Poll reform could mean smaller, and better

Noel Dempsey is flying another kite on the electoral system. He is in good company. Well-known Fianna Fail colleagues as well as Fine Gael luminaries such as Garret FitzGerald, have all backed the heave against the Single Transferable Vote (STV).

Many TDs loathe STV and long for a promised land of single-seat constituencies. They see this as a land free from local bush warfare with party running mates, a land free from the need to respond to the seemingly endless, and often duplicated, demands of their constituents. Some even see it as a land in which TDs will be able to spend at least five days a week in Dublin rather than 2 1/2, thinking seriously about affairs of State.

Noel Dempsey's plan is to introduce a version of the German "additional member" system. This fulfils his main objective by getting rid of multi-seat constituencies and replaces these with single-seaters. These are likely to be fought on the British first-past-the-post basis, although they could also be fought using STV under the current rules for a Dail bye-election.

Who are the additional members? In keeping with recent trends in electoral reform in countries as diverse as New Zealand, Italy and Japan, every voter would have two ballot papers. As well as voting for local constituency candidates, voters would cast a second vote for national party lists.

Each qualifying party would nominate a list of party candidates, ranked in order. A number of candidates would be elected from each list to ensure the balance of parties in the Dail reflected the balance of votes cast in the State as a whole.

Thus, if one party won a lot of constituency seats, it might only need to take the top two or three candidates from its list to top it up to the right number of seats overall. If other parties won no constituency seats, then candidates would be elected from the top of the party list to ensure that each party had a proportional number of TDs in the Dail as a whole. This would require the amendment of Articles 16.2.5 and 16.2.6 of the Constitution.

The Minister's latest kite has an interesting sting in its tail, however. Proposals for electoral reform, which have not played well with voters who have no interest in a new system that makes TDs less responsive to their every whim, have been coupled with proposals for a reduction in the number of TDs.

In the current climate of disillusionment with the exploits of some politicians, a proposal to chop the Dail from 166 to 120 has an engaging populist ring to it.

A number of things are quite clear in this debate. First, by international standards Ireland has far too many TDs. Belgium and the Netherlands each have smaller legislatures than Ireland, for example, with populations of about 10 million and 15 million respectively.

If we want to come closer to the European norm, we should cut the size of the Dail to about 70, but a useful start in this surgery would be to slice it to 120, as the Minister suggests. This also implies reducing the size of the government.

With a Dail of 120, the government representation would be 60-odd. With 15 cabinet ministers and at least as many junior ministers, plus committee chairs and whips, there might well not be enough talented, ambitious and hardworking raw material on the government benches to fill all the top jobs. You won't find politicians making such rude remarks, but a leaner, meaner cabinet would also play well with the voters.

Second, the additional-member system does combine the twin virtues of single-seat constituencies and proportional representation. Here it is important to note that one of the Minister's proposals, a 90-30 split between constituency and list seats, has no hope in the world of delivering proportional representation. Almost invariably, such a split would manufacture a Fianna Fail Dail majority from a minority of the popular vote.

The only viable option in Ireland for using the additional-member system to deliver proportional representation is a 50-50 split between constituency and list seats.

Third, if we used the German threshold of 5 per cent of the national vote for winning the top-up seats, then all but the largest three Irish parties would be wiped out.

A recent paper by the Policy Institute did show, however, that a 2 per cent threshold would be likely to produce a legislature with a composition more or less like that of the current Dail.

Fianna Fail would do much worse than it did in 1997, of course, because it used the STV system to its advantage to get more than its "fair" share of seats, but the results would have produced more or less the party system we have now.

Fourth, the additional-member system will create two classes of TD. Some will be elected in single-seaters, others from national lists.

The 60 constituency TDs will face pressure to do all the constituency work, for an area only slightly smaller than the present multi-seat constituencies. Failure to respond to the demands of constituents will put their seats under pressure. In exchange, they will have a fair degree of independence from the central party, having been elected in their own right.

The 60 list TDs will have no constituency at all. This may not mean that they have no constituency work, however. If the experience of New Zealand and Germany is anything to go by, list TDs will be assigned by their national parties to "mind" particular local areas, marking the local TD and making their life difficult.

This will be especially true for TDs from the smaller parties. This would have Labour and Green list TDs taking an interest in areas such as Donegal, for example, where they might have no hope at all of winning a seat. The downside for list TDs will be that they will depend for their political lives on the good graces of the central party, which is likely to have the major say on where candidates are placed on the list.

None of this is necessarily bad, of course. But it will be very, very different, perhaps more different than is realised by those who see electoral reform as simply a way of getting rid of multi-seat constituencies while preserving PR.

And I doubt it will reduce the burden of constituency work, which is something that politicians around the world complain about. The solution to this, though it will not be popular with the public, is quite simply to give TDs sufficient resources to deal with their workload.

Michael Laver is director of the Policy Institute at Trinity College and author of Does Ireland Need a New Electoral System?, published recently by the institute