Guest Post: Democracy Should Be for Election Losers as well as Winners

Hi all. Posting has been sporadic, to put it mildly, as I wrap up my dissertation. In the meantime, I’m happy to present this thought-provoking overview of the health of Canada’s democracy by UBC alumnus Chris Tenove. Chris is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics and Munk School of Global Affairs. He lives in Vancouver.

By Chris Tenove

Whatever happens in Monday’s election, many Canadians will wake up disappointed on Tuesday. The local representative we voted for will have lost, or our preferred party will not form government. It’s therefore worth remembering why democracy is the best political system for those who are on the losing side of elections, and not just for the winners.

Three features make losing more palatable and less dangerous in democracies – the legitimacy of elections, checks and balances on executive power, and a democratic culture of inclusion. Unfortunately, the Conservative government has undermined all three.

First, in functioning democracies, elections produce a government that is legitimate. We may be disappointed but we do not feel cheated, since each person had an equal opportunity to vote and each vote counted (more or less) equally.

However, with the misnamed Fair Elections Act, the Conservative government undermined fair and equal participation. The Act reduces Elections Canada’s programs to encourage voting, and takes away vouching or Voter Information Cards as sufficient proof of identification at polling stations. These changes are expected to make voting more difficult for thousands of people, with a greater impact on people less likely to vote Conservative, including student, indigenous and poor voters. The Act also reduces Elections Canada’s role in policing electoral laws.

Beginning Tuesday, we need to see how these changes affected the election. If people have faced unequal obstacles to voting, and if any party violated electoral laws as the Conservative party has in the past, we need to root out failings. Whether or not we pursue new voting systems, as the NDP and Liberals have proposed, we need to make sure that Canadian elections are increasingly equal, open and fair.

Second, elected governments face several institutional checks and balances, which help protect vulnerable groups and those on the losing side of elections.

Chief among these is the division of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Stephen Harper’s record here is clear: he has consolidated power in the Prime Minister’s Office to a degree not seen previously in Canadian history. The legislative branch is a ghost of its former self, with honest debate stifled in the House of Commons and Committees, with omnibus bills rammed through without sufficient time for study, and with MPs given little independence or authority.

The judicial branch has been threatened (including public attacks on Chief Justice McLachlin), and its rulings have sometimes been subverted or ignored. For instance, the Federal Court found the Conservative policy limiting health care for refugee claimants to be “cruel and unusual,” and ordered the government to reinstate preexisting coverage until there was a new policy or a successful appeal. Instead, the government simply disregarded the ruling, not only harming this vulnerable group but the rule of law itself.

The Senate, too, is supposed to act as a check and balance. Its ability to represent Canada’s regions and improve policies was compromised before Stephen Harper became prime minister. But as we learned from the Mike Duffy trial, the Prime Minister’s Office put great effort into corrupting the Senate in private, while publicly attacking its credibility and delaying meaningful reform.

The Conservative government has also chipped away at the quality and openness of the public service. We want our public servants to develop policies in a transparent, innovative and evidence-based manner. Instead, we have seen knowledge smothered, facts ignored, and government units re-purposed as advertising agencies for Conservative ministers.

Beginning Tuesday, we will need to reinvigorate these institutions that improve our public programs and restrain an overly powerful executive office.

This takes me to our democracy’s third major defense of those who are on the losing side of elections, one that is even more fundamental than fair elections and democratic institutions. That is a culture of tolerance, curiosity and care among our diverse citizens. Such a culture prompts us to work together with citizens on the goals and problems we share, and to aid those who are attacked or neglected.

This is why electoral tactics of stigmatization and dishonesty by the Conservatives has been so galling. Whether singling out wearers of the niqab as un-Canadian, promoting xenophobia through a “barbaric cultural practice” hot line, or spreading falsehoods to targeted audiences (such as advertising in Chinese and Punjabi media that Liberals plan to sell pot to kids), the Conservative party has shown a willingness to win votes by poisoning our political culture. This, too, must now be restored.

Democracy in Canada remains deeply entrenched. Whoever wins the election on Monday will have done so in a fairly legitimate process, will face laws and institutions that help guard against abuse of power, and will govern a country with admirable trust and concern among its diverse citizens. But whoever takes office on Tuesday should reverse the anti-democratic policies that Conservatives have pursued in recent years, and work to make democracy in Canada stronger.

Photo:B.C. NDP Leader Adrian Dix walks away from the podium and leaves the stage after conceding defeat in the provincial election in Vancouver, B.C., on Tuesday May 14, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Are the Liberals losing the Progressive Primary?

Are the Liberals in trouble? Recent developments—including not only the recent NDP win in Alberta, but also the continuing opposition to Bill C51—suggest it’s a question worth asking, as does a new poll putting the NDP in first place.

In Canada’s present federal political configuration, dating from the emergence of a united Conservative alternative, it is convenient (if oversimplistic) to think of Canadian politics as consisting of two simultaneous competitions: the progressive primary and the main event. That dual campaign gives contemporary Canadian federal party politics much of its character.

With the Conservatives apparently able to capture a sturdy but limited 30-40% share of the vote, a big win in the progressive primary is a necessary prerequisite for either the Liberals or the NDP to have a shot at winning an election. That is, one or the other must convince progressives who dislike the incumbent that they stand the better chance of unseating them. If neither does so decisively,

So just who is the GOAT POTUS?

Last month, inspired by a recent blog post in the Washington Post, and more generally the sabermetric revolution in baseball, I set out to sort out who the MVP was. You know, the Most Valuable President.

Rating Presidential Performance: The EAR of the President

So who is the MVP (Most Valuable President)?

Last week, Philip Bump of the Washington Post published an interesting little  post outlining what he thought were the best and the worst years to have been President in the last 70-odd years. The method was simple: compare across years how presidential approval, as measured by Gallup polls, changed over the course of the year. It’s just intended for fun, and not in any way scientific. The results are interesting, however. The best year? GW Bush, year 1. The worst? His father’s annus horribilis in 1991, when his approval dropped a stomach churning 33%.

Of course, it immediately struck me that I could do something similarly unscientific, yet WAAAAY more needlessly sophisticated. In part, I am inspired  by the sabermetrics revolution

Op-ed: Hey, stop hating on coalition governments!

The idea of coalition government has taken a beating recent years in Canada. The most recent example of the form comes courtesy of Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak, who said they are not good for voters. From the Globe and Mail:

“I do hope that Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath will stop all this coalition talk,” he said outside the polling station. “Voters don’t like that. It might be good for politicians, it’s not good for the province. I say no to coalitions. And I hope that Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath will stop this game and be equally clear.”

Talk that delegitimizes coalition government has long been a pet peeve of mine, so I fired off a response in the Ottawa Citizen. Among other things, it says:

The problem is such talk shapes opinions. Over time, if repeated often enough, they create a reality of their own. While uncommon in Canada, coalitions are a perfectly legitimate and potentially useful form of government, one seen now and then in most other Westminster-style parliaments.

If enough politicians claim that they’re illegitimate, however, Ontarians — and Canadians, since this debate occurs at the federal level as well — may come to accept it as fact, effectively taking off the table a potentially useful form of government in times of political uncertainty.

You can read it all here.

Op-ed: Canada needs to incentivize voting

[Update: the National Post link to this article no longer seems to work. I’ve posted the full text below.]

About a week ago, my friend and colleague David Moscrop wrote an intriguing op-ed in the National Post arguing that the biggest problem facing Canadian democracy is not low turnout, but unreflective voters. Among other things, it is a critique of the idea of mandatory voting. His full argument is here.

While certainly supportive of the idea that we need Canadians more engaged in politics, I nonetheless find the basic goal of increased turnout by various mechanisms, including mandatory or otherwise incentivized voting, to be convincing. At the same time, I found problematic David’s idea that increased turnout without additional reflection can actually be counter-democratic.  Eventually, I wrote my own op-ed:

Incentivize voting

Political reform is in the air. Conservative MP Michael Chong’s innovative Reform Act is working its way through Parliament. New civil society organizations, such as Samara, are generating ideas for bettering our political system. Even the government’s reviled Fair Elections Act has spurred Canadians to think more seriously about the kind of democracy they want.

Compulsory voting is also enjoying another moment in the sun, thanks in large part to a full-throated endorsement by Post columnist Andrew Coyne (‘Compulsory voting worth a try,’ May 15). Supporters of mandatory voting worry about declining turnout rates, and there are valid reasons for concern. Just 61% of registered voters showed up to the ballot box in the 2011 federal election – down from a peak of 79% in the early 1960s. A mere 24%, less than one in four, actually cast a ballot for the winning Conservatives.

Even worse, the divide between those who vote and those who do not is increasingly based on politically salient factors like age and class. Voters in Canada tend to be older and better educated than their non-voting counterparts. Non-voters tend to have somewhat lower incomes and to be less religious; they are also more likely to be foreign born, and of non-European origin. The same research also shows that people born after the Baby Boomers vote at lower rates than their predecessors did at the same age.

The result is socially uneven representation. Citizens at Canada’s social and economic margins are, to some extent, estranged from the country’s political system. Elected governments, in turn, see little profit in reaching out to them, producing a vicious circle of selective alienation.

Even so, critics fear that compulsory voting constitutes a cure worse than the disease, as compelled or induced votes would likely be made with less thought. Writing in the National Post, David Moscrop argues that society would be better off trying to produce “better citizens,” who are trained in the ways of critical thought and vote only after investing the time and energy necessary to make an informed choice, even if it means fewer votes cast (‘Some people shouldn’t vote,’ May 24).

Others suggest that there is a moral component to voting; that voters are performing their duty as citizens, or conversely, that the freedom not to vote is itself valuable. Either way, those who fail to vote ought to live with the consequences, should the elected government serve their interests poorly. Still others worry that any fines levelled against non-voters will tend to punish the very voters they are intended to help, since marginalized Canadians will likely continue to stay away from the polls in larger numbers than others.

While these arguments are all valid, they are also somewhat problematic. Concerns about uninformed voting constitute a false dichotomy: The goal ought to be to maximize both voter knowledge and turnout, rather than pitting one against the other. Any qualification for voting, however soft or well-intentioned, puts us on a slippery slope towards literacy tests and outright voter suppression. Meanwhile, to argue that voting is a moral duty, is to suggest that those at the centre of Canadian social life are more virtuous than those on the edges. That’s an awkward case to make, and it still leaves us with the serious problem of selective political alienation described above. The argument can also be turned back on itself: If voting is a duty, why not make it mandatory, like paying taxes or registering births and marriages? What’s needed is a solution that reinforces voting as a valued piece of civic engagement. Voting is, among other things, a habit, one that can be cultivated like any other. Incentivized voting is one way to do so. This would appeal to narrow self-interest in the short term, while also laying the foundations for a more engaged citizenry in the long run. It needn’t be a punitive system, either: Voters could easily be compensated through mechanisms, such as modest tax credits. Other strategies associated with positive habit formation ought to work, as well. This would leave intact the freedom not to vote for those who cherish that right.

Incentivized voting provides a workable solution to a real problem. If it is ultimately rejected, Canadians will have to find another approach, because the underlying issue of declining and uneven turnout is not going away.

Stewart Prest is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia. Follow him on Twitter @StewartPrest.

photo credit: JosephGilbert.org via photopin cc

Bartleby, the Mayor

It occurred to me this morning while watching the daily, and increasingly listless and uncertain coverage of Rob Ford unfold on my twitter feed that Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” provides an unlikely, yet illuminating lens through which to view the unending saga of Toronto’s mayor. It’s a classic, and an easy read at less than 15,000 words. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait. (What? All right, fine. Here’s a summary, and here’s the Wikipedia page.)

At first glance, the comparison seems strained at best. Bartleby is a relative nobody, a scribe in a lawyer’s office. He is courteous, quiet and passive, ultimately fatally so. Ford is an important public figure, a loud, bombastic, and impetuous one at that. If he has a fatal flaw, it would seem to be impulse control. Nonetheless, Bartleby and Ford share a common quality, one as rare in the 19th century as it is in the 21st, namely the ability, perhaps even the compulsion, to break with the social norms that bind members of the respective societies in which they live.

Race in the NFL Draft

In case you were wondering, race is still important in the U.S., including in American sports. Thanks to Deadspin, we can even quantify this to some extent.

Op-ed: Green Party Can Win, by Giving Up

[Update 23/5/14: With the disappearance of the original from the Ottawa Citizen’s pages—a perennial problem with the recently replaced website—I have reproduced the original article in its entirety here. Oh, and speaking of the new site, go check it out if you haven’t already. It’s a beaut, and the associated apps are something as well. SP]

My op-ed from last week’s Ottawa Citizen:

More than 80 per cent of Canadians believe there is “solid evidence” that the Earth has got warmer in recent decades, according to a survey released recently by think-tank Canada 2020 in co-operation with the University of Montreal. The same study found that 77 per cent of Canadians are concerned about global warming/climate change, and that nearly nine in 10 agree that the federal government ought to play a leading role in addressing the issue.

These results are at once a vindication and a repudiation of the Green Party of Canada. It is a validation of the idea that Canadians are concerned about climate change, and want to elect representatives who will act decisively on the issue.

Just as clearly however, it’s a rejection of the idea that the Green party can fulfil that need within the confines of Canada’s electoral system. Even as Canadians achieve consensus on the need for action on climate change, the party remains mired at about five-per-cent support nationally. The Greens have been utterly unable to leverage nearly universal concern about the environment into increased electoral support.

It’s not their fault, of course. The challenges facing the Green party are structural, and unlikely to be overcome absent a change in Canadian electoral law. In first-past-the-post political systems such as ours, only a small number of parties can achieve success at any given time. Moreover, competitive parties almost always identify themselves with a broad philosophy of governance applicable in general terms to any political issue, which in turn constitutes part of the bedrock of trust on which broad electoral success is built.

The Green party defines itself by an issue of concern, rather than a governing philosophy. In a proportional representation system, that can be enough to attract significant support. In a system like Canada’s, it is demonstrably not. Outside a small handful of ridings in the country, a vote for the Greens remains a protest vote, and that’s simply not good enough any more.

As Postmedia has reported, Canadians have moved from a debate about whether we should take action on climate change, to what kind of solutions we ought to pursue. Accordingly, the Green party must think hard about how it can contribute most constructively to this new phase of the discussion.

Here is my proposal: the Green party should abandon the pursuit of electoral victory, and embrace a new role in Canadian politics as a Green Network dedicated to support competitive candidates who have made credible commitments to act on climate change, regardless of party affiliation.

I call it the Kenobi Option. (Stay with me here.) Long story short, in the original Star Wars movie Obi-Wan Kenobi recognized that with his own personal flaws, he could never accomplish his goals (i.e. defeating the evil Darth Vader and more generally saving the galaxy). He decided his best option was to give up his own struggle, but did so in a way that granted him a different sort of power. He gained the ability to influence, to work with, to teach someone who had a chance to carry out that greater mission.

The Green party could do something similar. It could recognize its inherent limitations, and agree to abandon its current party form, in exchange becoming the backbone of a powerful movement in Canadian politics.

At base, this Green Network would work with its members in each riding in the run-up to each election to: 1) push all candidates to more progressive environmental positions and then; 2) work with local voters to select and support one candidate in each riding as a “green champion” for that riding around which green voters could coalesce. To be a champion, a candidate would: a) be judged to have made credible commitments to pursue meaningful action on climate change; and b) be highly competitive electorally.

This change would achieve a number of effects. By removing one name from the ballot, it would by definition reduce the likelihood of vote splitting among pro-environmental candidates. The selection of a green champion would further ease voter co-ordination among the remaining candidates. The result? The mandate—indeed a responsibility—to push for action. Between elections, the network would be well positioned to ensure MPs elected with its support honoured their pledges, since those that did not would risk the loss of the “green bump” in subsequent elections.

There are secondary benefits as well. Former Green party members—a dedicated and resourceful group of politically active citizens—would be free to join other political parties, and could work to strengthen existing environmental caucuses there. Rather than encouraging Canadians to elect the Green party, they would instead be working to ensure that whichever party Canadians ended up electing was greener – an approach analogous to effective lobbying campaigns. Finally, a pan-party network would provide a new space for communication and co-operation within our polarized political institutions.

So come on, Greens! Strike yourselves from the ballot and become more powerful than you (or we) could possibly imagine. You rightly pride yourselves on encouraging creative thinking in the face of the environmental challenges that confront us. It’s time to start thinking creatively about the political problems we face as well.

Stewart Prest is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia. Follow him at Twitter.com/StewartPrest.

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I’ve also turned the article into a call for dialogue between environmentally-sensitive voters within and outside the Green Party. Please read, sign, and share it here if you’re interested.

photo credit: like, totally via photopin cc

Oh, Split!

So, did the Greens really split the vote in last night’s BC election? That’s the claim being made by many today. There are a couple of ways to consider this question. The simplest is to examine the margin of victory in the election, and compare it to the Greens’ result. The GP captured just over 130,000 votes, or 8% of the total; in comparison, the margin of victory was about 80,000 votes, or 4.9%. If we simply take the GP total and add it to the NDP, the Dippers come out on top.

We can get a little fancier and repeat the exercise on a district-by-district basis. There were 61 districts with Green candidates running, and in 23 of them, their vote share exceeded the margin of victory. 12 were won by Liberals, 10 by NDP, and 1 by the GP itself. (Congratulations Dr. Weaver!)  If we repeat the process from above and add the Green votes to the NDP totals, the revised result has the NDP gaining 13 seats, narrowly winning the election with a total of 46 seats to 38, with one independent. Again, vote splitting seems to be at work, right?

Not so fast.

Both the above approaches assume that, absent a Green Party, all Green voters would simply move en masse to vote for the NDP. This seems unlikely, however. Green parties at both provincial and federal levels regularly tout their ability to attract support from across the political spectrum, and to activate voters who have no strong ties to any of the other parties.[1] Accordingly, while some Green supporters probably would vote NDP, others would likely vote for the Liberals, and some might stay home.

Absent good polling data on BC Green voters’ second best options (and frankly, we don’t seem to have good polling data on anything right now), we can’t know for sure what percentage of Green supporters would do what in an alternate Green-less reality. What we can do, however, is calculate how many would have had to switch in order to make a difference.

For instance, let’s assume for a moment that the Green Party disappeared on the eve of yesterday’s election, and that all Green voters in fact either voted NDP, or else stayed home (or ate their ballots, or voted for the Work Less Party, or basically did anything but vote for the Liberals). This amounts to the easiest case for the vote splitting argument. In that case, what percentage of former Greens would have had to switch over to the NDP to flip the result? By my calculations, it’s right around 62%.[2][3] That is, three in every five Green Party partisans would have had to vote NDP, with none voting Liberal, to get the NDP to a 43 seat majority.

Conversely, we can assume that every single Green voter who doesn’t switch to NDP bolts instead to the Liberals. Under those conditions, obviously, a higher percentage of Green voters would have to vote NDP to make a difference. How high? My results indicate that more than 80% would have had to vote Orange to get the NDP to a majority.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between those two numbers, but at least we have a range in mind: somewhere between 60 and 80% of Green voters would have had to defect in order to tip the balance. While possible, it seems unlikely. Figure 1 illustrates.

As a final exercise, it’s worth thinking about the above in the context of vote splitting on the right. Had the Liberals and the NDP been the only two choices, with Conservatives siding with the former, and Greens voting with the latter. In that case, the Right would have won last night, 45 seats to 39.

So what’s the bottom line? While we can’t say anything definitive, we have clarified what we’re assuming when we talk about vote splitting. We are making assumptions—potentially strong ones, at that—about why voters vote, and how they view the options available to them. It may be the case that voting has tipped elections in the past (ahem), but it’s hard to argue that that’s what happened in British Columbia last night.

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[1] Indeed, I’ve written elsewhere that this tendency is tantamount to a fatal flaw for Green Parties in a majoritarian system like ours, where voters depend upon a stable political “identity” in parties to guide their choices. To the extent that voters remain unclear what the Green Party’s governance “philosophy” is, they are unclear on what the party would do if actually elected to power. Would they raise taxes? Fund health care sufficiently? Devolve power to the provinces? Absent a reliable way to impute answers to such questions, most voters remain unlikely to trust Green Parties sufficiently to grant them even a share of power. That’s an argument for a different day, however.

[2] Basically, I’m assuming a constant rate of defection from Greens to NDP, with no counter-defection to the Liberals. This approach ignores regional variations, in that there are probably some areas of the province much more likely to break for NDP absent a Green option. In my defence, modeling that would be really hard, and this is just a blog post.

[3] Being satisfied with a minority would not have helped much at all. In fact, under these assumptions, there’s only one possible scenario in which the NDP could have achieved a minority: by winning exactly 42 seats. If they had done that, the Liberals would also have been reduced to 42. In that case, the tie-breaking Independent, Vicki Huntington, would have wielded the real power. As it happens, this would have been exceedingly unlikely outcome under this model, given that both Burnaby North and North Vancouver-Lonsdale flip between 61% and 62%.)

photo credit: pfos via photopin cc