Newfoundland and Labrador 2019

Now, this is a close election! Newfoundland and Labrador held its provincial election on 16 May. The result was the Liberal Party winning exactly half the seats–apparently. One of their losses is by five votes. Not five percentage points. Five votes. The apparent winner is the NDP candidate. There is likely to be a recount.

If the result holds, the NDP has won three seats in the 40-seat assembly, up from two in the previous election. The Liberals had 31 seats last time, so this is some electoral rebuke, even if it ends up back with a majority. The Progressive Conservative Party, which won 15 seats, has not conceded defeat, and the leader has said he will be calling on the NDP and two independents (who are ex-Liberals) to consider a possible bid for power if the Liberals do not win their 21st seat.

The Liberal vote total percentage was 43.9, PCs 42.6, NDP 6.3.

PEI 2019: Provincial assembly election and MMP referendum

Prince Edward Island election day was today. Results appear to be pointing towards a lead in votes and seats for the Progressive Conservatives. Thus the expectation (at least according to some polling) that the Greens might form the government looks unlikely now. The Green Party appears to be in second place, although closer (in votes) to the third place Liberals than to first place. The Liberals are the outgoing governing party, with a seat majority.

It looks like it will be a minority situation, which I think will be a first for PEI.

Voters were also voting in a referendum on whether to replace FPTP with a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system, with the voter brochure showing it as an open-list variant. That looks like a close call at this point, but most likely it has been defeated. To pass, the MMP proposal requires not only a majority of votes, but also a win in 17 of the 27 districts. At the moment, CBC is reporting it will win no more than 15 (and may not have a provincewide majority anyway).

PEI has been here before, having voted in a non-binding ballot (conducted by phone or online) for MMP in 2016, and having defeated an earlier MMP referendum by a big majority in 2005.

Today’s referendum had an odd ballot format: the NO option appears above the YES option. I am not sure I have ever seen that before.

(There is one district that did not vote today in the assembly election; a candidate, of the Greens, died in a canoe accident last Friday, so there will be a by-election at a future date.)

BC: Sticking with FPTP

I thought it would at least be close. It was not.

61.3% of voters in British Columbia voted to keep the FPTP system.

In the (now moot) second ballot question, MMP was favored over the other options, on 41.2%, with DMP a (surprising?) second on 29.5% and RUP on 29.3%. A total of 831,760 votes were cast in the second question, versus 1,380,753 in the main question. So fully 40% of voters did not answer the “what if” question.

The second question permitted a ranking of choices on the three alternatives. In the redistribution of preferences, MMP won with 63.05% (of 779,698 votes).

In 2009, I wrote a post entitled “BC: FPTP forever?” And then the question of change came up again a mere nine years later. But this is a pretty decisive defeat. I know forever is a long time. But it seems unlikely for proportional representation to get another chance anytime soon.

Is AV just FPTP on steroids?

In debates over electoral systems in Canada, one often hears, from otherwise pro-reform people, that a shift to the alternative vote would be worse than the status quo. It is easy to understand why this view might be held. The alternative vote (AV), also known as instant runoff (IRV), keeps the single-seat districts of a system like Canada’s current first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, but replaces the plurality election rule in each district with a ranked-ballot and a counting procedure aimed at producing a majority winner. (Plurality winners are still possible if, unlike in Australia, ranking all candidates is not mandatory. The point is that pluralities of first or sole-preference votes are not sufficient.)

Of course, the claim that AV would be FPTP on steroids implies that, were Canada to switch to AV, the current tendency towards inflated majorities for a party favored by less than half the voters would be even more intensified. This is plausible, inasmuch as AV should favor a center-positioned party. A noteworthy feature of the Canadian party system is the dominance, most of the time, by a centrist party. This is unusual in comparison with most other FPTP systems, notably the UK (I highly recommend Richard Johnston’s fascinating book on the topic). The party in question, the Liberal Party, would pick up many second preferences, mainly from the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP) and so, according to the “steroids” thesis, it would thus win many more seats than it does now. It might even become a “permanent majority”, able to win a parliamentary majority even if it is second in (first-preference) votes to the Conservatives (who thus win the majority or at least plurality of seats under FPTP). The “steroids” claim further implies that the NDP would win many fewer seats, and thus Canada would end up with more of a two-party system rather than the multiparty system it has under FPTP.

There is a strong plausibility to this claim. We can look to the UK, where AV was considered in a referendum. Simulations at the time showed that the Liberal Democrats would stand to benefit rather nicely from a change to AV. While the LibDems are a third party, heavily punished by the FPTP electoral system even when they have had 20% or so of the votes, what they have in common with the Canadian Liberals is their centrist placement. Thus, perhaps we have an iron law of AV: the centrist party gains in seats, whether or not it is already one of the two largest parties. An important caveat applies here: with the LibDems having fallen in support since their coalition with the Conservatives (2010-15), the assumptions they would gain from AV probably no longer apply.

On the other hand, we have the case of the Australian House of Representatives, which is elected by AV. There, a two-party system is even stronger in national politics than in the FPTP case of the UK, and far more so than in Canada. (When I say “two party” I am counting the Coalition as a party because it mostly operates as such in parliament and its distinct component parties seldom compete against one another in districts.)

It is not as if Australia has never had a center-positioned party. The Australian Democrats, for example, reached as high as 11.3% of the first-preference votes in 1990, but managed exactly zero seats (in what was then a 148-seat chamber). Thus being centrist is insufficient to gain from AV.

Nonetheless, the combination of centrism and largeness does imply that Canada’s Liberals would be richly rewarded by a change to AV. Or at least it seems that Justin Trudeau thought so. His campaign promised 2015 would be the last election under FPTP. While he did not say what would replace it, he’s previously said he likes a “ranked ballot” and he pulled the plug on an electoral-reform process when it was veering dangerously towards proportional representation.

Still, there are reasons to be somewhat skeptical, at least of the generalization of the Australian two-party experience. The reasons for my caution against the “steroids” view are two-fold: (1) the overlooked role of assembly size; (2) the ability of parties and voters to adapt.

Assembly size is the most important predictor of the size of the largest party, disproportionality, and the effective number of seat-winning parties in countries that use single-seat districts. (It is likely relatively less important when there are two rounds of voting, as in France, but still likely the most important factor.) This is a key conclusion of Votes from Seats. It is thus important not to overlook the fact that Australia has an assembly size considerably smaller than Canada’s. In the book, Taagepera and I show that Australia’s effective number of seat-winning parties and size of largest parliamentary party are almost what we would expect from its assembly size, even if FPTP were used. (See also this earlier post and its comment thread; how close it is to expectation depends on how we count what a “party” is.) The data are calculated over the 1949-2011 period, and the effective number of parties has been just 1.10 times the expectation from the Seat Product Model (which is based only on assembly size when single-seat districts are used). Similarly, the average largest party has been 93% of the expected size (averaging 50.5%  of seats when we would expect 54.2%).

Thus we do not need to invoke the alleged steroids aspect of AV to understand the dominance of two parties in Australia. But this does not mean it would not make a difference in Canada. Consider that the current effective number of parties and size of the largest party in that country, averaged over a similar period, are also just about what we should expect. The multipartism, including periodic minority governments, that characterize Canada are not surprising, when you use the Seat Product Model (SPM). They are surprising only if you think district magnitude is all that matters, and that FPTP is FPTP. But it isn’t! An electoral system using the FPTP electoral rule with an assembly of more than 300 seats is a different, and more multiparty-favoring, electoral system than one with 150 seats. Replace “FPTP” in that sentence with “AV” and it is surely still true.

But what about the centrist party, the Canadian Liberals? Surely AV would work differently in this context, and the Liberals would be a much more advantaged party. Right? Maybe. If so, then it would mean that the SPM would be overridden, at least partially, in Canada, and the largest party would be bigger than expected, for the assembly size, while the effective number of parties would be lower than expected. Of course, that’s possible! The SPM is devised for “simple” systems. AV is not simple, as we define that term. Maybe the SPM is just “lucky” that the one country to have used AV for a long time has the expected party system; or it is lucky that country has the “correct” assembly size to sustain two-party dominance. (Australia is the Lucky Country, after all, so if the SPM is going to get lucky somewhere, it might as well be Australia.)

This is where that other factor comes in. While no one has a crystal ball, I am going to go with the next best thing. I am going to say that the SPM is reliable enough that we can predict that, were Canada to have AV, it would have an effective number of parties around 2.6 and a largest party with around 48% of seats. In other words, just about where it has been for quite some time (adjusting for the House size having been a bit smaller in the past than it is now). Note these are averages, over many elections. Any one election might deviate–in either direction. I won’t claim that a first election using AV would not be really good for the Liberals! I am doubting that would be a new equilibrium. (Similarly, back in 2016 I said my inclination would not be to predict the effective number of parties to go down under AV.)

Parties and voters have a way of adapting to rules. Yes the Liberals are centrist, and yes the Conservatives are mostly alone on the right of the spectrum (albeit not quite as much now, heading into 2019, as in recent years). But that need not be an immutable fact of Canadian politics. Under AV, the Liberals might move leftward to attract NDP second preferences, the NDP center-ward to attract Liberal and even Conservative second preferences, the Conservatives also towards the center. It would be a different game! The Greens and other parties might be more viable in some districts than is currently the case, but also potentially less viable in others where they might win a plurality, but struggle to get lower ranked preferences. The point is, it could be fluid, and there is no reason to believe scenarios that have the largest party increasing in size (and being almost always the Liberals), and correspondingly the effective number of parties falling. With 338 or so districts, likely there would remain room for several parties, and periodic minority governments (and alternations between leading parties), just as the SPM predicts for a country with that assembly size and single-seat districts.

As I have noted before, it is the UK that is the surprising case. Its largest party tends to be far too large for that huge assembly (currently 650 seats), and its effective number of seat-winning parties is “too low”. Maybe it needs AV to realize its full potential, given that the simulations there showed the third party benefitting (at least when it was larger than it’s been in the two most recent elections).

Bottom line: I do not buy the “FPTP on steroids” characterization of AV. I can understand were it comes from, given the presence in Canada of a large centrist party. I just do not believe Liberal dominance would become entrenched. The large assembly and the diversity of the country’s politics (including its federal structure) both work against that.

I agree with electoral reformers that PR would be better for Canada than AV. I also happen to think it would be better for the Liberals! But would AV be worse than FPTP? Likely, it would not be as different as the “steroids” claim implies.

Is rural-urban PR gaining on MMP?

In the British Columbia mail-in referendum, the most likely option to win, should change from FPTP be endorsed, has seemed to be Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP). However, a poll from Mainstream BC, released on Nov. 8, suggests that one of the other options could be gaining.

The one that looks close, at least in this poll, is Rural-Urban PR (RUP). I reviewed all of the proposals before, and so will only briefly describe the RUP system here: It would be Single Transferable Vote (STV) for most of the province, but MMP in rural areas. The proposal is meant to address concerns that rural districts (ridings) would have to be too large if STV were used in the entire province, while still giving the rural interior a reasonable degree of proportionality.

This poll shows that on the critical first question, whether to keep FPTP or move to PR, the BC Interior prefers the status quo, 53.3% to 46.7%. Metro Vancouver voters only narrowly favor PR (50.1%), while Vancouver Island favors PR by a slightly wider margin (52.7%). The regional samples are small, so should be treated with caution. Nonetheless, they are suggestive of skepticism of PR in rural areas, exactly what the RUP proposal is meant to address. Overall, it is way too close to call: 50.5% for keeping FPTP, 49.9% for PR.

It is on preference over PR systems that we see the most interesting divide. According to this poll, MMP leads by a wide margin in Metro Vancouver: 50.4% to 32.2% for RUP and 17.4% for the third option, Dual-Member PR (DMP). On Vancouver Island, it is similar, but tighter: 40.4%, 38.3%, 21.3% (this is just 86 respondents). In BC Interior, however, the poll gets RUP on 49.5%, then MMP 37%, and DMP just 13.5%.

Overall, this still puts MMP in front, given the greater population of Vancouver: 44.8%, 38.2%, 17.0%.

It could be that RUP is gaining, as earlier polls had it and DMP both far behind MMP. There is an on-line presence for a specifically pro-RUP effort (“YUP for RUP”). There is some expressed support for RUP, for instance by Andrew Coyne in the National Post. He says he favors it “mostly for the STV part.”

It would be very interesting if RUP ended up winning, but on the strength of rural voters who, were it chosen, would vote by MMP, while Vancouver voters (who would vote by STV) had majority-preferred MMP but would get STV. OK, that was convoluted, but that is the point. It is not a likely outcome, but it is at least possible, provided it is really close in Vancouver and there is a decisive turn towards RUP in rural areas. And would be interesting!

The choice of PR model, if PR defeats FPTP in the first question, will be determined by province-wide alternative vote (the second question is a ranked ballot). So, it would be good to know what DMP supporters’ second choice tends to be. I would guess MMP, but that is just that–a guess. It probably depends on which feature of DMP that minority likes best–all members elected in local districts (for which STV would seem to beat MMP) or province-wide proportionality (for which MMP is clearly better than RUP).

A final note from the poll: It has 963 total respondents, but only 440 for the second question. So lots of voters may be planning to skip the question on choice of models. It is unclear whether that is because those who want FPTP are not weighing in at all, or because of pro-PR canvassers saying things like “if you are confused about the second part, you can skip it” (which I heard in my brief observation of campaigning).

Correction on BC’s MMP proposal

I realized only today that I had misread the proposal for the Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) system in the British Columbia Attorney General’s report on the options. [Or maybe not, after all: See Wilf’s comment.]

I had thought the compensation would play out only in regions, as is the case in Scotland. I based this on the phrase in the report that says, “the List PR seats are allocated on a regional basis rather than a province-wide basis.” However, somehow I missed the clear statement in the preceding paragraph of the report, where it says, “The overall share of seats each party holds in the Legislative Assembly is determined by the party’s share of the province-wide vote it receives.”

In other words, the regions would affect only which specific candidates are seated from the compensatory (“top-up”) lists, and thus the regional balance of each party’s caucus. They would not affect the number of such seats a party wins overall.

The provision also makes workable the possible open list, which is given as an option to be worked out post-referendum, but which the Premier has said he will ensure is chosen rather than a closed list. If the lists were province-wide, open lists would make for more cumbersome ballots and arguably excess choice (as well as failing to ensure regional balance in the assembly).

The details of how one balances province-wide proportionality with open regional lists are complex. It is the system in Bavaria, however, so it is not unproven.

I have corrected my two previous entries on this accordingly:

1. BC electoral reform options for referendum

2. What can we expect from electoral reform in BC?

 

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.