February 2002
The Fundamentals of Democratic Reform—Part V
by Gordon Gibson
As discussed in previous articles in this series, once government has been constrained to the smallest optimal size, power has been diffused among levels, and the tools of direct democracy have been put in place as a check to egregious error, what remains for control is still immense. Government spending still totals some 40.7 percent of GDP, actual government resource allocation is some 28.8 percent of GDP,1 and laws and regulations have enormous monetary and non-monetary impacts on our everyday lives.
The point for the moment is not whether this situation is right or wrong, but rather that government is awesomely important to us. Why, then, do most of us pay so little attention to government, seeing it more as a plague sent to be endured rather than an instrument to be used and controlled?
The problem lies with our main control mechanism, which is representative democracy. Almost all government decisions are made by our representatives, and, as argued earlier in this series, necessarily so. Our representatives are paid to spend their time gathering information and making decisions on our behalf. Ideally (and this seems obvious but is seldom said) we would like our representatives to make the same decisions in any given case as we ourselves would, were we there and similarly well informed.
That means that representatives should be, well, representative of the whole community, which is a tall order given the diversity of our land. Ideally, therefore, if 10 percent of the population prefer the colour black, 17 percent prefer green, and so on, our legislatures should reflect those preference proportions.
But that is not enough. Our representatives should also have similar incentives to the rest of us. If some of us worry in a very personal way about rising unemployment, or inadequate pensions, or inferior schools, or neighbourhood crime, or high taxes, so, ideally, should they. Customarily, of course, our representatives do everything they can to insulate themselves from the harsher incentives of life.
Our system in fact tends to fail these tests of representativeness and incentives in six ways.
1) As Nick Loenen has detailed, our current electoral system (so-called "first past the post," or more technically, "single member plurality") makes certain that much of the electorate is not represented in the Legislature in any way at all,2 because only the votes for the winner count, and the winner in our system can often take as little as 40 percent of the vote, or even less.
2) Entire regions may be very incompletely represented. Only half of Ontarians voted for the Liberals in the last federal election, but (with one exception) only Liberals were elected. The same phenomenon, if less dramatically, benefited the Alliance in the West.
3) Once a Legislature is elected, only those on the government side have any power. All constituencies foolish enough to support an opposition person are frozen out.
4) Even among the government members, only a few get close to real power, which is to say, into the Cabinet.
5) The way Cabinet government works in our system, only the First Minister and a very few close advisors wield all real power—and most of those advisors are not even elected! In other words, our real government is by a minority of a minority of a minority.
6) In the matter of incentives and as alluded to above, elected people's incentives quickly become very different from those of the people they represent. The money the representatives are spending is other people's money, not their own. Their chief incentive is to obtain good media and get re-elected, not to ensure good government.3 Fortunately there is some correlation between good media, getting re-elected, and good government. However, it is rather weak, and is made even more so by lack of information and government secrecy, the latter being a nigh universal problem in our system.
Indeed, when matters are put so baldly, it is a wonder that our governance is even as marginally adequate as it is at present. That it is not worse is a tribute to the many fine elected men and women who really do want to make the world a better place in spite of the perverse system, and, to some extent depending upon the jurisdiction, a tribute as well to a reasonably professional civil service.
From this viewpoint, the requirements for reform are pretty simple. First of all, the electoral system should be modified to make the Legislature more reflective of the community as a whole. Thereafter, the rules of the Legislature should be changed to ensure that each representative has a real voice. Finally, the incentive package should be changed to ensure a greater concordance between the rulers and the ruled.4
The first of these tasks, electoral reform, has been the subject of an enormous amount of study over the years, and a great deal of experimentation around the world. There is no single "right" system, for communities and countries differ greatly in their circumstances. Our Canadian system, for example, is well suited for a primitive society that is advanced enough for minimal democracy but still needs a "strong man" form of government. We no longer fit that profile.
Appropriate electoral systems will vary according to the relative homogeneity of a society, both locally and across its regions. The best choice will also depend upon not only the education and sophistication of the electorate, but also on the quality of communication links. Most importantly, the rules of election and the rules of the ensuing government structure are very inter-related. Parliamentary democracies where the executive branch requires continuous parliamentary support will have different electoral considerations than republican systems enjoying a separation of powers.
With all of these caveats it is my opinion—and, I believe, a generally shared one—that our system needs to be changed to deliver more representativeness, or "proportionality," as this is often called.
This does not necessarily mean what is usually referred to as "proportional representation," or "PR." As Nick Loenen's paper points out, there is a whole family of systems that deliver more or less proportionality, giving greater or less voter control over exactly which personalities are to rule them. These systems also offer greater or less direct geographical (i.e. constituency) representation, as opposed to, say, a nation-wide "list" system.
There are literally dozens of variations. Faced with this complex and important challenge, the government of British Columbia has proposed a promising approach to the question of electoral reform. According to the New Era document, there is to be a Citizen's Assembly on electoral reform charged with not just studying the various options in light of the needs of British Columbia, but then recommending appropriate change, if any. In line with the logic that an electoral system is the proper concern of the citizenry, not the government, the recommendations are then to be put to the people in a referendum, and subsequently implemented if approved.
Thus, there are grounds for believing that the electoral system, at least, is on its way to reform in British Columbia —a reform that may spread to other parts of the country.
But there is another, private electoral system that also cries out for attention, namely, the internal democracy of political parties in choosing leaders and candidates. That will be the subject of the next article in this series.
Notes
1 The difference between these two concepts is transfer payments to persons and organizations. In such cases the actual expenditure decisions of the transferred funds are made by non-government actors. However the government has still raised the money by taxation in the first instance, which has its own distorting effects.
2 See Nick Loenen's excellent paper "Selecting Representatives," presented at The Fraser Institute Conference on democratic reform on November 22, 2001, and available at www.fraserinstitute.ca.
3 This discordance in incentives is at the heart of public choice theory. A good primer is to be found in Mitchell and Simmons, Beyond Politics, Boulder, Colorado: The Independent Institute.
4 Note that this is in reference to legislators. Judges are quite a different thing. They are interpreters, not makers of the law—or at least, that is what they should be—and therefore they need a degree of isolation from ordinary incentives. This is why they have well-paid jobs for life, and are expected to refrain from most ordinary partisan and business activities.
Gordon Gibson (gordong@fraserinstitute.ca) has an MBA from Harvard and is The Fraser Institute’s Senior Fellow in Canadian Studies. He has served in the Prime Minister’s Office under Pierre Trudeau and as both an MLA and as leader of the BC Liberal Party (1975-79).
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