Saving the Seanad, not bloody likely

// May 27th, 2011 // No Comments » // GE11, Seanad, seanad eireann, seanad reform

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Once again the nation was treated this week to the sights and sounds of the returning Seanad. Not that most of the population had noticed that it had been away. Various people, most of them senators of long standing, used the occasion and the press attention to give voice to their strongly held view that the Seanad should be retained at all costs and indeed reformed to the benefit of all. Burdocks to that I say.

Let’s be straight with one another, without any concrete proposals being adopted by the Seanad itself to reform I won’t be voting or campaigning to save it as it is currently constituted, all on the promise that it might, one day, far off in the future, after it has had one more custard pie and a nice nap, be reformed in some way.

I stood as a candidate for the Seanad on the NUI panel on the basis that it must be reformed immediately or else abolished. My thoughts were and are that the time has long run out for last chances for this chamber, that it was time for things to be done or to dust with it. I’ve not changed my mind since that election took place. The last (the 12th in total) report from the Seanad itself on its reform was the usual weighty document, full of compromises ironed out amongst the senators themselves with one eye glancing back towards their past and future electorate of local authority members and a minority of 3rd level graduates. Hence the proposal to retain the election of some Senators by local authority members even while the general populous was to elect a portion of the chamber.

And we then saw how commitment to the reforms in that report as within the lifetime of the last Oireachtas various  senators from political parties and also noted independents welching and reneging on their support for even these watery set of reforms. Demanding, demanding no less, that even those small steps that could be enacted by a simple legislative process must not be touched unless the entire chamber was simultaneously reformed. This is beyond getting cats to walk in a line, it’s looking for them to do a synchronised about turn once they are all facing in the same direction.

That steadfast unwillingness to do even the bare minimum is the crux of the argument on any referendum on the abolition of the Seanad for me. I believe that abolition of the Seanad on its own is mere electoral window dressing and would represent a bad decision. Yet voting to keep the Seanad as is, in the forlorn hope that reforms might happen based on non-binding commitments post the referendum, would be a worse decision.

I will continue to poke those people I might chance to have access in the Dáil for the enactment of extensive changes to the Dáil electoral system which should happen simultaneously with the abolition of the Seanad. But I’m not going to make it a ‘do that or else’ demand. I will not campaign to save a chamber that can’t bring itself to present a real package of agreed reforms when faced with its own extinction. And these would have to be detailed reforms that it stand over, and could not and would not revoke. After all, if the members of the Seanad especially those most vocal in its defence can’t even act to pass a simple bill making those straightforward changes that could have been made by legislation then what right have they to demand that others must act save them and the chamber that they have done so much to keep the rest of the population away from. If they are not willing to act to save themselves then why should we bother?

A gender kink in political reform proposals

// February 9th, 2011 // No Comments » // GE11

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There is a recurring desire expressed to see more sittings of the Oireachtas moving to 4 days or even 5 days in part as a means to facilitate more family hours so that there would be less late sittings.

However, this creates another problem, as these same family friendly hours actually only suit those whose families are close enough for them to see them in the evening, i.e. Dublin based TDs or those within commuting distance as other TDs from further afield are actually away from their families during the week. So either the TDs from outside of Dublin move their children, dogs, cats, spouses to Dublin and have them attend school, chase cats and work there or they leave them at home and they only see them at weekends.

But that’s not family friendly at all and it will be to their electoral disadvantage as moving the family and those the family home to Dublin will leave those TDs open to a challenge from a more locally based candidate and the cycle would begin again. So a solution to a problem that we are told has a great impact on getting women, especially those with young child involved in politics it would seem that the likely effect of moving to more shorter sitting days would be to deny female TDs the longevity needed to become ministers, party leaders or ultimately Taoiseach because they either have to leave their children for longer periods of time or leave themselves more vulnerable to electoral defeat.

Of course, a solution to this might be to question why we need the Dail chamber aspect of being a parliamentarian requires you to be in Dublin at all. Might we start to reconsider the assembly nature of Dail process entirely? After all, it’s not like anyone is in the chamber genuinely listening to what others have to say so why do they need to be so close proximity at all? Would it be more properly family friendly to have a virtual chamber?

Did FF think their political reform proposals through at all?

// February 7th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // GE11

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Having a substitute in the Dail as suggested in the political reform segment of the FF manifesto would hardly free up a minister’s time at all, it’s not like voting in the Dail is causing them that many headaches for them as it is. They are already allocated up to half a dozen civil servants to handle their constituency work at the taxpayers expense. This is done without letting on to the constituent who is lead to believe it’s the minister who is writing and signing all those letters until that letter turns out to be for a murder or child molester in which case we’re then told it was their staff wrote it.

And what happens when the minister seeks to run for re-election or is dropped from the cabinet? Do they kick out the sub? and what do they campaign on? – People of Ballysomewhere “Vote for me, my sub did all the local work.” Or is it intended that you’d be a minister in a government and if you fall out of favour with the party leader that your political career over? Talk about giving a means to quell dissent against the leader.

Think about that for a moment, anyone who is a minister would serve entirely at the pleasure of the Taoiseach, once appointed they would be open to being dismissed and have no seat to return to, not means to challenge the leader of the day. There is a strong argument to made for this power if we were to elected the Taoiseach directly as the person in that office would have  strong direct mandate from the people. Yet to continue to have the Dail elect the Taoiseach who then appoints ministers, none of whom will be able to challenge him for fear of losing their jobs, would mean that for example Michael Martin would not have been able to challenge Brian Cowen nor Albert Reynolds challenge Charles Haughey. Once gone as minister they would be gone from parliament and without an income would be gone from public life.

These set of proposals is even more half baked than I thought they might be, and FF are still persisting, and being allowed to do so by the press, with inventing terms that make no sense like single seat PR *(it’s called the Alternative Vote and as LibDems in the UK will tell you it’s not really all that proportionate)  and unilateral renegotiation.

The upcoming bloodbath of Mount St

// January 5th, 2011 // 4 Comments » // Fianna Fail

As the prospect of securing a return to government recedes and the race for the succession gathers pace, the role of the Mount st insiders and where their loyalties lie could lead to a chaotic situation in FF headquarters.

In constituencies where the party has two or more outgoing TDs (TDs A,  B and C) and if  TD A for example is perceived to be a Michael Martin man but more of Lenihan’s people are in situ in key positions at the Mount st HQ they will work more to save TD B who seems to be more their guy at all costs. It will be bedlam at HQ as the factions try to safe their own. Those whose interest is in the wider party will be pushed roughly to one side as the .

This is just another danger arising from the failure to put to bed the question of the future leadership of the party prior to the general election at a time when we all know that the first business of Fianna Fail in opposition will be to oust Brian Cowen as a means to plot a return to government as quickly as feasible. With dozens of outgoing TDs likely to not return either through retirement or defeat at the polls along with a much reduced Seanad line up then every vote will be vital. The support of a mere dozen colleagues on the first ballot could allow someone to emerge up the middle as an interim unity candidate to ensure that the factions don’t do too much damage to the party in a leadership battle.

But with many of those at HQ likely tied to various contenders, the problem for FF is that in the view of some lackeys losing TD A and thus the seat entirely might be preferable to their return to the Dail if their support was to be for  someone other than their man. With no one in FF HQ of the necessarily influence and gravitas within the broader party who has the interest of the entire party into the future as their sole priority, FF’s HQ manoeuvrings could end up throwing half a dozen savable seats overboard for the sake of the interests of the factions.

Alternatives to lists and quotas to reduce clientelism and offer the electorate more diverse voting options

// December 30th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // 2010, Seanad, seanad eireann, seanad reform

Long form version of a post I have over on Political Reform.

Discussion about political change, and in particular where electoral reform is concerned, tends to start by identifying a problem by examining its symptoms and then seeks to alleviate those same symptoms. Often times through green-field gerrymandering that presupposes we are able to start from scratch at some future election. Such green field efforts aim for defined outcomes rather than simply ensuring the system is correct and allowing the outcomes to be in the hands of the voters. Such new systems and practices as are proposed also tend to ignore any number of real world practicalities. In this piece, I’m going to try to outline two of the problems as I see them in how the electoral system currently functions, coupled with some the practical realities that accompany them, and then suggest two forms of electoral change that would actually address those problems without seeking to ensure some particular outcome. Neither of the suggested systems would perfectly address the core problems I will be addressing but they would do so sufficiently to ensure that we can move on in our discussions to some of the other problems we face.

Two of biggest problems – and from which almost all others stem – are a lack of real diversity being offered to the electorate in our parliamentary and local administrative elections and a surfeit of clientelism. I will start with the latter.

1)      Clientelism

Excessive clientelism across Irish political life is a real problem we have to face up to. However, we need to recognise that clientelism is not simply the result of the PR-STV system but is rather a potentiality that exists in all electoral systems if the electorate are so minded to reward it. Other nations and local governmental units overseas have taken measures to prevent it getting out of control. It is therefore a situation that needs to be controlled and managed, not necessarily eliminated entirely as it originates from the behaviour of the public. In considering what those measures might involve in particular in the context of our local political environment here in Ireland, we need to consider the scale of clientelism and how it works in Ireland. I will confine myself initially with clientelism at the Dail level but the suggested solution outlined later could work with some modifications for local administration elections too.

Clientelism as a major problem manifests itself when it is possible to get elected from simply doing stuff particular to the everyday needs of individual voters or their families (letter writing, form filling, hand holding, funeral attending, and making calls for people) on a purely local level – the direct person to person contact – such that a sufficient number of people will reward you with a vote such that you can be elected on this support base alone. It is, in some senses, a transactional issue; you are buying votes for work done for those specific individuals who will in turn cast their ballots for you. In Irish elections, you are well in the running for a seat in most general elections if you poll over 6,000 first preference votes and are almost guaranteed one if you poll over 8,000. It is actually possible given the nature of Ireland to physically meet that many people and do that many small things and be rewarded by their extended families and communities over the course of the 3/5 year period that occurs between elections. Worse yet, you can be elected with considerably less than that level of support to the local council and with the winning of a council seat becoming more and more a required stepping stone to the Oireachtas (national parliament encompassing both the Dáil and Seanad) then only those who have won at local election level get to be in the running for a Dail  nomination.

What we are presented with is a straight forward problem of scaling; make it sufficiently hard to get in the running for a seat in the Dail simply on clientelism activities alone and you will reduce the impact of clientelism on the governance of the country. Most see the solutions to this as involving some large scale reduction in the numbers of seats so as to ensure higher quotas. This would act as a means to raise the bar sufficiently that you would need too large a number of votes say 20,000 or so or they seek to remove the link between locality and national representation via various list systems. Yet a parliament consisting of only 80 or so members (which is what decreasing the number of seats to increase the quotas to around 20,000 would mean) makes for its own problems in ensuring a deep enough pool from which to draw an executive while leaving enough legislators available. A government of 15/20 members drawn from only 40 or so representatives of the majority party would be a recipe for disaster, almost everyone who had been elected more than once would have to serve in cabinet. Doing less than this by reducing the Dail by much smaller amounts of say only 20 to 30 TDS would do next to nothing to affect clientelism as what is required is to increase the quotas by several orders of magnitude.

List systems of various types  are also suggested as a possible solution to the problem of clientelism but lists too bring with them their own set of new problems. It is unclear just who is going to decide who is on the list, and where they are placed and how people get well enough known nationally to get votes and how exactly that would all be funded. When people say that list systems would be controlled by the political parties it is never made clear who exactly in the parties they mean, the membership, local or national, the party executives, professionals who work for the party, the elected party leadership. People often talk of ‘the political parties’ as if they were sentient entities in their own right which shows up that many of those suggesting we should have national lists controlled by the parties have limited knowledge exactly how political parties operate at the senior level. Because – believe me – it won’t necessarily lead to any broadening of the general diversity of the candidates on offer to have the party hierarchy in charge of who gets on lists and what placement they are given.

So how might we go about requiring that you need considerably more votes than can be delivered through clientelism but not need to dangerously reduce the numbers of parliamentary seats? One solution that would require someone to get considerably more votes to get elected is to have multi-vote overlapping geographical and non-geographically based constituencies. We’re familiar with the concept of panel elections from the Seanad even if they operate on a much too restrictive franchise of local authority members and existing Oireachtas members. The idea is that each voter would have 4 (it could be 3 or 5, I’m not married to 4) votes to cast in 4 overlapping constituencies that would each be electing only a quarter of the number of TD per head as now. However, since there would be 4 of them we’d still end up with the same number of TDs only the quota would be increased by a factor of 4 without incurring the problems associated with having too small a parliament.

So we could have a West of Ireland constituency with 8 seats representing all the counties of the western seaboard with an electorate of 300,000 that also overlaps in places with a Munster constituency that has 10 seats and a 4 seat Southern constituency including part of Kerry, all of Cork and Waterford and a part of Wexford. We could have 3 and 4 seat constituencies for fishing, the Gaeltacht and other non-geographic profession or special interest constituencies based on other criteria. People in Louth could vote in North Leinster, East Leinster and the Border. It would be possible then for the quotas to be three and four times what they are now while retaining roughly same overall number of elected representatives as at present. In such a scenario with non-geographical constituencies (that could be made to dynamically grow as more people chose to exercise their votes for those panels rather than the geographical) we could look to eliminate the Seanad.

With no one being able to get elected just by being the main Killarney candidate or the sole candidate from Dingle, they would have to offer more in the way of a broader policy message for the country and to people spread across such distances that they can’t spend as much time being clientelist agents for. It would not end clientelism forever but it would reduce it considerably.

2)      Diversity and Broadening choice at election time.

There is considerable attention given to the lack of diversity in the Oireachtas which derives entirely from the lack of diversity is offered to the electorate. For many reasons, understandable but misguided, most of the attention is on purely the topic of gender diversity with the occasional nod towards the age profile of the parliament.

The truth is that lack of diversity in representative politics is not simply gender specific but encompasses age, income, educational background, and shocking though it might be for some to consider, political opinion. To focus solely on gender is to miss the core problem which is that it is the voters that cause the political parties to tack to the middle and safe, conservative waters in terms of candidate selection. Our parliament should no more have a minimum target for female or male representation any more than it would have a maximum one.

The question is often asked why don’t political parties run more women, more young people, more people who are gay, more openly ideologically opinionated people both left and right leaning, more people who like mountain biking or Aphex Twin (ok that’s probably just me). Yet the question is often asked more as a rhetorical device to castigate political party X or position Y instead of looking at the reality of why parties don’t run broader slates of candidates.

So why do parties cleave to the mainstream with their tickets? The truth is because they are ruled more by fear than adventure, and because most of them have seats that they can lose as much as they are targeting seats that they can win. Political party organisations as campaigning entities exist in the main to win seats, and winning seats is again about numbers and the behaviour of the electorate. You can design new electoral systems all you want but if the public want to vote a certain way or use the system to get a certain outcome then that is what they will do and that is what they will try to get. In part the problem in Ireland is that winning seats, not alone above all but to the exclusion of all else, has been become the sole objective of the party organisations.

So what is stopping parties running much more diverse slates, why not run 7 candidates in a 5 seater? Fundamentally it is down to transfers, you might think that running as broad a range of candidates would be the best option as it would ensure that everyone in an area has a candidate from a party whose policies they like that and who – on a personal leve – they are also comfortable voting for. With our form of geographically based PR-STV that is not what happens, e.g. the Killorglin FFer leaks votes to the FGer from Killorglin costing FF a 2^nd Kerry South seat that they should have won based on their share of the 1st preference vote. Even FF who used to run as many candidates as there were seats learned in the end that with PR-STV you will lose seats you would have won by running too many candidates as the transfers ebb away over the course of the counts.

Quotas that require a gender divide in candidate slates would be more damaging to those larger parties that might be able to think about win more than one seat in a constituency. They are also wholly unnecessary to achieve the aim of broadening access.  Requiring a party that might typically run 3 candidates in a 5 seater because they can win 2 seats to instead run 4 of which half must be of one gender are being targeted compared to the party that is just in the hunt for just one seat that will simply run their usual main candidate along with a token. It would lead to the smaller parties especially running complete token candidates, I’m sure that Joe Higgins and Clare Daly would find compliant running mates of the required gender whose name might be on the ballot but who won’t campaign worth a damn. And it is a measure that doesn’t apply to independent/non party or single issue candidates at all!

If we were to have quotas at all then it would be more reasonable to require all parties contesting the election to offer a panel of candidates equal to double the number of seats with an equal man/female split in others words to have what would be local lists. Some people will not unreasonably say this will hurt the smaller parties more that are in the running for more one seat in a 4 seater or that it would lead to tokenism. Yet so would the notion that we must run 50/50 tickets, but it is a valid criticism of local lists then it is a valid criticism of unequally weighted gender splits.

The suggestion I would make is that we could take one of the positive facets of a national list and say that the total allocation of parliamentary seats for each party is to be based on the national % of the 1^st preference vote the party secures, provided that some minimal threshold of 3/4/5% is reached. We could then proceed to elect 75/80% of the Dail in the manner we are used to with uniformly sized constituencies of 4 seats. Let’s say we have thirty constituencies of 4 seats each giving us 120 TDs in this manner. Yes they will straddle county boundaries and the like but what of it, the county system as a unit of local administration/governance is past its sale by date but that’s a post for another time. We could even have some portion of those 4 seat constituencies be non-geographically based, incorporating the reforms suggested in the first part of this piece to increase the quotas!

The first major change we will see is that parties will run broader slates as every last 1^st preferences counts for the same in getting their national seat totals! Running that smart female lecturer from Milltown who works in Tralee is no longer a problem even if the sitting male FF TD is based 4 miles away in Killorglin, they can run candidates in every town they want if they like (and if they have the money to do so). Her potential value to the party isn’t reduced as the eliminations take place; and the people still get to decide who is best placed to be elected first. Her extra votes are not progressively discounted by the elimination and transfer stages at the count. So imagine an election where the national vote percentages were FG 30% FF 20% Lab 25% SF 15% Green 5% Others 5% And the result when all the four seats are filled in all the constituencies were 120 – FG 40 FF 25 Lab 31 SF 17 Green 3 Others 2

With 30 to be distributed as mop-ups with the aim is to have a proportionate chamber of 150 the target to be aimed for is

150 seats – FG 46 FF 31 Lab 38 SF 22 Green 10 Others 2

The mop up or top up, overhang is performed by deeming those whose parties had sufficient national support to warrant election for more seats but it is not party hierarchies that are picking insider favourites to fill those slots, it is the people.  Very strong independents could continue to be elected by some areas as at present though there would not be an ‘independent’ list or top up element.

With the first allocations to be made to the smaller parties and a gap of 7 seats for the Greens they would get their 7 candidates who had ended up unelected in the order of those who had gotten the most votes around the country. So the constituency with the highest polling Green candidate at the end of the count process would have that Green candidate being deemed to be elected as a top/mop up overhang representative. They would still have to have run candidates who were from somewhere and the choice still remains with the electorate not the party hierarchy as to who is elected. And the parties have been given an incentive to run broad slates.

A counter argument might be advanced that party X might still not pick enough women but if that were the case and if the electorate (who are 50% female after all) care enough about gender alone and party Y runs more women then it is party Y not party X would benefit. The aim of this system is to break down barriers, to encourage more diversity – what happens after that is in the hands of the prospective candidates and the electorate.

In summary, we have real problems in our politics as a result of excessive clientelism and a lack of diversity at election time but we need to consider how any systemic changes being suggested would work in the actual environment that exists in Ireland. Too much discussion is based on laboratory conditions or what happens elsewhere under entirely different electoral systems. We need to recognise that encouraging much more choice is better in the long run than seeking to restrict choice and that our ties to purely geographically based representation is blinding us to inventive but practical options that might assist us to combating clientelism.

How to run a PR top up system with multi seat constituencies

// July 5th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // elections

the point of multi seat constituencies is to provide the electorate with a choice not alone of party but of personnel. It is in effect a potential instant primary system. However political parties don’t see it like that and tend towards running the minimal slate of candidates because they are currently fearful of using it as such because of the effect of transfers on the number of seats they get.

What if that problem was to be corrected by the allocation of the total number of seats in the Dail on the basis of your share of national 1st preferences and not on the basis of PR_STV but that PR-STV was instead used at the constituency level to decide who would elected.

Leaving aside the idea of reducing the size of the Dail itself as it complicates the illustration I’m using below.

We would, in this system, have 123 of the existing 166 TDs getting elected by from the multi-seat constituencies as at present but once the counts have completed the remaining 43 of 166 seats would be allotted to the parties, smallest first, on the basis of which of their candidates had the highest number of votes before being eliminated or perhaps not even eliminated but simply not elected (the last man standing scenario). It would be proportionate to the national vote received yet also ensure that the public were the ones deciding who was getting elected and not some closed insider type party list system. And it wouldn’t hurt parties if they ran 8 candidates in a 5 seater which would mean more choice for the voters. And they would have an incentive to run as many diverse candidates as they liked as it wouldn’t hurt them in the transfer stakes but rather would help them by boosting them national vote yield.

How very Gay-like

// February 12th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // irish politics, Uncategorized

In reading the responses to George Lee’s departure from the Dáil I saw this prompt endorsement of the party leader from Gay Mitchell. It would seem Gay is interested in nailing down his position on this matter very early on. It would be a shame if Jim O’Leary was to be gazumped yet again. But there might be no choice this time.

FG have to aim for a minimum of 30% or even better 35% of the first preference vote to avoid Alex White getting elected on FF/general anti-FG transfers. Right now, Alex White is better placed to win over the considerable amount of floating voters in Dublin South, while FG will still start with a larger core party support.

The election if it happened of Gay Mitchell would most likely mean the elevation of cllr Naoise O’Muiri to the MEP slot (not a lot of people noticed that) and an opening on the city council in Clontarf, I can just feel the jockeying there already. Of course I could be entirely wrong about this and Shay Brennan will surprise us all and romp home..