Discouraging clientelism
Read more about: Democracy, Electoral Register, Grassroots, Ireland, Law, Oireachtas, Referenda 
We don’t discuss the topic of electoral reform here on Irish Election, so I thought I’d throw out some crazy ideas I’ve had on how we can reform the process to fix some of the endemic problems in our system of government.
Ireland is a country of just over four million people, with a parliament consisting of 226 members in total, with 166 members in the the lower house and 60 in the upper, so for a nation of our size, we’ve a disproportionally high number of public representatives for a country our size.
The constitution places upper and lower limits on the number of representatives in the lower house in article 16.2.2, specifically one representative for every 20,000 to 30,000 of the population. The use of electoral constituencies is implicit in the language of the article, but does not specify the shape of those constituencies, nor whether they can overlap–these are all matters of statute rather than basic law.
As things stand, Irish politics is riddled with clientelism, with our politicians overly focused on getting elected again the next time an election comes around, so they spend far too much time acting as delegates from their constituency rather than as trustees of the best interests of the nation as a whole, which is what they ought to be. We need some way of breaking this cycle, and I think I’ve a way.
My idea is that fully one third of the representation should be elected nationally from a single national constituency. Doing this alone would be technically feasible due to do through an act to amend our electoral law, but the one sticking point is the use of the single transferrable vote (STV)–three-, four- and five-seater constituencies are enough of a pain to do the count on, never mind a massive national constituency that can elect over fifty TDs!
The use of STV is codified into the constitution. This has been a good thing because it’s avoided the situation where Fianna Fail could change the electoral law to use first past the post (FPTP) to get a permanent majority of the seats in the Dail. For a national constituency to be practical, a constitutional amendment would be required to specify the method used for electing from that constituency. In my mind, a party list system appear be the feasible method.
Do I think this would solve our problems? No, but I do think it would be a step in the right direction towards governments that worked in the best interests of the nation rather than themselves.
[First posted on talideon.com]
Keith, good idea but one problem. Irish people seem to like clientelism. That’s why FF keep getting elected, cos they are so good at it.
To be honest I think what’s more important is to have elected deputies not feeling like their party completely runs their lives. We need a system more like in Westminster where there are single-seat constituencies; where a member can say “Right, I’m going against that” and not be bullied with the threat of losing the Party Whip as a result (if there were single-seaters, a party couldn’t threaten to withdraw the whip for fear of having the TD returned as an independent next election).
What I’d prefer to see is single-seater constituencies, a third of the size of the current ones. That way we wouldn’t need to have such an enormous upheaval, and it would also completely get rid of the problem that destroys public life right now: that TDs can simply dodge responsibility for an issue because there are others who are equally responsible for solving a problem.
The only problem would be whether you’d need a constitutional referendum to introduce the single-seaters or whether you could force through an interpretation of the 20,000-30,000 rule that would comply with it…
It’s not a bad idea. Only thing is, it hinges on those TDs elected on a national basis being the ones who are selected for the cabinet. Otherwise, you’d have nationally-mandated backbenchers and parish pump Ministers; and that’d be the same as what we have now in effect.
And if you want to ensure that only nationally-elected TDs can be Ministers, you have to amend the constitution; and if you have to do that anyway, you might as well chose a better system than the party list one (such as a variant on the swiss model of direct democracy).
The thing is though, the government here has been consistently concentrating authority in itself over the local governmental bodies for the past decade or more; going to any form of system where the core doesn’t control everything would require you to basicly sack every TD in Dail Eireann and every mandarin in the Civil Service first!
The dutch use a full constituency model with a party list system to dole out seats on the basis of proportionality. Its also a question of what hte Irish people will actually get through a referendum. They are remarkably attacked to STV (and why not? – it delivers so much face time and ‘pull’).
The other problem with a mixed sysetm of list and constituency is that often times politicans find themselves wanting to gravitate toward constituency selection seeing the people’s vote for them as preferable to being picked on a list (I forget the reason, I am actually heading home to do some reading on this topic so forgive some of the vagueness, I suspect it gets them away from internal politiking and appears more legitimate) which brings us back to a situation of pols pandering to constituents over and above the national interest.
It isnt that it wouldnt work – though questions of a dual standard of politicians is intersting- but it is about making them want to stay in the ‘national’ panel that elected them. It is by far though the easiest way to ensure that certain expertise can be brought to the Dail and possibly to cabinet.
What countries have managed to move on from clientism?
It is a red herring. Clientelism just means being in touch with your constituents and finding out what their lives are like by following up issues on their behalf. Remove clientelism and you have an ivory tower. The reason we are in the mess we are in is that the wrong policies were implemented and behind those policies was the wrong ideology. The FF/PD policies we’ve had implemented were a mistake. Blaming it on clientilism is just an excuse to keep voting for the wrong politics.
@Sarah Carey: Sadly true.
@Gav: I agree, but that’s largely a consequence of the strength of the Whip in Irish politics as opposed to a consequence of STV, in my opinion. I very much doubt it would make any difference in that regard if we used FPTP; there’s plenty of evidence that former party loyalties would remain strong. You only need to look at the way FF quasi-independents vote on issues for evidence. What politicians who go independent lose is the party machine, but if they’ve been smart and built up a solid local machine, they’re actually in a good place.
I wouldn’t support the use of FPTP personally because STV has acted as a moderating influence on the two major parties here, whereas FPTP would give majorities far too easily.
A constitutional referendum would be needed to introduce FPTP—FF have tried to introduce it umpteen times in the past, and failed each and every time.
@Mark Dennehy: I think that’s largely a matter of the calibre and cuteness of the individual politician. Somebody elected from the nationally would still have the same kind of mandate as a constituency politician. TDs from that pool wouldn’t be in a ghetto like senators are – once they’re elected, they’re part of the same body as all the others. The one and only difference is that they’re prospects of being elected and reelected wouldn’t be dependent on local politics—something that councillors should be dealing with. If anything, it’d be in their interests to be visible!
I agree wholeheartedly with you on the decay of local government. The concentration of power in central is also an immense part of the problem. True decentralisation would be making local government worthwhile again, otherwise the whole concept of local government is bankrupt and should be done away with. But that’s unlikely to ever happen.
@Cian: It’s not really a matter for getting rid of STV, just that a proportion of TDs would be elected by another method. I like the Dutch system, but I’m not sure I’d use a party list for the election of all TDs—there’s something to be said for having a good proportion being constituency politicians. The point here is to moderate the influence of expressly local issues better dealt with locally on national politics.
@Niall: None, but it’s about discouraging or at least moderating it rather than totally eliminating it altogether.
@May: No, no red herring here. Your reasoning assumes that I’m talking of getting rid of constituency politicians altogether, but I’m not. I said that a third would be elected nationally, not half, not two thirds, but a third. Where’s the ivory tower? The idea that I’m looking to promote ivory tower thinking is the real red herring. I’m not against politicians listening to constituents, but I am against issues that should be dealt with locally effecting national politics. Need I bring up the idiocy of ‘decentralisation’? Need I bring up Abbottstown? Need I bring up politicians fiddling in planning issues? Need I bring up the idiotic National Spatial Strategy? And they’re just the things I can think of off the top of my head!
Of course, part of this is down to our weak system of local government, as I mentioned to Mark above. But that’s another discussion, though a worthwhile one; what I’m interested in right now is how we can improve how we select our representatives.
Tell me, do you’ve any better ideas for encouraging the people we elect to think in the national interest rather than having them worry about keeping their seat five years down the line? I’m open to suggestion.
Hope people don’t mind me contributing, but I have experience in Australia, where we both have STV-style elections as well as single-member preference systems. My experience is that in the ACT and Tasmania, where elections are similar to the Irish system, political parties tend to have much less control over their MPs to the big states, where the lower houses are elected using single-member preferences (similar to the system used in Irish by-elections).
On the Australian mainland, most state upper houses and the Senate technically use STV, but a very different system. We have “above the line” voting, where candidates are grouped according to the party they run in, and they are ranked.
So in the Senate, where each state elects 6 Senators at each election, the Labor Party and Liberal/National Party will each run six candidates, ranked in order. Most voters vote “above the line”, meaning their votes are cast according to the party’s wishes. Because each party wins 2-3 Senate seats, those in the first and second seats are basically guaranteed a seat, even if they don’t campaign, and they tend to be party hacks who no-one has ever heard of.
Also because it’s not practical to conduct a by-election in a big state with 7 million voters (like NSW), parties are given the power to automatically fill any vacancies in the Senate. Even more so, this means that Senators from major parties are completely reliant on their parties and have no personal vote. They tend to be seen as having less legitimacy, although the fact that lower houses have no PR at all and thus no representation of minor parties means that the Senate in general is seen as being a legitimate body.
But if you did want to have a bunch of TDs elected “at large” rather than by constituency (say 50) it might be constitutional to use the system NSW use, which while it’s technically an STV system, it’s more like a party-list system with preferences. Parties submit lists of candidates and most votes are cast according to party. Eg you vote [1] Green, [2] Labour, [3] Fine Gael, and your vote goes to all the Greens candidates first, then all the Labour candidates, then all the FG candidates.
If I remember correctly, Roy Jenkins produced a seminal analysis on an STV voting system for Britain in 1997 or thereabouts. As Ben Raue mentions above, one of the key defects of list systems is that party apparatchiks end up with too much influence over who makes it on to the list, increasing the ‘democratic deficit’, as only politicians who ‘toe the line’ with head office stand a chance of getting or staying on the list. The form of transferable vote introduced in the UK for European elections has seen this happen in practice – troublemaking poltiicians/candidates excluded from the list nest time out.
Noel Dempsey tried to initiate a national debate on electoral reform when he became Minister for Environment here in 1997, specifically the introduction of a list system with options for a number of single seat constitutencies so that one third of members of the Dail would be primarily legislators and so on. Most pundits took the view that Fianna Fail would end up with a permanent parliamentary majority under a reformed system, and typically, that this was part of an FF conspiracy to that purpose. In fact, Dempsey was genuinely interested in useful parliamentary reform, but there was no great appetite for his ideas among the public or politicians in general so the package was only partly implemented e.g. prohibition on two tier membership of Councils and the Oireachtas and the decision to pay salaries to Councillors.
This partial reform has arguably left us with the worst of all worlds. From 2005 onwards, TDs, and Senators were also provided with an allowance to hire political assistants/research personnel, supposedly to help them research their policy positions on national legislation. In practice most of them have used the allowance to boost their constituency staff, keeping back part of it to pay for fancy leaflets and newsletters that clog up peoples’ post boxes. When it comes to appointing substitutes to take over their places on Councils following their own election to national assemblies, TDs have also used that as an opportunity to shore up their own electoral base in their constituencies or provide their relatives with handy salaries at the public expense. The introduction of salaries for Councillors has not resulted in any improvement, by any yardstick of measurement, in either the quality of public representation or any reduction in its cost at that level. I can’t understand why, in the current financial crisis, no-one has as yet suggested that salaries to Councillors should be immediately abolished. Similarly with the much abused allowance to Oireacthas members for so-called parliamentary assistants. We, the public, are paying out a tidy sum to our elected representatives that they are using solely to promote themselves in their respective constituencies to ensure they keep their jobs at the next election, not the purpose for which the payment was ever intended at all.
I’ve always thought that with our version of STV Ireland has the most democratic electoral system in the world and the least democratic parliamentary system – the direct opposite of the UK. We have far too many TDs and the continued existence of the Senate has to be questioned – its abolition would make no difference whatsoever to the quality of our legislature since its electorate, apart from the University seats, is restricted to circa 1000 Councillors and the system of election to it is profoundly undemocratic, quite appart from the ‘Taoiseach’s eleven’ that guarantees every Government a Senate majority from the outset. A reform that reduced the number of TDs to about 100 and abolished the Upper House or if not, opened it up to the universal electorate(for example, one Senator per constituency) might be a useful start.
The real problem though, is in how the Dail works. Or doesn’t, more accurately. The system whereby the whip is applied to all votes is quite ridiculous and discourages debate and independent thinking amongst our parliamentarians. Whips should apply to financial votes only. That way, TDs would have to think through their positions on policy issues and be mroe responsive to their broader constituencies and the public at large. The system for debates and for raising topical issues in the Dail is also archaic. The expansion of the Committee system has simply been used to create additional salaried posts for backbenchers and key members of the opposition parities. All of this nonsense should be stopped in its tracks and the current crisis offers an excellent opportunity for reform as part of an overall package of public service reform in which it should be a key item. If we know anything right now, it is that our parliamentary system is failing us badly at precisely the time we need it most.
As for so-called clientilism – I have no problem with it since it promotes access by ordinary citizens to their public representatives. A more robust parliamentary system would sort out a lot of the problems in this area too, since it would raise the bar on the quality of discussion on national issues at every level, in the media, in the parliament and on the street.
sarah carey the regressive voice
Speaking as someone who spent most of his life in a place where there are no proportionally-voted-for members of the parliament, and yet rebellions against party are quite common…
Undemocratic first-past-the-post single-member constituency elections can create bizarrely-undemocratic outcomes — which may be why FF spent so long here trying to change the voting system to match Britain’s — you don’t have to look for long to find results where there are four candidates and the “winner” got 25% of the vote plus one.
But they do create ’safe seats’. A reliable 38% or so and solid constituency party support essentially sets a member up for life. That’s where you get people who are prepared to tell the party whips to shove it up their arses.
And again, having seen this parochial tosh after living elsewhere, it’s obvious that it stems from two places working in tandem:
a) An unbelievably unresponsive civil service full of jobsworths with no job requirement to help people, and
b) TDs who deliberately cultivate the idea that you can’t get anything done with a government agency directly because of a), and that you therefore need them for everything
In fact a) needn’t even be true, but b) certainly doesn’t help a) improve.
I’d submit, however, after 20 years of voting for no good reason whatsoever since the result was predetermined and my vote was worth nothing at all, that we have it pretty good.
Except, that is, for the parts of our electoral system where proportionality is being perverted and undermined. I speak of 3- and 4-seat constituencies. The Constituency Commissions can and should be instructed to elevate maintaining proportional representation above following county boundaries when constructing seats, and to assume that 3-seaters cannot reasonably return a proportional result. Remember that there’s no upper limit on seats in a constituency and (to pick one extreme example) nothing to stop all of Dublin City being redrawn as one 30-seat block.
Labour, the Greens, SF and independents are being screwed by 3- and 4-seat constituencies and the Dail would look very different if we set a 5-seat minimum. We can do that through legislation, and through telling the Constituency Commission of our new priority in favour of democratic representation, without recourse to any constitutional amendments.
@Keith In what way will changing the electoral system change our political culture?
In the mid 1980s, an Irish Times MRBI poll found that of the key factors which voters said would “influence then a lot” in deciding how to vote
1). 75 per cent opted for “Choosing a TD who look after the local needs of the constituency”
2) 53 per cent said that choosing a candidate who will perform effectively on national issues in the Dail
3) 45 per per cent said that party policies were important
4) 27 per cent identified choice of Taoiseach as a key factor.
If anyone can point to other more recent polling data on the same question, I would appreciate it.
But think about how our current politicians behave. On his election, the Taoiseach appealed first to Fianna Fail and then to his constituency. Little or no recognition from him of the wider public as shown by many US Presidents when elected. Also, look at the efforts candidates make to ensure that they have huge personal votes in their constituencies eg. Bertie Ahern. What is there to suggest that in actually voting, people would not still look for and appealing to constituency loyalties?
Assuming that this poll finding still holds, in what way would having a different electoral system change or improve anything?
Another thing about list systems is that they give huge power to those who place candidates on the list. IMO, the best way to see how that might operate here is the membership of the Senate. Of the 60 Senators, 90 per cent (54) are either elected by other elected representatives (Councillors, TDs etc) or appointed by the Taoiseach, another elected representative. Looking at the membership of the Senate, is there anything in its composition that suggests that any part of our political culture is trying to beyond clientalism? I suggest that this experience shows the kind of people who will get placed on a list, when membership of the list is controlled by central party managers.
In the UK, one part of that state changed from the first past the post (FPTP) system to a multi-seat STV for elections to the European Parliament. Northern Ireland is unique in the UK is having multi-seat STV.
IMO, this illustrates what UK observers pointed out ie. “History, political culture and the pattern of a nation’s socio-economic cleavages are almost always more important than the details of its electoral arrangements” The also pointed out that “the same system of proportional representation that is alleged to have doomed the German Weimar republic operated throughout the interwar period in Czechoslovakia(sic) where it enhanced democracy instead of undermining it” (Democracy and Elections: Electoral System and their Political Consequences. Edited by Vernon Bogdanor and David Butler)
I suggest that the effects of introducing a new electoral system can be very unpredictable. Even within our multi-seat STV system, this can happen. The post 1973 Coalition Government changed the constituencies so that there was a large number of 3-seaters, thinking that this would copper-fasten the then FG-Lab Coalition. This backfired in the 1977 election, when FF got a 20 seat majority, because they won 2 seats in many constituencies. This political response to this was to have constituencies redrawn by an Independent Commission!
We need to be very clear about what we hope to achieve by proposing and adopting another electoral system.
If our T.D’s were mostly focused on their own seats and votes they wouldn’t be loyally voting for the Government on issues such as the Education cuts, the medical card, the pension levy. I don’t believe with what they are doing but it is not clientelism that is making them keep loyal to their party on key votes, it is actually a loyalty to their party and a view that their party is doing what is best for the country. Again the problem is not clientelism, it is the ideology of the party the voters chose to give the most votes in the last 3 elections, that is the problem. With every thing up in the air now about the values that underpinned the “celtic tiger” the voters may well make a different choice next time and the fact that we have PR, “clientelism” etc. won’t influence that choice one way or another.