Women are worse off under STV

I respond to Dennis Pilon’s rabble article [1] 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A bit out of date, perhaps, as the Maltese women have done better in elections since then -- hitting 9.2 per cent of their assembly seats in 2003.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.

Comments

Submitted by Dennis Pilon on May 11, 2009 - 2:18pm.

Edwards' response above is so typical of the politicians running the No STV campaign. She claims she is going to respond to what I have written but doesn't actually engage with any of the facts presented. What about the 41% result for women under STV in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT)? What about the results in Tasmania or the results that Judy Rebick refers to in her piece on Rabble? No, she just continues to peddle her line about Malta and Ireland. She also peddles another distortion of what the serious research on women's representation says, specifically, that it is parties that make it happen, not the voting system. This flies in the face of all serious scholarship on the representation of women in western countries, which highlights how three inter-related factors influence diverse representation: social demands (in other words, an organized women's movement), a political party that responds to them (ie a socialist or labour party), and a permissive voting system (ie some form of PR). The latter is important because PR systems create a competitive dynamic where a 'contagion effect' can occur - in others words, as one party moves on women's representation, other then feel the need to follow. The result is the effect of all three, not just one as Edwards claims. Thus Malta and Ireland results cannot be used to dismiss STV because of important social factors (ie traditionally socially conservative views about the women's roles). And the Australian Senate results do not disprove the thesis - they prove it, because competition from third parties at the Senate level is what moved the major parties in Australia to finally take women's representation seriously.

I don't expect Edwards, as a politician, to know all this. Of course, that is also why I think no one should take her claims about STV and women representation seriously. Dr. Dennis Pilon Political Science Department University of Victoria

Submitted by Bill Tieleman on May 12, 2009 - 2:11am.

Oh my goodness Dennis - why don't you then talk about the Labour Party's affirmative action program for women candidates in Australia!
And as for Ireland's "socially conservative views about women's roles" how do you explain Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson from 1990 to 1997?
Or how do you explain this statement:
"Ireland ranks close to the bottom of the European scale in terms of women's representation in political life, yet there is no discernible bias among the electorate against women candidates."
- Yvonne Galligan Women In Politics 1999
So you put yourself above a woman from British Columbia who was an MLA for 10 years and a cabinet minister as well and simply dismiss her views as those of "a politician"?
Your arrogant approach is why STV is in so much trouble in BC.
Bill Tieleman
President, NO STV
www.nostv.org

Submitted by AntonyHodgson on May 12, 2009 - 12:04pm.

Dennis is correct that three inter-related factors have been demonstrated to improve the representation of women. People like Anne Edwards and Bill Tieleman consistently ignore this scholarship. Of course changes in party nomination practices are important, but we also need to ask what structural changes encourage such changes to occur. Scholars have frequently provided strong evidence that inter-party competition stimulated by a move towards gender balance on the part of one party (typically a left-leaning party, as Dennis has noted) and in the presence of a voting system which allows parties to put up new women candidates without displacing an incumbent (ie, typically some form of slate, such as STV and party list systems offer) has led to increased women's representation.

STV opponents have never, to my knowledge, cited more recent scholarship such as the following two articles, both of which strongly support the claim that STV will open possibilities for women:

Kaminsky (2007) ‘Electoral Systems and Women's Representation in Australia', Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 45:2, 185 - 201.

"This article tests the hypothesis that multi-member single transferable vote systems elect more women than single-member district systems by analysing the two houses of the Australian Parliament. The data regarding the number of female members of the Australian Parliament has been collected since the first woman was elected 61 years ago. The Senate, which utilises an STV voting system, has averaged more than two and a half times the percentage of women elected than the SMD House. The data confirms that multi-member district electoral systems using STV elect more women than single-member districts."

White (2006) New Hibernia Review / Iris Èireannach Nua,10:4, pp 71-83.

"Recent research in other national settings, especially Australia, leads one to expect that STV would result in a relatively high number of women elected to Ireland's lower house; but the number of women TDs elected since the founding of the Free State is surprisingly small.This finding does not necessarily contradict the results of research in other states that use a similar electoral system. Instead, it indicates that something beyond the mechanics of the electoral system accounts for the relatively low number of women elected to the Dail."

"The STV election system used in Ireland does not appear to be an obstacle and may, in fact, help to achieve higher levels of women's representation as more female candidates emerge and run for the Dail. Both party magnitude and the threshold effect based on the multimember nature of constituencies for the Dail encourage female representation."

Scholarly consensus therefore is that women will be elected more frequently when an electoral system offers multimember districts (which STV does) and when a society does not have strong prejudices against women participating in political processes (BC is very progressive on this front). The single largest contributor to the number of women who win seats, regardless of voting system, is how frequently they're nominated. With BC-STV, parties will have a strong incentive to put forward gender-balanced slates of candidates, especially if one of the major parties makes such a choice. Since the NDP already has a policy in place aimed at nominating more women candidates, they would likely shift to a gender-balanced policy under BC-STV and the Liberals would likely follow.

Finally, even if STV opponents are right that all that matters in enhancing women's representation is the attitude of the parties, they have not demonstrated that STV will be worse in that regard. At best, they will have demonstrated that there should be no difference in women's representation under STV, yet by continuing to cite the low rates in Malta and Ireland, they are arguing that STV will actually mitigate against improved women's representation, even though they present no scholarly evidence for this claim and ignore the substantial evidence to the contrary. Their claim that STV will lead to decreased women's representation because there are fewer women elected in Ireland than in BC is equivalent to proponents claiming that if we persist with FPTP, we'll drop to Yemen's status (ie, a single woman). Such arguments should be ignored.

Submitted by AntonyHodgson on May 12, 2009 - 12:07pm.

Bill, Galligan's statement is easily understood - the Irish voters have no discernible bias against women, but the parties do. Should the Irish parties change their nomination practices, the Irish voters will start electing women in far greater numbers as the voting system poses no impediment to their election.

Submitted by mybabble on July 14, 2009 - 12:26am.

Things are worst off for women Or haven't you noticed guys?