I respond to Dennis Pilon’s rabble article specifically on his continuing claim that women stand a better chance of being elected under a Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system than under our current system of First Past the Post (FPTP).  Perhaps his self-vaunted scholarship falls down on this point, too.

Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer and I issued a release refuting STV proponents’ claim that the system itself causes more women to be elected.  We referred to Ireland and Malta, the only nations in the world to use STV in their national assemblies, not so we could omit other countries using STV who do better at gender equity. 

Even at the sub-national level, the Australian senate, which moved from 14 per cent women to 36 per cent, does not show STV as the stimulus.  Reimer pointed out that: “Those gains weren’t made until one of their major parties made a commitment to run 50 per cent women. It had nothing to do with STV and it’s disingenuous to suggest it does.”  So where does Pilon look to buttress STV supporters’ claims?

Not to John C. Lane of the State University of New York at Buffalo whose article, “The Election of Women under Proportional Representation: the Case of Malta” appeared in the summer 1995 issue of the British journal of Democratization. 

A bit out of date, perhaps, as the Maltese women have done better in elections since then — hitting 9.2 per cent of their assembly seats in 2003.  Nevertheless, after a detailed study of voting data in Malta to discover reasons for “the paucity of women legislators,” he concluded that Malta’s “exceptional performance” (the lowest number of women elected of all western democracies) results from “the unwillingness or inability of party elites to recruit a substantial number of women candidates.” 

His conclusion is similar to those of many other scholars of women’s political inequality: the main solution lies within political parties, not the electoral system.

Lane graphed “Women in West European and North American legislatures, by country and electoral system.”  Canada, with the highest representation of women among countries with single member district systems — including the U.S., Britain and France — about equaled Switzerland, with eight European countries doing better, eight doing not as well. 

Malta was at the very bottom, Ireland four below Canada and Switzerland.  Lane called STV a “variant of proportional representation,” although other critics have referred to it as “occasionally proportional,” “quasi-proportional” or “proportional by accident.”

Currently B.C. has 23 per cent women elected as Members of the Legislative Assembly under First Past The Post, Ireland has 13.3 per cent women elected to their Parliament under STV and Malta 9.2 per cent women under STV.  B.C. has had 29 per cent women — in the late 1990s after two by-elections returned women, but only Quebec in Canada has reached the 30 per cent mark.

STV will not prevent women from being elected if the political parties decide to boost the number of women candidates.  For example, STV did not prevent Mary Robinson from becoming the first woman president of Ireland in 1990 or Mary McAleese from succeeding her in 1997 to become the first woman in the world to succeed another woman as a nation’s leader.

But it will not, as a system, promote the election of more women to our legislature. 

Pilon claims to have come to his pro-STV position by “studying all the relevant debates and evidence germane to the topic.”  

I make no such extravagant claims about my knowledge of women in politics or about STV as an electoral system.  I have done a lot of reading and talking and interviewing over a long period. 

I am a member of B.C.’s grassroots, and my association with politics was practical rather than totally theoretical.  I simply offer, for your consideration, my thoughts from a broad survey of information and a genuinely objective view of STV.

 

Anne Edwards is a former New Democratic Party MLA and cabinet minister, author of Seeking Balance: Conversations with BC Women in Politics and member of No STV, the official group opposing STV and supporting FPTP in the B.C. referendum May 12.

Anne Edwards

Anne Edwards is a former New Democratic Party MLA and cabinet minister, author of Seeking Balance: Conversations with BC Women in Politics and member of No STV, the official group opposing STV and supporting...