Thursday, October 12, 2006
Response to Scholar84's Thoughts on the Septmber 30th Meeting of the Citizens' Assembly
This is a very interesting observation, which unpacks Dr. Rose’s discussion of legislatures in a detailed and precise manner. While Scholar84’s analysis of the general connections between electoral process and the nature of legislative representation is quite instructive, I think an important omission from this observation is a practical application of it: a conclusive critique or endorsement of the current or prospective electoral systems. I would like to connect two separate points which Scholar84 made in his/her report on the Citizens’ Assembly in an attempt to create a brief critique of the current Single Member Plurality (SMP) system used in Ontario. The first point I would like to note is that in Canadian Parliamentary systems “the legislature is formally supreme and appoints the executive.” The second point of focus is “that legislatures matter to electoral systems and vice versa.” I suggest that the current electoral system has helped to create what the legislature’s relationship is to the executive today: formally supreme but in actuality inferior.
Our current electoral system, with its single-member ridings, creates a situation in which parties can only offer one representative to the riding at large to choose from. This makes sense in such a system in that by offering two separate candidates for one party the votes would be split between the two, essentially handing the riding over to the competitor. Put bluntly, wide variety in candidates is anathema to the single-member riding system.
Because representation is reduced to one candidate per party, and candidates must appeal to partisan interests first in order to gain candidacy, the line between the candidate and the party is rendered almost non-existent. Voting for candidates becomes simply a formal way of voting for parties since the candidate is the party’s representative to the riding as opposed to the riding’s representative to the party. Ultimately, the effect of this limit in choice is the creation of a de facto list system, but without its characteristic proportionality.
This brings me to my original point, that the legislature’s relationship to the executive is merely formal. By reducing electoral candidates to mere party representatives, SMP empowers the party leadership who develop the party policy. In turn, governments and shadow-governments are empowered over their backbenchers, since the latter were elected on the basis of their affiliation with the former. Thus, the legislature’s formal “appointing of the executive” is in actuality a foregone conclusion since the party’s leadership was empowered simply by the party being empowered. This is not a radical notion at all, and in fact is taken by most Canadians as a given (one need only observe how election campaigns are run to note that the party and the party leadership are much more important than the individual candidates in determining the outcomes of elections).
Yet, this is extremely problematic. The whole idea of the Westminster system is that the government is responsible to the legislators, and the legislators, in turn, are responsible to their constituents, thereby making the elected accountable to the electorate. But if the legislators are in actuality responsible to the government then who is responsible to the electorate? With the current infrastructure of constituency-based accountability existing in formality, holding the government directly accountable in reality is at best inefficient, and at worst unachievable.
Of course, SMP is not the only cause for this problem. The practice of party discipline also strongly reinforces the ascendancy of the executive over the legislature. But these are not mutually exclusive explanations. As Scholar84 pointed out, the behavior of legislature affects electoral process and vice versa, so both practices can be seen to bolster the same tendency.
However, regardless of which explanation you give primacy, reforming the current electoral system seems to be a necessary step in restoring accountability to Canadian politics.
Our current electoral system, with its single-member ridings, creates a situation in which parties can only offer one representative to the riding at large to choose from. This makes sense in such a system in that by offering two separate candidates for one party the votes would be split between the two, essentially handing the riding over to the competitor. Put bluntly, wide variety in candidates is anathema to the single-member riding system.
Because representation is reduced to one candidate per party, and candidates must appeal to partisan interests first in order to gain candidacy, the line between the candidate and the party is rendered almost non-existent. Voting for candidates becomes simply a formal way of voting for parties since the candidate is the party’s representative to the riding as opposed to the riding’s representative to the party. Ultimately, the effect of this limit in choice is the creation of a de facto list system, but without its characteristic proportionality.
This brings me to my original point, that the legislature’s relationship to the executive is merely formal. By reducing electoral candidates to mere party representatives, SMP empowers the party leadership who develop the party policy. In turn, governments and shadow-governments are empowered over their backbenchers, since the latter were elected on the basis of their affiliation with the former. Thus, the legislature’s formal “appointing of the executive” is in actuality a foregone conclusion since the party’s leadership was empowered simply by the party being empowered. This is not a radical notion at all, and in fact is taken by most Canadians as a given (one need only observe how election campaigns are run to note that the party and the party leadership are much more important than the individual candidates in determining the outcomes of elections).
Yet, this is extremely problematic. The whole idea of the Westminster system is that the government is responsible to the legislators, and the legislators, in turn, are responsible to their constituents, thereby making the elected accountable to the electorate. But if the legislators are in actuality responsible to the government then who is responsible to the electorate? With the current infrastructure of constituency-based accountability existing in formality, holding the government directly accountable in reality is at best inefficient, and at worst unachievable.
Of course, SMP is not the only cause for this problem. The practice of party discipline also strongly reinforces the ascendancy of the executive over the legislature. But these are not mutually exclusive explanations. As Scholar84 pointed out, the behavior of legislature affects electoral process and vice versa, so both practices can be seen to bolster the same tendency.
However, regardless of which explanation you give primacy, reforming the current electoral system seems to be a necessary step in restoring accountability to Canadian politics.
