In Europe, PR hands more power to extremes
Premier John Horgan told us to take a “leap of faith” and vote for proportional representation. Obviously he did not know about the trend in European proportional representation countries today.
Traditional centre-right and centre-left parties are disintegrating. One-issue populist parties are on the rise. Sarah de Lange, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam said: “The bigger parties are getting smaller and the smaller parties are getting bigger.”
The real story of Europe’s elections is not the march of Europe’s far right, as true as that is, but the continuing decline of all major centre-right and centre-left parties.
De Lange on Twitter: “Fragmentation has become extreme. Since the 1980s, the combined score of the three main Dutch centre-right and centre-left parties of government has halved, from 80 per cent to 40 per cent, and no fewer than 28 parties contested the last election, 13 of them winning seats.”
Simon Hix, a professor at the London School of Economics, said: “For me, the biggest take-home from the Swedish election is not the further rise of populists but the stunning volatility and party system fragmentation: it’s the Dutchification of European politics.”
The trend in Europe is fourfold: the decline of major centrist parties, the onward march of the far-right neo-Nazis, the rise of far-left, communist-based ideological parties and the plethora of smaller one-issue parties. Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister, notes: “The bottom line is that Sweden is just another European country, a fractured political landscape with the extremes doing better.”
In Germany, Europe’s only mixed-member proportional jurisdiction, centre-right and centre-left parties have lost 27 per cent of their support since 2002.
Last September, neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany surged to 12 per cent of the vote, taking three seats under first past the post and PR providing 91 additional seats.
The far-left communist-linked party Die Linke won five seats under FPTP but gained 64 PR seats with nine per cent of the vote. The Greens elected one seat with FPTP and have a total of 67 PR seats. Free Democracy won zero seats under FPTP and 80 under PR.
The trend of fragmentation is important but so are the impacts these radical parties have when trading their support for programs outside mainstream policy.
Smaller one-issue parties demand high prices for their support to form governments.
Their demands are either expensive, on the margins of mainstream policy, or both.
European professors of economic public policy have studied the size and composition of public expenditures as affected by electoral systems used across democratic jurisdictions. Their conclusions are consistent.
Using data from the International Monetary Fund, the Norwegian Centre for Research compared spending in 85 countries. In PR countries, the average central government expense was about 28 per cent of GDP. Averaging several large commonwealth countries, including Canada, the average was about 22 per cent.
In B.C., the government-spending-to-GDP ratio is 18 per cent.
Obviously, PR does not cause these problems for the body politic but it does legitimize radical and single-interest parties by allowing them to gain seats and achieve party status.
It provides disproportionate influence as minority government partners. And this gives them a significant say over fiscal policy, pushing up government spending and corrupts mainstream policy options.
The picture from Europe is consistent. The question is, does it matter? It does.
A better question is, why would we take the risk?
When you consider a leap of faith, think about what is on offer in this referendum, which is confusing, complicated and without full information or a clear choice. I will vote to keep our current, simple, stable, successful system.