reform and 'strong government': the international experience
Martin Linton MP

International comparisons are quickly called into play in any discussion about voting systems and opponents of proportional representation will usually turn to Israel, Italy, Ireland and occasionally the Netherlands for their most telling points against PR. They will look briefly at a few examples and move on quickly to a sweeping conclusion - usually that PR can only lead to weak multi-party coalitions and that the only way to avoid this is to stick to the familiar first-past-the-post system.

If they are on the left of the political spectrum, they will probably also argue that it is much harder for left-wing governments to push radical changes through under a PR system because they are forced to compromise with centre parties to form coalitions. Only the first-past-the-post system can give them the majority they need to carry their programme through.

The purpose here is to look at the international evidence and test these theses:

1. that proportional representation inevitably leads to coalition governments
    
2. that coalitions force radical parties to dilute their policies
    
3. that coalitions lead to weak government
    
4. that first-past-the-post leads to majority government

Proposition 1: that proportional representation inevitably leads to coalition governments

This is wrong for two reasons. First, some countries have systems based on proportional representation where it is nevertheless common for single- party majority governments to be elected. Greece and Spain are good examples. Secondly, even in countries where coalition governments are the norm, it is still perfectly possible and only marginally more difficult for a single party to win a majority.

Since their return to democracy, Spain and Greece have succeeded in combining proportional representation with single-party majority government. Practically every single election has resulted in the main party of the left or the right winning a majority of the seats without winning an overall majority of the votes.

The Greek system has been deliberately designed so that a party that wins by a plurality will generally have a majority in their parliament. They call it 'reinforced proportional representation' and it works through a series of thresholds at local, regional and national level that have been as high as 17 and 25 per cent. They keep the small parties out and award a 'winner's bonus' to the party that wins the national vote.

In the seven elections since the end of the colonels' regime Greece has alternated between majority rule by the right-wing New Democracy and the left-wing Pasok parties. Only in the first election after the dictatorship did one party succeed in winning more than 50% of the votes. In the other six elections parties with less than half the votes won more than half the seats thanks to the 'reinforcement' in the system.

Typically, the winning party gets up to 10% more of the seats than it does of the votes. Thus in 1981 Pasok won 57 % of the seats on 48 % of the vote; in 1985 it won it 54 % of the seats on 46 % of the vote. In the most recent election, in 2000, it won 53% of the seats on 44% of the votes. In effect the system gives a winner's bonus of up to 10 %.

In the early 1990s they did try reducing this winner's bonus. The result was that in 1990 New Democracy won exactly 50% of the seats for 46.9% of the vote and was deprived of a clear mandate in Parliament. By the next election they had changed the system back, which ironically helped Pasok to win the 1993 election with 57% of the seats for the same 46% share of the vote.

In Spain Felipe Gonzalez' Socialist Party had a majority in Spain through the 1980s without ever winning a majority of votes. The reason was the Spanish regional list system of proportional representation. Instead of being based on the Spanish regions, it is based on 50 provinces, many of them so small that they return only three or four MPs. This creates high thresholds and usually ensures that the seats are divided between the two biggest parties, the Socialists and the Popular Alliance.

Although quite different from the Greek system, it has the same effect of giving the winning party a winner's bonus of up to 10%. This helped the Socialists to win 58 % of the seats on 48 % of the vote in 1982, 53 % of the seats on 44 % of the vote in 1986 and 50 % of the seats on 39.6 % of the vote in 1991. In the most recent election in 2000 the right-wing Popular Alliance won 53% of the seats on 46.6% of the votes.

It is often assumed that the first-past-the-post system in the United Kingdom gives the winning party the biggest 'winner's bonus'. It is well known that Labour won a majority on the lowest percentage of the vote in October 1974 when Harold Wilson won just over 50% of the seats on just 39 % of the vote. But in fact Felipe Gonzalez achieved a similar winner's bonus - but under a 'proportional' system, when he won half the seats on just 39.6% of the vote in 1991.

Even under normal proportional systems a single party can win a majority of the seats and form a one-party government. The Austrian Socialist Party, for instance, was in power throughout the 1970s with more than 50 per cent of votes and more than 50 per cent of the seats. The Portuguese Socialists and the Social Democrats have both won elections by absolute majorities in the last 20 years.

In Ireland Fianna Fail has won an election with more than 50 % of the vote under their single transferable vote system - something that has not happened in the United Kingdom since 1935. Malta, which uses the same voting system as Ireland, has elected governments - Labour and Nationalist - with more than 50 per cent of the vote in the last five elections.

Even Germany, often cited as an example of permanent coalition, has elected a one-party government with more than 50% of the vote more recently than the UK if one can count the Christian Democrat Union and the Bavarian Christian Social Union as a single party. In Sweden the Social Democrats have won an absolute majority of seats and votes on two occasions.

Proposition 2: that coalitions force radical parties |to dilute their policies

Sweden has had a Social Democratic government for more than 60 of the last 70 years and that has included majority governments, minority governments and coalition governments, but it is 45 years since the Social Democrats were last in a formal coalition and, apart from a short period in a majority, it has held office as a minority government, dependent on smaller parties to keep it in power.

This has not been a government of the left forced to dilute its policies because it depends on support from parties of the centre or the right. On the contrary, the Swedish Social Democrats have been dependent on the support of the Left Party - the former Communists - and the Green Party, which has if anything forced the Social Democrats to stick closer to the Left, or to the Greens, than they might otherwise like to do.

The Swedish Left Party, under its charismatic leader Gudrun Schyman, plays exactly the role that many people on the left see for a British left party under a reformed voting system in this country. Acting as a leftward pressure and sometimes as the conscience of the governing party, especially on issues such as taxes and the minimum wage, it can influence the government by withholding its votes on individual issues without threatening to defeat the government on votes of confidence.

It is possible to exaggerate the bargaining power of a small party that holds the balance of power. The Left Party may be able to force concessions, but it cannot credibly threaten to bring a Social Democratic government down and replace it with a government of the right. But the pressure that it does exert is a leftward pressure. While a Labour government with a huge majority in Britain is focused on the centre ground and on 'Middle England', the Swedish Social Democrats feel a parliamentary pressure on their left and their green flank.

From a left perspective this can only be a good thing. A social-democratic party that was once seen as being to the right of the British Labour Party is now seen as being to its left, often prodding a British Labour government to support more radical positions, and the effect of being a minority government dependent on the support of small parties, far from pulling it towards the centre, is keeping it pinned to a more traditional left.

The opposite situation did of course exist in Germany for a long time when a small centre party, the Free Democrats, held the balance between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats and was able on occasions to determine which of them should be the government. This is the 'nightmare scenario' for many opponents of electoral reform in Britain where a Labour government would be held to ransom by a small party holding the balance of power. But it is as well to remember that this scenario has occurred in the United Kingdom under first past the post, when a Labour government entered the Lib-Lab pact from from 1976 to 1978 and there has been the recent experience of the Schroeder government in Germany, where the Social Democrats were no longer dependent on a party of the centre, but on the Greens.

Proposition 3: that coalitions lead to weak government

One of the contentions of the opponents of electoral reform is that coalition governments are not only more likely under PR, but are inherently weak and undesirable. It is difficult to test this thesis in any objective way. It is certainly true of some coalitions that they are inherently unstable and likely to be short-lived. This would certainly describe Italy in the '70s and '80s or France during the Fourth Republic and both of those countries have reacted by changing their constitutions to introduce a greater degree of stability into their governments. But not all coalition governments are either unstable or weak. Germany has been ruled by coalition governments almost continuously since the war, yet it has arguably been the strongest and most stable country in Europe. It has had only one change of government outside an election.

It is certainly true that there would be no support in this country for a voting system that was likely to lead to a succession of unstable coalition governments, though it is more likely that people would object to their instability than the fact of their being coalitions. When we have had coalition governments in this country, mainly in wartime and during the National Government of the thirties, there was a high level of support for them as coalitions.

However it is one of the most commonly used arguments against proportional representation that it would lead to coalitions. Some electoral reformers believe that coalitions are one of the positive benefits for proportional representation, but most accept that voters in this country would on the whole prefer to keep the possibility of one-party majority governments. That is why the Government made 'stability' one of the four desiderata for a new voting system in the terms of reference of the 'Independent Commission on the Voting System', which was established in December 1997 and chaired by Lord Jenkins.

Proposition 4: that first-past-the-post leads to majority government

The AV+ system proposed by the Jenkins Commission has been devised to be little more coalition-prone than our current first-past-the-post system and indeed its report was able to demonstrate that its proposed system would still have led to majority government in four of the previous five elections. The results would have been different in two respects. The winning parties' majorities would have been smaller and their geographical spread of support would have been more even. But the outcome of the election would only have been different in the case of John Major's narrow victory in 1992.

However, it should be borne in mind that the first-past-the-post system is already far less coalition-proof than we might think, as was clearly demonstrated by local election results in the mid-1980s when a majority of English and Welsh counties were 'hung'. Even now nearly 30% of English local authorities (51 out of 174) have no overall majority.

It is still a matter of contention whether these hung councils have performed better or worse than councils where one party has a majority. It is no surprise to discover that many councillors found it difficult to adjust to hung councils, and that sometimes hung councils were not so quick to reach decisions, but for many councils it was a spur to find new ways of working, both between councillors and officers and between party groups, that led to improvements in the quality and accountability of decisions.

Looking at the international evidence of countries using first-past-the- post, there is little evidence that it leads to one-party majority government. Many of the 70 countries that use first-past-the-post have multi-party governments. In some cases first-past-the-post has had the opposite effect of leading to proliferation of small parties. Papua-New Guinea, the only country that has actually switched to first-past-the-post in the last 50 years, had the unhappy experience of ending up with no large parties at all.

In a parliament where most of the candidates are tribal chiefs, the old preferential system forced candidates to seek the second preferences of other tribes. First-past-the-post made such consensual politics redundant. There was a big increase in electoral violence and clan-based politics and the winner was usually the chief of the biggest tribe within each constituency. Often there were 20 or 30 candidates and one candidate was elected with 6.3 per cent of vote. In the latest election the largest party won 16 of the 109 seats.

Although first-past-the-post remains a widespread electoral system, covering 59% of the world's population, they tend to be new democracies or ex-British colonies. The list starts with Afghanistan, Antigua, Aruba, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Bhutan Botswana and Burma, and ends with Kazakhstan, Lesotho, Malawi, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua, Rwanda, St Vincent, St Lucia, St Kitts, Solomon Isles, Sudan, Tonga, Uganda, the UK, the US and the Yemen.

There is a strong strand of left opinion that opposes proportional representation and clings uncritically to first-past-the-post. One hopes that those who hold this view will look at the international comparisons and see that first-past-the-post is a simplistic voting system, in most countries just a relic of British empire, already abandoned by Australia and New Zealand, but elsewhere a system that will only suit the very young democracies which are happy to use the most primitive system at least until its manifest drawbacks become too obvious.

Considering that the first-past-the-post system has not been adopted by any of the new democracies in Eastern Europe, is not used by any other European country, is not used by any political party for its own elections, including the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, that it has not been adopted for the new elections in Scotland or Wales or London or the English regions, nor for the European elections, nor the body to replace the House of Lords, is it too much to hope that the Left will wake up to the fact that it is defending the indefensible?

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