Has the time come to reform Ireland s PR-STV electoral system? John Kenny BSc Government III

Has the time come to reform Ireland s PR-STV electoral system? John Kenny BSc Government III In their programme for government, the Fine Gael-Labour coalition made a commitment on the establishment of a constitutional convention to consider reforming the Irish constitution, which is expected to take place during the first half of 2012. One of the reforms to be reviewed is the current electoral system PR-STV (Proportional Representation by the Single- Transferable Vote) (Department of the Taoiseach, 2011: 17) by which Dáil elections take place as per Article 16.2.5 of the constitution. In light of the forthcoming review, which may take place under the Governments proposed constitutional convention; this paper will take the opportunity to examine the strengths and weaknesses of PR-STV, the merits of switching to an alternative system through comparisons with other European electoral systems and changes that could be made within the framework of the existing system. The paper will then conclude by answering the question as to whether or not the time has come to reform the system. To begin with however, it is necessary to give a brief explanation as to how PR-STV works in Ireland. The system is designed for multi-seat constituencies and allows voters the opportunity to vote on both candidate and party lines, even though it is primarily candidate focused. When casting their votes, voters are given a list of all the candidates running for the constituency listed in alphabetical order with which they place a 1 next to their first preference and can continue to rank as many or as few of the other candidates as they wish to. In order for a candidate to be elected they need to reach a quota which is calculated as the

minimum number of votes which will fill the seats available and no more (Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, 2011: 2). This quota is known as the Droop quota and is calculated using the following formula: Total Number of Valid Votes Quota = + 1 Number of Seats + 1 (Sinnott, 2010: 118) If a candidate reaches the quota they are deemed elected and their surplus votes, based on the next available preferences for a candidate who is still in the race and taken from the top of the last pile of votes received. These are distributed on the condition that the surplus can elect the highest remaining candidate, bring the lowest candidate level or above that of the second lowest candidate or qualify a candidate for reimbursement of electoral expenses. If none of these conditions are met, or if any candidate fails to reach the quota, one has to eliminate the candidate(s) with the lowest votes and distribute their votes accordingly. This process of distributing surpluses and/or eliminating candidates and distributing their votes is continued until all of the seats are filled. (Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, 2011). Now that the system has been explained, its strengths and weaknesses will be examined. The issue of proportionality is one where PR-STV performs relatively strongly. The percentage difference between the amount of votes a party gets and the seats that they receive is usually quite small, never reaching double digits, and the system does not significantly disadvantage smaller parties. And even though its proportionality is slightly less than that achieved under list-pr, it is significantly greater than that experienced under plurality or majoritarian

systems (Farrell, 2011: 142). Where the implementation of PR in Ireland can come in for criticism though is for the low district magnitude, which refers to the amount of available seats per constituency. It is generally accepted that there should be a district magnitude of at least five in order to get the most proportional outcome, but in Ireland it ranges from three to five. This low figure can have the particular effect women and minorities being underrepresented in the Dáil. Buckley (in Joint Oireachtas Committee Report, 2010b: 55) presents the case that in a three seat constituency political parties will probably only field two candidates and will more than likely stick with the (usually male) incumbent and so females are unlikely to even be put on the ballot paper in this sort of a situation. She therefore argues that if the district magnitude was to be increased to six or more, it would increase the likelihood of equal gender representation being achieved. While there has since been a bill introduced that will force political parties to have at least thirty per cent of the candidates that they are fielding to be female from the next general election, with those failing to achieve this having their state funding cut in half (RTÉ News, 2011), an increase in district magnitude in conjunction with this could still have a positive effect for achieving gender parity and it would also help for representation of minorities. An even bigger criticism of the system than the district magnitude though is that it imposes a lifestyle on politicians which is directly inimical to good government and is a considerable deterrent to potential participants (Hussey, 2009). The argument is that, because there is both inter-party and intra-party competition, candidates cannot rely on their party s policy to be elected and so they have to carry out high levels of constituency work in order to distinguish themselves from their party rivals and increase their number of personal votes. The need to differentiate oneself from running mates is very important as 34 percent of TDs (Teachta

Dála) overall and 56 percent of Fianna Fáil TDs who lost their seats in the period between 1922 and 1997 lost the seat to a candidate from within their own party (Gallagher and Komito, 2010: 248/249). The link between this intra-party competition and a TD s constituency workload is clearly seen in a report by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution (2010a: 17) which found that TDs who faced no intraparty competition in their constituency in the 2007 general election spend on average 41 percent of their time on constituency issues, while those who faced two or more candidates from their own party spend 62 percent of their time on constituency issues. The major problem with the high constituency workload is that it can lead to TDs sidelining national issues during their tenure of office. As Gallagher and Komito (2010: 254) put it, dealing with casework reduces the time available for formal parliamentarian duties such as examining legislation and discussing policy, which weakens the Dáil s ability to provide effective scrutiny of government and to contribute to policy formation. And, as O Leary (2011: 340) has discovered, while TDs tend to spend a significant amount of time when in the Dáil on legislative work, with over 61 percent of those she surveyed spending at least 6 hours a day carrying out just legislative work while there, when TDs return to their constituency offices there is a reversal of this trend with 73 percent of TDs spending more than 6 hours a day on just constituency work while 68 percent spend less than 2 hours a day on legislative work. One can therefore see how legislative work can suffer as a result of constituency workloads. Another problem with the high constituency workload is that it can make politics an unattractive career option [for] able and nationally-oriented men and women and so the brightest and best tend not to go into politics (Gallagher, 2011). The following quote from an article that appeared in the Irish Times (2007) presents this argument very acutely:

While the single transferable vote system has many admirable features... the downside is that it has cursed the political system with a pernicious clientelism. It rewards those who write the most letters, attend the most funerals, sponsor the most football shirts, those for whom service in the Dáil is largely a permanent campaign for re-election. It punishes those who see their role primarily as legislator and who don t keep ahead of their party colleges snapping at their heel, as many a former TD will attest It is therefore clear that there are certainly grounds for changing to an electoral system that would deemphasise constituency work and allow TDs the opportunity to put national issues to the forefront of their agendas. However, while the constituency workload of a TD may be perceived as a weakness of the system, it does have its positives. For one, the electorate actually want their representatives to engage in constituency work. The results of the 2011 Irish National Election Study demonstrate that the majority of Irish people, with the exception of those in the Dublin area, feel that a TD providing a local service to the constituency is a strength of the Irish system and that they would actually prefer for this to be increased rather than decreased (Collins, 2011). The study also found that there is strong opposition to moving away from PR-STV and that representing the local area is more important than party affiliation when voting, so perhaps it is the case that the candidate-centred electoral system that we currently have is perhaps the electoral system that best matches the preferences of the electorate. Not only is the constituency work something that Irish people want to see in their representatives, but it may also have a beneficially effect on the TD s parliamentary duties as it keeps them in touch with the issues that are affecting the people that they are representing and they can then use this first-hand knowledge in order to create legislation that will best be able to deal with the problems that are facing the citizens.

[Constituency work] reduces alienation from the political system as a whole, makes voters feel that at least someone is on their side, and keeps MPs aware of the reality of life for ordinary people, preventing the development of a completely out-of-touch political class (Gallagher, 2009) With the weakness of local government and the lack of any form of regional or provincial government (Gallagher and Komito, 2010: 248), by TDs providing constituency services it fills in a void that would otherwise exist and also gives citizens direct access to the political system which can only be beneficial for democracy. One might say after all that the constituency workload of a TD might not be such a bad thing and so trying to significantly reduce it may have negative effects for the Irish political system. Even if one is still of the opinion that the level of work carried out by a TD is excessive and should be reduced, would changing the electoral system actually achieve this? As Farrell (2010a) points out, recent electoral reform in many countries has been unsuccessful in solving the issues they were supposed to solve, There have been exactly three countries in the last quarter century in the world of established democracies that have changed their electoral system and none of those reforms worked, so why should Ireland be any better at it?. This failure was seen clearly in Italy where the 1993 electoral reform had intended to combine the best of both worlds by introducing a mixed proportional and plurality system, but instead seemed to combine some of the worst aspects of the proportional and plurality worlds (Bull and Pasquino, 2007: 675). When Italy then decided to return to proportional representation in 2005 it was a move that reflected the interests of the dominant political parties, rather than the country as a whole, and ended up introducing even more instability into the system (Renwick, 2010: 119-128). And, as Farrell et al (1996: 25) note in the Irish case for the most part, such arguments [those regarding the disadvantages of intra-party

rivalry and excessive constituency work in PR-STV systems] usually ignore the fact that Irish political culture is endemically localist and to blame the electoral system is disingenuous and so one might not in reality be treating the real cause of constituency work with a change of electoral system. To look at another country that also uses PR-STV, in Malta parliamentarians have a 1:1 ratio in the way they divide their time between constituency and legislative work, but in Ireland the ratio is 1.4:1 (Farrell, 2010b). If high constituency work was purely a product of the electoral system, one would expect that it would also take place in Malta. However, there is still a possibility that it a change could still have a positive effect and so it is necessary to examine the available alternatives and what the likely consequences would be for the political system. The Single-Member Plurality (SMP) system, or First-Past-The Post as it is more commonly known, is one such system that could be introduced. It operates under single-seat constituencies where the candidate with the most votes wins and so could be advantageous as it would abolish the intra-party competition at the electoral level and potentially reduce constituency workloads. However it has twice been put forward and subsequently rejected in referendums in 1959 and 1968 respectably and its highly disproportionate nature would unfairly discriminate against smaller parties. This can be seen in the United Kingdom where, in the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats received 23 per cent of votes but less than 9 per cent of the seats but both Labour and the Conservatives each got ten percentage points more in seats than they did in actual votes (BBC, 2010). Due to its disproportionate nature, adopting it would appear to do more harm than good as it would erode the country s multiparty system. On the same grounds a majoritarian system, such as the two-round ballot used in France or the alternative vote system that is currently used in Irish presidential and bi-

elections, would also not be viable options as majority system can, and do, produce results that are even more inequitable than SMP (Farrell, 2011: 56/57). Another option would be to switch to a party list system where voters vote based on party rather than candidate, but this again would not be advisable. This is because intraparty competition would still be present under an open list system, whereas a closed list system would merely be swapping the strong constituency emphasis on the constituent to strong constituency emphasis by the selector. The most likely alternative that has been put forward would be a mixed system, like that used in Germany, where a certain proportion of seats are elected from a closed party list for legislative duties and the other half is elected on a candidate basis for constituency duties. While this may seem like the ideal system in order to get the correct balance between the constituency and legislative workload, as was seen in Italy mixed systems have their problems and Farrell (2010b) estimates that if employed in Ireland it would result in the contamination across the variants of the two systems. Where it has been implemented in other countries, it is often the case that list members aim to become constituency members and so informally link themselves to a constituency and carry out constituency services there (Sinnott, 2010: 132). And even where list members have no ambitions to become constituency members, they still need to carry out constituency work in order to increase their chances of re-election as can be seen in Germany, German list MPs have to maintain a presence in their home area if they wish to garner sufficient intra-party support in their region to assure a high list ranking in the next election (Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, 2010a: 33). A mixed electoral system would therefore not appear to provide the answers to the problems either. After looking at the available options, it is therefore not realistic to expect a change in the electoral system to transform the style of politics (Gallagher, 2011) in Ireland.

Alternatively, there are options for reform that could be made other than a change to the core of the system itself. One of these that have already been mentioned is the increase in district magnitude for all constituencies to six in order to increase proportionality and representation of women and minorities. A second option would be to reform the ballot paper design. With the candidates names being listed alphabetically on the ballot paper, there is evidence to suggest that this may benefit those listed towards the top due to some people voting in order of appearance of names rather than in order of their preferences. This effect could be counteracted by rotating the order in which candidates names appear on the ballot paper so that each one has an equal probability of appearing at the top and has already been implemented in certain regions of Australia (Farrell, 2011: 148/149). Thirdly, reform could be made with regard to the counting rules used to distribute surpluses. While the current system in which a sample of papers are chosen for distribution is supposed to be representative of the whole due to the random order in which papers are counted, it is this same randomness that may result in the transfers not actually being representative. Weeks (in Joint Oireachtas Committee, 2010b: 91) estimates that between 1981 and 2007 an average of 3.1 seats in each election would have been won by a different party under different counting rules which demonstrates the effect that just using a sample has on electoral outcomes. It could be rectified by employing the Gregory Method, as used for Seanad and Northern elections, in which all votes are included but at a fraction of their original value which eradicates the element of chance present in the current system. While it would slightly increase the amount of time required to count the votes, its adoption would make the system fairer and more just. All of these reforms could be passed through the Dáil without the need for a referendum as there are no constitutional impediments to enacting them.

To answer the question as to whether or not the time has come to reform the electoral system, the conclusion that this paper arrives at is yes to reform but no to change. As has been seen the current system already performs strongly on both proportionality and voter choice, and so any move to an alternative system would inevitably result in the reduction of at least one of these factors which would be less than desirable. Those who are proponents of change are usually arguing for it on the basis that TDs engage in too much constituency work at the expense of their legislative duties and that this could be reduced by abolishing the intra-party competition at the electoral level, but there are problems with this reasoning. Firstly, it presumes that the constituency work of a TD has little or no worth when in fact it does and, secondly, even if one did not see the worth of constituency duties, the electoral system is not the root cause of high constituency work but merely facilitates it, and so a change of system could not be expected to have a significant effect. For real change, one would instead need to the look at measures such as strengthening local government which may divert some of the constituency work from the national to the local politician or giving parliamentary committees a more active role which would naturally increase the parliamentary role of a TD but these measures are beyond the scope of this paper. So even though this paper is against the change of the electoral system, there are certain reforms that it does recommend introducing which would improve the workings of the system without changing its core character. These are increasing the district magnitude to at least six in all constituencies, rotating the names of candidates on the ballot paper during printing and the use of the Gregory method for counting votes. Such measures would greatly increase the quality of Irish democracy and so should be enacted as soon as possible while there is an appetite - not just in Ireland but across the whole of Europe - for political reform in order to improve the quality, accountability and transparency of our political systems in the face of continued economic

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