Abstract
As noted, many people believe in a form of majority rule which is based on majority voting. But if the (simple or weighted) majority vote is inadequate, and if the modified Borda count, MBC, is known to be more precise, democracy would presumably be enhanced if the latter were adopted as the international norm for democratic decision-making. As shown in Chap. 1, this MBC is indeed robust, inclusive and accurate; but it is also non-majoritarian. If therefore it were to be introduced, that which follows from majority voting—the crudest form of majority rule—should also be reformed. Thus the basis of democratic governance, everywhere, could be that which is often advocated for post-conflict societies: all-party power-sharing. Easier said than done, some might say; after all, many a so-called stable democracy sometimes has great difficulty in forming a new, post-election administration, even only a majority coalition let alone an all-party executive. With a matrix vote, however, it can be both said and done quite easily. This Chapter critiques current practice and (therefore) proposes an alternative.
It is now arguable that the party system… may be less well adapted to the needs of the twenty-first [century].
(Garret FitzGerald 2003 : 65)
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Notes
- 1.
His farewell address of 1796.
- 2.
In 2015, for example, the party with just 36.9% of the vote won 50.8% of the seats, a majority, just! But not a just majority.
- 3.
In 1979, Jim Prior was appointed to be the UK’s Secretary of State for Employment, but later on within the Cabinet, Prime Minister Thatcher described him as a ‘wet’—yet again, politics was binary, with the other wing of her cabinet supposedly ‘dry’; so two years later, she sent him off to the UK’s wettest and most distant outpost, Belfast.
- 4.
Gaelic for ‘ourselves alone’.
- 5.
In the 2015 election, while five parties gained more than 10 MPs, a further seven parties were only in single figures.
- 6.
When choosing a site for the state oil company, the three cities could not be placed in any order, so parliament used TRS . Stavanger got 75 of the 150 votes, exactly 50%, to Trondheim’s 49 and Bergen’s 20, so Stavanger was declared the winner.
- 7.
In, say, a three-option debate on options A, B and C, the outcome might be B. If an irrelevant alternative , option D is introduced—irrelevant in so far as no-one likes it very much—the outcome in an MBC might then be different, but not in a Condorcet count.
- 8.
In settings where proportionality is not considered to be important, this first part of a matrix vote count can be conducted in accordance with an MBC count. In political scenarios, however, when parliament is electing a cabinet or a local council is choosing its committee chairpersons, it is wiser to use QBS.
- 9.
And here too, the corresponding vote need not be binary.
- 10.
As was seen in Sect. 1.7.5, increasing the MP’s freedom of choice tends to decrease the degree of control by which a party whip may try to order her to act as he demands. In like manner, a matrix vote offers the MP an even greater degree of choice: in the above example, choosing six cabinet members from a parliament of just a score of MPs to serve in six portfolios, there are over 2 billion ways in which an MP may vote—2,009,318,400 to be exact. When choosing a cabinet of a dozen from a parliament of an hundred to serve in 12 ministries, the degree of freedom is measured in trillions. The social choice scientist may calculate the number; the political scientist may simply use the word ‘pluralism’.
- 11.
In a matrix vote, it is always possible for a talented member of a small party, or even a talented independent, to be elected to cabinet… if they get sufficient cross-party support.
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Emerson, P. (2020). Governance: From Power-dividing to Power-sharing. In: Majority Voting as a Catalyst of Populism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20219-4_3
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