Voting system has influenced Irish politics

What effect does the way we vote have on the way we are governed? What impact does it have on the way our politics is conducted? Is it time to think about a change?

There is no clamour for change right now, that’s for sure. Back in the days of 2008 and the economic crash, that was very different. ‘Political reform’ was all the talk then. If we get another crash or even downturn in the future, we can reasonably expect some more.

Ireland is one of the few countries in the world that uses proportional representation based on the single transferable vote in our elections – what we call PR-STV for short. Anyone who has voted knows broadly how it works. You vote number 1 for your first choice and you may vote on in order of your preference. Candidates must reach a quota to win, and if your first-preference choice doesn’t elect someone, your vote can be transferred to someone else who might.

This article though is not a tutorial on how PR-STV works. It is more a consideration on what effect it has, politically.

The first big effect is that it ensures a proportional result. Parties in general elections – for the most part – get the amount of seats their vote share in the country represented. That doesn’t always work perfectly.

If a party doesn’t run enough candidates for their vote share, they will lose out. If there are a lot of three-seat constituencies, smaller parties can find it hard to get a fair overall share. But overall, and across our history since independence, electoral outcomes in terms of numbers of seats versus national share of vote have been broadly proportional.

Proportional outcomes promote a sense of fairness and that’s valuable. You only need to look at the UK, where the Labour Party won a massive majority in seats with about one-third of the votes, to know how unfair their system of first-past-the-post can be. Margaret Thatcher, with her three election wins, never came close to 50% of the vote.

The absence of a sense of fairness undermines governments. That proportionality we have gives our governments a broad base of legitimacy. That is a plus undoubtedly.

A second thing our electoral system does is maybe not so beneficial. In our political system, political leaders are praised if they can position their parties in a way that will ‘attract transfers’. Much of Bertie Ahern’s electoral success was not in growing Fianna Fáil’s first-preference vote – he didn’t really do that – but in getting a slice of transfers from other candidates for Fianna Fáil candidates, a slice that his predecessors had not been able to achieve. That, and better candidate strategy - running the right number of candidates in each constituency - was central to Bertie’s electoral success.

Good for him. That made for good politics but maybe not for such good governing. For when you can get elected with a transfer of a vote rather than a number one vote, and that is your electoral strategy, it generates a sense that alienating any slice of opinion is electorally risky. It is said that to govern is to choose, but when you need transfers, it is often politically better not to choose at all - or to throw something at everyone in the audience. In that kind of system, making a hard decision comes with a lot of risk, and breeds caution.

If Ireland's corporation tax revenues fall in the coming years, and painful cuts become necessary, people may well reflect on this aspect of our political and electoral system and on how we have been governed during these recent years. And that doesn’t just include government parties, because opposition - in the positions they take up - are impacted by the exact same dynamic.

There is another dimension that gives political life and energy to all that. If you have an electoral system like ours, that gives interest groups a lot of power. They say to TDs and Ministers, if you don’t do the thing we want, a slice of opinion in your constituency will drift away from you and that may end your political career. That claim may be true or it may not - often these claims are balls of smoke - but politicians who have to govern would not be human if it didn’t make them think twice, and then often act parochially rather than nationally. That has been playing out for weeks now in the build up to this week’s budget. It also explains why so many politicians want more houses nationally, but oftentimes they support opposition to them locally.

That dynamic is not new. This ‘interest group’ aspect of our politics has always been with us. If you look back at the debates of the 1980s, when the country’s finances were collapsing, you will find time and again reference to how interest groups prevented the absolutely necessary reforms which were needed to get the country out of the fix it was in. It was only when Charlie Haughey’s government of 1987 decided to ignore these groups, and govern with the measures it deemed necessary, that things started to improve.

That domination of debate and decision by interest groups was a challenging enough thing in what is now called the analogue era, the time of print and broadcast media. In the digital era, with social media, the claims of interest groups, and the pressure, and often hostility, that can be applied turbo charges that impact. It is not a criticism of any of the groups to say that, just a reflection on how the world changes when technology changes.

The third thing that PR-STV does is that when choices do have to be made and policies adopted, parties and politicians are pushed towards the centre. If you want to be elected with PR-STV, you need to appeal to a certain slice of people who do not share your most trenchant positions. Parties - and candidates - must therefore appeal beyond their tribe. This has been our history since independence. Recent years has of course seen more polarisation, but my guess is that without PR-STV, the last few years would have seen more division rather than less of it. In an era of increasing polarisation, this might well be the best argument in favour of our electoral system. It may help to anchor us in the storms ahead, though paradoxically, the indecisiveness it generates may well cause some of those storms.

The next few years will bring challenges, opportunities and maybe even tumult. But the rules of the electoral game - of PR-STV - will shape how much of each of those we experience, what political actors will do, and therefore how we will respond.