Yes, the Liberals’ online democratic reform survey — MyDemocracy.ca — is terrible. But is it very much worse than most of what passes for debate on this issue?

Not really. The media, politicians and pundits have all contributed to the hot mess that is the visually attractive, intellectually bereft MyDemocracy.ca. The Liberals’ survey just re-packages a lot of the misinformed, misleading and irrelevant themes we’ve been hearing all along. Themes like simple versus complex ballots, local versus party interests, big parties versus small parties — themes that can be very easily addressed with research or common sense and shown to be nonsense. Yet we continue to talk about them.

As the site has come under increasing criticism, the political science advisors for the company responsible for the survey, Vox Pop Labs, have defended its approach, arguing that “the choice of items is defensible” and that “trade-offs are unavoidable when choosing an electoral system and the survey aims to reflect this.”

Except … the trade-offs addressed by this survey are not the real ones and political scientists, of all people, should know that.

Why is the debate so out of sync with what can be supported with facts? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because the people shaping the debate tend to draw lessons from their own experiences — in this case, with our first-past-the-post voting system and the results it tends to produce — and know very little about how other systems actually work in practical terms or the results they have tended to produce historically. And this groups includes, sadly, too many of the academics offering public commentary and advice on the issue.

Let’s critically review the key themes highlighted in the MyDemocracy.ca survey to see how well they withstand an encounter with facts.

Simple versus complex ballots

Two different questions on the survey deal with the issue of simple versus complex ballots — implying that ballots that require more of voters than marking a simple ‘x’ would be too confusing. The trade-off expressed here is between a ballot that could be easily understood versus one that would allow voters to indicate more complex preferences. But is this really a trade-off? Do more complex ballots inhibit voter participation? This is a good example of an issue that could be readily addressed through comparative evidence — examining what happens in countries with more complex ballots than ours.

The evidence says that there is no trade-off. For instance, Irish voters rank the candidates on their ballots in order of preference, 1, 2, 3. If this was too complex for the average voter, we would expect to see a high level of spoiled ballots. In fact, Ireland typically sees a lower level of spoiled ballots than we do in Canada.

Canada itself has had decades of experience in using different forms of ranked ballots at the provincial and municipal levels — again, without making the process too difficult for voters. Whether voters mark their ballots correctly is a question of election administration, not of the voting system. This isn’t even an issue, let alone a genuine trade-off.

Local versus party interests

Two different questions on the survey ask whether MPs should obey their political parties or the wishes of their local constituents. The trade-off here is supposed to be between local people getting what they want versus a political party getting what it wants.

Again, the trade-off doesn’t exist. By voting with their party, MPs are doing what they should be doing.

There are two key pieces of evidence supporting this. First, Canadian voters vote party. Few support purely local candidates or ones not running with major parties. Two, everywhere across the country — in every riding, in fact — voters are divided in their choices between a number of parties. Nowhere is there an uncontested ‘local constituency view’ to be represented.

So who are MPs representing when they abide by local interests over their parties? The 40 per cent who voted for them, or the 60 per cent who voted against them? How are MPs to vote on issues that divide their constituency? They can’t vote both for and against pipelines, or a national daycare program, or carbon emission targets.

Given the fact that our voting system is structured to produce one winner in each riding, it should be expected that a considerable number of people in each locale will complain that their MP is not listening to them — but that doesn’t mean they are ignoring everyone. This is a pretty basic Politics 101 insight that political scientists should be pointing out, not condoning as a fake trade-off.

Single party government versus parties working together

A host of questions ask respondents whether it’s better for one party to govern alone or work together with other parties, often in concert with another issue like policy accountability, governing efficiency, or the need for compromise among parties. The trade-off here is supposed to be between a single party government that cannot escape responsibility for its actions and some kind of coalition government where each participant can always pass the buck for unpopular decisions the government has made.

If the real world really looked like this purported trade-off, the answer would be easy: Stick with single party government. But the real world doesn’t look like this. Under our voting system it’s hard to operationalize just what ‘accountability’ really means because there are too many factors that contribute to whether governments win or lose power. In most cases it has more to do with how votes are spread across opposition parties rather than any clear endorsement or repudiation of the governing party.

Where are the questions exploring the trade-offs and risks involved in keeping our current voting system — the fact that single-party governments typically come at the cost of electoral competition and inclusive representation, and seem to trigger a pronounced policy lurch with every change in government? Where are the questions exploring the trade-offs and risks involved in keeping our current voting system — the fact that single-party governments typically come at the cost of electoral competition and inclusive representation, and seem to trigger a pronounced policy lurch with every change in government?

A majority of Canadian voters opposed Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2015, but it was only in 2015 that enough of them coalesced around a single party to turf him from power. On the other hand, the alleged problems with coalition government often touted by Canadian commentators are seldom supported by any sensible or credible comparative research.

What has been the experience in countries (and we’re talking about most western countries here) that operate under conditions of coalition government? Have they been inefficient, unaccountable or unable to compromise effectively? The experience in postwar Western Europe suggests this speculative caricature of coalition government is not supported by the facts.

The survey questions handle this particular trade-off in a weak and methodologically suspect manner. The questions are posed as normative preferences — essentially asking Canadian if they prefer ‘strong leadership’ over ‘parties working together’, all while avoiding the concrete political contexts that tend to influence how people feel about the issue.

Should a single party rule? Sure, some might say — if they represent more than 50 per cent of voters. But if they don’t, then coalition makes more sense. Indeed, it appears more like a necessity to some. To avoid this crucial contextual detail makes the question — and its alleged trade-off — meaningless. You’re basically asking people if the winner should have to share power with the losers, and it not hard to imagine how a lot of people might respond to such a question.

But the whole point of the critique of our single party so-called ‘majority’ governments is to challenge their normative right to rule given that they seldom enjoy the support of an actual majority of voters. Again, this is not a real trade-off because the terms of the discussion are wrong and fail to capture what the critics have been saying. In other words, this is not a real conversation anyone is having — apart from the people behind MyDemocracy.ca.

Major parties versus more parties

This is the most dishonest of the alleged trade-offs featured in the survey because only one side of the issue is presented. Respondents are asked if they support the election of more parties to Parliament even if it risks allowing ‘radical’ or ‘extremists’ to gain election.

But what does ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ mean? It’s pretty apparent that such terms are entirely subjective. A lot of people thought Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was pretty extreme. Conservatives routinely accuse all the other parties in Parliament of being too ‘radical’ in one way or another. Embedded in the question is the assumption that more parties = small parties = extremism.

Again, a little research on the issue (as opposed to uninformed speculation) might help. Western countries using PR showcase a range of party systems, some with many parties, other with just a few. Some have seen the election of radical right parties at different times, but also parties of the centre and the left. Nor does getting elected necessarily mean having any influence. Research on the long-term impact of perceived ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ parties in western Europe suggests they find few allies in the legislature, are shunned as potential coalition partners and tend to disappear after a few elections as ‘protesting electors’ return to parties that can actually work effectively with others.

At another point, survey-takers are asked whether they prefer “having many small parties in Parliament representing many different views OR having a few big parties that try to appeal to a broad range of people.”

Talk about a rigged question. The issue is not whether it’s better to have a few or a lot of parties in Parliament — that’s irrelevant. The issue is whether Parliament should reflect what Canadian voters want. They may want a few or many parties — we won’t know until they get a chance to register their preferences effectively.

People don’t care about some abstract ideal like having a lot of parties in Parliament for it’s own sake; they care about their vote having an impact. They only prefer “having a few big parties that try to appeal to a broad range of people” if they think that their party will be one of those parties. After all, the whole reason we’re discussing this issue of electoral reform is because our current ‘big parties’ have been pretty miserable failures in their efforts to “appeal to a broad range of people.”

And this is why the question is so one-sided. Where are the questions exploring the trade-offs and risks involved in keeping our current voting system — the fact that single-party governments typically come at the cost of electoral competition and inclusive representation, and seem to trigger a pronounced policy lurch with every change in government? The costs in this trade-off discussion, it would appear, only apply to the proposed alternatives — not to the status quo.

MyDemocracy.ca is a major blunder as public consultation, but its mistakes are not entirely its own. This electoral reform survey embodies many of the key ideas and assumptions about the issue — about what is important and how it should be addressed — that have been stressed by Canadian political scientists recently. But, as I’ve tried to spell out here, the ‘trade-offs’ discussion misses the mark. Most of the themes are fake issues, poorly thought out or easily challenged by evidence. The whole trade-offs discourse serves to legitimate Canada’s first past-the-post-voting system, giving it a veneer of democratic credibility under the guise of ‘values’ while obscuring its patently undemocratic features.

I think we can name what kind of values support a system that poorly represents what voters say with their votes, regularly allows a minority to dominate government, and limits party competition. They’re pretty undemocratic ones.

Now let me be clear – not all Canadian political scientists are guilty here. (After all, I’m a political scientist.) But the ones that have been shaping the public discourse, writing backgrounders for government, getting their op/eds into our national media and advising exercises like MyDemocracy.ca — those are the people who should be held at least partly responsible for this disastrous survey.

The more interesting question is why they promote this particular take on electoral reform. The simple reason is that they’re just not very critical of how Canadian politics is conducted now. They seem to largely accept the validity of our institutional structures and the results of our elections. They speak from within the dominant two-party consensus that sees big parties as good and small parties as a nuisance (or worse), single party government as necessary and stable, and political complaints as sour grapes.

The subtext of their rhetoric, whether deliberate or not, speaks to a Liberal/Conservative majority of voters, basically asking, ‘Do you think the system that benefits you should be kept in place’? Meanwhile, their constant focus on the prospect of ‘instability’ or ‘extremism’ that might result from moving away from the status quo suggests a deep distrust of voters. The fear that voters might make poor choices (ones that these political scientists don’t agree with, in other words) sounds a lot like 19th century arguments against extending the franchise to working people generally.

You have to be a democrat to do justice to discussions of democratic reform. In Canada, a great many political scientists prefer focusing on legitimating our current governing order to empowering voters and adding substance to Canadian democracy.

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