Adapted from e-mail conversations with RLC of 29, November and 13, December 1999. His comments are in blockquotes with a red bar to the side.
Sir, won't the annual elections simply drive out the poorer candidates and parties?
It is entirely possible that the poor candidates will be quickly removed by annual elections. To my mind this is one of the great strengths of such a system.
If a representative in parlaiment advocates a truely loony position, his constituents will be quick to abandon him when they find out and so he will be out on his ass before the next parlaiment.
The knowledge of this fact is quite desireable in the avoidance of bad laws, since only reasonable positions (from the perspective of that part of the political spectrum the particular representative respresents) will be taken and so the government will tend to be self-consistant.
But doesn't this also guarantee a session or two or three because of some hot flash point issue that will have the power to disturb the very existance of the government? Sir, often the political reaction in the new corrective parliament will be just as bad in its trying to reverse the perceived terrible laws of the earlier parliament . Sir, there is such a thing as government being to close and quick to respond to the will of the people. Sir, this is possibly a formula for facism, a form of government that it is very dictorial and undemocratic but strongly based on the will and emotions of the people at one time or another.
Only if no one knew this was true would it be a timebomb, since every politician who can gain and keep a seat in parlaiment knows this (since it's given that those who don't are thrown out quickly) there is no great problem. Politicians act in accordance with the wishes of the largest possible base of their constituents, they are particularly carefull not to offend as many people as possible (within the segment of the political spectrum which votes for them reliably, of course) and so tend to stick tenaciously to those parts of their platform which make them more popular generally and quietly drop those parts which make them less popular with their base. This produces a sort of political self-consistancy within a region and a party which intersect to make a particular candidate successful.
Plus STV provides an additional insulation against this: people know who their second choice is when a candidate looses their favour. They aren't likely to swing wildly to the other end of the political spectrum just because their MP is a loon, they'll swing slightly left or right to their next favorite choice, who is likely to be politically similar but without the known distastefull elements. Going from far left to center left isn't a particularly big change, especially when the base disapates in all directions, feeding the extreme left, and maybe even the center a little, too.
Only in the case of one party becoming extremely popular, then having a government so bad that everyone deserts it would anything like a toggle-switch change of government occur, and it would probably toggle from a majority-party government to a multiparty government centered somewhere around the old party.
Sir, I am beginning to think that the current American political process had dulled your thinking regarding how the heat of the moment which can last for a period of years could simply whip out any possibility of any stable government for many years to come. Sir, your too frequent elections would aid and abet flashpoint politics and undermine your self consistency . Sir, there are very sound reasons for having longer terms and not term limits.
Flashpoint politics: Possibly, but I have a hard time immagining issues which wouldn't simply become normal partizan objects subject to the political process.
The most likely case is that the majority of the population is convinced that it wants something, the politicians realize this, and those who recieve support from that segment push it through the political process and the people get what they want. Failing that, it quickly goes to initiative and the people push it through themselves.
Sir, in one election Canadians threw out the ruling and I believe majority Conservative Party to the point were it barely was represented in the next Parliament. Sir, I would say Canadians are a fairly stable lot as represented that their the new government went on to rule without to much alarm. Sir, but this did not happen in a time of high stress and political hatred and turmoil. Sir, add to this they did not have to face a new election that was either coming up next year or only two years down the road at most. Sir, there is no guarantee that at all that the center will reap the rewards and say history suggests that political turmoil begets political turmoil.
Canada has a first-past-the-post system which is only slightly more insulated than our own. The relevant examples are of countries with a system of proportional representation, where, when it happens at all, it happens either as a long-term change or as a change of coalition patterns between parties. The voting system within Parlaiment makes this unlikely to affect matters, since it tends to favour the center, regardless of the coalition patterns.
In the most relevant exemplars, Ireland, Malta, and Austrailia, all of which have to some degree an STV system, such toggle-switch changes of government almost never occur. The size of the pluralities changes, but nobody ever has a full majority and the countries are very stable in their governments.
A first-past-the post system with a majoritarian government has the interesting characteristic that it's not the proportion of the members that matters, as soon as one party has the majority it makes all the rules. So, since citizens are usually happy with their government, when parties change they tend to only do so by an overwhealming majority. That majority then erodes slowly until it reaches the threshold again, and then swing wildly in the other direction.
An STV system does not have this property when placed in a framework where a perminant coalition is not strictly nessicary to govern. A majority which erodes gradually dosn't automatically trigger a swing to a new majority, but rather a subtle re-alignment into a multiparty system.
Sir, I generally like how the people would chose their representatives for parliament. Sir, it is not unimportant that people trust and like their local representative the most immediate representative of governance in the land. Sir, I think that there is to high a chance that your member of Parliament would not be effective and get lost the deliberate nonpermanent nature of all your government offices
I can counter this by simple reference to fact. The California constitution mandates term limits far more restrictive than my own for both bodies of the legislature, yet we have an extremely effective legislature which passes a great many laws.
then be hit by all the checks and balances with no central authority.
As for this problem, I reference the American government, which is throughly balanced yet has no difficulty in passing and executing laws.
As for the difficulty: it's desireable in that it insures through deliberation before a bill is made law. This is as clost to mandating good government as it can get. The lack of central authority poses no difficulty because the routes of flow between the bodies are well-defined.
Sir, all of this could mean little to the well being of the formal government if its Constitution is was so arranged as to be seen as the impediment to getting things done because of its check and balances that only the insiders and knowing could possibly understand.
Beyond the general concepts of seperation of powers and checks and balances, what do non-insiders really *need* to know?
Only those who admire governmental structures (who, by definition, have great experience with the matter) and the members of governmental bodies really need to know all the implications of all the specific provisions and exactly how they work with the whole.
The checks imposed are no barrier to a truly popular proposal, which could be enacted quite swiftly by initiative with only the most minor of checks, or probably by the full process given that politicians love to see their names on a popular law.
Anyway, that it would be a barrier to desireable laws is an arguement against having a constitution in general, and just as applicable to any written constitution.
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