The surprising results of the recent national elections
in Britain have generated some interesting commentary from British political observers. Given that the US and the British tend to
move in similar directions, politically, socially, and economically, many of
the observations are relevant to issues of importance to the US.
From a US perspective, the observation that the
Conservative Party (Tories) won a sufficient number of seats to form a government
on its own and the Labour and Liberal Democratic parties lost a significant
number of seats suggests that the British electorate is becoming more
conservative, and that progressive or liberal ideas are falling into
disfavor. Such a conclusion is
particularly troubling to those with liberal leanings given the results of the
2014 mid-term elections. Geoffrey Wheatcroft
has produced an article for the New York
Review of Books that warns us that such simple assumptions are dangerous
because the situation is much more complicated.
Wheatcroft’s concern is not so much the unexpected
dominance of the Conservative Party as the political stability of Great Britain
itself. To express his fears he titled
his essay Britain: The Implosion. He provides some illuminating voting data on
the conservative/liberal issue.
“….a 6.5-point lead for the
Conservatives, who had 36.9 percent of the popular vote to Labour’s 30.4.
Labour had in fact slightly increased its overall vote from five years before,
and increased it more than the Tories increased theirs, but that’s small
comfort. The only thing that counts is which party wins the most votes in each
parliamentary constituency. The Tories won 331 seats, Labour 232.”
“Cameron ought to be chastened
by the knowledge that fewer than four votes in ten were cast for his party, and
less than a quarter of the whole electorate voted Tory. The overall Tory vote
increased by only 0.08 percent since the last election, while Labour’s
increased by 1.4 percent. But his party will not be chastened at all.”
What actually occurred should have led to a small
increase in Labour representation in an electoral system where representation
is proportional to the percentage of votes received. Neither Britain nor the US has such a
system. The person who receives the most
votes in a given district is the representative of that district. The British seem to refer to this as a “first-past-the-post-system,”
while in the US it is more usually referred to as a “winner-take-all”
system. It is this aspect of electoral
politics that allows small changes in voting results to produce large changes
in representation. The most significant
result from the British election was the sweep of seats by the Scottish
National Party (SNP) in Scotland, an area that is definitely left-leaning. The movement of liberals in Scotland to the
SNP and the fear of Scottish independence in other parts of Britain combined to
lower vote totals for Labour and other liberal parties.
It is often said that winner-take-all electoral systems
can only support two significant parties.
For much of its recent history British elections were determined by
competition between the Conservative and Labour parties. That has begun to change. In 2010, Cameron’s Conservative Party was
forced to form a government in an alliance with the Liberal Democrat Party
which won 57 seats. In 2015 it won only
8 seats.
“We have had periods when third
parties held the parliamentary balance, as the Irish party did in favor of the
Liberals after 1910, or when there was true three-party politics, as in the
1920s, with Labour coming up to overtake the Liberals. But if, as A.J.P. Taylor
said of that time, the British electoral system ‘was ill adapted to cope with
three parties,’ how much less adapted is it to cope with electing a Commons
where eleven parties are now represented, five of which campaign throughout the
whole country, and six more of which are from the ‘Celtic fringe,’ Scotland,
Wales, and Northern Ireland?”
Wheatcroft seems to be concerned with the demise of a
single liberal alternative to the Conservatives, and with the potential for
chaos and perhaps even the dissolution of the United Kingdom, from the rise of
nationalist parties like the SNP.
What is of greatest interest to us in the US is whether
or not the devolution of two dominant national parties into multiple issue-focused
parties might be a good thing or a bad thing in terms of running a government.
In the US, it is easy to interpret stories of countries
where multiparty accommodations are being made to form a functioning government
as a sign of ultimate weakness in governance, if not incompetence. But is that true? Or might it indicate a more advanced and more
productive means of governing a complex society?
David Runciman addresses this issue directly in comments on the recent election that
appeared in the London Review of Books. He summarizes the conventional wisdom in this
manner.
“….few people dissent from the
line that it is better to have a government that can pass legislation and take
decisions when it needs to than to be stuck with one that stumbles on
hand-to-mouth from vote to vote. We seem to prefer certainty to confusion.”
He then proposes that a single party majority (the US
equivalence would be one party controlling both houses of Congress and the
presidency) has historically not proven to be more efficient at governance.
“What evidence is there that
majority governments are better at governing? The fundamental long-term
problems this country faces – inequality, a struggling education system,
growing health costs, changing employment patterns, environmental threats – are
ones that a series of majority governments (and I include the coalition, which
had a big parliamentary majority) have failed to address. This is not just a
left/right issue. Blair didn’t tackle them, despite his massive parliamentary
ascendancy, any more than Thatcher did.”
Rather, the evidence supports the notion that political
systems that incorporate proportional voting and thus encourage multiparty
governance have been more efficient.
“The two countries that have
seen the greatest rise in inequality over the past couple of decades are
Britain and the United States. Both have a first-past-the-post system designed
to offer a clear choice between two main parties. Yet whichever of the two
parties wins, the drift towards inequality has been inexorable. This contrasts
with continental Europe, where there are barriers in the way of vastly unequal
distributions of wealth and power and where there also happen to be
proportional representation systems that force multiple parties to negotiate
for influence and outcomes.”
Britain and the US face complex problems in a complex
world over which they have little control.
They must deal with this environment in an arena in which special
interests, feeding off the increased inequality, have ever more resources with
which to purchase the allegiance of a given party. A majority party is not so much better able
to make decisive decisions as they are more easily bought.
“Majority governments flatter to
deceive. They are not more decisive. They are just more biddable.”
“Decisive, single-party
governments are not the way to resist these forces, because their freedom of
manoeuvre makes them easier to buy off without anyone else being able to hold
them to account. What national democracies need is not more autonomy but more
barriers in the way of any single political faction or grouping being able to
call the shots. The presence in government of multiple parties representing
multiple interests helps to give democracy a measure of defence against the
whirlwind of money that swirls around it. It makes it harder to sell out,
because it makes it harder to do anything reckless. I realise that doesn’t
sound like a ringing endorsement of democracy. But for now it’s the best one
there is.”
One might expect that majority governments will feel free
to proceed boldly in implementing policy.
Runciman believes that history suggests otherwise. One is free to be bold only if one is free of
worry about being reelected.
“What single-party governments
do, instead of making the messy compromises that might offer their populations
some real protection, is focus their attention on the areas where their freedom
of action can make an immediate difference….It is no coincidence that
first-past-the-post states also tend to turn into national security states:
their governments have the capacity to take aggressive action against immediate
threats that appear amenable to massive concentrations of firepower, regardless
of the long-term consequences….Unencumbered executive leaders worry about being
lumbered with the blame for any failures of national security, because their
autonomy leaves them exposed to carrying the can. Majority governments spend
more time avoiding the risks that impinge on them than mitigating the risks
that threaten the rest of us.”
How do such considerations apply to the US? One might argue about the level to which
political parties are under the control of plutocratic interests, but clearly
money buys influence and power in our country.
The Supreme Court has gone so far as to declare that the purchase of
political power is a perfectly acceptable attribute of our political system,
and any attempt to enforce equality of political opportunity is unconstitutional.
One suspects that the voting public fears—perhaps subconsciously—the
consolidation of too much power in a single party. It seems to be content with the notion that
control of congress and the presidency should not reside in a single party. One also suspects that the closeness of national
voting in presidential elections arises from some political dynamic rather than
any similarity in attractiveness of the particular candidates. If Runciman’s cynicism is accepted, one could
conclude that as soon as one party acquires enough power to pursue a specific
agenda it demonstrates its ineffectiveness, incompetence, or recklessness and
drives the electorate back towards the minority party—a form of political
equilibration.
Even the politicians themselves recognize the danger that
exists in single-party governance. The
much-maligned filibuster option incorporated in the rules for Senate
deliberations were not determined by constitutional mandate, but by a mutual
recognition that “we are not to be trusted.”
This single procedure has been very effective in limiting the power of
the majority over the minority that Runciman recommends. The party in power
complains about the filibuster rule but maintains it because it knows it will
soon be out of power.
One might embrace the minority veto power that exists in
the Senate as a good thing. In a
spectacularly diverse country like the US it would be highly unlikely that a
relative handful of politicians, or a handful of technocrats, would be able to
assess complex social problems and come up with an optimal solution for the
nation as a whole. While the national government
frets about its inability to take action, we have state and local governments
performing what might be referred to as social experiments. Let these various experiments play out and
compete for social approval. Those that
can demonstrate sufficient effectiveness to obtain broad acceptance can then be
canonized as national law. This is the
process gay marriage and minimum wage legislation are following.
Would the US have a more effective means of governance if
it possessed a multiparty system? We
will probably never know. It is
extremely difficult to create a new party capable of gaining representation
under our current winner-take-all policy.
We have a number of parties that gain a place on ballots but they almost
never win a seat in government.
Occasionally, a charismatic individual will make a run for the
presidency as a third party or independent candidate and gather a significant
number of votes, but this movement dissipates as soon as the leader retreats
from the battle. The best opportunity to
create a viable third party arose when the Southern states tried to protect
their racial policies from being dismantled. This was a regional issue in which
a majority of voters in that region could be expected to vote for the party
candidate, similar to the situation in Scotland. Ultimately, the Southern politicians decided
that their best strategy was to move their block of votes from the Democratic
Party to the Republican Party.
One advantage of a multiparty system would be a shorter
and simpler election process. In many
countries one votes for the party of choice not the candidate of choice. In multiparty environments, the views of the
candidate are defined by the political platform of the party, otherwise he/she
would not be the candidate. In our
nominally two-party system, the Democratic Party would harbor
environmentalists, union supporters, gay-rights advocates, feminists, and a few
socialists; the Republican Party would provide a home for states-rights
advocates, Christian evangelists, libertarians, and advocates of corporate
interests. Each of these subgroups
could, in principle, be represented by their own party. Since they are not, then the public has no
way of knowing what the specific beliefs of a Republican or Democratic candidate
might be from merely their party label.
This is one reason why our election campaigns are so long; a candidate
must try to sell himself/herself to all these specific subgroups and that can
take a long time.
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