of Ontario's proposal strengthen my belief that the Liberals and Conservatives are not going anywhere soon. The first has to do with small party incentives. In Ontario parties need to win ridings in order to challenge for dominance, since only 30% of the MPPs will come from lists. In order to win ridings parties need a lot of concentrated local support. I suspect this will happen to some degree, because list MPPs will likely contend for local seats, reducing the incumbent advantage riding members usually enjoy in FPTP. This is more likely to benefit big parties (which win list seats too, after all) than the smaller parties. A list MPP from a big party will have two weapons in his or her attempt to overthrow the incumbent: the familiarity gained by being a list MPP, and the media saturation that the big-tent parties enjoy. List MPPs from smaller parties will only have one of those weapons in their arsenals, and thus will have a harder time dethroning the incumbent. Furthermore (as I will mention in a later post) incumbents get incumbent advantage as well.

Another factor: ridings are not that important in MMP because the overall number of ridings a party wins is mostly determined by the party vote. In fact, every riding a small party wins is a list seat that party loses. A big question mark here is how much prestige voters will assign to riding seats; if voters trust parties that win more ridings to those that win fewer, then small parties might compete for local ridings more actively. Otherwise, they could well focus on raising their share of the party vote. This can help them do better in competition with other medium and small parties, but it won't help in challenging a big party for dominance.

The NDP is an interesting wildcard in all of this. Will they continue to aspire to big party status and seriously compete in most ridings, or will they give up on ridings and focus on the party vote (perhaps running token candidates in ridings)? If the NDP stops taking ridings seriously, it seems plausible that other smaller parties will follow suit.

I don't see the NDP as being a serious contender for big party status unless another big party implodes. In order to become a big party, the NDP would have to shift to the centre, which would imply that some catastrophe hit either the Conservatives or Liberals. What seems more likely to me is that a niche opens up the middle of the Liberals and Conservatives. Middle parties in this niche could play both ends against the middle, and sit in either Conservative or Liberal governments. This happens in Germany with the FDP, and in New Zealand with a number of parties including United and New Zealand First. These middle parties seem more-or-less content with their niches; it does not appear that they seriously contend for big-party status either.

In short, I think the Liberals and Conservatives are safe for the forseeable future. Under MMP, other parties could cause them headaches by stealing their votes and demanding lots of coalition concessions, but I don't see anybody toppling their thrones.

Even if the party labels don't change, I have some hope that the influence of smaller parties might shift the policies behind the label. To some degree, we see evidence of this already. Federally, the big parties have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon -- partially because Al Gore made a movie, and partially in response to Elizabeth May taking over the Green Party leadership. Since big parties are not required to be in diametric opposition to their smaller competitors, they can poach good ideas from their "little buddies", which can change their policy platforms without name changes.

References

You know where election results come from: Wikipedia makes them up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Germany

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_elections

Housing and a movie

2007-08-12T03:13:57Z

Have I ever mentioned that I hate looking for housing?

Knock on wood, I think I found something. But I spent an agonizing few hours today trying to figure out which of two options I would pursue; the risky option with a higher payoff, or the moderately safer option. I think I made the wrong decision.

In other news, I saw Children of Men today at the library. I found it a little too cheery.

First of all, the ending chickened out. Stupid Hollywood. One of the messages of the movie that made it so intense was the message that nobody's life was worth much. The hopeful ending spoiled that. I did like that the main antagonist of the Fishes did not die, though. I wish that the dreadlocked guy had been spared as well (at least onscreen).

Although I recognize that the crying baby scene near the end was intended to be symbolic and stuff, it snapped the film's credibility. The military might have called a ceasefire, but within minutes they would have been trying to get their hands on the baby as well. Furthermore, I suspect that a more realistic response would have been for somebody to go nuts and shoot the Kee and the baby, just like the kids in school felt obligated to smash the sand castles and snow forts you put hours into building. Awe may last for a few minutes, but there's always a spoiler.

I did find the film heavy handed with the scenario expositions, but this is a minor quibble.

The film was gorgeously detailed. I feel like rewatching it just to read all the protest signs and headlines.

I do wish that Quietus was available on the market.

In other news I am in grave danger of breaking a writing streak today. I know it does not matter to anybody but me, but I think it's going to hurt.

Ambiguous web searches

2007-08-11T02:24:34Z

I think the future just got a bit closer. Today I was procrastinating by looking up the old television show ReBoot. I thought about using a search engine, but realized that it would be as painful as any web search involving common words. Then I realized that Wikipedia has disambiguation pages.

UPDATE: In retrospect the web search would not have been that difficult, given that I remembered some of the character names. So maybe this is another one of those techniques that makes us lazier.