From: smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Great Britain as a malfunctioning democracy
Date: 14 Apr 92 16:01:29 GMT
Reply-To: P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Organization: University of Bristol

In article <jh5kdak@zola.esd.sgi.com> livesey@solntze.esd.sgi.com (Jon Livesey) writes:
>Personally, I'd be pretty upset if my local Party-X candidate spent
>a lot of time finding out about local affairs, and was duly elected
>by and the othe voters in my constituency, and was then bumped out 
>of Parliament to make room for some dink whose party just happened
>to get 1% of the vote throughout the nation, but never put in the work
>to get elected in any specific constituency.

There are less drastic ways of dealing with this, of course.  However,
you're getting close to one of my pet subjects, which is my guess as an
outside observer as to what the flaw in the British system really is.
(Do note, I believe ALL political systems tried so far have flaws.  I'm
not picking on the British.  Rather, I'm trying to catalyse reasoned
discussion.)

Problem is the all-or-nothing nature of the system.  In general, the
local MPs do NOT look after the best interests of their voters, in any
detailed sense.  The nature of the system is such that they generally
toe the party line.  

Now, it is probably true that the guy got elected because the party
line matches local perceived majority interests in most respects; but,
even in cases where the constituents believe it doesn't, the MP will
probably follow the party line anyway.  (There's pretty good reason to
believe that this is what finally nailed Chris Patten in Bath.  On one
critical issue, his voters were strongly against Tory dogma, but he
went for it anyway, and got caught out.)

Why do they do this?  Well, they are caught between the proverbial rock
and the hard place.  If too many government MPs vote against some major
government policy, it may force dissolution of Parliament, and a new
election; and, the party may well not reselect them to defend their
seat because 'it was their fault'.  On the other hand, if they vote
with the Government but against their constituents' interests, then the
voters may eventually get them.  All in all, though, it's probably more
in their self-interest to stick with their party, which, if it likes
them, will simply stand them for election in some other seat, next
chance it gets.

Now, there are two features of the US political system which work
against this effect, and in favor of elected representatives being able
to support the wishes of their constituents.  (Note at this point that
there certainly are a lot of things wrong with the US system, and I
wouldn't suggest adopting it wholesale, but I think that it does also
have some good points which can serve as a basis for discussion.)

One is that in most areas of the US there is a residence requirement
(unless this has changed in the past 12 years).  Your representative
probably has some tie, however tenuous, with the area; over here,
parties can, and frequently do, stand any-bloody-body they want for any
seat which is available.

The other is that parties are not absolute.  Representatives can, and
often do, vote against the party line if they feel that that is what
their voters want.  They can do this secure in the knowledge that it
doesn't mean they may be out of a job next month.  (In fact, the
traditional split in the US is 'leftish' -- using the term loosely --
Democrats and Republicans on one side, and 'rightish' Ds and Rs on the
other.)  Since candidate selection is a local matter (except in a few
well-known areas of smoke-filled-room type party politics), the national
party cannot then drop them at the next election, as punishment.  (Indeed,
the national parties have almost no power at all.  Most of the party
power resides in the state and local level organizations.)

One of the woman Scottish MPs talked about party politics after she was
first elected.  (Read an interview with her in a Tayside newspaper a
few years ago, don't remember her name, and don't know whether she is
still in or not.)  She'd been a barrister (high-class lawyer, for the
US audience), and was looking forward to Parliament as being a place
where reasonable people would engage in serious debate about the
problems of the day, and then try to solve them.

She said she was very disappointed to learn the reality:  Two groups of
people acting like 12-year-old schoolyard gangs yell at each other a
bit, call each other names (but very politely, lest they be 'named',
i.e. have their hands slapped), and then vote in whichever way their
party told them to.  No-one pays any attention to the debate, which
probably doesn't matter because there isn't much serious debate anyway.

(Note again, the last two paragraphs reflect what she said -- anyone
remember her name? -- and are not some opinion that I've pulled out
of my own hat.  I'm not prepared either to defend or attack them,
though having seen a few broadcasts I can certainly believe them.)

(As a side note to this, Parliament occasionally expresses dismay at the
way British football fans behave abroad, and wonders aloud where they
got the idea that that was an acceptable form of public behavior.  My
suspicion is that they learned it by watching televised Parliamentary
debates.)

>Is it fair that each US State has the same number of Senators?   Is it 
>fair that the UK and Belgium each get one turn at the EC presidency?

I'll pass on the EC.  It is 'fair' as designed that each US State has
the same number of Senators.  The Senators are specifically supposed to
be there to represent the interests of the States as separate
individual sovereign bodies.  (There's a parallel between the US as
designed, if not in practice, and the EC, here, and it can be useful to
consider each of the States as a separate independent nation, and the
US as a supra-national level of government which binds them together.)
The House of Representatives is charged with looking after the
interests of the people as people, and there each State has a number of
Representatives which is approximately in proportion to its
population.

This compromise is left over from the days when the union was first
formed, from a group of 'states' which were previously separate
sovereign entities.  The big states wanted representation by
population, so that the fewer people in the smaller states wouldn't
have a disproportionate amount of power.  The little states wanted
representation by state, so that they wouldn't be swamped by the big
ones.  We ended up with a bit of both, which they all seemed to find
acceptable.  Without that compromise, it's quite likely that the US
would never have been formed at all.

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!uknet!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132