Re: [EL] a "thumping" in the U.K. AV referendum

(1)     A fair assessment of the record of FPTP
voting should look at its failures as well as its
successes. Present-day Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, and
Pakistan must be added to the ledger, alongside
apartheid-era South Africa. No country that is
not a former British colony granted independence
has voluntarily adopted FPTP in the past century.
Even former British colonies like Ireland,
Australia, Malta and New Zealand have abandoned FPTP.

(2)     I would query whether the US actually
does use FPTP voting in the same sense that
India, Canada, the UK and Malaysia do. The
universal use of primaries (govt-run, conducted
by secret ballot) makes the US closer to a
French-style runoff system (albeit with a
time-lag of months rather than weeks between the
polls) than to its UK ancestor (where there is
only a single election and where less-viable
contenders are identified by opinion polls rather
than by actual votes cast). However, with a very
long time-lag, or if more than two major
candidates run at the general election, the US
system has similar features to the British.

(3)     Retaining FPTP voting may be a result
rather than a cause of political stability. When
countries undergo political upheavals, they need
to re-assess their institutions and almost
invariably this involves movement towards an
electoral system that wastes fewer rather than
more votes; almost never is the choice in favour
of FPTP over a proportional system. Also, after
political upheaval, political allegiances and
cleavages are in flux; political parties are
forced to operate under something more like a
Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" - they can't guess
in advance whether their vote percentage will be
in the 40s, the 20s or the 10s - and faced with
this uncertainty, the safest course for any given
party is to play it risk-averse and support a
proportional system, rather than gamble on a FPTP
system that might give it 55% of the seats with
40% of the votes but might equally reduce it to
2% of the seats with 25% of the votes. Finally,
after political upheavals it is harder for
established players with vested interests in the
status quo to write the rules so as to make it
harder for new rivals to run candidates and/or poll votes and/or win seats.

It is revealing that almost never will a body
that has power to write the rules for its own
elections, choose FPTP voting for itself, even if
the same body thinks FPTP is good enough for the
unwashed. The British Conservatives, of course,
use an exhaustive ballot to elect their party
leader - David Cameron won even though David
Davis had a plurality on the first count - as
does the House of Commons when choosing its
Speaker. Republicans and Democrats alike in the
US would never consider a presidential candidate
to be finally nominated just because s/he had a
42% or 43% plurality of the delegates' votes at
the party convention. "A plurality winner for
thee, but not for me" is the stance taken by
politicians in the small number of democracies that still use FPTP.

At 06:25 8/05/2011, Smith, Brad wrote: