Caucus vote on leader is more democratic
Say what you want about the Australians, they don’t waste any time. By Monday morning, discontent within the governing Liberal party over the erratic leadership of Prime Minister Tony Abbott had come to a boil. By Monday afternoon, he faced a formal challenge. By nighttime he was gone, and his replacement chosen: Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott’s predecessor as Liberal leader.
If you think you’ve seen this movie somewhere before, you have. This is the fourth such leadership “spill,” as the Australians call it, in the last six years. Not only did the Liberal party replace one leader with another only to replace the new leader with the old, the Labor Party did the same: Julia Gillard spilling Kevin Rudd, who spilled Gillard in her turn.
What makes all this horseplay possible, of course, is the Australian system of electing (and deposing) party leaders, since modified in the Labor Party but still in place in the Liberal party, whereby the choice is made, not by a vote of the whole party membership, as in Canada, but by a vote of the parliamentary caucus.
But it isn’t the Australian system, really: it’s the Westminster system, the classical parliamentary model as it applied until 1919 in Canada, and until much later than that at Westminster itself. It is also the system by which caucus leaders are chosen in the U.S. House and Senate.
The premise on which it is based is that the job of a party leader is to lead his party in Parliament. That presumes that what goes on in Parliament matters, but what goes on in Parliament matters, in large part, to the degree that party leaders are answerable to its members. An Australian party leader knows that he can be deposed at any time by his caucus. That’s not only a strong incentive to treat them with respect. It makes each of them more important figures in their own right.
That may seem less democratic than our own system. In fact it is rooted in an unassailably democratic principle: government with the consent of the governed. Before one presumes to lead a caucus, to hire and fire its members and order them about, it would seem only democratic to first obtain their authority. Whereas in our system the leader of the party in Parliament is chosen by an entirely different group of people, most whom he has never seen, nor ever will: a body that is brought together for the sole purpose of voting, and having voted, disappears. Under the Westminster model the leader is accountable to caucus; under our system, the leader is effectively accountable to no one.
It isn’t that party leaders never come under challenge in our system. But the effort is draining, the rules mysterious, and even if, after many months of intrigue the attempt succeeds, that only guarantees many more months of division before a new leader is elected. Abbott, by contrast, was replaced in a matter of hours.
Yes, you are thinking, but do we really want the kind of manic leader-shopping the Australians have just gone through? No, but that level of instability is unusual — not only elsewhere, but in Australia. And there are penalties for it: a big part of Australian Labor’s defeat at the last election was attributed to voter weariness with the party’s leadership shenanigans.
Or if it’s stability you’re after, have a look at the alternative, as presented in another recent leadership election: that of the British Labour Party. The winner, Jeremy Corbyn, was the choice, it is true, of a majority of the party rank and file, not only among those free-floating supporters who plunked down their £3 to vote, but existing members as well.
But he had next to no support among his colleagues in the parliamentary caucus, the people he is now supposed to lead. A good chunk of the party’s front bench resigned rather than serve under him. Partly that was over genuine policy differences, with a leader who wants to pull out of NATO, nationalize major industries, and conscript the Bank of England to pay for it all. Partly it is because they know he is political poison.
But, well, they’re stuck with him now, aren’t they? He owes them nothing. They have no power to remove him. Those closest to him he will reward with critics’ posts and other plums. The rest must slink to the backbenches, or to other parties, or retire. Divided, demoralized, the party now drifts towards a very uncertain future.
That’s an extreme example. But we’ve seen other cases of leaders imposed upon their caucuses in the same way, with similarly unhappy results. Think of Alison Redford in Alberta. Perhaps this is merely the result of a caucus growing out of touch with its grassroots. But the “grassroots” may themselves have become unrepresentative: far fewer people are members of political parties than were in past decades. Whereas a sitting MP is not only the choice of party members, but of the riding at large.
Will the recently passed Reform Act change all that? We shall see. The legislation only gives caucuses the power to fire their leaders, not to hire them. And it only gives even that power to caucuses that decide, after each election, to accept its application. But it’s a start. No system is perfect. But between dumping leaders prematurely, and being saddled with them eternally, I know which one is the lesser evil.