Greens cast shadow over proportional representation

B.C. Green party Leader Andrew Weaver has provocatively declared that the promises the B.C. NDP made during the election campaign last spring are now “irrelevant.”

What matters, he says, is the agreement between the NDP and the Greens that enabled the NDP to assume power. So the NDP promise of $10-a-day daycare is now on the back burner because Weaver doesn’t think it is the best early childhood education policy.

But with this boastful comment, he has unwittingly provided one of the strongest arguments against the adoption of a proportional representation electoral system, something the Greens desperately want to see adopted in B.C. Their political fortunes depend almost wholly on the adoption of a new electoral system.

The current first-past-the-post electoral system tends to advantage two large parties — one of which typically wins a majority of seats with less than a majority of the votes. This gives rise to stable majority government, even if it is not entirely democratic in the sense that the government is supported by less than a majority of voters.

With first-past-the-post, small parties are often shut out of the legislature completely, or at least confined to just a few seats in areas where the party has some base of support, such as the Greens in and around Victoria.

There are different kinds of proportional representation electoral systems, but they all have the same general outcomes: the allocation of seats in the legislature is more or less proportional to each party’s share of the vote. There are typically more parties in the legislature and typically no party wins a majority of seats. Thus, in PR systems, we typically see two or more parties governing together in a coalition. PR electoral systems thus bring about a very different type of politics.

Foes of PR often argue that PR electoral systems produce political instability. Italy and Israel are often cited as examples or, more recently, Belgium.

But PR electoral systems can also produce very efficient and stable government. Germany and Switzerland operate versions of proportional representation, and they are models of political stability and efficient government.

While coalition governments can be a bit more difficult to manage, they have the virtue of representing a majority of voters and the policies adopted by the coalition typically represent a broader social consensus. In this way, PR systems are regarded by many political scientists as more democratic.

In PR electoral systems, however, the critical moment is not necessarily the election itself but the coalition negotiations among the parties after the election.

This in fact is what we saw last May, after the election produced an ambiguous political result. The Green party entered negotiations with both the NDP and the B.C. Liberal party privately. With the Green party holding the balance of power, Weaver was able to get the two large parties in to a bidding war for the support of the Greens in the legislature.

If B.C. adopts a system of proportional representation, we could expect to see coalition governments, and the pattern of postelection negotiations among the parties would become a fixture in the province’s politics.

That means all of the promises made by parties during the election campaign would be immediately up for negotiation and possibly dispensed with in order to make a deal with some other party.

And as we could see more parties in the system, the coalition negotiations could become more complicated and protracted. After the 2010 election in Belgium, the parties negotiated for 541 days before a government was formed.

While PR electoral systems are generally regarded as more democratic, it is hardly democratic for parties to ditch their platforms immediately after an election and negotiate the formation of the government privately, with small parties often exacting ransom from the larger and more popular parties.

If Weaver wants British Columbians to vote for a PR electoral system in a referendum next fall, he should probably avoid creating the perception that he is holding the B.C. government hostage to his policy preferences.

Hamish Telford is an associate professor of political science at the University of the Fraser Valley.