Pearls from Wells (with one small correction)

I am extremely thankful to Paul Wells for his insightful commentary on yesterday's German federal election:

The cheap talking point of the next few days in Ottawa will be that Germany just switched from a coalition of the centre-right and centre-left to a coalition of the centre-right and the slightly-righter, and nobody freaked out. It’s such a cheap talking point that I’ve already used it, tonight on CPAC. The slightly higher-value talking point is that this coalition didn’t advertise itself before the election. Angela Merkel’s choice of coalition partner remained her prerogative, and contingent on the returns, until after everyone had voted. So the Tom Flanagan argument, that coalitions should only be valid if they advertise their makeup before everyone gets to vote, wasn’t followed in Germany. And nobody’s freaking out.

In fact, I'm so thankful to him for saying this that I'm almost reluctant to say that he's not quite right. But he isn't quite right. It's absolutely true that the new German coalition partners didn't "advertise" their future coalition, but I follow German politics pretty closely, and what both big parties did do (and always do) is "signal" their desired coalition partners during the election. That's why a government could be formed right away instead of only much later, after lots of negotiation.

Here's how "signalling" works in Germany: The centre-right big tent party (the CDU) campaigns on their own and tries to win over as many people as they can. And the centre-left big tent party (the SPD) of course does the same. But at the same time, they also mention in their speeches and in interviews which other (usually smaller) party they each would most prefer to cooperate with in parliament. So the CDU, for example, will say something like this: "A strong CDU needs a strong coalition partner in the FDP!" and their supporters will cheer. And the SPD does the same with the Greens.

Sometimes, though, you get an election where it doesn't quite work out that way for either coalition (i.e. where the CDU and the FDP together don't add up to 50%, and the SPD and the Greens together don't add up to 50% either). This means that what the parties signalled ahead of time to the voters isn't going to be possible any way you stack it. And that's when the Germans do freak out a little bit. We know this very well, because it's exactly what happened during the Germans' last federal election in 2005, when both preferred coalitions fell short of 50%. Back then, after literally weeks of negotiation, the two big-tent parties finally decided to solve the problem by reluctantly forming a government together (what they call a "Grand Coalition", which is essentially the equivalent of the Canadian Conservatives and Liberals sitting on the same side of the aisle in the House of Commons and sharing cabinet posts and otherwise working as a unit). The German form of "freaking out" is closer to grumbling and moaning about why the voters didn't give one or the other of the preferred coalitions 50%, of course (rather than party leaders accusing other parties of treason and clueless idiots chanting in the streets about coups), but whenever parties end up having to form a coalition that didn't get signalled in advance, it's there all the same.

But the basic point behind what Wells said is 100% right, and that's that parties in Germany--and in the rest of the democratic world, for that matter--don't advertise together and run together as a block when they think there might be a particular coalition after the election. Why? Because that would be freaking presumptuous! It's up to the voters to determine which potential coalition governments can and can't form a majority, and nobody knows that for sure until after the election, once the voters have had a chance to have their say.

MMP and me

It occurs to me that some of you may not realize that I wasn't born a statistics-spouting, FAQ-writing, electoral reform geek--I was made that way. This post is that story.

When I was a young, politically-oblivious American teenager, I went over to Germany as an exchange student. I learned a lot of German, of course (which was the point), but as it turned out, it was also the beginning of my political education. Over the course of that year, I figured out that Germany had not two viable political parties, but four. I also figured out that some of the parties had to work together in order for anything to get done, because that was the only way they could add up to over fifty percent. And I also learned that this working together thing actually seemed to work for them--it actually produced policies that most of the country agreed with. What a wonderful thing this 'parliamentary democracy' thing was.

I didn't fully understand what their voting process looked like until a little later, when I was living there again immediately following German unification and the government put together a "this is how you vote!" program for the benefit of the rapidly democratizing East Germans. Your ballot has two votes, the program explained. On one side of the ballot, you mark the person you want as your local representative. On the other side, you pick the political party you like best. The East German first-time voters understood it quickly, and so did I--in fact, it intuitively made sense to me. It meant that if I were German and I liked that nice Mr. Schmidt and wanted him to represent me in Parliament, but in my heart of hearts, I really wanted to give my vote to a different party, I could do both. What a truly wonderful thing this 'parliamentary democracy' thing was.

Now, by the mid-80s, I knew I didn't want to live in the U.S. for the rest of my life--and frankly, a lot of that had to do with my early exposure to a political system that was clearly superior to the one I'd grown up with. But by the early 90s, I knew Germany was always going to remain a flirtation for me as well. By then I spoke the language as if it were my own and had loads of wonderful friends, but there were certain bits of me that were just too North American to ever feel truly at home there. So when I ended up in Ottawa during the 1993 federal election, I was ripe for seduction--and boy, oh boy did this country seduce me. I loved its bilingualism, its multiculturalism, the diversity of its political landscape. And that election...oh. Pure heroin to any budding political junkie.

And then came the results. The Liberals ascendant, the Bloc Québécois and Reform as strong regional forces, the NDP holding on for dear life, and most fascinatingly, the ruling Progressive Conservatives reduced to two seats (or less than 1% of the 295 seats). Everyone was shocked, but I was dumbfounded. Even the most pessimistic polls over the last few days of the campaign had seen the Tories in the low twenties or high teens--how the hell could they have suddenly gotten less than 1% of the vote? Didn't Canada have that 'parliamentary democracy' thing--you know, that thing where you vote for your local representative separately and the party vote determines the seat percentages?

It took me weeks--after I'd long since returned to the U.S.--to figure it all out. I learned that while the Progressive Conservative vote had gone down by a lot, they'd actually still gotten a perfectly respectable 16%. Which put them only a couple of percentage points behind the Reform Party...but somehow, Reform had gotten 50 more seats than them. And more confusing still was the Bloc, which had somehow managed to form the Official Opposition with only 14% of the vote. It quickly became clear that this wasn't my nice familiar German parliamentary democracy; this was some bizarro parliamentary democracy in which 16% meant two seats, but 19% meant 52 and 14% meant 54. Um. Okay, then!

Finally, someone was able to explain to me that it was the voting system that had made the difference; that the way it worked in Canada was simply different from how they voted in Germany. But even after I'd had it explained to me, it continued to baffle me. The Canadians had a parliamentary democracy, which as far as I was concerned was the most sensible political system in the world. So why did they want to screw that up with this weird voting system that clearly could produce such skewed results? Why didn't they do it the way the Germans did--it would be so easy and so clear! And then the polls everybody talked about during their campaigns would actually mean something!

Despite the fact that the Canadian voting system freaked me the hell out, the bug I'd caught during that trip stuck with me anyway, and so when it came time to apply for a permanent position a couple years later, I went after one in Edmonton and got it. I came to love this place as my home. But every once in a while my new Canadian friends and I would talk about elections, and I'd explain to them how things worked in Germany. Every time, they would emerge from our discussion asking the same questions I'd been asking for years: why did Canadians use such a screwy system when a far more sensible alternative was available? I did a little reading, and learned that the system I liked was called mixed-member proportional or MMP, while the one I didn't like was called first-past-the-post. And eventually, I learned that there was an organization called Fair Vote Canada that was trying to change things for the better. I joined up, I started blogging, and here I am.

Which brings us to today, just a few weeks before October 10th. October 10th, when the people of Ontario have a chance to change the system from one in which 16% sometimes means two seats and 14% sometimes means 54, to the one that's impressed me since I was fifteen for its simple, clear, and fair results. To say that this is a historic opportunity is a huge understatement. It seems that when people are truly informed about the two choices and what they mean, they tend to prefer MMP--but I unfortunately don't have the ability to inject the hands-on political education I got by living first in Germany and then in Canada into every Ontarian's brain. So I'm asking you to trust me a little on this: MMP really does work. It doesn't produce perpetual unstable minority governments, it doesn't make political parties into super-sized patronage machines, and it's not at all hard to understand.

Yes, it's different from what people are used to, and yes, that's scary. But it's even scarier to the status-quo politicians who have benefited under the current system, and are completely panicked about the prospect of having to learn to do their jobs differently. Don't listen to them. They haven't lived under MMP and really seen how it works, and I have. I know about all of the frightening scenarios that they want you to believe--the ones that could, in some alternate universe, potentially produce some scary result like parties taking control and stacking parliament with people who owe them favours. But the thing is, they're talking about what's theoretically possible, and MMP really doesn't work that way in practice. And even if that alternate universe somehow came to pass, none of those scenarios are scarier than things that have already happened in Canada as a direct result of the system we already have.

It's long past time for a change. Make history, Ontario. Make me proud.

And Germany has a marble game!

It only took three weeks. Over in Old Germany, the kiddies have finally sorted through their various squabbles and found a way to get their marble game off the ground. Angie Black will serve as the first female team captain (causing all the little boys to squeal "eeew!"), but various standins for George Red (who's apparently decided he's had enough of marbles for now) will get more turns at the hill. Guido Yellow, Josh Green, and the twins will be watching from the sidelines. A fine compromise, and an inspiration to all the marbles-playing children across the world who have yet to learn to share with their little friends.

(For those looking for more serious commentary in English, this upcoming TIME Europe article is really quite good.)

Make your own German chancellor

The latest insanity from Germany: Since neither Christian Democrat leader Angela Merkel nor Social Democrat leader Gerhard Schröder can agree on who would be chancellor in their potential grand coalition, it has been suggested that they share the job. The plan has been dubbed "Kanzler-Sharing" (chancellor sharing) by the German blogosphere, in analogy with the lovely "German" words 'Car-Sharing' and 'Job-Sharing'.

Enter the latest -- and arguably the most disturbing -- in a now ubiquitous series of political flash animations: Der Kanzlergenerator. (It's in German, but believe me, the message is clear.)

In defense of proportional representation

It was inevitable, I suppose, that someone was going to come out and blame the crazy results of recent elections in Germany and New Zealand on that gosh-darned proportional representation. And if it was inevitable that someone was going to do that, then I suppose it was equally inevitable that that someone was going to be Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail:

Nobody knows who'll form the government in either country. The wheeling and dealing, haggling and bargaining has begun to form minority/coalition governments. When the bargaining's done, and new governments emerge, they'll likely be weak, unstable and incapable of making difficult, unpopular decisions. That's just what many PR advocates want. They don't like strong governments. For them, strict representation trumps effectiveness. They want strictly representative governments in which votes match seats. They want negotiations, haggling and coalitions. This is democracy. They like minority governments, thinking them more "responsive" to the people than majority ones based on the first-past-the-post system. So they're going to love what will unfold in Germany and New Zealand.

Unfortunately for the soundness of Simpson's argument, there is no such thing as "minority/coalition governments," and the equation of minority and coalition governments is lumping together apples and oranges. It is certainly the case that minority governments (in which the governing party or parties do not have a majority of the voices in parliament) have been historically unstable. In the entire post-war history of Germany, for example, there have been only three minority governments on the national level (Ludwig Erhard's 1963 government, Willy Brandt's 1972 government, and Helmut Schmidt's 1982 government), and due in large part to that sort of instability, each was very short-lived. Coalition governments, on the other hand, are formed precisely to do away with that sort of instability, and in practice, they have been extremely effective at doing just that. The recently defeated coalition between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens was stable enough to be reelected in 2002. Extremely stable coalition governments of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Free Democrats (FDP) have also existed under chancellors Adenauer, Erhard, and the seemingly undefeatable Helmut Kohl, who was reelected a total of five times. And as for the supposed ineffectiveness of such governments, it seems not only disingenuous, but also ludicrous to claim that the vast majority of the governments in a country that has gone from near-total destruction to the primary European power in a mere sixty years (while integrating an entirely separate country only fifteen years ago) have been "weak, unstable and incapable of making difficult, unpopular decisions."

Simpson throws out another strawman argument as his column continues, this time in the form of the bogeyman of ideological or regional parties:

In Germany, the conservative forces won 35.6 per cent of the vote, the Social Democratic party 34.2 per cent. Smaller parties did well -- something that often happens in PR, because parties spring up around ideology, region or ethnicity. The small parties are now the political kingmakers. In New Zealand, the Labour Party won 50 seats, the National (conservative) Party 49. Six minor parties held the remaining 23 seats. As in Germany, these small parties will determine who governs.

Although Simpson would clearly like to blame the good result for small parties on proportional representation, the facts about these particular elections don't bear that out. Both Germany and New Zealand have high (5%) thresholds specifically to discourage the proliferation of tiny parties in parliament, and this threshhold in fact did keep out most of the tiny parties that had sprung up "around ideology, region, or ethnicity." Only those with a significant percentage of the voters behind them were able to make it over this hurdle. And in the case of New Zealand, there are in fact several more parties than have been elected in the past, but this is because they won constituencies, not because of proportional representation.

Finally, Simpson attempts to make one point that is just plain incorrect, no matter how you slice it:

Germans cast two ballots: one vote for the constituency, one for the party list. The result always produces a minority winner. That party then negotiates with others to form a coalition. Or, the coalition partners are known in advance. If you vote for Party A, and that party wins the largest number of votes, you know you'll also get a coalition government of Party A and Party B. New Zealand uses a complicated version of this dual system. It's called Mixed Member Proportional (MMP).

Germans do not cast two ballots; instead there is a single ballot with two separate votes. As I explained back here, in the first vote, or "district vote," Germans vote for the person whom they think can best represent their district in parliament. In the second vote, or "party vote," they vote for the party whose policies are most closely aligned with their own preferences. Those candidates who are directly elected then serve in parliament, and candidates from party lists are added to this group by means of this second vote. It is also not the case that this ballot "always produces a minority winner"; there have been single-party majority governments in several different German federal states. And finally, it is not the case that New Zealand uses "a complicated version of this dual system called Mixed Member Proportional" -- New Zealand uses essentially the same system as Germany, and they are both called Mixed-Member Proportional. As to whether it is overly "complicated," keep in mind that Germany managed to successfully explain it to seventeen million new citizens after East and West Germany reunified in 1990.

Are the election results in Germany and New Zealand a problem? You bet. Are they the norm? Hardly. Are they an inevitable result of a Mixed-Member Proportional electoral system? Absolutely not--and anyone who thinks that hasn't done their homework. The problem this time around wasn't the way the Germans and New Zealanders elect MPs, but the positively miserable performance of both of the major parties in both countries. Under MMP, it is normal for the major parties to have one or more potential coalition partners in the works going into an election, so that once the result is known, the winning party is able to establish a working government right away. This time, the major parties did badly enough that this wasn't possible, but the blame for that muddle needs to rest with the current unpopularity of those parties, not with an electoral system that has worked perfectly well for decades.

Ironically, if the current negotiations fail to produce a stable coalition in Germany, a chancellor will be chosen by a relative (rather than an absolute) majority of the newly elected Bundestag. The result of this failure would then be a minority government, which, given past evidence, Simpson would almost certainly be justified in calling unstable and ineffective. But we Canadians know all about that sort of thing. After all, it would be the exact same situation that Simpson's beloved first-past-the-post system produced right here.

Schwampels and Jamaica coalitions

Yet another consequence of the German post-election horsetrading insanity: the creation of new words.

In common parlance, each of the big German political parties is assigned a colour. The conservative CDU/CSU is black, the SPD is red (though the primarily eastern German Left Party is annoyingly also red--I always thought they should be, like, scarlet or crimson), the Greens are, well, green, and the FDP is yellow. These descriptors are used judiciously; it's not at all unusual for Germans to have entire political discussions using only colour terms (a la "Too bad that it didn't work out with red-green." "Yeah, too bad. What do you think of red-red-green?" "Too radical. I'd rather see black-yellow-green."). I have long since thought this practice should be adopted by Canada as well--it makes for great shorthand, not to mention some hilarious puns.

This practice is carried so far that a potential coalition between the SPD, the FDP, and the Greens is pretty much universally known by the punditry as an 'Ampelkoalition,' or 'traffic light coalition' (no, really! I'm not making this up!). Well, when recently there started to be talks about a potential coalition between CDU/CSU (black), FDP (yellow), and the Greens, they needed a word for this as well. Enter 'Schwampel,' which comes from the German word for 'black' ('schwarz'), combined with the word for 'traffic light' ('Ampel'). The beautiful thing, though, is that this word got created more or less overnight, and yet everybody automatically knew what it meant. German Green Party supporters were shown on television tonight waving signs with a picture of a traffic light with black, yellow, and green lights, a line through it, and a caption reading "KEINE SCHWAMPEL" (no, um, 'Schwampel'). Even better: a google search on the word 'Schwampel' produces around 12,500 pages. And the best of all: if you think the word 'Schwampel' sounds too ridiculous, your alternative term is Jamaika-Koalition.

I love this language.

A story problem

A friend of mine was speculating this afternoon that the world may well be in the midst of some sort of cosmic electoral weirdness oneupsmanship. It goes something like this:

USA: We have an undecidable election going before the Supreme Court!

Ukraine: Oh, yeah, well, one of our candidates poisoned the other with Dioxin!

Canada: Oh, YEAH? Well...we're all switching sides! It's musical parties! And--GO!

Germany: Amateurs.

And now, for you mathematical whizzes out there, a story problem, brought to you by the letters 'o', 'my', and 'god':

Five kids want to play a game of marbles. They need at least fifty marbles to play, and the game allows for an unlimited number of participants. Nobody's allowed to loan their marbles to anyone else.

Angie Black has 35 marbles.
George Red has 34 marbles.
Guido Yellow has 10 marbles.
The twins, Oscar and Greg Crimson, have 9 marbles between them.
Josh Green has 8 marbles.

Angie would most like to play with Guido, and utterly refuses to play with the twins. She would prefer not to play with Josh or with George, but she'd rather do that than not play at all.

George would most like to play with Josh, and has said he would never play with the twins. He doesn't want to play with Guido or Angie, either, but again, would rather do that than not play at all.

Guido used to play very nicely with both Angie and with George, but at different times. Recently he's been hoping to play with Angie and promising never again to play with George, but he's a fickle sort and would probably break that promise if he absolutely had to. He's also willing not to play at all, if it comes to that. He would never dream of playing with the twins.

The twins don't really want to play with anyone (they're happy just to stand on the sidelines taunting Angie, Guido, and George), but they would probably entertain a quick little game with Josh or maybe even George (especially if nobody was looking).

Josh would most like to play alone with George, but he knows that's hopeless. He hasn't promised not to play with anybody else, but he doesn't really get along very well with anyone but George and would prefer to sit this one out if he can't play with him. But in a pinch, he could probably be talked into a game with at least some of the others.

What combination of children (and marbles) would make the largest number of them happy?

German election irony

It wasn't supposed to happen until 2006. But in a sharp contrast to the Canadian Liberals' "let's hold onto power by tooth and claw" behaviour this past spring, when the citizens of North Rhine Westphalia (previously always a stronghold of the social democrats) voted for the conservative CDU, the current social democratic chancellor Schröder took it as a sign of the way the wind was blowing and decided to give up the ghost. A no-confidence vote was held, and lost, parliament was dissolved, and new elections were called for this fall. For today.

As ever in Germany, though, irony abounds. While just a few months ago the polls were declaring reelection of Schröder's coalition government between the social democrats (SPD) and the Green party to be worse than hopeless, conservative leader Angela Merkel's call for a flat tax has met with significant criticism, and the long-ruling social democrats have nearly caught up with with her CDU. In even tastier irony, a reelection of the beleaguered SPD-Green coalition would give the Germans another government led by two old, straight white men, a win for the CDU would likely mean an alliance between a formerly East German woman and a youngish gay man. And perhaps most deliciously of all, there's a pretty decent chance that the CDU's partner of choice, the fiscally conservative FDP, won't receive a high enough percentage of the vote to be able to form a coalition (Germany has a mixed-member proportional electoral system, which produces coalition governments if one party can't reach an absolute majority), in which case a winning CDU would have to choose as its coalition partner ... Schröder's social democrats.

It's not quite the insane twists and turns of April 2005 in Canada (will anything ever be again?), but there's plenty there for election buffs. Go watch.

[Update: And in the end, the winner was ... irony. The CDU got the most votes, but did badly enough that they can't form a government together with the FDP. The SPD and the Greens can't form one, either. Of the remaining possibilities, the most likely one is a "grand coalition" between the CDU and the SPD. Imagine the Canadian Liberals and the Conservatives forming a coalition, and you'll have some idea how amusing that idea is. It's a great night for the German cabaret tradition, let me tell you.]

A proportional response

In this Canadian federal election campaign, a lot of words have been exchanged on the subject of proportional representation. This is just as Jack Layton would have it, as a national referendum on just this topic is a major plank -- if not THE major plank -- of the NDP platform. Those in favour of proportional representation say that the current "first-past-the-post" system (where the candidate who comes in first simply takes the seat and all of the other votes don't count, and the party which wins of the highest number of seats forms the government) is undemocratic, and we need to usher in a system where the number of seats better reflects the relative percentages each party has taken in the general election. Opponents of proportional representation say that it isn't a system that's at all suited to a country with such local and regional loyalties as Canada, and that it's extremely valuable for each Member of Parliament to be responsible for a small and clearly defined area such as a riding. Leaving aside the fact that the parties on both sides of this argument seem more interested in having the system in place that's best for their party than the one that's best for Canada, there's a lot of merit to each of these perspectives.

What I don't get, though, is why no one on the pro side is bothering to mention in any of these discussions that it's possible to have your cake and eat it too. I present to you the German system. On a German ballot, voters get not one, but two votes. In the first vote, or "district vote," you vote for the person who you think can best represent your district in parliament. In the second vote, or "party vote," you vote for the party whose policies are most closely aligned with your preferences. Approximately half of the seats in parliament are filled by the district vote, and half are filled by the party vote. The party vote seats are then filled by regional lists of candidates chosen by the parties. In order to prevent huge numbers of small, unserious parties from gaining too much power, though, each party must "surpass the 5% hurdle," or gain at least 5% of the vote, in order to assume seats. (An exception is made for parties that field winning candidates in at least three districts but which still take less than 5% nationally. This nod to regionally important parties is particularly important in a country that was, until very recently, two countries, and this practice would seem to have obvious applications to Canada.) The result is a system that both allows for local districts to be represented by individual MPs, *and* gives each party proportional representation in parliament.

I can think of three potential drawbacks to applying the German system to Canada. The first of these is that minority governments are commonplace under such a system. Now, as someone who first grew her political roots in Germany, where coalition governments are seen as the norm and majority governments are seen as giving a scary amount of power to a single party, I don't at all view this as a bad thing. But I realize that in Canada minority governments are widely viewed as unstable, so I thought I'd mention it. Second, in practice the two-vote system allows voters to split their votes strategically among existing or potential coalition partners instead of voting for the single party they most favour. Again, not something I think of as a disadvantage, but many Canadians might well see it that way. Third -- and this is the most logistically difficult issue -- there are a lot more MPs under such a system (the German parliament has 598 seats). In theory this shouldn't be that big a deal, but in practice it would take a lot of getting used to. Office space on Parliament Hill would be at a premium. They'd have to redesign the House of Commons in order to fit everyone in. Et cetera.

Other than those relatively minor considerations, I can't think of a single problem with applying the German system to Canada. I've lived under it, and it works. In fact, it works so well that when New Zealand recently decided to switch from a first-past-the-post system to a proportional system, they decided to adopt it pretty much whole-cloth. For Canada, too, it would seem to be an ideal compromise.