Would proportional representation lead to even more splintering of parties?

I don't know whether to call this a propaganda stunt by the anti-democratic establishment or something based on the instability in Italy:

1) I do see the re-emergence of "Red Tories" as a political force.
2) I don't see splits within the Liberal party.
3) I HOPE to see the Socialist Caucus break away from the NDP.
4) The Greens have a broad ideological range, but I see them drifting to the right if the Socialist Caucus becomes more vocal about "green" issues.

My guess is that if we had say PR-STV, or MMP with a 4% threshold, that the Conservatives would eventually split, the Greens would get elected, and the Bloc would diminish drastically. I don't see additional parties of any great significance.

In Australia where the penalty for voting for a small party is as near zero as can be, there is a tremendous list of small parties which run, like Pauline Hanson's One Nation (xenophobic), the Motorists' Party, the Shooters' Party, the Fishing and Lifestyle party, etc., etc. (including some classical hard left parties) but very few ever elect anyone anywhere even in the PR-STV legislatures.

The parties that get elected are 2 1/2, Liberal/National plus Labour in the AV legislatures, with the addition of the Greens and the Democrats (pretty well faded now) in the PR-STV legislatures.

In Germany there were for a long time 2 big and 1 small, then on the rise of the Greens 2 big and 2 small, now with unification an ex-communist and a small proto-Nazi party as well.

In the Irish Republic there are about 1 big, 2 medium, 2 small and 3 or so very small parties that ever get elected.

The main change I would expect on the Canadian scene is that we would have an end to gaming the system and trying to work small changes in the likely vote to gain government or smash another party. We would have governing coalitions. We would probably have somewhat closer attention to serious issues. I think the "Friendly Dictatorships" would be weakened.

It would likely take a while to settle down; my impression is that the right in New Zealand has not yet reconciled itself to PR and still dreams of reinstating FPTP and ruling with fake majorities.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario

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Stunt or not, it's a question that will need to be dealt with if PR is going to be discussed thoroughly.

Something dug up from surfing: PR squared in NZ

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How were you able to not "dig up" the fact that there is a 3 or 4 per cent base requirement of votes before there is representation in a legislature?

Opponents to MMP in Ontario last year managed to avoid mentioning just such facts. "Splintering" then could easily be made to become, for the unenlightened great unread, something equated with an attack on the democratic process itself.

Unrepresented voters above that arbitrary number of course actually become victims of a very un-democratic process - in the name of tradition but in reality and secretly in defence of plutocracy.

In reply to the post question. Yes, and that's a good thing.

The existence of a broader range of parties will give more people alternatives to vote for that they actually agree with.

I expect that some of the existing smaller parties (Christian Heritage springs to mind) will grow to the point of occaisonally electing members. I support democracy, even when I not in favour of the result.

There will be some splits, and I expect the Liberals to do a lot of melting.

Since I like to read profiles of newbies I was interested in your occupation. So let me guess Mr. Canada you work for CLAC.

Great system this FPTP system. It pretty much guarantees that the status quo of who runs the country will never change. It hasn't changed in 140 years so why change now. The system works well for the rich elite.

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Originally posted by Mr.Canada:
[b]I'm a conservative and enjoy arguing so here I am. [/b]

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And look, there you go! Buh-bye! (For what you said in a couple of other threads, that is, not in this one.)

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Originally posted by Michelle:
[b]

And look, there you go! Buh-bye! (For what you said in a couple of other threads, that is, not in this one.)[/b]

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Sorry nevermind my last post MrCanada. Hi michelle how's things?

If individual ridings got bigger it would make it harder for independents to get elected.

For small parties it would be more a risk/reward kind of thing. It would be more expensive to run a campaign to try to reach the cutoff (either legislated or implicit) OTOH if they succeeded they would have seats (possibly a seat if we run things by regions).

Jacob Richter: I have to disagree with you, I see the Liberal party splintering more than even the Conservatives -- I don't see them as having any real core constituency, they are in many respects a party of convenience for those who might reasonably be described as "technocrats". I do not want to totally malign their intentions, but they do seem to be made up of people whose primary interest is in exercising power or some deluded notion of noblesse oblige (if I wanted to totally malign them I would have used the term opportunists). It might take an election or two, but I see them splintering to both the left and the right and probably ending up as a Central Canadian (and centerist) regional interest party -- and probable coalition partners of [i]any[/i] government that is formed. They are not likely to fade away, but nor would they be likely to be the majority partner in coalitions once the electorate became more comfortable with a PR system.

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Originally posted by Mr.Canada:
[b]

A PR system doesn't work and will never be implemented in this country.

[/b]

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Let's look at how PR systems "work". To do that we will have to make cross-national comparisons between countries with PR and majoritarian systems, like first-past-the-post.

The best book I've read that does that is Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

In that book, he cites numerous cross-national comparisons that show that citizens in countries using PR systems are significantly more satisfied with government than those in countries using systems like ours.

In another measure of voter satisfaction, it has been demonstrated that in PR countries the difference in voter satisfaction between winners of the election (those who voted for parties in government) and losers (those who voted for parties not in government) is significantly SMALLER in countries with PR systems.

Finally, two different studies, using data from the late 70s to mid 80s, shows that governments in PR countries are more like be closer to the median voter, as measured on a left-right scale.

Sounds like PR works pretty good to me.

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Originally posted by gram swaraj:
[b]In the context of this country, would proportional representation lead to even more splintering of Canadian political parties?[/b]

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Excellent topic. One can sketch the answer.

The short answer is, as many as voters want and the threshold will permit.

As to the threshold: the NDP convention in 2003 had the first recent threshold debate. The PR Committee had recommended the federal NDP take no position on the threshold, just like the Ontario NDP. A minority report won support from the convention floor: a 5% threshold. Never disrespect the wisdom of the convention. This is a long-standing debate in Europe, where Germany has stuck with 5% while Scandinavia, Austria, and others use 4%. The Ontario Citizens' Assembly even dropped to 3%, on the conclusion that "we don't see extremist parties barking at Ontario's doors." This was one of the attack points for PR's opponents in Ontario, although not the main one. I think most of us have concluded that 5% makes a good threshold for Canada. (More importantly, closed province-wide lists didn't fly: open regional lists are clearly a more acceptable Mixed Member Proportional model.)

With a 5% threshold, Germany and its provinces have usually had 3 or 4 parties, sometimes 5.

Democratic conservatives mostly want the freedom to offer competing conservative visions. In New Zealand they don't split on social conservatism but on economics: a hard-line libertarian thatcherite party with echoes of Canada's Citizens Coalition, and a larger more moderate conservative party. Other countries split on immigration as Quebec conservatives have recently. If a democratically-reformed Canada is not to have a centrist liberal party as a partner in every future government whether of the centre-left or centre-right, there needs to be a centrist conservative party and a more principled one, or however conservatives might wish to frame the distinction.

Greens, New Democrats, Liberals, PCs, Reformers; that may be all that emerges, plus a different spectrum in Quebec. Do we have room for a Left-Socialist Party, a Green Party, and the NDP? Maybe. In many European countries, even with PR, they have had to form a left-green alliance in order to make the threshold. I have grave doubts that a left-socialist party in Canada could make 5%. The attempt to do so could drain off a lot of wasted votes.

That, of course, is the great merit of STV. True, even with seven-seat districts it takes more than 5% to win a seat, although a party that gets 4% might easily get 9% in a few urban districts and win a few seats on the last count. But none of those votes are wasted: they transfer to their second choice.

So STV might give us six parties as Ireland has, plus the odd socialist or left-liberal or conservative independent. Or it might even give us seven parties as Northern Ireland has, albeit two of them are very small.

Perhaps a more interesting question is what it would do to the Liberals. Those who refuse to take part in a centre-left coalition could migrate to the centrist-conservative party. Those who refuse to take part in a centre-right coalition would be able to more safely migrate to the NDP. The Liberal "big tent" might split in two, but I think it would more likely shrink to a more principled centre party willing to be a force for moderation in a centre-left or centre-right coalition. Lots of voters want that option. New Zealand had no such party, until voters found one and pushed it into real existence.

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Originally posted by genstrike:
[b]I think we would have to have a fairly low threshold in order to be representative and allow for smaller parties to have a voice.[/b]

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If we don't add a whole lot of MPs to the House, Manitoba is capped at 14 MPs. High threshold or low threshold, it will take about 7% of the vote to elect an MP in Manitoba. If the "highest remainder" calculation is used, a party might get a seat with only 4% if it was very lucky.

However, Toronto with 22 MPs could, if Toronto is a region, fairly easily elect an MP with only 4% of the vote if the threshold permitted that. Same with the BC Lower Mainland with 21 MPs, and Montreal + Laval with 21.

A 4% threshold is perfectly defensible; Israel's 2% is too low for most tastes. Still, it won't matter in Manitoba.

No one proposes a national list system: the constitution deals with the number of MPs per province in relation to the population of the province. All MPs are from provinces.

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Originally posted by a lonely worker:
[b]Quebec Solidaire routinely polls close to 5% in Quebec already without PR.[/b]

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But it has no normal social democratic party competing with it.

Look at Germany: the Left Party has its base in former East Germany. But in the western states, in state elections it got over 5% only in Lower Saxony, Hesse, and the city-states of Hamburg and Bremen. It could not make 5% in Rhineland-Palatinate, Oskar Lafontaine's home state, nor in Bavaria or Baden-Wьrttemberg.

In Greece with its radical history, a left alliance caled the The Coalition of the Radical Left (Sy.Riz.A) managed only 5.05% even though it included ten political parties.

In Netherlands, the PR paradise with no threshold, the Green Left managed to get only 4.6%.

I could go on. Don't think 5% is easy.

I do not think thresholds are necessary. Basically a threshold gets the votes of some party below the threshold, nullifies them and deals the seats from those votes out to the other partys. Not fair!
People talk routinely about disenfranchising a party if its vote drops from 5% to 4.9%. This does happen too. So suddenly one twentieth of the seats in the house are lost because of an arbitary rule. Another problem is how do you start a new party? You cannot go from zero to 5% without a serious amount of capital. But in the absence of a 5% rule, a new party can start off small and gradually build itself up.
A 5% or 3% rule is just a way for the old established partys to protect their turf.

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Originally posted by a lonely worker:
[b]Every "western" European country with PR has a socialist party and its often these parties that keep the social democrats scared and somewhat more progressive.[/b]

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Well, in Spain, does the United Left (IU) with its three seats scare the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) with its 169 seats? Not much. Zapatero's party is pretty progressive on its own.

In Portugal, the Socialist Party (PS) government has an absolute majority with 121 seats. The left-green alliance there is the Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU) with 14 seats, or which 12 are Communist Party and 2 for the Green Party. As well, the Left Bloc (BE) got enough votes for 15 seats but won only 8 because of the effective thresholds: only Lisbon (48 seats), Porto (38 seats) and Setubal (17 seats) were big enough districts for it.

Even countries with good PR systems do not, except for the Netherlands, give small parties unlimited scope: they have thresholds of one kind or another.

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Originally posted by Left Turn:
[b]I also think we would see the emergence of a party to the left of the NDP. [/b]

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We already have parties to the left of the NDP, and they attract [url=http://enr.elections.ca/National_e.aspx]only about 0.1% of the vote[/url]. I wouldn't expect them to dissapear under PR, but there just isn't a lot of far-left strategic voters out there who want to vote for them but instead cast their ballots for the NDP (what voters like that we have are probably posting on this board, I'll grant you). So it's highly unlikely they would get much more than perhaps 0.2% or at most 0.3% of the vote even without the need to vote strategically. Certainly far less than any reasonable threshold required to get seats.

The unrealistic scenarios postulated on this board are hilarious. So far, people have postulated that every major political party would split up (except for the Bloc). And a horde of new parties would come up too, on both the left and the right. Documented experience in other western countries that have switched just doesn't bear these scenarios out.

A Canada with PR wouldn't have radical changes in the number of parties actually winning seats. But it would have equitable seat distribution and more effective representation.

[Correction: someone even thought the Bloc would split up, lol.]

[ 31 October 2008: Message edited by: A Blair ]

I agree. Here is the problem with 4% or 3% or 55 thresholds. You can have a couple of partys close to the threshold and pretty soon there is 10% or more of the voters disenfranchised. The threshold has the strategic vote effect on people too. "I would vote for party X but they are at 4% and the threshold is 5% and I want my vote to count" Result: a vote that should have gone to party X goes to one of the big 5. Result part 2: party x is stillborn.
The ONLY reason that all these countrys have thresholds to prevent the growth of new partys.
Take a look at the Irish green party or the irish progressive democrat party. I doubt that either party could exist if there was a 5% threshold.
The PD party might die off anyway but they were a very important part of the government for a decade. We need the safety valve. A big old party with no competition gets complacent and corrupt and lazy. But if there is a small left or right or center party waiting on the wings, they are more alert and tend to listen to the voters a lot more.
Brian

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Originally posted by It's Me D:
[b]

0.3% is about one seat worth of the popular vote, I'm not sure why a "reasonable" threshold would deny access to parliament to a party which got enough votes for a seat... Unless voting Conservative/Liberal for another couple centuries is your definition of "reasonable", in which case we have a perfectly reasonable system right now.[/b]

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Originally posted by Brian White:
[b]The ONLY reason that all these countrys have thresholds is to prevent the growth of new partys.[/b]

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It's not quite that simple.

The German 5% threshold was specifically intended to hinder neo-nazi splinter parties, and indeed to hinder a multiplicity of splinter parties such as occurred in the Weimar Republic with no threshold, and still occurs in Holland where the animal-rights Party For Animals elected two MPs.

Because the start-up of democracy post-1945 occurred at the state level, some parties operated only in some states, so the first thresholds were state-level. In the 1949 election this let the National Democratic Party win 5 seats with only 1.8% of the national vote, the Bavaria Party win 17 seats with 4.2% of the national vote, the German Party win 17 seats with 4.0% of the national vote, the Centre Party win 10 seats with 3.1% of the national vote, the Reconstruction League win 12 seats with 2.9% of the national vote, and four others win seats.

By 1961 the various local parties had merged, and the threshold was made nation-wide in West Germany. This cut out the remnants of the "German Party" that were slow to join the CDU, and still got 2.8% in 1961. It cut out the rightist National Democratic Party with 0.8%, as intended, and the German Peace Union, a substitute for the banned West German Communist Party, with 1.9%. The three main parties survived, counting the CDU/CSU as one.

But the Greens managed to break in. In 1980 they got only 1.5%. But on their second try in 1983 they grew to 5.6% and 28 seats. Not prevented by the threshold.

As for STV, when first conceived by Thomas Hare and John Stuart Mill, it was to have a nation-wide constituency, with very long ballots. When first used in Tasmania in 1909 the state was divided into five six-seaters. This cut the number of parties to two: the Labor Party and the Anti-Socialist Party, later the Liberal Party (much like BC, eh?). Worked like a threshold. When first used in Ireland in 1923 it had one nine-seater, three eight-seaters, and five seven-seaters, as well as smaller districts, but 46% of the MPs came from the larger districts. Six parties won seats. For the 1937 election the government shrank the district size and abolished most larger districts; only three parties survived. Yet even that didn't prevent the growth of new parties.

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Originally posted by Brian White:
[b]Take a look at the Irish green party or the irish progressive democrat party. I doubt that either party could exist if there was a 5% threshold.[/b]

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Not quite. Mind you, the PD evolved the easy way: it split from Fianna Fбil with a more right-wing economic policy and more secular social policies, had five incumbents on its first try in 1987, and won 14 seats. They got 11.4% of the vote, so a 5% threshold would not have stopped them. Then the Greens won their first seat in 1989. True, they did not get 5%, so STV helped them: Roger Garland got 8.8% of first preferences, but picked up enough transfers (being every party's favourite second choice) to have 16.3% on the final count. However, when the Greens won their first Scottish seat they did not have 5% either: Scotland has only the effective threshold of 16-seat districts, which is a lot lower than the effective Irish STV threshold for five-seaters.

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Originally posted by Brian White:
[b]A big old party with no competition gets complacent and corrupt and lazy. But if there is a small left or right or center party waiting on the wings, they are more alert and tend to listen to the voters a lot more.[/b]

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Very true, a great virtue of any PR system.

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Originally posted by a lonely worker:
[b]Again, the example of Quebec Solidaire shows that there is a sizeabloe amount of people who would vote for a truly progressive party. None of the current "small" parties have a similar manifesto which is why its not fair to campare QS with the Marxist Leninist's for example.

I do agree, the 5% threshold is an unecessarily high barrier (3% makes sense) but anything's better than our current political oligarchy.[/b]

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Bolivia uses a 3% threshold in their MMP system. It did not prevent the rise of Evo Morales. But in his new party's first election in 2002 they got 14.6%, so a 5% threshold would have been no problem either.

But Canada is not Bolivia. We will not form new parties so fast.

[ 01 November 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]

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Originally posted by a lonely worker:
[b]
I do agree, the 5% threshold is an unecessarily high barrier (3% makes sense) but anything's better than our current political oligarchy.[/b]

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It's interesting to note that even by Russia's stiff 7% threshold, the Green Party would have representation by even that gold standard. Canada's FPTP not as fair as Russian democracy? Who's backsliding on democracy now?

[ 31 October 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]

One excuse people put in for thresholds is the rise of the bogeymen. Neo Nazis and so forth.
I think it is far better having these people in the system (and having the system change them) than having them outside it trying to destroy the system. I can point to the evolution of the IRA partys in ireland. The official IRA was kindo communist, became official sinn fein, became sinn fein the workers party, then the workers party (totally opposed to violence by the way!) and then democratic left. They then folded into the labour party (and i think provided their leader for a while). I think provisional ira- sinn fein has started down the same road to moderation.
(In the 1970's their manefesto called for revolution and the destruction of the republic of ireland too!)
(Their banned publication was available on every street corner in the country too)
Kinda hard to make that call when the boys are sitting in the same parliament.
I do not think you can change these partys if they are not in the system.

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Originally posted by Wilf Day:
[b]
Bolivia uses a 3% threshold in their MMP system. It did not prevent the rise of Evo Morales. But in his new party's first election in 2002 they got 14.6%, so a 5% threshold would have been no problem either.

But Canada is not Bolivia. We will not form new parties so fast.

[ 01 November 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ][/b]

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Not gonna happen. Christian Heritage maybe, but that's as about as right as Canada is going to go.

Political parties that promote violence are in the same group, if not absolutely comparable.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
[b]Not gonna happen. Christian Heritage maybe, but that's as about as right as Canada is going to go.[/b]

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Unless somebody like Jim Pankiw had the wherewithal to start something up.

Has austria thresholds? And have they stopped the neo nazis? Every other party in southern ireland has refused to go into coalition with sinn fein until they stop killing people. And it has worked for the most part.
I would much prefer a little neo nazi party than the neo nazis voting for the conservative party and working inside it for the bad of canada.
Anyone who thinks there are not neo nazi's here is living in dreamland.

[
QUOTE]Originally posted by martin dufresne:
[b]An official neo-Nazi party sitting in the Canadian Parliament as a "far better" solution!!! As first recommended in Babble, folks! [img]rolleyes.gif" border="0[/img]
(I think comparing the IRA to neo-Nazis is not only dumb but unconscionable.)[/b][/QUOTE]

hehehe yeah...I'm stupid. [img]rolleyes.gif" border="0[/img]

First of all, Wilf there was no nameless
coalition between the libs and the cons.
Only if it was wink wink nod nod when emerson jumped partys could you call it a coalition.
The libs were just waiting for the cons to screw up in full view of the public so that they could win.
If the libs had pulled the plug earlier harper would have got his majority.
And you will never find a lot of party members that are "happy" to go into coalition. But they are happier in power than out.
Some poster said nobody votes for coalitions. Not true!
Lots of time people do vote for coalitons. You can see it in the STV records in ireland and probably in the mmp records for germany too. People vote for coalitions for many reasons, one being to moderate the excesses of leaders.

And you bring up the weimar republic. Let us not forget that germany was a slave nation at the time with all their money going to britain and france. And a very young nation too. Their country had just been destroyed. Of course it was unstable. Communications was disrupted and it was a federation of states that were at war with each other not that much earlier so of course there was instability.
Perhaps at the same stage of nationhood as southern african countrys in the 1970's.
The weimer republic is not relevant to normal politics. A coalition of 4 partys is big but not unworkable.
But like I said, all germanys production went to pay reparations so no party or coalition was going to be remembered as successful.

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Originally posted by Wilf Day:
[b]
But it does show the problem, as does the Left Party in Germany and the Bloc in Canada: when a small party holds the balance of power but is so outcast that no one will form a government that depends on that party for support, it paraylzes normal political life. The result was a coalition in Ireland of the Green Party and Fianna Fail, the Party most Green Party voters most dislike; a Grand Coalition in Germany; and the nameless alliance in Canada's last parliament between the Conservatives and Liberals. So this problem is not unique to PR.

In time, Germany and Ireland will find a way to adapt (the Green Party were similar outcasts when they first won seats in Germany, and after a while a Green became Deputy Prme Minister, just as Northern Ireland eventually got a Sinn Fein Deputy Prime Minister.)

But an excessive number of small parties can indeed cause problems, as it did in the Weimar Republic. The problem with a Grand Coalition is that the opposition, extreme as it may be, becomes the only alternative, and gains strength.

When the British imposed a 5% threshold in the British zone of Germany in 1946, the election results they were all looking at were 1928:

Party, vote %, seats
Social Democrats (SPD) 29.76% 153
National People's (DNVP) 14.25% 73
Centre (Z) 12.07% 61
Communists (KPD) 10.62% 54
People's (DVP) 8.71% 45
Democratic (DDP) 4.81% 25
Reich Party of the Middle Class (WP) 4.54% 23
Bavarian People's (BVP) 3.07% 17
National Socialist Workers (NSDAP) 2.63% 12
Landfolk (CNBL) 1.89% 9
Farmers' (DBP) 1.56% 8
Hanoverian (DHP) 0.64% 4
Agricultural League 0.65% 3
Right-Wing People's 1.57% 2
Sдchsische Landvolk 0.42% 2

The result was yet another Grand Coalition of members of the SDP, DDP, Centre Party, and the DVP. The SDP, DDP, and Centre Party had formed the "Weimar Coalition" in 1919, and this was at the core of all German governments until 1930. But it had to add the People's Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP), essentially the right wing of the old National Liberal Party. Due to its lukewarm acceptance of democracy, the DVP was initially part of the "national opposition" to the Weimar Coalition. However, gradually it moved into cooperation with the parties of the center and left, until it quit in 1930, giving Hitler his big chance. After the 1930 election there was no longer a moderate majority in the Reichstag even for a Grand Coalition of moderate parties, and a centre-right minority government ruled by presidential decrees.

Both Ireland, with districts no larger than five-seaters, and Germany, with its 5% threshold, have usually avoided that kind of paralysis. No system can guarantee it will never happen, as Canada knows all too well.

[ 02 November 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ][/b]

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