Jobs for the Boys

From Anthony Reich

This blog was first written in September 2008, but seems relevant in the current season of primaries leading up to the general election. All comments welcome.

In addition to the lack of accountability, PR also seems to contribute to attracting only a certain type of person to run for office. As an ordinary citizen, I would have no hope of gaining entry to one of the lists unless I have a long-standing relationship with a significant number of party members who I can rely to vote for me. There is no opportunity for me to stand as an independent who could be a solid representative for my constituency and fight the election on the basis of local politics. Instead, PR forces all candidates to play a national political game which can often become dirty and even crooked. One only needs to cite the example of Naomi Blumenthal, a Likud Knesset member who was convicted of bribing party members to vote for her by entertaining them at a luxury hotel. She was the one who got caught, but there are no doubt others like her. All of this results in a certain type of person being attracted to offering him/herself for election, and frightens others off who may be excellent value as a representative. It leaves a strong feeling that the environment is one where there are only “jobs for the boys”, and one where newcomers are not welcome and have little prospect of breaking in.

Amy’s contention that minorities, and minority parties, have better representation has proven itself to be true in the Israeli example. This has, however, become exaggerated to the point where minority parties have way more power than their minority position justifies. There could be as many as twenty parties running in a general election. Any party achieving more than the threshold, currently just 2% of the national vote, will be guaranteed a seat. This contributes to the reality that Israel has never yet had an election result where one party has achieved an outright majority. Instead, the largest party may hold anything between 25% and 40% of the total seats on offer with the remaining seats being broadly distributed amongst smaller niche-interest parties. This requires a coalition to be constructed in order to form a government. In the process of forming a coalition, the minority parties are able to extract high value from the leading party in exchange for joining the coalition and supporting the government. The value that the minority parties are able to derive is usually significantly beyond what their minority position justifies. They have become experts at this process, and would be happy to sell out to either a left or a right-wing government as long as their demands are met. In addition, the smaller parties are known to change their stance mid-term and begin to demand additional value from the government. Usually, these demands are also accompanied by threats to leave the coalition if they are not met. Where the coalition is made up of a number of such minority parties, the leading party unfortunately spends more time keeping the coalition together than running the country, and this inevitably contributes to a very unstable system of government.

Whilst arguing persuasively for a PR system in the USA, Amy is fair enough to mention the fact that PR does not work particularly well in Israel and Italy. He attributes the PR problems in both these countries to thresholds that are too low. He uses Germany as an example of a country that has successfully adopted PR. Here, the threshold is 5% of the national vote. If the 5% threshold had been applied in Israel during the 2006 election, it would have reduced the number of parties sitting in the Knesset from 12 to 7.

In addition, he suggests applying PR to smaller electoral districts rather than one large district as is the case in Israel. So, instead of having one district with 120 seats, the idea is to split the country into say 10 districts of 12 seats each. The 12 seats would be divided according to the PR vote in that district. I imagine that this could work, on condition that the candidates for each electoral district are selected by people from within the district. This would address the problem of accountability to the people who are being represented.

It sounds to me as if Professor Amy is really advocating a PR system that is a hybrid. Without acknowledging all the problems with the way in which PR is applied in Israel, he is suggesting a slightly mixed system that plugs many of its weaknesses. I believe that his suggestions are workable, and would represent significant progress if adopted in Israel.

The likelihood of this happening unfortunately seems very remote. The problem is that the people who are responsible for adopting and agreeing these changes, are also the ones that are potentially threatened by them. Which of the “boys” are likely to amend a system that guarantees “jobs for the boys”? It seems that it is more than just the electoral system that needs changing!