The argument I suppose I’ve heard most often in favour of PR is that it’s “fair”, while the argument I’ve most often heard against it is that it produces weak and indecisive governments. I’ve also heard that it gives disproportionate influence to fringe parties (if they hold the balance of power in parliament), and allows extremists and fascists a voice.
I’m unimpressed by all of those arguments. The “fairness” argument is meaningless. The purpose of elections (I’m arguing) is not to create a parliament that resembles the electorate, it’s to force the legislators to try to keep us happy, to give them an incentive to seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
The same goes for the fringe party or extremists argument; if significant numbers of people think that expelling the Poles, or the Muslims, or the Jews, or the tailors, is the answer to their problems, then they must be seriously unhappy, which means the legislators are doing a horrible job. Frankly, the politicians that destroyed the stock of social housing and then blamed immigrants for the lack of housing had only themselves to blame when people voted to leave the EU. And you don’t cure that sort of poison by denying people a voice, you cure it by engaging with it, telling people the truth, and trying to make people as happy as you can.
The argument from the desirability of strong government, I think, misses the point of democracy altogether. Chile under Pinochet, Spain under Franco, Britain under Thatcher, Russia under Putin – all these are examples of very strong government. But what’s the point of having a strong government if it is not considering the happiness of its citizens? No, if you want to form a strong government, you should have to persuade the electorate to put their trust in you. That sort of strength should not be given by default just because you crossed an arbitrary line.
So, what is my argument for PR? It’s this. The current plurality system (colloquially known as “first past the post”) creates a distortion in the system. Some constituencies are so reliably held by one party – so-called “safe seats” – that the Utilitarian rating system doesn’t work. Some voters in that constituency will be deeply unhappy with the party that holds the seat, but their ratings are just deleted from the system. But even the voters who broadly like what the incumbent is doing can generally be safely ignored. The only people that need to be listened to are the voters at the margins, the persuadable ones, the “floating voters”, the median voters.
And this means that they are the ruling class. It is their utility that is considered. Rather than measuring the sum of happiness, we’re measuring a weighted sum, where extra weight is given to the happiness of a special group.
If any version of democracy is going to even remotely track the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it has to include everybody’s happiness in the aggregate score. Any scheme of voting that allows politicians to safely ignore a sector of society condemns that sector to non-citizen status. So a Labour MP, in a solid Labour area, can safely ignore what her Tory (or UKIP, or Green, or LibDem) constituents want, because the only people she needs to convince are the people who voted Labour last time but might not this time. Even if the majority of voters would be happier with (say) a state-owned rail system, she can safely ignore their wishes because the floater is king, and polls have told her what they want.
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