In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper criticised the idea that political philosophy should be about the question of who should rule. Any person or group is fallible, so the question “Who should rule?” begs for a false answer. So what question should we ask? Rationality consists not of finding the right policy or idea by some complicated argument and sticking to it, but of exposing our policies and ideas to criticism and eliminating bad policies – error correction. So the question to ask is how we can change the political system to make it more open to error correction?
Today in Britain, many people want an alternative to the current first past the post voting system that is more “representative”. That is, their criterion for choosing a voting system is that the people should have the party they like represented in parliament in proportion to the number of people who like that party. This way of looking at voting systems is focused on who should get to decide the mix of politicians. But is this in the spirit of openness to criticism advocated by Popper? And if not, is it even compatible with openness to error correction?
There are some strong arguments that “representative” voting systems are usually bad for error correction, including the proposed Alternative vote system. Some of these focus on the fact that many of them lead to coalition governments. When there is a coalition, each party in the coalition can blame the others for what goes wrong. Then it is very difficult to keep any party out of power if it has some supporters no matter how bad their ideas. It gets worse, these representative voting systems have the property that if you vote for a party, the number of seats it gets can decrease.
The situation gets worse, there are mathematical results indicating that no voting system has all the properties we might want in a voting system. We have to make a choice about what criteria we want our voting system to satisfy and if we want a more open society we cannot choose a system that leads to less accountability.
First past the post tends to put one party in power and so that party cannot blame anyone else for its failures. If you vote under first past the post then the number of seats allotted to the party you vote for increases or stays the same, it does not decrease. In addition, in first past the post politicians are accountable to the voters in their constituency whereas in other voting systems they are not tied to a particular constituency. So first past the post makes political parties more accountable than does any proportional voting system.
I think it is fair to say that people in Britain are unhappy with the current political situation and see MPs as an unaccountable bunch of layabouts whose main skill is spending other people’s money. How can this problem be solved by putting in place a voting system that can decrease the number of seats a party gets when you vote for it and that severs the link between politicians and their constituents?
UPDATE: The mathematically inclined reader who wants to learn more about voting systems might find Donald Saari’s book Decisions and Elections interesting. I should note that Saari may not agree with what I’ve written above.
In a nearby universe not long ago, Sir Karl Popper quit his job as a schoolteacher to become a management consultant.
He maintained that “Who should I hire?” is a bad question. More important is putting mechanisms in place to *fire* people effectively.
It is much easier to recognise a poorly performing current employee – one who would truly be happier elsewhere — than a good candidate at interview, he said.
He used this argument to further justify his belief that examinations are worthless.
I’m guessing this is supposed to be sarcasm. It would be easier to figure out what your point is if you stated it without sarcasm. However, both in a job interview and in an election you want to be able to keep out people who have shown no aptitude for the job. Adopting the wrong voting system means you will have a lot of trouble with firing incompetents.
Employees are hired to do specific tasks, possibly with a provision to dismiss them if they are incompetent (but not if you fall foul of “unfair dismissal” legislation). In contrast political parties offer a mixed bag of good, bad and indifferent policies, so it is very hard to say whether a party is actually doing what it said it was going to do, and in any case you are stuck with them for three or four years.
In the long term the only way out is to restrict the roles and functions of government to the very minimum. Then it will be easier to assess performance and in additon the level of corruption will be reduced because there will be next to no discretion to hand out favours of various kinds, including corporate welfare.
It also means that people do not need to be alarmed about what happens when some particular group (Catholics, welfare dependents, masons, Islamists or whatever) achieve the dreaded figure of 50.1% of the voting population.
Utopian maybe, but no more so than trying to improve the electoral system.