Tag Archives: voting reform

The anatomy of democratic backsliding: could it happen here?

Posted on by

The term ‘backsliding’ has been coined to describe the phenomenon by which leaders who come to office within a democratic framework, only to attack some of democracy’s core features when in office. Stephan Haggard and Robert R Kaufman outline some of the key features of ‘backsliding’, discuss how and why it can take hold, and whether there are warning signs that such a process could happen in the UK. 

During the presidency of Donald Trump, American democracy suffered the most serious challenge it has faced since the country’s Civil War. Trump and his administration inflamed divisions that jeopardise the rights of women and minorities; attacked the press; defied oversight; sought to stack the judiciary and law enforcement agencies with partisan loyalists; challenged the integrity of the electoral system, and ultimately stoked a violent challenge to the democratic transfer of power. These threats were different from conventional forms of democratic reversion, such as the coup d’etat. Instead, they reflected a more insidious process that has come to be known as ‘backsliding,’ in which illiberal leaders rise to power within a democratic framework and attack core features of democracy from within.

Because the United States occupies a unique position at the heart of the international system, backsliding there commanded worldwide attention. But the United States was hardly alone. In a new study, we identified at least 15 other countries in which duly-elected democratic governments recently moved along similar paths. Not all of these paths lead all the way to autocracy; in the United States, democracy survived the Trump era badly damaged but intact. But depending on the metric used, more than half of these cases slid into ‘competitive authoritarian rule’: systems in which elections persisted but were manifestly rigged. Notably, although many of the failed democracies we examined were weakly institutionalised at the outset (for example, Bolivia, Ukraine, and Zambia), others such as Hungary, Poland, and Venezuela were once considered relatively robust democratic regimes.

These cases raise the question of whether similar adverse developments could occur in other seemingly stable democracies. Could they perhaps even happen in the UK? 

Continue reading →

Choosing a voting method for British Columbia: the case for a Mixed Member Proportional system

Posted on by

jq finalIn the second of two posts on the voting reform referendum in British Columbia, Jameson Quinn argues that the province’s electorate should support a move to some form of proportional representation. Specifically, he argues that the version known as Mixed Member Proportional is best for both the province itself and representative democracy as a whole. 

This is the second of two posts on the upcoming British Columbia (BC) referendum on proportional representation (which I’ll call ‘pro-rep’, because ‘PR’ has too many other meanings). In the first post, I discussed the context and rules of the referendum itself. In this one, I’m going to discuss the options available, in the context of theories of voting and democracy. I’ll also look at some of the arguments being used in this campaign.

Before I start, I should lay my cards on the table. I am unabashedly in favour of voting reform. For over 20 years, I’ve felt that choose-one voting, as used in most English speaking countries, is a badly-flawed form of democracy. Also known as FPTP, for ‘first past the post’, choose-one almost inevitably leads to spoiled elections, dishonest strategic voting, or both. My support of voting reform is what led me to join the board of the Center for Election Science, a non-profit that advocates for better voting systems.

As my previous post mentioned, I was one of the primary organisers of the BC Symposium on Proportional Representation. Though many of the experts and activists attending that symposium were, like me, advocates for reform, the symposium itself remained neutral on whether changing to pro-rep was a good idea. Our role was to impartially lay out the evidence regarding the relative advantages and disadvantages of various options.

The functions of representative democracy

In order to argue that pro-rep is a better option for BC, I’m going to be explicit about what I mean by ‘better’; that is, what representative democracy is for. I believe that representative democracy serves three basic functions:

  1. Provides a format for regular, orderly, non-violent transitions of power. If you’re dissatisfied with the current government, you don’t have to pick up a gun; if you’re currently in power, you avoid excessive corruption, because you know the next government would investigate. Any voting method can fulfill this function, as long as it’s seen as legitimate; so I won’t discuss this further.
  2. Helps make relatively good decisions. Diverse groups in society get to have input, and all in all the wisdom of these diverse points of view can, at least sometimes, add up to more than the sum of its parts. We all know that democratic decisions can still sometimes be terrible, but as far as I can tell, any other government structure is more often worse.
  3. Is relatively efficient at making decisions. Unlike direct democracy, where everybody has to weigh in on every argument, representative democracy keeps that task to a relatively small group of professionals. Ideally, the voting method should make voters’ task easy, while choosing representatives who are both well-qualified for their jobs and reflective of the community from which they are elected.

Any well-designed pro-rep method—which all three of the options on the BC referendum are or could be—is clearly superior to the current choose-one method on the latter two points: each would give outcomes that are more representative without being more divisive (point 2), all the while remaining comparably simple for voters (point 3). Continue reading →