Ken writes:
It looks like the Irish electorate voted with their wallets this time. The outgoing Fianna Fail party (there are diacritics missing on that word, but I don’t know how to code for them in html) presided over a prolonged period of economic prosperity and the public seems to have voted for more of the same.
I don’t know enough about the character of Irish politics to have developed views about the result itself. For me, the most interesting thing about this election has been the system itself. I’m still trying to understand the details of it. A few days ago, I gave my understanding of how it basically works, but that left some things unexplained. The single transferrable vote (STV) system asks voters to rank the candidates in order of their preference. After each round of counting, and the votes are counted and recounted several times, the candidate with the least number of (1st preference) votes is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the other candidates according to the 2nd preferences of their voters. So far so good, but why do the Irish have multi-seat constituencies? There are 3, 4, or 5 seats up for election in each constituency and most parties have several candidates standing. Where we live, in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, there were five seats up for grabs and two went to Fianna Fail, and one each to Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens.
I think the multi-seat constituencies must serve to exert a pressure toward proportional representation (I put it this way, because I don’t think it’s as efficient a means of getting proportional representation than the mixed member type of system in use in New Zealand and Germany). If you only have one seat per constituency, then unless someone is elected on 100% of the vote, the party represented by that candidate will have all of the representation but less than all of the vote. If there was only one constituency, this would be very disproportionate. You address this somewhat by having lots of constituencies, assuming that the diversity of the electorate will manifest itself in different parties winning seats in different constituencies. In every case, the party gets all the representation for less than all the votes, but it’s swings and roundabouts; they lose here and gain there, so the disproportionality is spread and balanced out. But of course it’s not. Since if one party always won by a large margin and lost by a narrow one, it would have fewer seats per vote than a party that always won narrowly and always lost by a large margin. Having multiple seats per constituency makes it possible to address this element of disproportionality. Instead of one person being elected on a large share of the vote, more than one person representing that party is elected, and in cases close to a tie, candidates representing different parties are elected. Mind you, I’m not sure I understand how this system is better than having more constituencies. I’m also not sure on how the STV system delivers the proportionality. It definitely contributes something, though. As you can see from the results for Dun Laoghaire, once candidate, Richard Boyd Barrett, was not elected although he had more first preference votes than Ciaran Cuffe, who was. Cuffe received more votes from other candidates who were eliminated. So a multi-seat system that just decided things on first preferences would have yielded a different result.
Mary Hanafin FF Elected 11,884
Barry Andrews FF Elected (2nd count) 8,587
Eamon Gilmore Lab Elected (6th count) 7,127
Sean Barrett FG Elected (8th count) 5,361
Ciarán Cuffe Green Elected (10th count) 4,534
Richard Boyd Barrett Ind Eliminated 5,233
There were nearly 59,000 valid, unspoiled ballots in Dun Laoghaire, so all the parties that had candidates elected did better than the first preference tallies deliver. Fianna Fail got around a third of the votes but 40% of the representation (two out of five seats); Fine Gael got 20% percent of the representation with under ten percent of the first preference votes. So this seems quite disproportionate.
On the other hand, the candidates elected all had to pass a threshold to get elected (and their surplus first preference votes were passed on to someone else) So, in another sense all (except the last) of the candidates elected got the same number of votes, i.e. the minimum necessary to pass the threshold, so that way the result was proportionate. It’s just that some of these votes weren’t first preference votes.
Oh, it’s all a bit confusing. I can see I’m going to have to think a bit more about it (either that or just give in and buy a book on Irish politics and read about it). One further question I have is why do they have different numbers of seats per constituency? If having five seats ensures more proportionality than having three, then why are there any constituencies with three seats? Is it because if every constituency had the same number of seats, then to have the same number of voters per seat some constituencies would have to be geographically very large, which may diminish the importance of local issues in the election. And the option of differently many seats would allow the preservation of an element of locality without compromising the other desiderata to much.
