Today I'll follow up on my previous post about election systems. The upshot of the last post was that switching to a (partial) first-past-the-post (FPTP) regional voting method will result in two major parties (and possibly one or two minor parties with regional appeal).

In this post, I'll explain the overall advantages and disadvantages of such a system as compared to the current proportional system.

In an excellent article in Azure, Amotz Asa-el outlines the failures of Israel's proportional representation system. He identifies the crucial issues as:
1. A plethora of small parties representing special interests. Since such parties are necessary for forming coalitions, they have power that is incommensurate both with their limited size and with their limited sense of national responsibility.
2. Greater accountability of MKs to their parties than to their constituents. This leads to all manner of irresponsible and even corrupt behavior, as predicted in a brilliant paper by Ferdinand Hermens, cited at length by Asa-el.

So will FPTP solve these problems?

With regard to the first issue, as discussed in my previous post, there is no doubt that most small parties will be eliminated. But then there are two possibilities. The less likely one is that neither major party will have an absolute majority and will need to form a coalition with some minor regional party. In this case, the problem of disproportional power is not diminished but rather greatly exacerbated, since the minor partner is likely to be the sole coalition option and hence will have the same voting power as the major partner. The more likely possibility is that one party will have an absolute majority. This is a scary proposition, unless Israel's major political parties become significantly more responsible than they are now.

Which leads to the question of accountability to the voters as opposed to party interests. Clearly the need for MKs to please the voters leads inevitably to a weakening of the parties. Just as clearly, as voters abandon small parties in regions where those parties have no chance, the larger parties will be incentivized to run candidates in those regions who are attractive to the floating voters. In the long run, this will lead to great improvements. Unfortunately, it will take a fair amount of time until 1) voters learn to abandon parties with no chance and 2) parties learn to run attractive candidates rather than ones that are loyal to the party line. Until that happens, matters will be worse rather than better.

As a result, we are better off if, during a transition period, we adopt a system that combines direct election of MKs with proportional results (and I don't mean half this and half that). There are a number of ways to do this. One is to use single transferable vote, in which elections are regional but more than one candidate is elected in each region in such manner that each party receives a number of seats proportional to the number of overall votes it received. The other is to use a system as in Belgium in which elections are national and proportional, as they are now, but in which a voter specifies preferred candidates within the party he has selected.

Both these systems encourage personal accountability while preserving proportionality. Once Israel's parties have learned the principle of accountability, we can take the next step and move to ordinary regional elections. Once we do, I hope we use something a bit more sophisticated than FPTP. As I did in my previous post, I once again promise to explain the alternatives in my next post.