Electoral Rules Matter: Part I
Paul Eidelberg
Professor of social sciences Rein Taagepera and political scientist Matthew Soberg Shugart are renowned experts on electoral systems. Israeli politicians should study their book Seats & Votes.
Taagepera and Shugart use mathematical models in studying scores of electoral rules. Their research is especially relevant to Israel, not only because the government is working on a constitution, but also because it is considering a proposal to make the leader of the party that wins the largest number of seats in a Knesset election Israel’s prime minister.
That Kadima won 29 seats (the most of any party) in the 2006 election would have been sufficient to make Ehud Olmert prime minister without his having been designated by the president to form a government and have it approved by the Knesset.
In other words, it was enough for Kadima to win a mere 24 percent of the votes cast in the 2006 election for Olmert to become Israel’s prime minister. This calls to mind the following passages from Seats & Votes:
In 1970 Chile had three major candidates running for president. Socialist Salvador Allende narrowly surpassed a centrist and a rightist candidate and became president, although he received only 36.3 percent of the total vote. Allende’s electoral platform committed him to carry out extensive social changes. However, his support base was too narrow, and his attempt to forge ahead with radical changes despite this drawback backfired badly. The centrists became alienated to the point where they acquiesced in a military coup. The outcome was a bloody dictatorship.
History would have been quite different if Chile had different electoral rules. Chilean tradition demanded that the legislature confirm as president the candidate with the largest number of votes, although Allende was the least desirable of the three candidates for more than half the voters. In some other countries an absolute majority (that is, more than 50 percent of votes cast) is required for election. A majority can be achieved by having a second round of elections in which only the two candidates with the most votes participate. The outcome might be that the centrist candidate is eliminated, and the voters offered the choice between a rightist and a leftist. If most of the former supporters of the centrist candidate were to switch to the rightist, the latter could win, much to the dismay of many leftist voters. Instead of a second round, one can also have one round of elections but ask voters for their second preferences. In this case, the centrist candidate would presumably be the second choice of both leftists and rights, and the country would get a president at least semiacceptable to every body.
The point here is not to argue that one of the possible methods or outcomes described above is better than the others. The point is that electoral rules matter: with the same distribution of votes. The presidency could go to the leftist, the centrist, or the rightist candidate, depending on the rules.
Another case in point: The Weimar Republic’s parliamentary system was based on proportional representation with a low electoral threshold. It has been argued that Hitler’s ascendancy was helped by this electoral system, which, as one writer has put it, “preserved a maddening profusion of parties and led to a widespread yearning for a strong leader.” Even if the connection between electoral rules and Hitler’s political success is debatable, “the very suggestion indicates that electoral rules might have serious consequences … even for an entire nation, its neighbors—and even the whole world.”
Electoral rules matter in Israel. Indeed, it was known as early as 1952 that Israel’s electoral rules, more precisely, its single countrywide electoral district with proportional representation and closed party lists intensify group conflict, produce unstable governments, and actually render the people powerless.
In his essay “How Electoral Systems Matter for Democratization,” Taagepera sets forth two desirable outputs of an electoral system: fairness and stability. “A major (though by means the sole) criterion of fairness is proportionality between vote shares and seat shares. Representation of significant minorities is an aspect of it. Stability is affected, among many other factors, by the number of parties … Too many parties may make for unstable coalition [and inept] governments.”
A tension thus exists between fairness and stability. While Proportional Representation (PR) promotes fairness, it may also undermine stability and even national security, without which talk about fairness is flapdoodle.
PR obviously produces a multiplicity of parties—more with a low electoral threshold (currently 2 percent in Israel). Since no party in Israel has ever come close to winning a majority of the seats in the Knesset, a coalition of (rival) parties is necessary to form the government. According to Taagepera, “As the number of actors [in the government] increases the number of possible disputes increase roughly as the square of the number of actors.” Taagepera arrived at this conclusion by statistical analysis of many countries. Since Israeli governments often have more than five rival party leaders in the cabinet, it seems miraculous that Israel has survived under its divisive electoral rules.
(To be continued)
Electoral Rules Matter: Part II
Paul Eidelberg
Part I cited the renowned expert on electoral rules professor Rein Taagepera. Perhaps his most telling point is this: “As the number of actors increases the number of possible disputes increase roughly as the square of the number of actors.” This obviously applies to Israel, whose government typically consists of roughly 20 cabinet ministers representing rival political parties. No wonder the average duration of Israeli governments since 1948 is less than two years! This short tenure renders it virtually impossible for the government to pursue coherent, consistent, and long-term national policies.
Here I am reminded of the warnings and wisdom of James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 62, where he defends the six-year tenure of the Senate, a defense that applies to Israel’s Knesset as well as to its Government despite their prescribed (but unrealized) tenure of four years:
The mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members, however qualified they may be, points out, in the strongest manner, the necessity of some stable institution in the government. Every election in the States [i.e., the original thirteen states] is found to change one-half of the representatives. From this change of men must proceed a change of opinions; and from a change of opinions, a change of [laws or] measures. But a continual change even of good measures is inconsistent with every rule of prudence and every prospect of success. The remark is verified in private life, and becomes more just as well as more important, in national transactions.
Madison goes on to enumerate the mischievous effects of mutable governments:
In the first place, it forfeits the respect and confidence of other nations, and all the advantages connected with national character [my emphasis] …The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood … or undergo such incessant change that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any manner affecting the value of different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens…..
Madison also shows how mutable governments and policies undermine the predictability essential to enterprise and commerce, hence national prosperity. He concludes by saying:
But the most deplorable effect of all is that diminution of attachment and reverence which steals into the hearts of the people, towards a political system which betrays so many marks of infirmity, and disappoints so many of their hopes. No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a portion of order and stability.
Is it any wonder that opinion polls in Israel indicate that as much as 90 percent of the public despises the government and regard the Knesset as a mere haven for job-seekers?
In conclusion, certain Madisonian insights should be reiterated. First, the instability of Israeli governments diminishes the respect of other nations. Second, frequent change of public policies facilitates corruption by cunning “insiders.” Third, the excessive mutability of Israeli governments erodes public trust and confidence. Fourth, the transient nature of Israeli governments—a consequence of Israel’s ill-designed electoral rules—undermines the development of Jewish national character.
(To be continued)
Electoral Rules Matter: Conclusion
Paul Eidelberg
As noted by professors Rein Taagepera and Matthew Shugart, “a main function of an electoral system is to preserve political stability in the face of potentially disruptive or paralyzing disagreements on issues.” Since Proportional Representation (PR), as a general rule, multiplies the number parties, then, as indicated in Part II, the number of possible disputes in government increases roughly as the square of the number of actors.
However, diminishing the degree of proportional representation—say by combining national list PR with single-member plurality districts—does not necessarily diminish the number parties in the legislature (or in multi-party governments like Israel). Italy recently diminished PR, but the number of parties remained virtually the same because new issue dimensions arose, serious enough to trigger the formation of new parties. This only indicates that politics is more complicated than electoral rules, although the significance of such rules should not be minimized, let alone ignored.
As our two experts make clear, electoral systems and issue dimensions are not independent of each other. When an electoral system is changed, it will influence the number of issue dimensions existing at that particular time. This is not an argument against shifting from PR to single-member electoral districts. We merely want to emphasize the complexity not only of political systems but also of political culture.
For example, under the French Constitution, where the President may be of one party while the parliamentary majority belongs to different parties, the resulting “cohabitation” may paralyze the government. This is not the case of the United States where the President and the Congress are controlled by different parties (the situation under the previous Bush administration). Cohabitation or “gridlock” is avoided because the two major parties, Democratic and Republican, unlike parties in France, are loose coalitions; and given the existence of open primaries in the U.S., where candidates are not subject to party leadership, what may appear to amateurs or the media as a political deadlock in theory is negligible in practice.
U.S. Senators and Representatives, unlike members of Israel’s Knesset, are individually accountable to the voters in their respective (geographic) constituencies; and politicians must produce results if they are going to be re-elected. Bi-partisanship is the rule (but like any political rule, is punctuated by exceptions).
The phenomenon of gerrymandering, which may result from multi-district elections, is another matter. There are ways of eliminating or at least minimizing this evil by diverse electoral rules: for example, by the “Personalized Proportional Representation” system used in Sweden, Germany, and Denmark, or the “Preferential Vote” system used in Australia, Ireland, and Malta. (See my book Jewish Statesmanship on this subject.)
Conclusion:
Our two mentioned authorities raise the question: “Can a malfunctioning electoral system alone destabilize a regime?” They answer: “This is rarely the case in a direct sense [but let’s not forget the examples of Chile and Germany discussed in Part I]. Undesirable outputs [such as instability] can be compensated by ad hoc means or by changes in either the electoral system itself or in some other component of the political system. This is possible if the polity is otherwise healthy. A sound polity can salvage a defective electoral system, while no electoral system can save a polity bent on self-destruction…. But this leaves the marginal cases, and in our world many regimes are in marginal health.” (Emphasis added.)
Many people will agree with the present writer that Israel is anything but a healthy regime. Hence I have ceaselessly advocated not only changes in its electoral rules, but also drastic reform of Israel’s political and judicial institutions.
However, as Rein Taagepera and Matthew Shugart point put, “Compared to other components of political systems, electoral systems are the easiest to manipulate with specific goals in view. This does not mean that electoral rules are easy to change but only that the other components are usually even harder to change.”
It is in this light that the present author has so often urged that Israel, to begin with, should scrap its single nationwide district election—which necessitates proportional representation—and establish a multi-district or constituency electoral system that makes members of the Knesset individually accountable to the voters, and not to party machines or party leaders. This reform is a necessary precondition of changing the disastrous course of this country.
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