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January 18, 2006
Does Italy need First-Past-the-Post?
Usually if one were to read the sentence 'Silvio Berlusconi is barely human', one would think of his allegedly disreputable ways, or perhaps his pseudo-plastic face. One would not instinctively think of it in the sense of a power-restricting: 'so he is human after all, albeit just about'. Yet it appears that is the current state of play in Italy, where a proposed change to the rules governing political parties' media access (that would've further benefited Berlusconi's 'Forza Italia' gang), has just been scrapped. Either that or Silvio's simply getting cocky.
Given that Signor Berlusconi's centre-right coalition is still six percentage points behind its centre-left rival, blithe cockiness seems a little way away just yet, even though this is Silvio, and even though that poll lead could well translate into a centre-right victory, thanks to Berlusconi's cheekily rapacious change to the electoral system.
The more likely interpretation is that Berlusconi was forced to backtrack due to the misgivings expressed by some of his coalition partners, who would've been worse off under the planned change.
First time for everything an' all that.
In truth, it's a minor legislative setback for Silvio & Co. The slick-haired one is still to Italy's media what that big black rock in Mecca is to the world's Muslims, thus slanting political broadcasts shouldn't be too tricky.
More interesting perhaps than Silvio (and here obviously I'm talking about the implications of electoral systems; nothing's more interesting than Silvio generally) is the state of the centre-left coalition under the new (or old, given that it's a reversion) system of 'crazy PR'. Yesterday I drew attention to the continuing problems Romano Prodi is having uniting the centre-left in order to successfully navigate the obstacles Silvio keeps plonking in Prodi's path. Yet with so many parties, the biggest obstacle may not be anything to do with Silvio. The competing demands of all the one-step-from-insignificance parties are doing a pretty good job derailing the opposition cause by themselves. These party-political shenanigans arguably contribute as much to Italy's ongoing political farce as the blatant corruption at the top.
Under these circumstances, one can see how an argument for FPTP in Italy could be grounded. And given that intellectually speaking this whole electoral reform issue is soporifically one-sided, it's definitely something worth working with.
Under FPTP, the smaller parties, if they wanted the sort of power that they are now vying for via a coalition, would have to moderate some of their views and work with each other under a big banner, much like Prodi is trying and failing to achieve at the moment. With so many parties, it's not like the voters would be deprived of too much of their say—how they're supposed to know which bits of which party manifesto will be implemented at the moment is beyond me. There's clearly no way of knowing who is ultimately responsible for any stupid legislation that makes it onto the statute books during the course of a parliament, thus votes can't be cast on much more than media propaganda and instincts completely unrelated to the running of the country.
And yet… that's where the argument starts to get a bit tricky… it's just as hard to say how such problems would be solved by adopting a system based on geographical spread of votes, one that encourages cronyism and plays right into the hands of people like Signor Berlusconi. In terms of the current circus, he may be a no bigger problem than the squabbles of the little parties, but that doesn't mean he, and the power he is allowed to wield to his own gain, not giving a damn about his country, isn't a huge problem itself.
Italy's political problems, like every other country's, lie not in how to clean up the politicians themselves—that's never going to work, they're like hydras: decapitate one corrupt suit and another will spring up in its place—but rather in taming the power that we necessarily have to bestow upon them. It was this need to 'tame power' that arguably gave rise to Italy's foolish almost-full-PR system in the first place. Much like Weimar Germany, the system was designed to not let any one man or party get too powerful. Yet, again like Weimar, they went a bit far, and thanks to Italians being, as Eddie Izzard told us, too busy driving around on Vespas saying 'ciao', no one did much about it.
Furthermore, a full-PR system doesn't do the best job of taming the power of the people at the top, because the power still resides, quite comfortably, if with a little less authoritarian pomp, in the upper echelons of the political domain. All a fragmenting system means is that the ruling castes are pulled apart by inter-party bickering as opposed to the intra-party type that we get under FPTP. In short, where there is power, there are fights to collect it, like kids in a playground scrapping over Pokemon cards. And like those kids, in the nastier areas, knives can get involved. Nothing like growing up, is there?
The only way to make politicians fight over the voters rather than amongst themselves is to give the voters a real choice. Which inevitably means a choice between different members of the same party. It's the same everywhere, from Rome to Romford.
Posted by pauldavies on January 18, 2006
Comments
Fascinating stuff, but on the solution being to give voters choice within a party, that's exactly what Italians had under the "pure" PR in place from the first post-WWII election until the mixed-member system was adopted in 1993.
That system was open lists. Votes cast for individual candidates exclusively determined the order in which a party's candidates were elected.
Posted by: Matthew Shugart at January 22, 2006 07:58 PM
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