Irish Expert: STV Works Very Well Here

This blog article was originally posted by Robert Jago on May 5, in the Canadian Provincial Politics section of The Western Standard

There was a post on the Western Standard the other day that
kind of took me by surprise.  It was about the BC STV Referendum, and
it was titled "Short for Stymies Traditionalist Voters"?.

Besides misunderstanding how the BC STV system works (and here's a video both sides in the referendum point to, which explains STV better),
the writer of the post said "I'm discouraged that no one is looking
closely at how similar voting systems have played out in other
countries."

Visit
the home pages of either side in the BC STV referendum, and it won't
take you long to find them referencing the foreign experience.  In fact, it was the BC-STV 'No' side's prominent, and I think irrelevant, dig at Ireland's system
which got me looking - not at the absence of talk about how the system
works in other countries - but about the quality of that talk.

I've lived in Ireland, and of all the many problems I saw when I was
there, I never heard a single person attribute any of them to the
voting system.  In fact, when you look into it in any way, the
criticisms you see of the Irish STV experience are almost the exact
opposite of the criticisms you see here in BC.

Dr. Michael Gallagher is Ireland's foremost expert on voting systems.  Among his books on the topic is The Politics of Electoral Systems.  It's a book that the Canadian Journal of Political Science calls 'no less than the bible of electoral systems'.

The first question I had for Dr. Gallagher was - 'does the Irish system work'?

Michael Gallagher (MG): Yes, it does. Parties in
Ireland are represented in parliament in close proportion to their
voting strength, comparable with the average for proportional
representation electoral systems across Europe. In policy terms, it is
true to say that the main Irish parties are not very different from
each other

Western Standard (WS): The criticism of PR-STV that you have
described as 'the most plausible' is that it imposes an excessive
burden on TDs (Members of Ireland's Parliament) to perform constituency duties.  Here in Canada,
opponents of STV are attacking the system for the exact opposite
reason, claiming that it would effectively cost many small and rural
communities their representation.  Can you please explain what effect
STV has on constituency representation?

MG: That is the most widespread criticism of PR-STV in
Ireland, but others believe that the close links between TDs and their
constituents result more from the political culture in Ireland (voters
expect this close contact and would insist on it regardless of the
electoral system) and from the small size of the country (a ratio of
around 1 TD per 12,000 voters), and thus are not convinced that PR-STV
is the cause of those close links. In much larger constituencies, such
as those in BC, MPs would still have an incentive to be responsive to
their constituents, both to win more support from other candidates of
their own party and to attract lower preferences from supporters of
other parties.

WS: In 'Politics in the Republic of Ireland' you wrote that
STV can have 'consequences for government stability'.  Could you
elaborate on this?

MG: Like any PR electoral system, it is less likely than the
first-past-the-post system to create an 'artificial majority' that
means one party can form a government on its own. Hence coalition
governments are much more common under any kind of PR, including
PR-STV. In practice, government stability has not been a problem in
Ireland.