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Tom Monto

FPTP produces oversize governments, wrong-winners, etc.

Updated: Dec 18, 2020

Notes from "Electoral Experimentation in BC and Canada," paper for the BC Citizens' Assembly, Weekend 2, Session 3 (available online)


Few governments in Canada have the support of a majority of the population.

[Only six federal government had the support of a majority of voters, as detailed in blog "Federal FPTP produces odd results..."]


Only once in the last half a century (in 2001) has a party won a majority of the votes in BC, yet every government elected during that period had a majority of the seats in the legislature and was able to implement whatever policies it chose.


How does this happen? A party does not need to win a majority of the votes in an electoral district to win the seat, all it needs is more votes than any other party. So if it wins lots of districts with less than a majority, the total number of seats it wins may be more than a majority even though it didn’t have a majority of all the votes cast in the province.


The principal arguments for electoral systems that have this effect is that artificial majorities are necessary to provide us with stable single one-party, accountable government BUT Giving the government a majority it has not earned provides it with a false legitimacy that allows it to impose its preferred policies despite a lack of support for them in the community. [or even strong opposition to those ideas!] When a party wins lots of seats by smallish margins and loses others by larger amounts, the totals can add up in a very peculiar way.

Such was the case in the Vancouver districts in 1996.


The NDP won a majority of the Vancouver seats (6/10) even though it won fewer votes than the Liberals. And the one voter in 10 who voted for neither of these two big parties elected no one. When this pattern was replicated across the province, the NDP won a majority of seats even though it had less than 4 out of every ten votes cast and the Liberals had 36,000 more votes overall.


Is this sort of thing common? No, if we mean does it happen very often – we have had only one case in BC in the last half century.


But yes, if we mean is it something that may happen as a normal part of the working of the system.


Here is a list of “wrong winners” in Canada over that same period.

They have occurred in all but two provinces (Alberta and PEI) and four times a person has become Prime Minister as a “wrong winner.” So we should expect it to happen again, here or somewhere else in Canada.

Newfoundland 1989

Nova Scotia 1970

New Brunswick 1974

Quebec 1966, 1998

Ontario 1985

Manitoba 1945

Saskatchewan 1986, 1999

British Columbia 1996

CANADA 1957, 1979, 2019 [also 1896]

OVERSIZED GOVERNMENTS Our system of responsible government assumes that the government can be supervised and controlled by an active parliament. And if party discipline has transformed the legislature-government relationship, then at least a vigorous opposition can continue to challenge the government and at election time the public can act as judge and jury by choosing between them.


But when electoral systems give governments majorities they didn’t earn they also deprive the opposition of the needed strength to do their job. This makes it easy for the government to dominate the legislature; it also means that the basic arrangement at the heart of our system is weakened. Consider the record of BC legislatures over the past half-century: BC governments have been, on average, twice as large as their opposition; and the opposition party has had less than one-quarter of the seats in one government out of three. In that situation the opposition is rarely able to do much of a job in holding the government’s feet to the fire. This is not uncommon.


A review of all the provincial legislatures elected across Canada since World War II indicates that

-- in about 40 percent of all cases the governing party controlled more than 70 percent of the seats:

-- in almost 10 percent of the cases the government had more than 90 per cent of all the seats in the legislature.


[After Alberta split the province into single-member districts and adopted FPTP for its provincial elections until 1986, a period of 30 years, the leading party (SC, then P-C) almost never took less than 90 percent of the seats in the Legislature. Only in two elections did the governing party caucus have less than 90 percent of the seats, a ratio of nine to one against the opposition MLAs.

From 1986 to 2012 the Conservative government only once had less than 70 percent of the legislative seats, a ratio of two to one against the opposition MLAs. With this kind of imbalance, what kind of critical check on the government could the opposition MLAs exert?


This weakness is particularly galling because since STV was cancelled in 1955, an Alberta governing party has never received more than 63 percent support among Alberta voters. And often it has taken less than a majority of the votes but still taken a vast majority of seats.]

In a few recent instances the electoral system produced either no opposition, or one so small that it had no capacity to do its job.

• New Brunswick 1988 (0 seats)

• Prince Edward Island 1989 (2), 1993 (1), 2000 (1)

• British Columbia 2001 (2)

• [Alberta 1959 (4), 1963 (3), 1975 (5), 1982 (4)]

In those instances the parliamentary system was all but broken down and there was no hope for it to work as it is designed to.

Women in legislatures Canada about 20 percent of legislators are women [Under Notley's AB it was higher] Canadian women are better represented than others (such as U.S.) but not as well represented as women in Scandinavian countries.

The type of electoral system has impact on representation of women: Electoral system Percent of women in national legislature Plurality / Majority 16.9 Mixed: constituency--proportional 19.4 Proportional representation (list) 29.5 Why are there these differences? It is not entirely clear why different systems seem to produce different electoral success rates of this kind.


The most likely explanation is that different electoral systems have direct implications for who controls the nomination process, especially for seats that the party can expect to win. Plurality and majority systems use a system of local electoral districts. In those cases very often the control over the nomination process is in the hands of local party members. With only one or two nominations available, there is often a vigorous local contest whose outcome cannot easily be controlled.


This gives the central party leadership and authorities limited control over who its candidates are. Proportional systems that require a party to present a list of candidates in the order they are to be elected give the party leadership considerable influence over who is nominated and ultimately elected.


Where the central party authorities are determined to increase the numbers of some types of candidates they can do it simply by fixing who is on the party list and how highly placed they are. In this way electoral systems work indirectly: they make a difference by changing the internal operations of the parties, and especially their nomination and campaigning processes. [Thus the writer of the paper blamed local constituency associations for poor female representation while probably the fault lies more in how under FPTP, parties put only one candidate forward, (usually a man) and thus only one person has a chance at being elected.

In PR a variety of candidates run, and voters, half of which are women, choose who will be elected.]


Thanks for reading.

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