{"id":14,"date":"2010-12-31T04:58:55","date_gmt":"2010-12-31T04:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/?p=14"},"modified":"2010-12-31T04:58:55","modified_gmt":"2010-12-31T04:58:55","slug":"those-damn-political-parties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"Those damn political parties!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The power of political parties has become, perhaps increasingly, a common complaint of observers and participants in Icelandic politics and many of the proposed reforms of the political system have focused on reducing the power of political parties.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, by introducing an element of a `personal vote\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 into the electoral system (usually by adopting an open list proportional representation system) and measures to strengthen parliament vis-\u00c3\u00a0-vis the executive.<\/em><\/p>\n

The election of the constitutional assembly is a useful reminder that parties do serve an important function in politics.\u00c2\u00a0 The constitutional assembly election saw over 500 candidates running for 25 seats \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the great majority of which was unknown to most voters.\u00c2\u00a0 As I have discussed before, learning about what these candidates stood for was an enormous and an overwhelming task for voters.\u00c2\u00a0 Contrast that with a regular parliamentary election in Iceland where the number of candidates is probably of a similar magnitude.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet voters don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t appear to have much difficult (most of the time) figuring out how to cast their votes in parliamentary elections.\u00c2\u00a0 The reason is that the candidates stand for parties and the voters cast their votes for parties rather than candidates.\u00c2\u00a0 And importantly, the parties usually have reasonably clearly formulated party platforms \u00e2\u20ac\u201c choosing among 4-6 party platforms is a far easier task than choosing among 500 candidates.\u00c2\u00a0 This is one of the primary roles of parties, i.e., to aggregate policy preferences and to formulate policy alternatives so that on election day voters simply face a choice among a handful of party platforms.<\/p>\n

The downside, of course, is if the parties do a poor job of presenting voters with platforms that they would like to see. \u00c2\u00a0Overall, I think Icelandic political parties do a decent job of that – at the very least, most voters see the parties as representing different interests. \u00c2\u00a0Of course, it is possible to argue that while offering different policy alternatives, the political parties still fail to represent the wishes of a majority of voters – and opinions are likely to differ on that point. \u00c2\u00a0Regardless of what position one takes on that issue, it seems sensible to ask what the alternative might look like if one adopts institutional reforms aimed dismantling the party system in its current form. \u00c2\u00a0While \u00c2\u00a0extending voters’ ability to cast a personal vote arguably increases voters’ choice, those choices may ultimately be less meaningful. \u00c2\u00a0An open-list proportional representation system would increase the independence of MPs (and candidates) from their parties, allowing them to carve out their own policy platforms. \u00c2\u00a0The question then is, if I vote candidate X who runs for party Y but that candidate is not elected I may end up having supported a party whose MPs support policies that I don’t like that much. \u00c2\u00a0In the worst case scenario, party labels would a worthless signal about candidates policy preferences. \u00c2\u00a0A more likely scenario is that the party label will still provide a rough guide to its candidates’ ideological orientation. \u00c2\u00a0But it is not clear to me that it is desirable to introduce greater uncertainty into the mix. \u00c2\u00a0As it stands, voters have a difficulty predicting how their votes will influence policy – I may like a certain party but it may not always be in my best interest to vote for that party because I’m unsure which coalition will form after the election. \u00c2\u00a0Increasing the scope for casting personal vote would likely increase that uncertainty – now I would both be uncertain about which coalitions may form and also about who the people at the bargaining table will be.<\/p>\n

Of course, we cannot overlook the fact that, essentially, we already have a system based on a personal vote. \u00c2\u00a0All the major parties regularly hold party primaries where voters, usually, determine the order of the candidates on the party lists. \u00c2\u00a0This fact points to an interesting question. \u00c2\u00a0First, if an electoral system based on a personal vote is seen as conducive to producing more independent MPs and a stronger parliament, why don’t the party primaries achieve this? \u00c2\u00a0Or turning things around, what is it about making the personal vote important in parliamentary elections that makes MPs more independent? \u00c2\u00a0My intuition is that MPs’ independence has less to do with the electoral system than the nature of parliamentary systems – MPs are forced to support the government lest they want to risk becoming a part of the opposition, which plays to the advantage of the cabinet. \u00c2\u00a0Moreover, most MPs dream of becoming ministers one day and defying the party leaders is rarely conducive to realizing that dream.<\/p>\n

At any rate, it is not clear to me that the case for weak political parties has been made – it is easy to point at the Icelandic parties and argue that their strength limits the independence of MPs and the power of Althingi. \u00c2\u00a0The solution to those problems is usually treated as obvious – make the fortunes of MPs more independent of their parties – but I think it is also important to think more carefully about what the alternative might look like, i.e., what would politics with weak parties look like? \u00c2\u00a0I have already suggested that it may make voters’ choice more difficult but one might also wonder about how it would affect legislative politics. \u00c2\u00a0What happens when we don’t have strong parties to usher legislation through parliament? \u00c2\u00a0If I had to guess I would say it would be less efficient and more time consuming without necessarily making for better public policy – in order to cut through legislative stale mate, policy makers will be more likely to cut through legislative deadlock by catering to special interests. \u00c2\u00a0But that is just a guess – and there is no need to rely on guesses, there is some evidence, and possibly a lot of data, that could be used to answer questions such as these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The power of political parties has become, perhaps increasingly, a common complaint of observers and participants in Icelandic politics and many of the proposed reforms of the political system have focused on reducing the power of political parties.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, by introducing an element of a `personal vote\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 into the electoral system (usually by adopting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-constitution","category-election"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}