Local Democracy Notepad

Apologies for the light posting here lately – I’ve been busy with the Political Innovation project. There’s a series of posts buy viagra canada I’ve added there on ‘What Politicians need to know about social public information.’

I’ll be reviving this blog shortly. In the meantime, here’s something on electronic voting that I found via O’Conall Street.

“Well isn’t this an exciting moment?”

I got ‘the fisheye’ when I viagra for sale cheap said this earlier today to a bleary-eyed crowd of people who had been canvassing for different parties in Northern Ireland.

Some of them were into their thirtieth hour without sleep. There’s a time and a place for train-spottery musings about constitutional permutations.

Electoral reform looks like it’s on the cards though. Whatever the Lib-Dems say, I doubt that they will exit a moment where they can exert leverage without firstly securing a commitment to PR – probably of the STV variety. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Fry (pic: Wikimedia sharealike)

The US-based Fair Vote site makes the very valid point that some attempt at civic education needs to be done in advance of any proposals for electoral reform. It particularly concerns the actor Richard Dreyfuss who makes one or two pithy points on the subject:

“Don’t call it ‘civics’ because ‘civics’ is easily the most boring word in America,” Dreyfuss says. “Call it what it is: political power.”

If Gordon Brown is serious about a public debate on this matter, perhaps this is another role for celebrity? A creative way of visualising an issue is one thing, but nothing can get issues accross as effectively as … well … Stephen Fry (let’s be specific, shall we?).

He may be coming almost ubiquitous now (he’s even stepping into Humphrey Littleton’s shoes on ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue‘ – a step too far perhaps?) but I suppose that it’s yet another job for him?

If the rumours are correct, Gordon Brown is about to announce his intention to promote a new voting system for Parliamentary elections in the UK. His choice is said to be the Alternative Vote (AV) system. It looks like the Vote For A Change campaign will get their way and there will be a referendum on the matter.

The Electoral Reform society offers a summary or this voting system that offers its’ strengths and shortcomings (indeed, you can see all of the alternatives on their site). 

And while the ERS as an organisation have doubts about AV (their CEO Ken Ritchie has already been quoted saying that it’s a ‘weak’ option), I recall that a report that they published on their site last year (PDF) made two very upbeat points:

1. AV is better than it initially appears as an option in the UK, and it offers a significant improvement on current First Past the Post (FPTP) system
2. It’s also the most likely ‘do-able’ reform in the UK, and a good stepping stone to a more deeper proportional system

Otherwise known as ‘instant runoff,‘ AV can make for quite an exciting election night. 

Personally, I’ve never come to firm view on which voting system I prefer. One advantage of AV, I think, is that it reduces the number of ‘safe seats’ – the origin of a good deal of the perceived arrogance of some MPs who have come to regard their seat as a sinecure.

It is also a system that – while not proportional – will be welcomed in the short term by the Liberal Democrats as it’s likely to increase their representation. 

Voting reformer anorak section

The best summary of electoral options in the UK that I’ve found is David Beetham’s offering (MS Word Doc) on Stuart Weir’s Democratic Audit site (that has a good page with some good links including Peter Hain’s arguments in favour of AV.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on voting systems and here’s the electoral commission’s outline of the different voting systems that are currently in place in the UK. As ever, Keele University’s politics department has had a serious crack at providing a definitive index of voting systems from around the world.

What we need now, though, is a debategraph on the subject….

Reboot Britain

We can learn things from the way they elect Popes – and the way they used to.

Chris Dillow reprises his ‘extremist not a fanatic’ theme – that it is rational not to care too much about politics – and that politics benefits from our indifference.

And finally ‘Reboot Britain’ will be worth keeping an eye on – it will have a significant strand covering democratic renewal.

I’m hoping that it will provide another run-out for the PICamp project that started very successfully in Belfast last month.

According to the Municipal Journal, the UK Government has abandoned plans to introduce a Community Empowerment Bill, which would have implemented some parts of the Communities in Control White Paper.

According to the Commons authorities, the Bill would have enabled remote voting in Council meetings, reduced the barriers to introducing an elected mayor, change the definition of politically restricted posts, reform the office of alderman, and modernise the law relating to parish councils.

It is not known whether these provisions will be taken forward in any other way.

Wonk-blogger Will Davies has an excellent post up here. Quoting the Communities in Control White Paper as follows…

We believe that the causes of political disengagement, while complex, can be distilled to a dominant factor: a sense of powerlessness on the part of most citizens that their voices are not being heard, their views not listened to, their participation unwelcomed or their activity unrewarded.

Will comments: 

Ah, a sense of powerlessness. Not a fact of powerlessness, perhaps induced by the fact that only a small minority of voters actually count – and are courted politically – under the British voting system.

That’s not the strongest argument either in a very hard-hitting piece that finds the weaknesses in New Labour’s approach to empowerment – both a reluctance to address the actual problem, and a hubristic faith in the power of management. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a very good article over at Westminster Wisdom about the longevity of the US two-party system – a dominance of only two largely unchanged political parties since 1860 – “a record unmatched by any other Democracy.”

A comparison with the UK, in which the period from 1945 until the late 1960s marked a fairly rigid period of allignment along party and class lines, and the subsequent fragmentation of voting paterns is interesting. There’s an entertaining gap-fill exercise here where you can test your knowledge of this, but it’s often hard to recognise just how much things have changed since 1966.

If you look at the general election results, you see only two very major parties, a very marginal Liberal Party, nothing that could be called a Green Party, tiny Nationalist parties and a miniscule far-right (Union Movement). 

Of the 630 MPs, all but 13 were Labour or Conservative. And of the remainder, 12 were Liberal and one was Republican Labour – the late Gerry Fitt in West Belfast.

The expectation among politicians that they should advance particular policies – as opposed to a general approach – in order to attract votes is a fairly new one in the UK. When Labour lost power to the Conservatives in 1970, a relatively small number of voters switched allegiance. In addition, it is often argued that this reflected a demographic shift (people leaving the Labour-voting class and joining the strata that vote Conservative) more than any reflection on the actual polcies of the political parties.

In 1970, Labour went into the General Election with a fair degree of optimism – their defeat was an unpleasant surprise to them. All of this following a period that included the devaluation of Sterling and Harold Wilson’s famous ‘Pound in your pocket‘ sophistry. 

All of this raises the question: Do we have an electoral system that reflects voters’ expectations of representation? If the main system of voting did so in 1970, by definition, it can no longer do so in 2009 because those expectations have changed so dramatically.

On proportional systems of voting, and how they can have a direct impact upon the way that social issues are addressed:

“Proportional representation correlates with more welfare, reduced corruption, less crime, and a host of other social benefits. The need for consensus among a number of groups with drastically different agendas forces government to be more representative of the entire electorate.  Creative and progressive solutions to problems tend to be the order of the day, with smaller political parties gaining seats in government and diverse viewpoints collaborating to find solutions.”

The author of the post draws then links through to an article by the BBC’s Mark Easton in which he details a more progressive and effective approach to youth crime that is in place in Finland – a state with a much more proportionately-elected system of government.

Three questions: 

1. What are the downsides of PR?
2. How would a governing class that owed it’s position to a ‘First Past the Post’ voting system be persuaded to introduce a system of PR?
3. Local government is often dominated by a different political party from the one that runs central government. Surely it would be advantageous for central government to impose a PR system on local government?