The weird thing about this

Wilf Day

rabble-rouser-supreme

Member: 4276

Joined: Oct 31 2002

May 3, 2009 - 5:20pm

The weird thing about this discussion is that it should be the Greens, not New Democrats, complaining that MMP would have been better for them than the current BC-STV map. The average District Magnitude of the present map is 4.25. As Michael Gallagher's book about Ireland's 2007 election notes, Fianna Fail got 46.7% of the seats on 41.6% of the votes, while the second party Fine Gael got 30.9% of the seats on 27.3% of the votes, and Labour also got a bonus while all others (including the Greens) got fewer seats than their vote share.

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The (Fianna Fail) party remains overrepresented by the electoral system due mainly to the small average number of TDs per constituency (only four, which is very low by the standards of proportional representation systems internationally)

So BC-STV will actually be better for the NDP than MMP would have been. But at the cost of opening up nearly-safe NDP seats to competition, which Tieleman cannot abide. As Gallagher's book notes:

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Under PR-STV, candidates, especially in the two major parties, are in competition with their running mates as well as with candidates from other parties, and some of the most intense battles take place within the party fold. From the party's point of view, this competition can be beneficial; it gives each candidate an incentive to bring in as many votes as he/she can, both by active campaigning and by his/her work between elections, and thus contributes to maximising the party's overall vote total. At the same time, the party must try to ensure that intra-party competition does not get out of hand and disrupt its cohesion, leading to splits or the creation of bitterly opposed factions. In addition, candidates sense that concentrating their fire on a running mate rather than on the opposition does not impress the voters and, moreover, is likely to be looked askance upon by the party leadership and central organisation and may thus be costly when promotional opportunities (minister, frontbench spokesperson, parliamentary committee chair) arise. Consequently, parties try to maintain a public facade of unity, knowing that the media will prick up their ears if the fur starts flying in fights between its candidates.

An interesting comment here on "safe seats" about a Green MP unexpectedly defeated:

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Its defeat came in Cork SC, where Dan Boyle, who had been seen as a likely minister if the party entered government, lost to Labour in one of the biggest surprises of the election. Because Boyle was seen as a virtual certainty to be re-elected, his campaign could not credibly send out the message that every vote was crucial. Irish politicians seeking election react to being described as 'safe' in the same way as Count Dracula reacts to garlic, and while their horror at the word sometimes seems to border on superstition, Boyle's defeat is a reminder that it is by no means irrational.

Baron Visi wrote:

Tieleman writes that STV "breaks each single vote into fractions. This is simply wrong. Many votes are never transferred, and stay with their top preference, intact.

I'd say most votes stay with their top preference. I haven't found any analysis, but let's take a Dublin four-seater, Dublin South East. It elected one Fianna Fail man, one Fine Gael woman, one Labour man, and one Green Party man. On the first count the four winners had 23,232 votes out of 33,842 cast. The loser on the final count was incumbent Progressive Democrat Michael McDowell; he had 4,450 first preferences, making 27,682 voters who were still with their first choice on the final count, 82% of the total. Of the other 6,160, only 801 ballots had exhausted, mostly Fianna Fail voters annoyed by criticism from their Progressive Democrat coalition partner; their failure to transfer to him saw him defeated by the Green Party. Another 1,710 had transferred to the Green man, 1,641 to the PD man (too few to save him), 1,225 to Labour, 614 to Fine Gael, and 169 to Fianna Fail. The only fractional transfers in the whole count were from the winning Fianna Fail man who reached quota on the second count with 351 votes more than he needed. The BC-STV transfer rules would transfer his surplus by transferring all his votes at 5.2% transfer value.