And why first-past-the-post is more than the least worst option
In British Columbia we are having a referendum on November 30th 2018, on whether or not to change our voting system from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to proportional representation (PR). After looking into the arguments for and against each system, I was surprised to find that I’m strongly in favor of FPTP, and not just as the least-worst alternative. I hope to convince you to vote against the current proposal to change our voting system, but to explain why first requires a bit of a dive into the philosophy of democracy, which is more interesting than it sounds, I promise.
First, what is FPTP? It’s a winner-takes-all scheme where the candidate with the most votes in the district wins. The name, also referred to as “Plurality Voting”, originates from horse racing, where the first horse to pass the finish line (ie. the “post”) is declared the winner. In electoral systems, this simply means whichever party has the most votes wins. If party A, B, C, and D receive 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10% of the votes, then party A is elected despite only being supported by 40% of the electorate.
A lot of people hate this system. As in the above example, it leads to a single party having 100% percent of the power despite having the support of less than 50% of the population. In Canada, for example, Justin Trudeau was elected with 39.47% support in 2015, and Stephen Harper with 37.65% seven years before that. Thus in both elections the views of 60% of the country were not represented by the ruling government.
This highlights another consequence of FPTP - it often leads to two-party systems. Voters feel they must “hold their nose” and vote for the least-worst candidate who has a chance of being elected. This is summarized on wikipedia as “All votes for anyone other than the runner-up are votes for the winner.”.
Worse still, FPTP results in the votes of some people counting more than other people. If you are a republican living in California, your vote doesn’t really matter. Ditto for liberals living in red states. This is why politicians in the US campaign so hard in “swing” states, as the votes from individuals living in these “battleground” districts are more decisive in the final outcome than, say, the lone vote of a liberal living in Austin. The same thing happens in BC. You can see the effect of districting in BC here.
The main theme that underlies most criticism of FPTP is that it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that a party can be elected without majority support, and it isn’t fair that some voters have more influence than others. This is the problem that proportional representation seeks to address. There are many variations of PR, but in this referendum BC residents are choosing between “Rural-Urban Proportional”, “Mixed Member Proportional”, and “Dual Member Proportional”.
Information about each is provided in the links. While they vary in how many votes each voter gets, how the votes are counted, and how the votes are allocated among the various parties, what all PR systems have in common is they result in a greater chance of coalition governments. So if party A, B, C, and D receive 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10% votes, PR tries to achieve a government that consists of roughly 40% party A, 30% party B, 20% party C, etc, so as to ‘proportionately’ represent the views of the voters.
Okay, so why am I against this? This is where the philosophy of democracy becomes relevant.
What is democracy for? The classic theory is that democracy is mechanism that allows people in a society to rule themselves. Therefore, a system that instills a government that doesn’t represent the numerical distribution of opinion of the populous is fundamentally undemocratic and unjust. Therefore, FPTP is fundamentally undemocratic and unjust.
A more recent view of the purpose of Democracy, first put forth by Karl Popper and then later expounded upon by the physicist David Deutsch, is that democracy should be viewed as a mechanism to apply the scientific method to societies.
Science progresses by hypothesizing theories about how the world works, and then falsifying those theories that don’t match the results of experiments. Political policies are theories too; they are theories about how best to live harmoniously with one another and maximize the wellbeing of the people within the society. But, like theories in biology or physics, we cannot know in advance which are correct without trying them and removing the ones that don’t work. Therefore, in contrast to the classical theory, Democracy should instead be seen as an error-correcting mechanism that allows bad policies and bad rulers to be removed without violence. Or in Popper’s words:
The new problem, as distinct from the old “Who should rule?”, can be formulated as follows: how is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence?
This, in contrast to the old question, is a thoroughly practical, almost technical, problem. And the modern so-called democracies are all good examples of practical solutions to this problem, even though they were not consciously designed with this problem in mind. For they all adopt what is the simplest solution to the new problem—that is, the principle that the government can be dismissed by a majority vote.
So the question becomes: Is FPTP better than proportional representation at removing bad policies and bad leaders? The answer is a definitive yes. As Deutsch explains in chapter 13 of The Beginning of Infinity:
Let me trace the mechanism of that advantage more explicitly. Following a plurality-voting election, the usual outcome is that the party with the largest total number of votes has an overall majority in the legislature, and therefore takes sole charge. All the losing parties are removed entirely from power. This is rare under proportional representation, because some of the parties in the old coalition are usually needed in the new one. Consequently, the logic of plurality is that politicians and political parties have little chance of gaining any share in power unless they can persuade a substantial proportion of the population to vote for them. That gives all parties the incentive to find better explanations, or at least to convince more people of their existing ones, for if they fail they will be relegated to powerlessness at the next election.
In the plurality system, the winning explanations are then exposed to criticism and testing, because they can be implemented without mixing them with the most important claims of opposing agendas. Similarly, the winning politicians are solely responsible for the choices they make, so they have the least possible scope for making excuses later if those are deemed to have been bad choices. If, by the time of the next election, they are less convincing to the voters than they were, there is usually no scope for deals that will keep them in power regardless.
Under a proportional system, small changes in public opinion seldom count for anything, and power can easily shift in the opposite direction to public opinion. What counts most is changes in the opinion of the leader of the third-largest party. This shields not only that leader but most of the incumbent politicians and policies from being removed from power through voting. They are more often removed by losing support within their own party, or by shifting alliances between parties. So in that respect the system badly fails Popper’s criterion. Under plurality voting, it is the other way round. The all-or-nothing nature of the constituency elections, and the consequent low representation of small parties, makes the overall outcome sensitive to small changes in opinion. When there is a small shift in opinion away from the ruling party, it is usually in real danger of losing power completely.
Under proportional representation, there are strong incentives for the system’s characteristic unfairnesses to persist, or to become worse, over time. For example, if a small faction defects from a large party, it may then end up with more chance of having its policies tried out than it would if its supporters had remained within the original party. This results in a proliferation of small parties in the legislature, which in turn increases the necessity for coalitions – including coalitions with the smaller parties, which further increases their disproportionate power.”
But what about fairness? Are Popper and Deutsch saying fairness doesn’t matter? No, they are not. Fairness matters a great deal, but it matters more so between elections rather than during them. Each citizen within a society must be given a fair opportunity to have their voice heard. The essence of democratic and scientific progress is in the idea-generation stage; the period where arguments, debates, and discussions take place about which experiments to run and why. Fairness is vital because we do not know in advance where the good ideas are going to come from, and therefore we do not want to arbitrarily exclude large portions of the population from participating in these discussions.
Fairness matters in the arguments between elections. It’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It’s the Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s Black Lives Matter. It’s Occupy Wall Street and the Never Trumpers. It’s the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and the suffragette movement. It’s about citizens having an fair opportunity to reason with other citizens about which policies are better than which other policies and why. These arguments then percolate through society and shape future elections.
But you ask, why not have both? Why not have a fair voting system, as well as a fair platform for debate between votes? Because a fair voting system is impossible. Like, travel-faster-than-the-speed-of-light impossible. The Balinski–Young theorem shows that any system of apportionment that tries to divide discrete votes among different parties will always result in some votes counting more than others. And Kenneth Arrow showed that ranked preferences lead to paradoxes as well..
But even if it was possible, why would we necessarily want fairness just for its own sake? Fairness only matters to me if it leads to material, tangible improvements in the lives of human beings and other sentient creatures. It’s not a Good Thing just because. We want to make the lives of human beings better, and as discussed above, fairness plays a vital role in that process. But in order to do so we have to understand just how fairness is making peoples’ lives better, and that requires understanding its limitations. As Deutsch described above, and in greater length in his book, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of deciding on an election system, the primary concern shouldn’t be fairness, but the ease with which we can remove bad leaders without violence. And coalition governments make that project much more difficult.
Fair Vote Canada would like you to take the following pledge in favor of proportional representation:
British Columbia needs a fair and equal voting system to ensure all voters are represented in the Legislature. The share of seats held by each political party should closely reflect the popular vote. Government decisions should be based on the diverse values and needs of BC citizens, not just the interests of one party. It’s time we joined most western democracies in the world using proportional representation. We believe our province can play a leadership role in moving Canada towards real democracy.
“Real democracy”. “Fair and equal”. These concepts are simply defined to be good things without any explanation as to why we should, in fact, value them. We needn’t be bound be definition of democracy some greeks came up with 2500 years ago. Our understanding has come a long way since then.
We live in a society where people have wildly divergent ideas on how best to live. Some of these ideas will turn out to be right and others will turn out to be wrong, but we won’t know until we try them out, see which policies work, and undo the ones that don’t. Democracy is the best technology we currently have to do this without killing each other.
First past the post is one of many imperfect ways to accomplish this. It has many problems, the main one being that it results in some voters having more influence in the final outcome than others. However, all these are secondary concerns to its central strength, which is that it is better than the alternatives in removing bad policies and bad rulers without violence.
Finally, we should think about democracy the way we think about science. Both are imperfect mechanisms to make progress. We want all people to have a fair and equal opportunity at contributing to both projects because we do not and cannot know in advance where the good ideas are going to come from. However, we wouldn’t want to build a bridge by fairly representing the views of all engineers. And we wouldn’t want to develop climate policy by fairly representing the views of the 2% of climate scientists who don’t believe in climate change. We instead want to generate new ideas, test the plausible ones, refute and undo those which do not work, and continue to make progress together, forever.