Institutions Matter
E.J. Dionne writes:
But Canadians, devoted as always to subtlety and prudence, refused to give Harper a majority. Diane Ablonczy, a Conservative parliamentarian from Alberta, offered a perceptive take on the voters' verdict. She said they "want to test-drive the Conservative Party" before allowing it to govern without help. In stable democracies, voters can take test-drives.
In the elections for the Palestinian Authority, the voters also rose up against the incumbents. But in the process, they gave a majority to Hamas, a party that has embraced terrorism and would obliterate Israel.
I completely agree with what follows this in the column, but it's important to be careful in attribute collective intentions to voters in legislative elections. Both Hamas in Palestine and the Conservative Party in Canada won pluralities, rather than majorities, of the total votes cast. Indeed, the Conservatives' margin over the Liberals in Canada was bigger than Hamas' margin over Fatah in Palestine. But Hamas wound up with a majority of seats and the Conservatives didn't because Canada and Palestine use different electoral systems (Canada uses first past the post voting in single-member constituencies like the US and UK, Palestine has a mixed system whose details I don't understand) and the third party dynamics in the two countries are different.
I think Matt got it wrong. In widely copied German system, one half of the parliamentary seats is allocated by vote in constituencies, and one half according to national percentages.
hamas got 46 out of 66 seats allocated by constituencies and 30 our of 66 of seats allocated from the national lists. This suggests that Hamas got 45% of the votes that we cast on lists, while Fatah got 40%.
In multi-mandate constituencise, one gets a ballot with names of all candidates running is that particular constituency, and than one marks some names, no more than the number of seats this constituency gets. There Hamas got 46 our of 66, while Fatah got 16.
As persons, Fatah candidates were popular in surprisingly few places
The biggest difference between Canadian results and Palestinian results is a much larger degree of regional variation in Canada as opposed to West Bank and Gaza.
January 27, 2006 9:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Palestinian system appears to be a variant of the proportional systems that are usual outside of UK-USA-Australia. As I write, there exists an explanation at Wikipedia that appear both clair, fair and legitimate to me. Given that the Wikipedia account is correct, and not changed after I saw it, the Palestinian system gives a much better representativity than the Candian system does.
January 27, 2006 4:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hmmm... one shouldn't write when one's tired. The Palestinian system is not much more proportional or representative, ...and whether the Wikipedia article gets changed or not does of course not influence the system the article describes. Embarrassing! ;-/
January 27, 2006 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dionne, whose work I admire, is just talking nonsense. You can't look at the Canadian vote and say they're "devoted to subtlety and prudence," or that they "refused to give Harper a majority." Each Canadian voter either voted for the Conservatives or voted for someone else, duh. How would a voter have to vote in order to manifest his devotion to subtlety and prudence? Was there a line on the ballot for "I vote for the Conservatives but against their getting a majority"?
January 27, 2006 11:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry Rat, but you've got it wrong. Dionne is taking some poetic license, but he's also pretty much on the mark. Canadiansare big fans "strategic voting". There are many Canadians who absolutely wanted the Liberals out, but when they saw that the Conservatives were almost certain to win more seats, decided to vote liberal in their riding anyway so that the Conservatives wouldn't get *too* many seats. It doesn't always work (Ontario was flabbergasted to wake up to an New Democrat majority in the early 90s -- everyone "protest voted" together and the ship capsized), but for the most part people guess right on this.
So while you're right that you can only vote for who you vote for, the "subtlety and prudence" lies in the sheer number of voters who wanted the Conservatives to win but voted against them. And got exactly what they wanted.
January 28, 2006 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink