Proportional Representation - Power to the People or Crock of ****e?

milmo

Does our PR system help or hinder us as a society and as a nation.

Does it offer citizens having choice, forcing representatives to pay attention to local issues, allowing people to vote for the party and still have a choice of candidates etc etc etc?

Or does PR put the focus on the local to the detriment of the national? Are our politicians are capable of making difficult strategic decisions as a result of the intense competition within parties within constituencies. mean that TDs focus is purely on their competition/colleague



IMHO nimbys, lobby groups, vested interests etc get disproportionate influence and then everybody loses out. Our infrastructure and planning vacuum is as a direct result of this. The secret deals with the independents are the most blatant examples in recent months.

I would venture so far as to suggest that our national inability to strategically plan, bring projects in at cost and generally get things done has its routes in our PR driven political culture.

People here vote for the politician who will fills their potholes and ignores the fact his party are responsible for letting the roads fall apart in the first place

Do people agree with this assessment?

Should we keep PR, alter PR or introduce a new system?

If so what model should we use?? First past the post is out, but are there any better ideas??

Dirk Gently

As flawed as the PR system is, (independents getting deals / PD's getting into government) I'd still rather that to something like in the US where it's Democrats or republican. Accountability and responsibility are what's lacking more so than the PR system.

The variety and competition in the PR system (in theory) forces parties to be fresh and progressive but it hasn't worked out that way in practice. We've had a long time with one party calling the shots despite our PR system and maybe people themselves through their own apathy and willingness to accept current political standards are to blame. The global economy doesn't leave much room for manoeuvre either with regards to our national direction but the acceptance of the state of our infrastructure and lack of future planning is the mandate we the people continuously give our politicians.

I am a fan of greater participatory democracy in politics especially at a local level. If communities had a role and a vote in decision making it would force ordinary people to work out problems themselves, reaching a solution acceptable to the community as a whole and not vested interests with a hold over an individual politician. It would mean freeing up politicians to concentrate on the national interest. A recall election on any public representitives it was felt wasn't doing the job they were elected to do would keep a lot of politicians honest and transparent and a slashing in wages to keep them in line with the average person would weed out those not interested in genuinely representing the people. Imagine a Dail full of people who couldn't afford a house, childcare, bills and so on. Imagine a Dail full of people who had to use public health services and public transport :eek: I think we would see some improvement after not too long a time. performance related pay perhaps?

but perhaps representative democracy is best for Ireland seen as how much we Irish like to generally moan but accept second best nevertheless.

What would we do if we had a role in making decisions? Who could we moan about and blame then. Would we lose our Irishness :eek:

Hotblack Desiato

clown bag wrote:

I am a fan of greater participatory democracy in politics especially at a local level. If communities had a role and a vote in decision making it would force ordinary people to work out problems themselves, reaching a solution acceptable to the community as a whole and not vested interests with a hold over an individual politician.

Power is nothing without funding.
Until we get our heads around the idea that we need a functioning system of local taxation then there is no hope for local government.

and a slashing in wages to keep them in line with the average person would weed out those not interested in genuinely representing the people.

Actually it would weed out anyone not independently wealthy, or without a job for life in their back pocket (teachers) to return to when they lose their seat.
The average person can't afford to bet their family's future on the result of an election every five years (or less.)

Liam Byrne

ninja900 wrote:

The average person can't afford to bet their family's future on the result of an election every five years (or less.)

This is a gem that's trotted out fairly regularly to justify over-inflated salaries and pensions for the TDs, but to be honest it harks back to the days when a job was for life.....

Most people nowadays switch jobs (or their jobs could go) so it's not required.

Plus, it negates the obvious comparison to a real job......if you're good at what you do, you'll be kept on!

Fratton Fred

It's a good way of getting a coalition government. If you like coalition governments it's a good thing.

I think it works out undemocratic, because you end up in a situation where a minority party who hardly anyone voted for, gets three ministerial jobs because they sold their souls to the devil.

Jackie laughlin

Liam,
Are you in favour of more modest salaries for everyone or do you wish merely to limit the salaries of TDs?

Many of the problems of our PRSTV system could be solved by having larger constituencies which would undermine to some extent localism. Ultimately this line of thought leads towards list systems.

Hotblack Desiato

Liam Byrne wrote:

This is a gem that's trotted out fairly regularly to justify over-inflated salaries and pensions for the TDs, but to be honest it harks back to the days when a job was for life.....

Most people nowadays switch jobs (or their jobs could go) so it's not required.

That's all very well if you're skilled (or, rather, your skills are in demand) and in your 20s or 30s with no dependants.
Lots of people made redundant in their 50s and even 40s find it very difficult to get any sort of decent job. Why put yourself into a position where you know that you have a good chance of 'redundancy' every few years even if you personally do your job well? Plenty of TDs are punished for their party's failings, have voting pacts go awry, lose out in constituency redrawings.

There's a bloody good reason the Dail is full of publicans, landowners, solicitors and other professionals, and teachers. They can all either fall back on their own wealth/business (and keep it going while in politics) or just go back to their old job easily and pick up where they left off. Few if any ordinary employees have that sort of job security behind them so are unlikely to take a big leap into the unknown.

I'm not advocating further increases in politicians' salaries, but it's a risky profession by any measure and the rewards need to reflect the risk.

Liam Byrne

ninja900 wrote:

I'm not advocating further increases in politicians' salaries, but it's a risky profession by any measure and the rewards need to reflect the risk.

By all means factor that in, but all I'm saying is that the rewards should also reflect the performance and work done, just like in real life.....

Rewarding someone with a pension for life if/when they were chucked out of their first ministry after their first term because they were ****e at it is not acceptable!

The TDs have regularly increased their own salaries, with no possiblity of blocking this, but they impose benchmarking on "normal" public servants....i.e. "achieve your target and we'll sort out the increase then".

That means that anyone involved in privatisation, broadband, justice and/or health (to name just the obvious ones) should not, IMHO, be given any increase and definitely not be given a pension....

Regarding the other question, whether I was more interested in modest salaries for everyone or just for TDs, it applies to both industry and politicians. Basically, we're the ones paying, whether through inflated prices or through taxes, and there is a line.......watching a company make billions of profit while consumers suffer and the MD gets 14 million in a bonus is sickening......

By all means, offer bonuses and incentives for getting jobs done and targets achieved, but watching a pension company exec get ludicrous bonuses while my pension value went down the swanee a few years back was crazy; hearing John O'Donoghue go on and on about "zero tolerance" and still get paid a fortune when he failed miserably to follow it up; watching Noel Dempsey get a huge salary and pension while the country can barely get broadband and there are no train services along the west coast; seeing highly-paid ministers with government shareholding in Aer Lingus chicken out of doing anything about Shannon; the list goes on and on. :rolleyes:

So, if there was proper target-setting and follow-up and implementation, by all means, pay them well, but otherwise it's far too cushy and it's OUR money. :mad:

Lennoxschips

I think PR is the best way to count the votes, but we need one national constituency, or possibly larger constituencies with 20-40 TDs each. The current small constituencies play too much into the hands of the gombeem man getting elected promising to fix potholes. (Local politics should be decided by the council elections, leave the Dail to sort out the big stuff.) And small constituencies are vulnerable to gerrymandering.

Jackie laughlin

Liam,
I think it would be better and more credible if you argued against silly salaries in general. However, one look at the size of some "remuneration packages" would exclude TDs' salaries from consideration. (The head of the HSE gets 450,000 + per annum!)

Some kind of financial security has to be offered to allow the average person to consider putting himself or herself forward for election. A person in mid-life with a fairly modest income and some prospects for advancement would risk a great deal by winning a Dail seat. Losing at a subsequent election could be financially ruinous. This is one of the reasons why business people and professionals can run for office; the cost of rejection is merely going back to their old job. Indeed, the introduction of pay for politicians in the first place was to break the monopoly of the independently wealthy.

Hotblack Desiato

Liam Byrne wrote:

So, if there was proper target-setting and follow-up and implementation, by all means, pay them well, but otherwise it's far too cushy and it's OUR money. :mad:

When people start giving out like this you'd swear we didn't have elections :rolleyes:
Kicking them out for poor performance is surely better than withholding a pay rise.
The ministerial pension thing is ridiculous but that's another story.

Lennoxschips wrote:

I think PR is the best way to count the votes, but we need one national constituency, or possibly larger constituencies with 20-40 TDs each. The current small constituencies play too much into the hands of the gombeem man getting elected promising to fix potholes. (Local politics should be decided by the council elections, leave the Dail to sort out the big stuff.) And small constituencies are vulnerable to gerrymandering.

I agree. If we had had that in the last election, Michael McDowell and Joe Higgins probably wouldn't have lost their seats due to local issues, because of their national profile. I wouldn't have a problem with it.

Mad Finn

PR encourages greater voter participation in elections. Our turnouts tend to be much higher than in the US or Britain which have, effectively, two-party systems. ie you can only vote for tweedledum or tweedledee. If you split the vote, the other side gets in by default.

Case in point the 1980s. Thatcher won two landslide victories with about 40% of the vote because Labour had split between the mad left and what became the liberal democrats. Labour and the SDP (as was) got an almost identical 28/29% of the vote each. In the UK system that handed power to the Tories.

Here, it's a great deal more subtle. A new party coming in merely shifts transfer votes around so it's hard to gauge who loses out. As someboy once said, with some degree of accuracy about the Progressive Democrats, they would get Fianna Fail members, Fine Gael votes and Labour seats. True.

The other thing to remember about our system is teh big guys usually win in the long run. Swings against coalition governments usually see the junior partner clobbered. It happened this time to th ePDs. In the past it has happened to labour.

Expect to see a lot fewer Green TDs after the next election.

bonkey

Mad Finn wrote:

PR encourages greater voter participation in elections. Our turnouts tend to be much higher than in the US or Britain which have, effectively, two-party systems. ie you can only vote for tweedledum or tweedledee. If you split the vote, the other side gets in by default.

But PR and two-party systems aren't mutually exclusive. You can have non-PR with multi-party, and you can have PR in a two-party system (imagins a constituency in Ireland where only 2 parties fielded candidates).

I'm going from memory, but some years ago, various voting systems were mathematically analysed. The conclusions were that they were broadly the same, with the distinctions only playing a part in "fringe" cases...in which situations there was no clear winner - no clear "most fair" system.

SkepticOne

The current multi-seat constituency PR system we have encourages a multitude of unimaginative populist candidates with lowest common denominator policies and no real choice for the voter.

milmo

SkepticOne wrote:

The current multi-seat constituency PR system we have encourages a multitude of unimaginative populist candidates with lowest common denominator policies and no real choice for the voter.

Agreed.

Now what can we do about it??

grahamo

non-PR with multi-party, 1 man, 1 vote!

DadaKopf

SkepticOne wrote:

The current multi-seat constituency PR system we have encourages a multitude of unimaginative populist candidates with lowest common denominator policies and no real choice for the voter.

I read a lot about this in the lead-up to the elections, and while the voting system in any country introduces a dynamic in politics, it doesn't provide a full explanation.

For example, the PR-list system is overwhelmingly used in mainland Europe. This system fits those countries because PR-list maps their political development since the 1800s fairly well - strong class, left/right, Catholic/protestant and urban-rural divides. Parties cohered around these movements, and so people in mainland Europe vote for parties more than people. Would a change in voting system radically alter what is deeply-rooted social, political and economic structures?

The Irish party system emerged out of anti-colonial struggle and the subsequent fallout between two factions involved in that struggle. This was combined with powerful localism and suspicion of central government brought about by the colonial system in Ireland.

This is simply the reality of Irish politics, and despite its problems, it's also a good system for a small island. When PR-STV was chosen, the argument was that it favours larger parties, but allows smaller parties a fair amount of political influence without producing instability that could arise with too much proportionality.

So the voting system isn't entirely to blame, nor will a change fix Irish politics. And people haven't wanted change: referenda to introduce first-past-the-post have been rejected three times.

In contrast to mainland Europe, we have a system of political brokerage - TDs are (at least, perceived to be) people who manage citizens' access to public power (government departments, civil service). Sometimes this becomes clientelism. Crucially, Ireland's political history has worked against the creation social solidarity expressed the in the form of European-style social/ideological movements. Brokerage/clientelism is partly to blame for this, but its roots go much deeper than our electoral system - it's the fabric of our culture, and changing the voting system could just be window-dressing.

But, you have to ask: why did Dev try to get first-past-the-post introduced? I imagine to further consolidate clientelism and the Fianna Fáil machine, rather than to change anything. Which puts the blame back on deeper issues in Irish society, not the voting system.

Other reasons include our legislative system, which produces a very weak parliament & opposition and an overly-strong executive - but perhaps that's another thread.

JHMEG

PR is great in theory, and in reality it's probably our only option, but is flawed.

If we had a first past the post system like in the UK, we could have FF in power for 40 years. They know that and have attempted to get PR modified/ditched on a number of occasions.

Unfortunately for PR to work effectively there has to be a good spread of policital persuasion and a balanced opposition, whereas we have a hardcore 40% FF voters and a fragmented opposition. 60% of the public voted against FF in the last election, but because of a fragmented opposition, FF ended up getting in anyway. In an ideal system we would not have FF in power now as clearly the majority did not want them.

Hotblack Desiato

JHMEG wrote: »

In an ideal system we would not have FF in power now as clearly the majority did not want them.

I'd imagine most Green voters would have considered themselves part of that majority, too, yet their vote helped put FF back into power. There are a good number of Labour voters who consider that ruling out a coalition with FF was a mistake. When it boils down to it, the prospect of power overrules any principle, the only party we can be certain will not coalesce with FF is FG and that's down to dinosaur civil war politics and could conceivably change. So it's arguable there is no party in the country you know what your getting when you vote for them - except FF!