Electoral reform, including proportional representation, is back on the national agenda. The B.C. government has just commissioned former provincial Liberal leader Gordon Gibson to look at major changes to the way elections are run in that province. Earlier this week in these pages, former federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent teamed up with Hugh Segal, president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, to make the case for PR.
I once shared this passion, and helped write the Quebec government's green paper touting PR in the late '70s. But, over the years, I've come to have growing doubts that PR would improve our democracy.
PR's supporters believe elections are supposed to produce a legislature that is a faithful representation of all the currents of policy opinion in the electorate at election time. Not so: Elections are about choosing a government. Under our current system, voters get to do that directly but are robbed of that ability by PR. Look at New Zealand or Germany or Israel or most of the other PR systems: The choice of government is often the unpredictable outcome of a mad few weeks of horse-trading after the election is over. It's Meech Lake every four years.
It is no vice of first past the post that it usually boosts the seat count of the most popular party; on the contrary, this "winner's premium" is a way of boosting the chances that the party with the strongest support can form a stable government. A stable government able to resist the short-term shifts of public opinion and answerable for its stewardship of power at the next election is a great strength of our system.
PR's friends believe elections are essentially policy-based and forward-looking. They are neither. For most people, policy is far too complicated and boring. What elections allow them to do is to form judgments about people.
An election is a contest between competing teams for the voters' confidence. And the first thing to be judged is the performance of the outgoing team. In other words, past performance counts for more than future promises. That is why incumbents enjoy an advantage.
Only where past performance has been disappointing do other parties really have much of a chance. And then the electorate's judgment is chiefly about intangibles such as personalities and trust. If that is the case, then most votes are only a weak expression of preference for one party's "program" or "principles."
PR supporters also tend to believe that the party platform ought to trump all other considerations in policy-making. Yet this is not the way politics works. George W. Bush, for example, didn't have a policy on the war on terrorism when he was elected. Politics is a struggle to impose will and order on unpredictable and shifting events and people.
The future is not bound by party platforms. That's why democracies confer a rather unrestricted ability to make decisions about unpredictable future events on specific individuals and party teams. And voter judgments are relative, not absolute.
What democracy requires is that each election produce a party that is clearly accountable at the next election for its administration of the necessarily unpredictable affairs of the country. The voters can then pass judgment on whether that team should be returned to office, or hand that responsibility to others in whom they have greater confidence.
In other words, PR focuses too much on mathematical representation of parties, on binding politicians to programs, principles and the future, when elections are really about letting the population choose a government, the confidence that potential leaders inspire in people, dealing with the unpredictable and accountability for the past. First past the post, for all its faults, does it better. Brian Lee Crowley is president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a Halifax-based public policy think tank.