From: livesey@solntze.wpd.sgi.com (Jon Livesey)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Rule Britannia
Date: 9 Nov 92 05:08:25 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: solntze.wpd.sgi.com


In article <1992Nov8.112817.3421@infodev.cam.ac.uk>, gdb15@grebe.cl.cam.ac.uk writes:
> 
> The moral of that appears to be that pure PR isn't a very stable
> system of government, and that a compromise like the German system is
> preferable.

Well, that's interesting, isn't it.   You have already
started to introduce concepts like 'stable' in talking
about a system whose main advertised virtue is - I believe
- fairness.

I wonder how we know which versions of PR are 'stable
enough'?   My guess is that we try one out, and see what
happens, but then of course, we are back to pragmatism.

What we are saying then is not that we derive a system that
exhibits various properties of fairness and representation,
but that we end up with the system that appears to "work".
And there's nothing wrong with that, of course, since
that's pretty much how we got the present system.

> >> I think politicians can take far fewer liberties if they
> >> have to negotiate with people outside their own party.
> >
> >I don't know.   Negotiation, to me, implies the exchange of
> >favours.
> 
> Are you saying that doesn't happen within one-party government?
> We don't have to look back further than Wednesday...

Sure thing.   When a party fails to assemble the strength
to pass a Bill, it must either abandon the Bill, or seek
support from other parties.

All I am claiming is that PR would increase the number of
times this happens.   We go from a situation in which, once
elected, the Administration gets to do most of what it wants
and then must face the, electors again, to a situation in 
which the largest party has to get support from other parties
quite a lot of the time.

As far as I can see, what this mainly does is to make it
more difficult for the largest party to implement its
program, and spreads the responsibility for the program that
is implemented, quite broadly.

> I'm quite sure that if we currently had a Tory-Lib Dem government
> then Labour and the other parties would be working just as
> hard to expose them.

Yes and no.   In the case that parties outside the ruling 
coalition have no ambition to join it, they might be as
savage as they are now.   But in the case where an oppostion
party wishes to join the ruling coalition, they might pull
their punches a little.

> 
> True -- that's why coalitions break up sometimes.  I don't
> know much about the National Government so I can't really
> comment on that.  All I can say is that it's in the nature
> of politicians always to blame someone else.  How often
> do you hear any politician admitting responsibility for
> his/her own mistakes?

Can't do that.   Wouldn't be prudent.    Stay tuned.

Seriously, I'm not so much concerned with what they admit,
as with what we can pin on them.   As voters, we don't have
to prove cases: it's entirely a matter of our own
judgement.  Having a single party identified with a program
means that you at least know whom to blame.   But in the
case of some of these funny Continental governments, you
first have to go through a process of figuring out which
part of the ruling coalition was responsible for which part
of the program, and only then can you make any sensible
decisions about whom to vote for next time.

> 
> No -- it's an indication that the voters have divergent views.
> You can't coerce people into voting for party B merely on
> the grounds that they're opposed to party A.  There have
> got to be positive reasons as well.

On the other hand, you can get some paradoxical results.
If there are two parties, and A gets 55% of the vote and B
gets 45%, then we expect party B to be the opposition.   No
coalition is required.

But if voting is arranged so that parties get seats in
proportion to their total popular vote, and three parties
A, B, and C split the vote 45%, 40%, 15%, then I would
expect a coalition of A and C.    Strangely, C gets to be
part of the ruling coalition by virtue of being *smaller*,
simply because now voting alliance in the Legislature have
become important.

> So you're saying "We don't really get what we vote for, but
> at least we know what we've got when we've got it".  I wouldn't
> call that a sufficient reason for defending a system that's
> supposed to be democratic.

The trouble with PR is, you don't get what you vote for
either.  Once the polls close, and the negotiations over
forming the ruling coalition start, who knows what gets
traded off for what?    How can you tell "what" you are
voting for if the party you vote for may trade away part of
the platform it ran on.

I don't think that the issue here is quite as you have
presented it.   There is compromise and negotiation in
British politics too, but to a certain extent it takes
place inside parties rather than between parties.   The
evolution of the Tory Party in the last two years has been
interesting to watch, as was the evolution of the Labour
Party under Kinnock.

I believe that politicians are rational animals, so I
believe that these changes have taken place in response to
what the parties *believed* the mass of their supporters
wanted, from time to time.   As the opinions of the voters
changed on various topics, the parties tended to change to
track the voters, more than the voters switching their
votes among parties.

That means that 'democracy' consists partly of parties
responding to feedback from voters.   If parties were rigid
and unchanging monoliths, representing perfectly
crystallised policies, then I would agree that the system
should give a voice to many of them.   But they are plastic
rather than rigid, so I don't think that the current system
can really be called undemocratic.  Moreover, the current
system does have this happy knack of producing stable
governments, which *some* PR systems do not have.

> Why not have an even simpler system?  Count up all the votes,
> and the party that gets the most votes gets absolute power -- no
> need for Parliament.  Wouldn't that be even better by your
> criteria?

No, because all the other virtues of the current system,
like a snoopy opposition, and votes of confidence, and so
on, would be missing.

> Well that's your personal opinion.  It's probably because
> they've always been *in* opposition, so they seem like a natural
> opposition party.  I'm sure some people feel the same way about
> the current Labour party.

I used to feel that way, but this Smith guy shows promise.
I think you could put him in a room with Kohl and Mitterand,
and people would find it perfectly natural.

jon.