Would moving to proportional representation affect B.C.’s triple-A credit rating?
Probably not.
Countries like Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, which all have some form of proportional representation (PR), have triple-A credit and bond ratings, while the U.K., which has a first-past-the-post system, has only a double-A rating from Fitch and Standard & Poor’s.
One legitimate concern for business, however, is government spending and taxation under PR systems.
PR often creates “pizza parliaments” that tend to spend more money than governments elected under the current first-past-the-post (FPP), according to a Fraser Institute study from last year.
“You end up with more minority governments,” said University of Windsor political scientist Lydia Miljan, who contributed to the study. “So whenever you have a minority government, you have different political parties that have to enter into coalition, and often the price of coalition is that you spend money on goodies for your constituents.”
“I think that’s a fair concern,” said Max Cameron, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, who nonetheless thinks PR is a more representative system.
“If you look at European parliamentary democracies, they are bigger governments and they do have robust welfare states and there is a fairly strong consensus around redistributive policies – particularly taxation and so forth.
“So it does seem like it lends itself to a more social democratic social orientation. If that’s a concern, then I think you’d want to stick with the current system. If it’s not a concern, if you are prepared to tolerate a slightly larger government and slightly higher taxes and so forth, then I think some kind of PR is what you want.”
In an analysis of electoral systems last year, the Fraser Institute found that 83% of the elections held by governments with PR resulted in coalition governments. It found higher central government spending in PR government systems – an average of 29.2% of gross domestic product, compared with 24.3% in FPP systems.
The report also found more deficit spending in PR systems than in FPP systems. It found government spending was 5.7% lower in FPP systems than under PR systems.
The biggest selling point of PR electoral systems is that the number of seats that a party wins in an election more accurately reflects the popular vote.
“The distribution of seats isn’t the same as the distribution of votes,” Cameron said of the current FPP system. “If you get 40% of the votes, you can still get over 50% of the seats and hence govern without needing to consult with the Opposition or bargain with it.”
But PR systems can also sometimes produce results that don’t necessarily reflect the way most people voted.
Take the recent case of New Zealand, which adopted a mixed-member proportional voting system in 1996, and has not had a majority government since then.
In the September election, the party that won the most seats did not form government – the party that won 10 fewer seats did.
In the September 23 election, the incumbent National Party (conservative) won 56 seats – five seats shy of a majority – while the Labour Party won 46 seats.
But Labour Leader Jacinda Arden is now New Zealand’s prime minister, thanks to a coalition her party struck with the New Zealand First Party – described as an anti-immigration, socially conservative party – to form a minority government, with the help of the Green Party through a confidence-and-supply agreement, in which the smaller parties pledged to support Labour in motions of confidence and appropriation or budget votes.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because British Columbia recently had a similar outcome under the current FPP system.
John Horgan’s BC NDP won two fewer seats than the BC Liberal Party, and yet Horgan is now premier, thanks to a confidence-and-supply agreement struck with the BC Green Party.
However, the kind of political promiscuity that has resulted in New Zealand’s odd alliance between left and right parties tends to be more common under PR than under FPP.
FPP systems tend to favour larger, established parties, to the detriment of smaller fringe parties, because consensus among various factions gets hashed out at the party level. Under PR, however, parties may have to make concessions to other parties that exacerbate internal divisions.
That is why some BC NDP insiders are wondering why their leader is flirting with a system that could ultimately cause their party to fracture along labour and environmentalist lines.
“What proportional representation does is dilute the power of a mass party,” Miljan said.
In B.C., the biggest beneficiary of PR would likely be the Green party, which Cameron said could grow at the expense of both the NDP and Liberals.
“It would probably mean going from a two- to three-party system,” he said.
Ultimately, for those concerned about the stability of government policies, PR might be better than FPP, Cameron said.
Despite recent uncertainty in Germany, the country has generally had stable governments because of its coalitions, not despite them.
“It’s the stability of their coalitions which gives the kind of permanence to their policies,” Cameron said. “One of the critical things governments have to do is govern for the long haul. They can’t just govern for the next four years. What you get with the majoritarian system is this lurching back and forth – Liberal, NDP, Liberal, NDP. Although, in reality, in our province, it’s primarily Liberal, with the NDP occasionally coming in and then reversing policies Liberals have done, and Liberals coming back and reversing NDP policy. In terms of policy, it’s actually more unstable.”
British Columbians who want to have a say on how the referendum question is framed have until February 28, 2018, to provide input.
