(The following is an article I wrote for the Millwoods Mosaic, August 2023)
We prize living in a democratic society where citizens have input into choosing the government that governs them. But it turns out not all democracies are equally fair. Not all value a person’s vote the same way. This variation is reflected in ranking systems that analyze countries' democracies. Canada is ranked high but we could do better.
The Economist Democracy Index divides the countries of the world into four categories - full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. The ranking is based on perceptions expressed by experts of the country's political system, civil liberties, and other factors. A different measure, Democracy Ranking, looks at election results and societal outcomes such as economy, health and environment.
These lists rank the world’s countries somewhat differently, but both list Canada as #12. This is a high ranking considering the many political failings that Canada has. Some failings arise from the single-winner First Past The Post system that we use.
Other countries use different election systems that value votes more highly, and their rankings on the two lists reflect the difference. Both lists give high marks to the Nordic countries - Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark. Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium also are ranked higher than Canada.
These countries use election systems that are described as proportional representation (PR). Under such systems, parties get their due share of seats based on their vote shares, and most votes are used to elect someone.
Many of the highly-ranked European countries use a form of PR where each voter casts a vote for a party of choice and the parties take seats based on their vote tally. Netherlands looks only at overall vote tallies across the country, but all the other countries are divided into sub-parts. Seats are allocated to each sub-part and then proportionately to each party within each place. If Canada gets proportional representation, this is the kind of PR that would likely be used in Canada due to constitutional guarantees of a set number of members for each province.
Ireland is also credited with being a full democracy. There, votes are cast for candidates, not parties. This is the system called Single Transferable Voting (STV). Multi-member districts are used, and each voter has just one vote. The vote, originally cast for one candidate, may be moved to another candidate who is the voter’s lower choice if it is not useful in its first destination. And in that way most votes are used to actually elect someone, and parties get their due share of seats through that fairness. Because it uses districts, Canada could adopt that STV for itself. In fact Edmonton MLAs were elected through STV for 30 years starting in 1924.
Outside Europe, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and Uruguay, Costa Rica and Chile get high rankings and are described as full democracies. Like the Nordic countries, they use list PR to elect all or some of their legislators.
India describes itself as the world’s largest democracy. About 600M people voted in the 2019 general election, so certainly the large descriptor applies. The upper house, the Rajya Sabha, is elected by state legislatures through STV, which shares the seats over both large and small parties. This compares well to the Canadian Senate, which is not elected at all - Canadian Senators are appointed by the choice of the prime minister.
India's lower house, Lok Sabha, is elected by First Past The Post, same as Canada's House of Commons and our Alberta legislature.
And like the Canadian election results, often a party with less than half the vote is awarded a majority of seats. Many members are elected with less than half the votes cast in their district. All the votes not cast for the winner are ignored as far as representation goes, so a large proportion of votes cast have no more effect than if they had not been cast at all. In the last Alberta election, almost all of the NDP votes cast outside Edmonton and Calgary, and all of the Conservative votes cast in Edmonton, produced no representation. And the same happens in India.
In addition to these disproportionate results, India suffers from less than satisfactory political outcomes. A recent headline “Wild elephant killed by speeding train in India” tells us something of the challenges that the country faces. So the Economist Index gives the country the low ranking of #46.
Italy, an ancient country but one recently reputed to have enfeebled politics, is ranked at #28, in the Economist ranking. This is about the lowest rank for any western European country. Its election system is such that despite most voters voting centrist or left, a right-wing coalition majority government was elected.
This sort of result is similar to what Alberta saw in 1993 and 2004 when Ralph Klein's Conservatives were elected to something like 75 percent of the seats with only about 46 percent of the vote. About the only good thing to say about First Past The Post is that it promises majority government (one party holds power) even if that majority may not be the choice of the voters. But FPTP's promise is sometimes not fulfilled. In Canada, only twice in the last seven federal elections has a single party taken a majority of seats.
This is the same kind of election results that you see in many countries using PR. To accommodate this, it is common to see two or more parties to co-operate to make up a stable majority in the assembly. Minority governments are said to be unstable, but that is only true if it is expected for one party to have power all by itself. Countries with PR encourage parties to work together. And now we have that happening in Ottawa with the NDP supporting the Liberal government in exchange for movement on NDP priorities.
Because of this co-operative political culture, PR countries such as Norway, Ireland and Belgium have had fewer elections than Canada. Canada had 23 elections between 1945 and 2017 while those countries had as few as 19. So obviously it is not true that a switch to PR must lead to more frequent elections.
It is also not true that all Commonwealth countries and former British colonies use single-member districts. Canada frequently used multi-member districts in the past. Others use them today.
Mauritius, a group of islands off Africa, is the only African country regarded as a full democracy in the Economist Index. Mauritius's parliament, the National Assembly, consists of 70 members, most of them elected in multi-member districts. The districts elect two or three members each. Each voter casts as many votes as the number of seats to fill in the district. Reducing each voter to just one vote would help prevent one-party sweeps of the district seats and also would reduce the number of votes that need to be counted. Changing from block voting to single voting would mean districts could be larger. The capital of Mauritius, Port Louis, is divided into four districts, which likely splits up voting blocks into ineffective scatterings. Under single voting, it could be just one district with eight seats.
The problem of artificial micro-districts dividing a city is seen in elections here in Edmonton. The city is divided into 12 wards, 20 provincial districts and eight ridings, all different and all un-necessarily dividing groups of like-minded voters. Two districts, each covering half the city, could serve in all three levels, albeit with different numbers of members at each level. With each voter casting just one vote, the two multi-member districts would do a much better job of electing representation that truly reflects the sentiments of city residents than our present system.
Currently, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom use single-member districts. New Zealand, as the only one of the three, elects additional members that compensate for the disproportional results of the First Past The Post elections in districts. This fairness is mostly why New Zealand is ranked as #2 on the Economist Index.
Our neighbour to the south, like us, uses single-member districts. The Economist Index ranks it only as a flawed democracy. Only 137M voted in the 2016 U.S. election out of a population of 323M. And in 2016, 97 percent of the voters funnelled themselves into supporting one of the two main parties just to avoid having their vote wasted.
In the last Alberta election, we saw the same kind of thing. Any vote not for the UCP or the NDP was seen as being a wasted vote. Almost all the votes went to candidates of the two main parties; supporters of other parties mostly stayed home. More than a third of eligible voters did not vote in the last Alberta election.
The 2021 Norwegian national election saw a voter turn-out of 77 percent. This is part of the reason why that country was accorded the #1 position on the Economist Index and the Democracy Ranking list.
So even though democracy lists give Canada good marks for its politics, we know we can do better. The example of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and others show us that proportional representation works. Because almost all votes are actually used to elect someone, PR elections are not prone to the kind of accidental results that we have seen so often when First Past The Post is used in an election. If Canada switches to PR, our elections might finally reflect the high ranking that analysts award Canada.
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(Here is a longer version before extensive reduction)
We all prize living in a society where citizens have input into choosing the government that governs them. Democracies are renowned for having this relationship. But it turns out not all democracies are equally fair. Not all value a person’s vote the same way.
The Economist Democracy Index divides the countries of the world into four categories - full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. The ranking is based on perceptions expressed by experts of the country's political system, civil liberties, and other factors.
Another democracy measurement list, Democracy Ranking, looks at the election results and societal outcomes such as economy, health and environment.
These lists rank the world’s countries somewhat differently, but both list Canada as #12. This is a high ranking considering the many political failings that come with the single-winner First Past The Post system that we use.
Both lists give better marks to the Nordic countries - Norway (#1), Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium also are ranked better than Canada. These countries use election systems that are described as proportional representation (PR). Under such systems, parties get their due share of seats based on their vote shares, and most votes are used to elect someone. Canada’s election system offers no such fairness, but other virtues of our politics apparently elevate our ranking above what is normal for countries that share our election system.
Many of the highly-ranked European countries use a form of PR where each voter casts a vote for a party of choice and the parties take seats based on their vote tally. Netherlands looks only at overall vote tallies across the country, but all the other countries divide the country into regions (or multi-member districts). Seats are allocated to each place and then proportionately to each party within each place. If Canada gets proportional representation, this is the kind of PR that would likely be used in Canada due to constitutional guarantees of a set number of members for each province.
Ireland and Australia also are credited with being full democracies. Unlike the others, they use an election system where votes are cast for candidates, not parties. This is the system called Single Transferable Voting (STV). Voters are divided into multi-member districts and each voter has just one vote. The vote, originally cast for one candidate, may be moved to another candidate who is the voter’s lower choice if it is not useful in its first destination. And in that way most votes are used to actually elect someone, and parties get their due share of seats through that fairness.
Outside Europe, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and Uruguay, Costa Rica and Chile get high rankings for their democracies. Like the Nordic countries, they too use list PR to elect all or some of their national legislators.
India describes itself as the world’s largest democracy. About 600M people voted in the 2019 general election, so certainly the large descriptor applies. The upper house, the Rajya Sabha, is elected by state legislatures through STV, which shares the seats over both the large and small parties. This compares well to the Canadian Senate, which is not elected at all - Canadian Senators are appointed by the choice of the prime minister.
India's lower house, Lok Sabha, is elected by First Past The Post, same as Canada's House of Commons. And like the Canadian election results, often a party with less than half the vote is awarded a majority of seats.
In addition to these disproportionate results, India suffers from less than satisfactory political outcomes, which are at least partly due to the country's poverty and its specific conditions. A recent headline “Wild elephant killed by speeding train in India” tells us something of the challenges that the country faces. So the country is given a relatively low ranking of #46 in the Economist ranking.
Democracy Ranking gives India an even lower ranking - #65. This puts India in about the same area of rankings as South Africa and Ukraine.
Italy, an ancient country but one recently reputed to have enfeebled politics, is ranked at #28, in the Economist ranking. This is about the lowest rank for any western European country. Its election system is such that despite most voters voting centrist or left, a right-wing coalition majority government was elected. This sort of result is similar to what Alberta saw in 1993 and 2004 when Ralph Klein's Conservatives were elected to something like 75 percent of the seats with only about 46 percent of the vote.
Italy's disproportional result comes at a critical time when the government that was “elected” is taking a hard line on immigrants arriving from Africa while, it seems, many voters, perhaps the majority, favour a more welcoming stance. Canada’s neighbours are not producing the large exodus of emigrants that countries close to Italy are, and our country is under-populated by most measures, so immigration is not as contentious here as compared to countries adjacent to the Mediterranean.
All in all, Canada is doing well. Our problems, as serious as some are, are much less pressing than the problems that other countries face. Abundant natural resources and land, a healthy well-educated population, only one land-neighbour who has long since stopped sizing us up for invasion (after being stopped in 1776 and 1812). So luckily for us, the shortcomings of our political system have not been evident. But our political culture does have failings. Our natural instinct is to look to one party to be government, but five of the last seven national elections have produced national assemblies where no party held a majority of seats. This has caused us to have elections at frequent intervals. The odd chance allowed by our First Past the Post election has ensured that usually a different HofC resulted, thus preventing a stalemate that might have caused governmental paralysis. The result has not always been democratic but it usually has been different.
About the only good thing to say about First Past the post is that it promises majority government even if that majority may not be the choice of the voters. But in Canada, the number of parties that now take substantial vote tallies are such that only twice in the last seven elections has a party taken a majority of seats. Never a majority of votes, but a majority of seats.
This is the same voting results that you see in many countries using PR. There, like today in Ottawa, parties co-operate to ensure that a group of two or more parties have established joint effort to ensure that there is a stable majority in the assembly. Minority governments are said to be unstable, but that is only true if it is expected for one party to have power all by itself. Countries with PR encourage parties to work together – not all of them but enough to secure a majority position in the assembly.
And so generally we see PR countries having more political stability than Canada. Since 1945, Canada with its FPTP election system has had more elections than Norway, Ireland, Belgium and many other PR countries. Canada had 23 elections between 1945 and 2017 while those countries had as few as 19. So obviously it is not true that PR must lead to frequent elections.
It is also not true that single-member districts, such as Canada uses in its election system, is the only acceptable way to run an election. Canada is a member of the Commonwealth, and it might be thought that all Commonwealth or former British colonies use only single-member districts. But there are many counter-examples.
Mauritius, a group of islands off Africa, is the only African country regarded as a full democracy. It is #21 in the Economist ranking, #39 in Democracy Ranking. It became independent from Britain in 1968 and a republic within the Commonwealth in 1992. The British monarch was removed as head of state at that time. (Mauritius may be on my mind as I regularly get tasty dishes at a Mauritian restaurant just off Whyte Avenue.)
Mauritius's parliament, the National Assembly, consists of 70 members -- 62 are elected in 21 multi-member districts. Each of the districts return two or three members. Block voting is used to elect the members, each voter casting as many votes as the number of seats to fill. As well, eight members, "best losers" in the district contests, are declared elected to ensure that ethnic and religious minorities are equitably represented as much as possible. Reducing each voter to just one vote would help prevent one-party sweeps of the district seats and also would reduce the number of votes that would need to be counted.
Changing from block voting to single voting would also mean that districts could be larger. The capital of Mauritius, Port Louis, is divided into four districts, which likely splits up voting blocks into ineffective scatterings. It could have just one district with eight seats, under single voting.
The problem of artificial micro-districts dividing a city is seen in elections here in Edmonton. The city is divided into 12 wards, 20 provincial districts and eight ridings, all different and all un-necessarily dividing the voting blocks. Two districts, each covering half the city, could serve in all three levels, albeit with different numbers of members at each level. With each voter casting just one vote, the multi-member districts would do a much better job of electing representation that truly reflects the sentiments of city residents than our present system.
Canada frequently used multi-member districts in the past. PEI, for example, used nothing but two-member districts previous to 1996. But currently, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom use single-member districts. New Zealand, as the only one of the three, elects additional members that compensate for the disproportional results of the First Past The Post elections in districts. This fairness and other factors are why New Zealand is ranked as #2 on the Economist index.
Unlike New Zealand, the electoral systems of the United Kingdom and Canada have no proportional aspect – the candidate with the most votes in the district is elected; one member in a district cannot provide balanced representation. In many cases the winner is not the choice of the majority of voters in the district.
Canada is #12 in the Economist's list and on the Democracy Ranking list. Canada is lucky to be given such a high ranking. We likely get it not for our elections but for our regard for human rights and our generally-calm and reasonable political culture. We allow any adult citizen to run for public office for example, although obviously the chance of being elected is best if they belong to the Liberal or Conservative parties.
Our neighbour, the U.S., shares many characteristics with us, but the Economist ranking lists it only as a flawed democracy. This is due to the polarization between the two main parties, attempts at disenfranchisement and the many other developments that have been dominating the news headlines since 2016. As well, only 137M voted in the 2016 U.S. election out of a population of 323M.
Democracy is sometimes measured by a scale called the Gallagher Index (GI). The Gallagher Index analyzes the proportionality of elections by comparing parties' seat share to their vote share. The GI for the 2016 U.S. election was calculated as being 5, but this relatively benign result is due to 97 percent of the voters funnelling themselves into supporting either of the two main parties just to avoid having their vote wasted.
In the last Alberta election, we saw the same kind of thing, any vote not for the UCP or the NDP was recognized as being a lost cause. So 97 percent of the votes were cast for candidates of the two main parties. This self-censorship of voting behaviour is not measured by the Gallagher Index but obviously is of concern if we are concerned about satisfied voters.
The Gallagher Index for Canada’s 2016 federal election was measured as being 12. This is not very good when compared to Sweden's 2018 election where GI was calculated as being less than 2.
In Canada meanwhile, 17M people cast votes in 2021, out of a population of 37M. This seems ike a good proportion but by comparison, in Denmark, in 2019 3.5M voted out of a population of 5.8M. So U.S. and Canada obviously have a ways to go to make voters feel as respected as they are in Denmark and other parts of Europe. Denmark is given the #5 spot in the Democracy Ranking.
The 2021 Norwegian national election saw a voter turn-out of 77 percent. This seems likely to be part of reason why that country was accorded the #1 position on the Economist list and the Democracy Ranking list.
Canada's last federal election and the last Albert election saw about 62 percent of voters vote. More than a third of eligible voters did not vote. So no reason to congratulate ourselves.
As well, in those elections, many members were elected with less than half the votes cast in their district. We don't know that they were in fact the choice of a majority of voters in the district. All the votes not cast for the winner were ignored as far as representation went, so a large proportion of votes cast were ignored and had no more effect than if they had not been cast at all.
In the Alberta election, all the Conservative votes cast in Edmonton did not produce any representation. Most of the NDP votes cast outside Edmonton did not produce any representation. But the number of wasted votes are seldom measured.
The Gallagher Index looks at overall party votes and overall party seat share so does not reflect how many votes are wasted. According to the Gallagher Index, the Alberta election was almost perfectly proportional. The under-representation of Conservative votes in Edmonton was balanced against the under-representation of NDP voters elsewhere, so overall the result looked fine. But that balance hid the fact that almost all of the NDP votes cast outside Edmonton and Calgary, and all of the Conservative votes cast in Edmonton, produced no representation.
So even though democracy lists give Canada good marks for its politics, we know we can do better. The example of Norway, Sweden, Denmark Switzerland show us that proportional representation works. It is more fair and thus calms the overheated rhetoric and polarization that Canada is experiencing. As well because under PR almost all votes are actually used to elect someone, elections are not prone to accidental results, such as may happen next time First Past The Post is used to fill the legislature.
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