Open lists in MMP: An option for BC and the experience in Bavaria

One of the options for electoral reform in British Columbia is mixed-member proportional (MMP) representation. The criteria for the potential system allow for a post-referendum decision (if MMP is approved by voters) on whether the party lists should be open or closed. The guide that was sent to all BC voters shows a mock-up of a ballot that looks like New Zealand’s, with closed lists. However, the provincial premier has stated that, if MMP is adopted, lists will be open.

When it comes to lists, it is my opinion that citizens will elect all of the members of the legislature. They will select names that are representative of their communities.

I remain uncertain about the value of open lists under MMP. Is it worth the extra ballot complexity? What additional gain does one get from having preference votes determine order of election for those winning compensatory seats? The MMP Review in New Zealand after the 2011 referendum (in which voters voted to keep MMP) looked at this question extensively. It came down firmly on the side of keeping lists closed.

Nonetheless, the statement by the premier suggests he believes the system is less likely to be chosen if voters expect the lists to be closed. And, given regional districts on the compensation tier, as explicitly called for in the system proposal, the lists would not be too long and thus the ballots not too complex.

It happens that there is one MMP system in existence in which the lists are open. Such a system has been used in Bavaria for quite some time. I actually proposed such a model in a post way back in 2005, quite early in the life of this blog. At the time I had no idea that what I had “invented” was, more or less, the existing Bavarian model.

Of course, Bavaria just had an election. In the thread on that election, Wilf Day offered some valuable insights into how the open lists worked. I am “promoting” selections from Wilf’s comments here. Indented text in the remainder of this post is by Wilf.

The Bavarian lists are fully “open,” and the ballot position has no bearing on the outcome, except to the extent the voters are guided by it, especially seen in voting for the number 1 candidate.

Of the 114 list seats, 31 were elected thanks to voters moving them up the list, while 83 would have been elected with closed lists.

Did the first on the list always get elected? Almost. In the region of Lower Bavaria, the liberal FDP elected only 1 MLA, and he had been second on their regional list.

Did the open lists hurt women? I did not check most results, but the SPD zippers their lists, and I noticed in Upper Palatinate the SPD elected 2 MLAs, list numbers 1 and 3 (two women). Conversely, in Middle Franconia the SPD elected 4 MLAs: 1, 2, 3, and 5 (three men).

Little known fact: a substantial number of voters in Bavaria, being used to voting in federal elections where their second vote is just for a party, blink at the Bavarian ballot, look for the usual space to vote beside the party name, it’s not there, so they put an X beside the party name anyway. A spoiled ballot? No, they count it as a vote for the party. Not a vote for the list as ranked, it does not count for the ranking or for any candidate, but it does count in the party count. Just like Brazil, where a vote for the party is not a vote for the list ranking, except Bavaria does not publicize the option of voting for the party.

Among the more interesting new Free Voter MLAs:

Anna Stolz, lawyer, Mayor of the City of Arnstein; she had been elected Mayor in 2014 as the joint candidate of the Greens, SPD, and Free Voters; the local Greens said they were very proud of her as Mayor. The Free Voter delegates meeting made her number 5 on the state list, but the voters moved her up to second place as one of the two Free Voter MLAs from Lower Franconia.

From Upper Bavaria, the capital region, list #12 was Hans Friedl, with his own platform: “a socially ecologically liberal voice, an immigration law based on the Canadian model, no privatization of the drinking water supply, a clear rejection of the privatization of motorways”). The voters moved him up to #8, making him the last of 8 Free Voters elected in that region.

Note: the comments are excerpted, and the order of ideas is a little different from where they appear in the thread. I thank WIlf for his comments, and for his permission to make them more prominent.

Canadian provincial elections and the SPM: Those assemblies are too small

After posting my earlier overview of expectations from possible electoral reform in British Columbia, I was wondering how well the Seat Product Model has performed over time in Canadian provincial assembly elections. Spoiler alert: not nearly as well in the provinces as a whole as in BC, and better for votes than for seats. The latter is particularly puzzling; the model works by first estimating seats (which are more “mechanically” constrained by district magnitude and assembly size than are votes). That is why the book Rein Taagepera and I published in 2017 is called Votes from Seats. The key to the puzzle may be the serious under-sizing of Canadian provincial assemblies. As I will show in a table at the end of this entry, many provincial assemblies should be almost twice their current size, if we go by the cube root law.

I have a dataset originally constructed for my “to keep or change FPTP” project (published in Blais, ed., 2008). It has most provincial elections back to around 1960, although it stops around 2011. Maybe some day I will update it. For now, it will have to do.

The first graph shows the degree of correspondence between a given election’s observed effective number of vote-earning parties (N_V) and the expectation from its seat product (i.e., for FPTP, the assembly size). The black diagonal is the equality line: perfect prediction would place an election on this line. The lighter diagonal is a regression line. Clearly, the mean Canadian provincial election exhibits N_V higher than expected. On the other hand, the 95% confidence interval (dashed curves) includes the equality line other than very trivially near the middle of the x-axis range. Thus, in statistical terms, we are unable to reject the hypothesis that actual N_V in Canadian provincial elections is, on average, as expected by the SPM. However, the regression-estimated line is systematically on the high side.

It might be noted that we never have N_V expected to be 2.0, and in the largest provinces, the assemblies are large enough that we should expect N_V>2.5. (“Large enough” here meaning independent of what they “should be”, by the cube root; this is referring only to actual assembly size.) So the classic “Duvergerian” outcome is really only expected in the one province with the smallest assembly. And such an outcome is more or less observed there, in PEI. Nonetheless, a bunch of elections are very much more fragmented than expected, with N_V>3! And several are unexpectedly low; many of these are earlier elections in Quebec.

All individual elections are labelled; in a few cases the label generation did not work well (some elections in 2000s). The regression coefficient is significant, although the regression’s R² is only 0.15. The basic conclusion is a marginally acceptable fit on average, but lots of scatter and some tendency for the average election to be more fragmented than expected.

Now, for the largest seat-winner in the assembly (s₁). Here things get a little ugly.

This might be considered a rather poor fit. There is a systematic tendency for the largest party to be bigger than expected: note that the equality line is essentially never within the 95% confidence interval. When we expect, based on assembly size, the largest party to have 60% of the seats, it actually tends to have more like 68%. More importantly, the scatter is massive. In fact, the regression coefficient is insignificant here; please do not ask what the  R² is!

The size of Canadian provincial parliaments is never so large that the leading party is expected to have only 50% of the seats (note the reference lines and where the equality line crosses the 50-50 point). Yet there is not a trivial number of elections with the largest party under 50%. More common, however, are the blowout wins, where the largest party has 80% or more of the seats. This has been a chronic feature of Canadian provincial politics, especially in a few provinces (notably Alberta, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island).

Why is N_v so much better predicted (even if not exceptionally well) than s₁? It is hard to say. It is an unusual situation to have both N_V and s₁ trend higher than expected. After all, normally the more “significant” parties there are the smaller the largest party should tend to be. In the set of predictive equations, s₁ (and the effective number of seat-winning parties, N_S) are prior to N_V, because the seat-based measures are more directly constrained. This is why the book is called Votes from Seats. In our diagram (p. 149) deriving the various quantities from the seat product, we show N_V and s₁ coming off separate branches from “Ns0” (the actual number of parties winning seats), which is expected to be (MS)^0.25, where M is the magnitude and S the assembly size. Thus for FPTP, it is S^0.25. A parliament with 81 seats is expected to feature three parties; the other formulas would predict that N_S=2.08, s₁=0.577, and N_V=2.52. If the parliament had 256 seats, we would expect four parties, N_S=2.52, s₁=0.50, and N_V=2.92.

Unfortunately, the dataset I am using does not (yet) have how many parties won seats–actual or effective number. Thus I can’t determine whether this is the point at which the connections get fuzzy in the Canadian provincial arena. Nonetheless, there should be a relationship between N_V and s₁. It can be calculated from the formulas displayed in Table 9.2 (also on p. 149). It would be:

s₁=(N_V^1.5 -1)^-0.5.

In this last graph, I plot this expectation with the solid dark line, and a regression on s₁ and N_V from Canadian provincial elections as the lighter line (with its 95% confidence intervals in dashed curves).

The pattern is obvious: there are many elections in Canadian provinces in which the leading party gets a majority or even 60% or 70% or more of the seats despite a very fragmented electorate. We should not expect a leading party with more than 50% of the seats when N_V>2.92. And yet 17 elections (around 15% of the total) defy this logically derived expectation. Six have a party with 2/3 or more of the seats despite N_V>2.92 (in order of increasing N_V: BC91, AB04, NB91, QC70, AB67, BC72; in the last one, N_V=3.37!).

I think the most likely explanation is Cube Root Law violations! Canadian provincial assemblies are much too small for their populations. So, the cause of the above patterns may be that voters in Canadian provinces vote as if their assemblies were the “right” size, but these votes are turned into seats in seriously undersized assemblies, which inflates the size of the largest party. (Yes, votes come from seats in terms of predictive models, but obviously in any given election it is the reverse!)

There is some support for this. I can calculate what s₁ and N_V would be expected to be, if the assemblies were the “right” size, which is to say the cube root of the number of voters (which is obviously smaller than the number of citizens, but this is what I have to work with). I will call these s_1cr and N_Vcr. Then I can take ratios of actual s₁ and actual N_V to these “expectations”. The mean ratios are: N_V/N_Vcr=0.994; s₁/s_1cr=1.19. If the assemblies were larger, the votes–already with a degree of fragmentation about as expected from more properly sized assemblies–would probably have stayed about the same. However, with these hypothetically larger assemblies, the largest party in parliament would be less inflated by the mechanics of the electoral system.

Canadian provinces would have a greatly reduced tendency to have lopsided majorities if only they would expand their assemblies up to the cube root of their active voting population. Of course, this assumes they stick to FPTP. The other thing they could do is switch to (moderately) proportional representation systems, like BC is currently considering. That would be seem to be a good idea regardless of whether they also correct their undersized assemblies.

Below is a table of suggested sizes compared to actual, for several provinces. (“Current” here is for the latest election actually in the dataset; some of these have been increased–somewhat–subsequently.)

Prov.	Current S	Increased S
Alberta	83	121
British Columbia	79	152
Manitoba	57	94
New Brunswick	55	91
Newfoundland	48	81
Nova Scotia	52	95
Ontario	107	208
Prince Edward Island	27	55
Quebec	125	197
Saskatchewan	58	95

_________

(By the way, the R² on that s₁ graph that I asked you not to ask about? If you must know, it is 0.03.)

 

Why “voting system”?

In the earlier entry on the BC referendum, I quoted a passage from the ballot question. It uses the term, voting system.

Yes, “voting system” rather than “electoral system”. Why? What the voters are being asked to decide is clearly what we political scientists mean by electoral system. Is there something objectionable about that term to the general public?

I do not ever use the term, voting system. However, if I did, I would probably understand it to mean the ballot format and other aspects of the process of casting a vote. I would not understand it to include how seats are allocated. An electoral system, as I understand it, is a set of rules that govern voting, counting, and allocation. A whole electoral system is assembly size, district magnitude, tier structure (if not “simple” single-tier), and the specific seat-allocation rule (edit: and the ballot structure). The BC proposals cover all these aspects. It clearly is a referendum on the electoral system. Yet it is officially, “a referendum on what voting system we should use for provincial elections.”

I find it puzzling, although not troubling in any sort of way. (Now, if the term starts creeping into political science, I reserve the right to object.) On the other hand, proponents of change in Canada seem to prefer to call proportional representation “ProRep” rather than PR. I can kind of understand that (“PR” means public relations to civilians). Whenever I see “ProRep” I flinch just a little. But if calling it that helps sell it, I can get over it.

New Brunswick 2018

The Canadian province of New Brunswick held its provincial assembly election on 24 September. The result is an assembly with no majority of seats.

The incumbent Liberal government, which won a majority in 2014 but had fallen to minority in the interim, came in second place in seats but first in votes in the 2018 election. The main opposition, Progressive Conservatives (PC), won just one seat more, and are short of a majority.

The Liberals have 21 seats on 37.8% of the vote, the PCs 22 seats on 31.9%, while a previously underrepresented party, People’s Alliance (PANB) and the Green Party each won three seats. The PANB won 12.6% of the vote and the Greens 11.9%. The NDP won 5% of the votes, but no seats.

The district-level results are interesting. The People’s Alliance leader, Kris Austin, won a clear majority (54.6% in Fredricton-Grand Lake, with the runner up being a PC incumbent with only 27.7%; in 2014, Austin had lost to the PC candidate 28.8%-28.5%!). In another riding, Fredricton-York, the PANB candidate defeated another PC incumbent, 33.7%-30.9%. The third PANB winner was in Miramichi and won 57.0% to 35.0% over a Liberal. I counted six other seats in which a PANB candidate came in second, although only one of these was really close (Southwest Miramichi-Bay Du Vin, where a PC has 35.4% over the PANB on 35.0%). The three districts the PANB won and the one where they are very narrowly behind, are all contiguous. It is clearly a regional party; it ran in 30 of the 49 ridings.

As for the Green winners, leader David Coon, who was their first elected MLA (2014) retained his seat easily, 56.3%-20.1% over a Liberal. In Kent North their candidate won 45.9%-37.4% over a Liberal. In Memramcook-Tantramar, Megan “Landslide” Mitton won by 11 votes (38.3%-38.2%) over a Liberal.  It seems there are two districts in which a Green came in second, but neither was close; in both cases the Liberal winner had a majority. The Green wins are not contiguous districts; the leader represents a seat in Fredricton and the other two are geographically large coastal districts. (See results and map at CBC; these are, of course, not necessarily final at this point, and there is even one Liberal lead of just 10 votes over a PC.)

It is not clear what the government result will be. I’ve been listening to CBC on the post-election discussions, and it seems the Greens have rejected a possible coalition with the Liberals; given that the results revised above suggest the Liberals are the Greens’ main opponent at district level, this reluctance has some (FPTP-based) logic to it. The Conservatives have said they will vote down a Liberal throne speech (not surprisingly). The PCs have declared all of their members are unwilling to stand for Speaker, and the Liberals also do not want any of their own to take the post. Without a Speaker, no other business can be transacted. So, for now at least, we have a stand off. (Update: The Liberal leader and current Premier Brian Gallant has said his party will put forth a candidate for Speaker today.)

It is worth noting that New Brunswick has quite a record of unusual election outcomes, and electoral-reform proposals. Just click “N.B.” at the bottom of this post to see previous entries on this recent history. Of particular interest is the time the Liberals took power thanks to a plurality reversal and promptly called off the previous (Conservative) government’s planned referendum on adopting MMP. Maybe it is time to dust off those proposals. The voters of the province seem unwilling to play the old FPTP game the way “the law” says to play it.

What could we expect from electoral reform in BC?

This week is the beginning of the mail voting period for the referendum on whether to reform the electoral system for provincial assembly elections in British Columbia. The ballot asks two questions: (1) Do you want to keep the current FPTP system or “a proportional representation voting system”: (2) If BC adopts PR, which of three types of PR do you prefer?

The second question offers three choices, which voter may rank: Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP); Dual-Member Proportional (DMP); Rural-Urban Proportional (RUP).

I have reviewed before what these options entails, and will not repeat in detail here. Besides, the official BC Elections site explains them better than I could. What I want to try to get it here is how we might expect BC’s provincial party system to change, were any of these options adopted. To answer that question, I turn, of course, to the Seat Product Model, including the extended form for two-tier systems developed in Votes from Seats.

The punch line is that the various scenarios I ran on the options all suggest the effective number of parties in the legislative assembly would be, on average, somewhere in the 2.46 to 2.94 range, the effective number of vote-earning parties would tend to be in the 2.83 to 3.32 range, and the size of the largest party would be somewhere between 45% and 51% of the seats. Again, these are all on average. The ranges just provided do not mean elections would not produce a largest party smaller than 45% or larger than 51%. Actual elections will vary around whatever is the point prediction of the Seat Product Model for any given design that is adopted. And fine, yet important, details of whichever system is adopted (if FPTP is not retained) will remain to be fleshed out later.

The ranges I am giving are formula-predicted averages, given the inputs implied by the various scenarios. I explain more below how I arrived at these values. The key point is that all proposals on the ballot are quite moderate forms of PR, and thus the party system would not be expected to inflate dramatically. However, coalition governments, or minority governments with support from other parties, would become common; nonetheless, single-party majority governments would not likely disappear from the province’s future election outcomes. As we shall see, one of the proposals would make single-party governments reman as the default mean expectation.

Before going to the scenarios, it is important to see whether the real BC has been in “compliance” with the Seat Product Model (SPM). If it has tended to deviate from expectations under its actual FPTP system, we might expect it to continue to deviate under a new, proportional one.

Fortunately, deviations have been miniscule. For all elections since 1960, the actual effective number of vote-earning parties has averaged 1.117 times greater than predicted. That is really minor. More important is whether it captures the actual size of the largest party well. This, after all, is what determines whether a single-party majority government can form after any given election. For all elections since 1960, the average ratio of actual largest-party seat share to the SPM prediction is 1.068. So it is even closer. For an assembly the size of BC’s in recent years (mean 80.7 since 1991), the SPM predicts the largest party will have around 57.8% of seats. The mean in actual elections since 1991 has been 62.7%. That is a mean error on the order of 4 seats. So, the SPM captures something real about the current BC electoral system.

Going a little deeper, and looking only at the period starting in 1996, when something like the current party system became established (due to the emergence of the Liberals and the collapse of Social Credit), we find ratios of actual to predicted as follows: 1.07 for effective number of vote-earning parties; 1.07 for largest parliamentary party seat share; 0.905 for effective number of seat-winning parties. If we omit the highly unusual 2001 election, which had an effective number of parties in the assembly of only 1.05 and largest party with 96.2%, we get ratios of 0.98 for effective number of seat-winning party and 0.954 for largest party size. The 2017 election was the first one since some time before 1960 not to result in a majority party, and it is this balanced parliament that is responsible for the current electoral reform process.

As for the proposed new systems, all options call for the assembly to have between 87 seats (its current size) and 95 seats. So I used 91, the mean; such small changes will not matter much to the estimates.

The MMP proposal calls for 60% of seats to remain in single-seat districts (ridings) and the rest to be in the compensatory tier (which would be itself be regionally based; more on that later). So my scenarios involved a basic tier consisting of 55 seats and a resulting 36 seats for compensation. Those 36/91 seats mean a “tier ratio” of 0.395 (and I used the rounded 0.4). The formula for expected effective number of seat-winning parties (Ns) is:

Ns=2.5^t(MS)^0.167.

With t=.4, M=1 (in the basic tier) and S=91, this results in Ns=2.81. I will show the results for other outputs below.

For the DMP proposal, the calculations depend on how many districts we assume will continue to elect only one member of the legislative assembly (MLA). The proposal says “rural” districts will have just one, to avoid making them too large geographically, while all others will have two seats by combining existing adjacent districts (if the assembly size stays the same; as noted, the proposals all allow for a modest increase). In any case, the first seat in any district goes to the party with the plurality in the district, and the second is assigned based on province-wide proportionality. For my purposes, this is a two-tier PR system, in which the compensatory tier consists of a number of seats equivalent to the total number of districts that elect a second MLA to comprise this compensatory pool. Here is where the scenarios come in.

I did two scenarios, one with minimal districts classified as “rural” and one with more. The minimal scenario has 5 such districts–basically just the existing really large territorial ridings (see map). The other has 11 such districts, encompassing much more of the interior and north coast (including riding #72, which includes most of the northern part of Vancouver Island). I will demonstrate the effect with the minimal-rural scenario, because it turned out to the most substantial move to a more “permissive” (small-party-favoring) system of any that I looked at.

Of our 91 seats, we take out five for “rural” districts, leaving us with 86. These 86 seats are thus split into 43 “dual-member” districts. The same formula as above applies. (Votes from Seats develops it for two-tier PR, of which MMP is a subset.) The total number of basic-tier seats is 48 (the five rural seats plus the 43 DM seats). There are 43 compensation seats, which gives us a tier ratio, t=43/91=0.473. Ah ha! That is why this is the most permissive system of the group: more compensation seats! Anyway, the result is Ns=2.94.

If we do the 11-rural seat scenario, we are down to 80 seats in the DM portion of the system and thus 40+11 basic-tier seats. The tier ratio (40/91) drops to 0.44. The resulting prediction is Ns=2.61. This does not sound like much, and it really is not. But these results imply a difference for largest seat size between the first scenario (45%) and the second (49%) that makes a difference for how close the resulting system would be to making majority parties likely.

Finally, we have RUP. This one is a little complex to calculate because it is really two different systems for different parts of the province: MMP for “rural” areas and STV for the rest. I am going to go with my 11 seats from my second DMP scenario as my “rural” area. Moreover, I understand the spirit of this proposal to be one that avoids making the districts in rural areas larger than they currently are. Yet we need compensation seats for rural areas, and like the full MMP proposal, RUP says that that “No more than 40% of the total seats in an MMP region may be List PR seats”, so this region needs about 18 seats (the 11 districts, plus 7 list seats, allowing 11/18=0.61, thereby keeping the list seats just under 40%.) That leaves us with 91-18=73 seats for the STV districts. The proposal says these will have magnitudes in the 2-7 range. I will take the geometric mean and assume 3.7 seats per district, on average. This gives us a seat product for the STV area of 3.7*73=270.

In Votes from Seats, we show that at least for Ireland, STV has functioned just like any “simple” PR system, and thus the SPM works fine. We expect Ns=(MS)^.167=2.54. However, this is only part of the RUP system. We have to do the MMP part of the province separately. With just 11 basic-tier seats and a tier ratio of 0.39, this region is expected to have Ns=2.13. A weighted average (based on the STV region comprising 80.2% of all seats) yields Ns=2.46.

The key point from the above exercise is that RUP could result in single-party majority governments remaining the norm. Above I focused mainly on Ns expectations. However, all of the predictive formulas link together, such that if we know what we expect Ns to be, we can determine the likely seat-share of the largest party (s1) will be, as well as the effective number of vote-earning parties (Nv). While that means lots of assumptions built in, we already saw that the expectations work pretty well on the existing FPTP system.

Here are the results of the scenarios for all three output variables:

System	Expected Ns	Expected Nv	Expected s1
MMP	2.81	3.19	0.46
DMP1	2.94	3.32	0.45
DMP2	2.61	3.01	0.49
RUP	2.46	2.87	0.51

“DMP1” refers to the minimal (5) seats considered “rural” and DMP2 to the one with 11 such seats. If we went with more such seats, a “DMP3” would have lower Ns and Nv and larger s1 than DMP2, and the same effect would be felt in RUP. I did a further scenario for RUP with the MMP region being 20 districts, and wound up with Ns=2.415, Nv=2.83, s1=.52; obviously these minor tweaks do not matter a lot, but it is clear which way the trend goes.And whether any given election is under or over s1=0.50 obviously makes a very large difference for how the province is governed for the following four years!

I would not really try to offer the above as a voter guide, because the differences across systems in the predicted outputs are not very large. However, if I wanted to maximize the chances that the leading party would need partners to govern the province, I’d probably be inclined to rank MMP first and RUP third. The latter proposal simply makes it harder to fit all the parameters together in a more than very marginally proportional system.

By the way, we might want to compare to the BC-STV proposal that was approved by 57% of voters in 2005 (but needed 60%, and came up for a second referendum in 2009, when no prevailed). That proposal could have been expected to yield averages of Ns=2.61, Nv=3.0, and s1=.49. By total coincidence, exactly the same as my DMP2 scenario.

A final note concerns the regional compensation in the MMP proposal vs. province-wide in DMP. In an on-line appendix to Votes from Seats, I explored whether regional compensation in the case of Scotland produces a less permissive system than if compensation were across all of Scotland. I concluded it made no difference to Ns or s1. (It did, however, result in lower proportionality.) Of course, if it made a difference, province-wide would have to be more favorable to small parties. Thus if this were a BC voter’s most important criterion, DMP might pull ahead of MMP. However, the benefit on this score of DMP is greater under a “low-rural” design. The benefit of DMP vanishes, relative to MMP, if the system adopted were to be one with a higher share of seats marked as rural. I certainly am unable to predict how the design details would play out, as this will be left up to Elections BC.

The bottom line is that all proposals are for very moderately proportional systems, with MMP likely the most permissive/proportional on offer.

Quebec 2018

Because it took place on Shemeni Atzeret, a very big Jewish holiday that “closes” the festival of Sukkot (but is separate from it), I totally missed that Quebec was having a provincial general election.

The result is being called a “surprise”. The Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) won a majority of seats (74 of 125) on just 37.4% of the votes. That is 59.2% of the seats, for an advantage ratio of 1.58, which is certainly on the high side.

The incumbent Liberals won 32 seats (compared to 70 at the last election) on 24.8% of the votes (compared to 41.5% last time). Quebec Solidaire (QS) has 10 seats on 16.1% and the Parti Quebecois (PQ), which was governing as recently as 2014, a mere 9 seats on 17.1% of the vote.

You might note that this is rather far from a “Duvergerian” outcome. It is, however, a “typical” FPTP result, given the presence of a multiparty system: The plurality party won a manufactured majority.

The regional distribution of party support was critical to the outcome, as is also a common feature of FPTP elections. CTV has the list of districts (ridings) and the winner’s percentage of the vote. Not surprisingly, many were won with well under 40% of the vote. An example is Abitibi-Ouest, where the CAQ winner earned 34.1% of the vote and a margin of 195 votes over a PQ candidate. Some other close results also were CAQ over PQ: Bourget, where the winner had a mere 27.6% of the votes and the PQ candidate was 500 votes behind; Ungava (45-vote margin with only 26.5%). On the other hand, there was Iles-de-la-Madeleine, decided in favor of the PQ by only 21 votes over a Liberal candidate (the winner won 38.7%). Then there was Duplessis, decided by 126 votes, with the PQ on top (34.3%) and CAQ second. The Liberals had some narrow victories, too (such as Gaspé, 33.8%, 132 votes over the PQ; Laval-Des-Rapides, 31.6%, 297 votes over the PQ). It is a pretty wild district-level picture!

The opposition parties going into the election–CAQ, QS, and PQ (plus the Greens)–had committed to a platform calling for a change of electoral system to proportional representation, apparently MMP.  I can’t say for sure–no doubt some readers will know–but I’d tend to assume this was promised under the assumption of a no-majority assembly. (The Liberal leader reiterated shortly before the election that he was not on board, even in the event his party would have formed a minority government after this election.) A real test of the CAQ is whether it has now had an overnight conversion to the virtues of FPTP, or whether the commitment will be effectively binding. The list above of CAQ victories over the PQ certainly shows that, to some significant degree, the parties are rivals given the dynamics of the current electoral system. Quebec–and Canada–has seemed at the cusp of electoral reform before…

(Note: There is already some ongoing discussion of this election at a previous post about the 2014 election.)

BC electoral reform options for referendum

The electoral-reform process in British Columbia has advanced another step with the Attorney General’s release of recommendations. The existence of this process is a product of the deal struck after the 2017 election, which resulted in a minority NDP government, backed by the Green Party.

In either October or November, there will be a province-wide vote consisting of two questions: First, do you want to keep the current FPTP system or replace it with a proportional system? Second, which of three PR options would you prefer if the province were to adopt PR? The second part will permit voters to rank-order their choices.

The choices being put to the voters are (using the names given in the recommendations):

Dual-Member PR (DMP)

Mixed-Member PR (MMP)

Rural-Urban PR

I will take the three in order of most familiar to least.

Readers of this blog are probably generally pretty familiar with what MMP is. The short version is: a system in which some percentage of seats (the proposal is for no more than 40%) are elected as “compensatory” list seats, while the rest continue to be elected as under FPTP, in single-seat districts (ridings) by plurality. The key feature is the compensatory nature of the process, so that any party’s number of seats in the provincial assembly are roughly proportional to its province-wide votes. Any seats the party wins in individual ridings are deducted from this total, and remaining seats a party is entitled to hold under the proportionality principle come from the list. It should be noted that the report says “List PR seats are to be allocated within defined regions, not on a province-wide basis.” This could limit proportionality somewhat, but this proposal is likely to be the most proportional of the three (unless perhaps if the compensation regions are quite small).

Rural-Urban PR is mostly single transferable vote (STV), but in the rural parts of the province MMP would be used. This is an unusual system in that it actually is two electoral systems, depending in where you are in the province: STV in urban and “semi-urban” areas, but MMP elsewhere. Under STV, voters rank candidates, but under MMP it seems that it would remain plurality. The logic is to prevent rural ridings from being significantly larger than they are now–one of the concerns raised with “BC-STV” when it was proposed in the province’s previous electoral reform process. The provision for MMP compensation regions in rural areas is obviously an effort to allow for proportional representation even in the areas where the districts will be single-seat. The proposal suggests district magnitudes for the STV regions of 2-9, with a preference for the higher end of that range.

Both MMP proposals–the full province-wide one or the rural component of Rural-Urban PR–could have either a single vote or two votes. The proposal explicitly leaves this (important!) detail to the legislature after the referendum. If there were one vote, then votes for candidates in single-seat ridings would be aggregated by party for the purposes of carrying out proportional compensation (which, for Rural-Urban, would be taking place only over the regions in which the single-seat districts were located). With a two-vote MMP (as found in Germany and New Zealand), voters can vote directly for a list of their preferred party, and thus vote for a party that is different from that of their preferred local candidate. Yet another feature to be left to the legislature to decide would be whether lists would be closed (as is typical for MMP systems), open, or flexible (also known as semi-open, but misleadingly called in the recommendations “open list with party option”).

DMP is a system not actually used anywhere (but see the earlier P.E.I. proposal), and it is a bit complex. In general, each district would elect two members, although the recommendations allow that the “largest rural districts could remain unchanged as single-member districts.” Each party could nominate two candidates, and they would be ranked by the party. Thus we have a closed-list system. Voters would cast a single party vote. The first seat in each 2-seat district would be won by the first-ranked candidate on the party with the most votes in the district. The second seat would actually be allocated based on province-wide votes. It is thus a two-tier compensatory closed-list PR system. How would the assignment of the compensatory seats to districts–given that there is no separate list or compensation district–be done? The proposal says only, “The process for allocating the second seat in each district is fairly complicated.” (Perhaps it would be something like the provisions in Slovenia or as an option for parties in Denmark.)

DMP ensures that all candidates, even those elected on province-wide votes, would represent a riding. It also ensures that one member in each 2-seat riding is elected based on the riding’s own votes. (Exception: it seems there would be a 5% threshold for any party to win seats under any of the list-based provisions being proposed; if that is correct, then it is conceivable that a party could win a plurality of votes in some riding but not be entitled to a seat.)

A puzzling aspect of DMP is the one on independents. If an independent places first in a district, that candidate is elected. That is straightforward enough. However, it is also the case that if an independent places second, that candidate is elected and “the district is removed from the remainder of the second-seat allocation process.” I don’t understand the logic of that provision.

Each proposal allows for the assembly to be increased from its present 87 members up to a maximum of 95, but does not require that the assembly size be increased.

An observation: Why not do DMP with open lists? Have the voter vote for a candidate, rather than a party. It would be a lesser break with FPTP while still being quite proportional. A potential answer: it could mean the candidate with the most personal votes is not elected (because that candidate is on a party that is overall less popular than another in the district). That could be addressed by making it more like MMP–the leading candidate wins the first seat, but that seat is deducted from the compensation entitlement. Otherwise, the DMP provisions would apply. It is interesting that the DMP proposal is explicitly closed list, whereas the list type in the MMP variants would be left up to the legislature.

Any of these systems would seem like a clear improvement for BC. Rural-Urban is an odd mix, but it could work. MMP is proven. DMP is unusual but not based on wholly unknown principles.

(For further reading, see On Elections or Sightline)