Die Neue Zeit
29th November 2015, 02:20
Disclosure: While the original 2008 version of this can be found here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/party-recallable-closed-t94427/index.html), a more recent translation of another work (http://www.revleft.com/vb/kautsky-constituency-and-t194513/index.html) inspired me to change this by using more theoretically and programmatically authoritative sources.
Party-Recallable, Closed-List Representation with Full or Near-Full Proportionality
"A complete democracy is to be found nowhere, and everywhere we have to strive after modifications and improvements. Even in Switzerland there is an agitation for the extension of the legislative powers of the people, for proportional representation and for woman suffrage. In America the power and mode of selection of the highest judges need to be very severely restricted. Far greater are the demands that should be put forward by us in the great bureaucratic and militarist States in the interests of democracy." (K.J. Kautsky)
Before continuing, it is fortunate that my quotations of the senile renegade Mister K.J. Kautsky, along with his obsession with “refuting” the Russian Revolution, are limited to this section. The quotation above comes from his controversial work The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, whose “refutations” of the Russian Revolution directly prompted the justified and timely response by Lenin now known as The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
Much has been said time and again about the benefits of proportional representation (PR) over single-member district “representation” (plurality/first-past-the-post, instant-runoff, and so on), in spite of the “pure PR” caricature presented by the Israelis. These benefits include: the irrelevancy of ideally electing the candidate who would beat every other candidate in a pairwise contest (the so-called “Condorcet method” in political science), the elimination of tactical voting for the “lesser of two evils,” and the elimination of wasted votes for losing candidates and for winning candidates (excess votes in safe seats, usually due to the geographically seat-manipulative gerrymandering) – thereby increasing voter turnout.
The traditional incorporation of single-member, plurality-voting-based “representation” into every district within a mixed voting system – whether a non-proportional, parallel voting system or a non-parallel, mixed-member proportional representation system (MMP) – is not a significant improvement. Where the mixed voting system is based on parallel voting, proportionality is confined to the list seats, and the risk of traditional gerrymandering remains. Where the mixed voting system is based on subtracting district seats won from the list seats (MMP), there is the risk of overhang, wherein a parliamentary group wins more district seats than purely proportional representation would allow. For the latter, there is also the special risk of district boundary manipulation, or traditional gerrymandering, being used specifically to maximize overhang.
Also, there have been attempts to mischaracterize unorthodox forms of district representation as proportional. For example, it has been argued that the standalone single transferable vote system (STV) in Australia and Ireland is proportional, given that the district representation is multi-member and not single-member, and given that the same representation is based on preferential voting and not plurality voting. However, while standalone STV may be less prone to traditional gerrymandering, electorally-motivated determinations on district magnitude, or the number of members per multi-member district, are a form of gerrymandering, and have been used in both Australia and Ireland.
In every district-related case above, even where a non-partisan electoral body is responsible for determining either district boundaries or the number of members per multi-member district, there are still wasted votes. This would suggest an inherent problem with any district-based constituency representation.
Two options remain for realizing the full benefits of proportional representation, one being the institution of proportional representation without any district-based constituency representation at all (party-list proportional representation), and the other being the institution of proportional representation in which any district-based constituency representation is both based on the least disproportional voting system and limited to no more than half of the total seats – and to less in places such as New Zealand. For the second option, all district-based constituency representation would be based on preferential voting and not plurality voting. For the second option, district-based constituency representation for all but the lowest population density areas would be based on multi-member districts and not single-member districts.
Does this reform facilitate the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands?
First, under any form of district-based constituency representation (including STV), the constituents can call their misrepresentative legislators and tell them to vote a certain way, but usually this does not happen, even if the constituents dislike the voting record of their respective legislators. At the turn of the 20th century, Kautsky wrote profoundly true and important remarks in Constituency and Party, a 1904 article that was referenced by Lenin in One Steps Forward, Two Steps Back:
Can and should the deputies arrange their political activity as they see fit, according to their own discretion, or are they representatives, who are to carry out the orders of those who have issued them? And, if they are representatives, then do they represent their voters or the party as a whole? These are the questions with which we are concerned and it is in this certainty that we must keep them in mind and beware of allowing them to become blurred in the fog of general phrases about “freedom of opinion,” “democratic principle” and “free personality,” in which the revisionists so gladly attempt to enshroud them. We are not dealing with the freedom of opinion of the masses, but the freedom of action of the leaders. Democracy does not mean the absence of rule, it does not mean anarchy: it means the rule of the masses over their representatives, in distinction to other forms of rule, where the supposed servants of the people are in reality their masters.
[…]
The voters, however, are only sovereign during the election. Following the election, all the power at the masses’ disposal is handed to the person elected, who does with it what he likes. He can sell out and betray his voters as he sees fit; nothing stands in the way of the “free” development of his “personality.” He is “free” until the next election and can carry the “democratic principle” to the height of absurdity; his voters have no power to restrict his “intellectual freedom.” He cannot, of course, take things too far, otherwise he will not be re-elected. But his successor probably will not do a better job and, after all, the electorate has such a short memory! If he behaves himself in a way that is to some extent friendly towards the people, then this can cover up quite a lot.
Before contrasting the above with what happens under a party-recallable, closed-list electoral form that achieves full or near-full proportionality – whether there is no district-based constituency representation at all, or whether any district-based constituency representation is both based on the least disproportional voting system and limited to no more than half of the total seats - it must be pointed out that Kautsky unwittingly predicted in his 1904 article the long-term consequences of the absence of accountability to the party-movement:
They considered themselves responsible only to ‘the voters’, or at best the party congress – but not to the party’s executive, which, after all, in the first instance has to implement the decisions of the party congress. During the entire legislative period they thus did not recognise any arbitrators above them, but during the election they felt justified in fishing for votes using all possible means – even by denying the socialist character of their politics.
In 1907, long before the outbreak of the mislabelled “First World War,” it was thought that a “revolutionary victory” had been achieved in the Second International against the pacifist Bernstein’s class-conciliationist revisionism. In fact, however, there were no tendency struggles afterwards to purge far worse opportunists from the SPD and its Executive Committee, especially those who were also legislators (and were hence practically free from subordination to party decisions outside the legislature). This absence of purges ultimately led to betrayal of the working class by the Executive Committee and the party’s legislative group, in the form of voting for war credits. Without “party control” over legislative seats themselves, who can prevent opportunist “representatives” from switching party affiliations (usually from some opposition party to the governing party), or conscious legislators (district representatives or otherwise) from becoming independents, thereby depriving parties of the relevant seats in either case? After all, Kautsky continued:
There can be no doubt that a deputy will only do a half-hearted job if he represents politics which he inwardly condemns. His personality is not only crippled: it is directly degraded and in the long run is corrupted, reduced to untruthfulness and duplicity.
Contemporarily speaking, the 2015 election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in the UK exposed the triangular impasse between that organization’s “soft left” voters at large, its further-left membership, and its further-right Parliamentary Labour Party. As noted by George Eaton of the New Statesman:
When Labour fought the general election in May it had around 200,000 full members. It now has more than 380,000, close to the 400,000 reached in 1997 and an increase of around 90,000 since Jeremy Corbyn became leader.
[…]
As both supporters and opponents of the Labour leader emphasise, the increasing discontent among MPs is not shared by the membership.
For this reason, as I write in my column this week, the question of deselection, be it of Corbyn or of recalcitrant MPs, will persist. True unity will not be achieved until the PLP reflects the leader, or the leader reflects the PLP. As Labour's divisions grow, MPs fear that left-wing members will increasingly turn on them.
[…]
A more left-wing membership will make it easier for Corbyn to win conference policy votes and for his supporters to become parliamentary candidates. As the Labour leader's opponents privately acknowledge, it will also make it far harder for any candidate significantly to his right to win in any future contest.
On the other hand, under a party-recallable, closed-list electoral form that achieves full or near-full proportionality – whether there is no district-based constituency representation at all, or whether any district-based constituency representation is both based on the least disproportional voting system and limited to no more than half of the total seats – there are less direct links between the "constituents" and the "representatives” (which already exists in cases of electoral parachuting). Such further formalization of the distance between the "constituents" and their so-called "representatives" except through political parties can actually result in participatory democracy of some sort, with the “constituents” having to exert party-based pressure for certain laws to be passed, especially through increased party memberships and increased participatory democracy at the expense of bureaucratic fetishes within the various political parties.
Second, since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle remarked that “it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot [and] for them to be elected oligarchic,” the complete implementation of party-recallable, closed-list representation that achieves full or near-full proportionality – with the potential for mandatory random selection or at least (somewhat) random balloting of officeholders by political parties themselves – would go a long way towards combating the very degenerative yet professional personality politics (or rather, non-politics, being bereft of substantive policy discussions and formulations), ranging from individual corruption scandals that can be addressed through party-based replacements to person-based attack ads not being as widely circulated. These days, many if not most electoral campaigns have truly revealed the oligarchic nature of electoralism, dispensing with sufficient discussions on electoral platforms and strategic policies bound to be unfulfilled by those “best qualified” to be in the halls of legislative power.
Third, the complete implementation of party-recallable, closed-list representation that achieves full or near-full proportionality can and should be extended – on an immediate basis, in fact – to those in the higher halls of executive power, starting with the singular chief executives and the cabinet officials! This extension may have the potential to go a long way towards the full integration of legislative and executive powers “after the type of the [Paris] Commune,” as Lenin once remarked.
Does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view” – the criterion set out by the same individual responsible for writing the horribly illusory words above? If electoralist universal suffrage is nothing but, as Engels said, “the gauge of the maturity of the working class” that will one day show “boiling-point among the workers,” then steps need to be taken in order to replace this with a better gauge, if not with real political enfranchisement.
REFERENCES
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat by K.J. Kautsky [https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole/ch10.htm]
The Politics of Electoral Systems by Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell [http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199257566.001.0001/acprof-9780199257560-chapter-25]
Electoral Malapportionment: Partisanship, Rhetoric and Reform in the Shadow of the Agrarian Strong-Man by Graeme Orr and Ron Levy [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1579826]
Ireland at the Polls, 1981, 1982, and 1987: A Study of Four General Elections by Howard Rae Penniman and Brian Farrell [https://books.google.ca/books?id=PaS-PdCzF_4C&printsec=frontcover]
Electoral Reform: Neglected questions on mixed-member proportional representation [http://rabble.ca/babble/canadian-politics/electoral-reform-neglected-questions-on-mixed-member-proportional-represent]
“Non-reformist” reforms and “social fascism” [http://www.revleft.com/vb/non-reformist-reforms-t86845/index.html]
Constituency and Party by Karl Kautsky [http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1081/origins-of-democratic-centralism/]
Labour's membership is moving further leftwards by George Eaton, New Statesman [http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/11/labours-membership-moving-further-leftwards]
Party-Recallable, Closed-List Representation with Full or Near-Full Proportionality
"A complete democracy is to be found nowhere, and everywhere we have to strive after modifications and improvements. Even in Switzerland there is an agitation for the extension of the legislative powers of the people, for proportional representation and for woman suffrage. In America the power and mode of selection of the highest judges need to be very severely restricted. Far greater are the demands that should be put forward by us in the great bureaucratic and militarist States in the interests of democracy." (K.J. Kautsky)
Before continuing, it is fortunate that my quotations of the senile renegade Mister K.J. Kautsky, along with his obsession with “refuting” the Russian Revolution, are limited to this section. The quotation above comes from his controversial work The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, whose “refutations” of the Russian Revolution directly prompted the justified and timely response by Lenin now known as The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
Much has been said time and again about the benefits of proportional representation (PR) over single-member district “representation” (plurality/first-past-the-post, instant-runoff, and so on), in spite of the “pure PR” caricature presented by the Israelis. These benefits include: the irrelevancy of ideally electing the candidate who would beat every other candidate in a pairwise contest (the so-called “Condorcet method” in political science), the elimination of tactical voting for the “lesser of two evils,” and the elimination of wasted votes for losing candidates and for winning candidates (excess votes in safe seats, usually due to the geographically seat-manipulative gerrymandering) – thereby increasing voter turnout.
The traditional incorporation of single-member, plurality-voting-based “representation” into every district within a mixed voting system – whether a non-proportional, parallel voting system or a non-parallel, mixed-member proportional representation system (MMP) – is not a significant improvement. Where the mixed voting system is based on parallel voting, proportionality is confined to the list seats, and the risk of traditional gerrymandering remains. Where the mixed voting system is based on subtracting district seats won from the list seats (MMP), there is the risk of overhang, wherein a parliamentary group wins more district seats than purely proportional representation would allow. For the latter, there is also the special risk of district boundary manipulation, or traditional gerrymandering, being used specifically to maximize overhang.
Also, there have been attempts to mischaracterize unorthodox forms of district representation as proportional. For example, it has been argued that the standalone single transferable vote system (STV) in Australia and Ireland is proportional, given that the district representation is multi-member and not single-member, and given that the same representation is based on preferential voting and not plurality voting. However, while standalone STV may be less prone to traditional gerrymandering, electorally-motivated determinations on district magnitude, or the number of members per multi-member district, are a form of gerrymandering, and have been used in both Australia and Ireland.
In every district-related case above, even where a non-partisan electoral body is responsible for determining either district boundaries or the number of members per multi-member district, there are still wasted votes. This would suggest an inherent problem with any district-based constituency representation.
Two options remain for realizing the full benefits of proportional representation, one being the institution of proportional representation without any district-based constituency representation at all (party-list proportional representation), and the other being the institution of proportional representation in which any district-based constituency representation is both based on the least disproportional voting system and limited to no more than half of the total seats – and to less in places such as New Zealand. For the second option, all district-based constituency representation would be based on preferential voting and not plurality voting. For the second option, district-based constituency representation for all but the lowest population density areas would be based on multi-member districts and not single-member districts.
Does this reform facilitate the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands?
First, under any form of district-based constituency representation (including STV), the constituents can call their misrepresentative legislators and tell them to vote a certain way, but usually this does not happen, even if the constituents dislike the voting record of their respective legislators. At the turn of the 20th century, Kautsky wrote profoundly true and important remarks in Constituency and Party, a 1904 article that was referenced by Lenin in One Steps Forward, Two Steps Back:
Can and should the deputies arrange their political activity as they see fit, according to their own discretion, or are they representatives, who are to carry out the orders of those who have issued them? And, if they are representatives, then do they represent their voters or the party as a whole? These are the questions with which we are concerned and it is in this certainty that we must keep them in mind and beware of allowing them to become blurred in the fog of general phrases about “freedom of opinion,” “democratic principle” and “free personality,” in which the revisionists so gladly attempt to enshroud them. We are not dealing with the freedom of opinion of the masses, but the freedom of action of the leaders. Democracy does not mean the absence of rule, it does not mean anarchy: it means the rule of the masses over their representatives, in distinction to other forms of rule, where the supposed servants of the people are in reality their masters.
[…]
The voters, however, are only sovereign during the election. Following the election, all the power at the masses’ disposal is handed to the person elected, who does with it what he likes. He can sell out and betray his voters as he sees fit; nothing stands in the way of the “free” development of his “personality.” He is “free” until the next election and can carry the “democratic principle” to the height of absurdity; his voters have no power to restrict his “intellectual freedom.” He cannot, of course, take things too far, otherwise he will not be re-elected. But his successor probably will not do a better job and, after all, the electorate has such a short memory! If he behaves himself in a way that is to some extent friendly towards the people, then this can cover up quite a lot.
Before contrasting the above with what happens under a party-recallable, closed-list electoral form that achieves full or near-full proportionality – whether there is no district-based constituency representation at all, or whether any district-based constituency representation is both based on the least disproportional voting system and limited to no more than half of the total seats - it must be pointed out that Kautsky unwittingly predicted in his 1904 article the long-term consequences of the absence of accountability to the party-movement:
They considered themselves responsible only to ‘the voters’, or at best the party congress – but not to the party’s executive, which, after all, in the first instance has to implement the decisions of the party congress. During the entire legislative period they thus did not recognise any arbitrators above them, but during the election they felt justified in fishing for votes using all possible means – even by denying the socialist character of their politics.
In 1907, long before the outbreak of the mislabelled “First World War,” it was thought that a “revolutionary victory” had been achieved in the Second International against the pacifist Bernstein’s class-conciliationist revisionism. In fact, however, there were no tendency struggles afterwards to purge far worse opportunists from the SPD and its Executive Committee, especially those who were also legislators (and were hence practically free from subordination to party decisions outside the legislature). This absence of purges ultimately led to betrayal of the working class by the Executive Committee and the party’s legislative group, in the form of voting for war credits. Without “party control” over legislative seats themselves, who can prevent opportunist “representatives” from switching party affiliations (usually from some opposition party to the governing party), or conscious legislators (district representatives or otherwise) from becoming independents, thereby depriving parties of the relevant seats in either case? After all, Kautsky continued:
There can be no doubt that a deputy will only do a half-hearted job if he represents politics which he inwardly condemns. His personality is not only crippled: it is directly degraded and in the long run is corrupted, reduced to untruthfulness and duplicity.
Contemporarily speaking, the 2015 election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in the UK exposed the triangular impasse between that organization’s “soft left” voters at large, its further-left membership, and its further-right Parliamentary Labour Party. As noted by George Eaton of the New Statesman:
When Labour fought the general election in May it had around 200,000 full members. It now has more than 380,000, close to the 400,000 reached in 1997 and an increase of around 90,000 since Jeremy Corbyn became leader.
[…]
As both supporters and opponents of the Labour leader emphasise, the increasing discontent among MPs is not shared by the membership.
For this reason, as I write in my column this week, the question of deselection, be it of Corbyn or of recalcitrant MPs, will persist. True unity will not be achieved until the PLP reflects the leader, or the leader reflects the PLP. As Labour's divisions grow, MPs fear that left-wing members will increasingly turn on them.
[…]
A more left-wing membership will make it easier for Corbyn to win conference policy votes and for his supporters to become parliamentary candidates. As the Labour leader's opponents privately acknowledge, it will also make it far harder for any candidate significantly to his right to win in any future contest.
On the other hand, under a party-recallable, closed-list electoral form that achieves full or near-full proportionality – whether there is no district-based constituency representation at all, or whether any district-based constituency representation is both based on the least disproportional voting system and limited to no more than half of the total seats – there are less direct links between the "constituents" and the "representatives” (which already exists in cases of electoral parachuting). Such further formalization of the distance between the "constituents" and their so-called "representatives" except through political parties can actually result in participatory democracy of some sort, with the “constituents” having to exert party-based pressure for certain laws to be passed, especially through increased party memberships and increased participatory democracy at the expense of bureaucratic fetishes within the various political parties.
Second, since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle remarked that “it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot [and] for them to be elected oligarchic,” the complete implementation of party-recallable, closed-list representation that achieves full or near-full proportionality – with the potential for mandatory random selection or at least (somewhat) random balloting of officeholders by political parties themselves – would go a long way towards combating the very degenerative yet professional personality politics (or rather, non-politics, being bereft of substantive policy discussions and formulations), ranging from individual corruption scandals that can be addressed through party-based replacements to person-based attack ads not being as widely circulated. These days, many if not most electoral campaigns have truly revealed the oligarchic nature of electoralism, dispensing with sufficient discussions on electoral platforms and strategic policies bound to be unfulfilled by those “best qualified” to be in the halls of legislative power.
Third, the complete implementation of party-recallable, closed-list representation that achieves full or near-full proportionality can and should be extended – on an immediate basis, in fact – to those in the higher halls of executive power, starting with the singular chief executives and the cabinet officials! This extension may have the potential to go a long way towards the full integration of legislative and executive powers “after the type of the [Paris] Commune,” as Lenin once remarked.
Does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view” – the criterion set out by the same individual responsible for writing the horribly illusory words above? If electoralist universal suffrage is nothing but, as Engels said, “the gauge of the maturity of the working class” that will one day show “boiling-point among the workers,” then steps need to be taken in order to replace this with a better gauge, if not with real political enfranchisement.
REFERENCES
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat by K.J. Kautsky [https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole/ch10.htm]
The Politics of Electoral Systems by Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell [http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199257566.001.0001/acprof-9780199257560-chapter-25]
Electoral Malapportionment: Partisanship, Rhetoric and Reform in the Shadow of the Agrarian Strong-Man by Graeme Orr and Ron Levy [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1579826]
Ireland at the Polls, 1981, 1982, and 1987: A Study of Four General Elections by Howard Rae Penniman and Brian Farrell [https://books.google.ca/books?id=PaS-PdCzF_4C&printsec=frontcover]
Electoral Reform: Neglected questions on mixed-member proportional representation [http://rabble.ca/babble/canadian-politics/electoral-reform-neglected-questions-on-mixed-member-proportional-represent]
“Non-reformist” reforms and “social fascism” [http://www.revleft.com/vb/non-reformist-reforms-t86845/index.html]
Constituency and Party by Karl Kautsky [http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1081/origins-of-democratic-centralism/]
Labour's membership is moving further leftwards by George Eaton, New Statesman [http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/11/labours-membership-moving-further-leftwards]