This one’s going to be controversial so I’ll post it while my blog is still small

One thing I’ve read a lot of is the differences between First Past the Post (FPTP) voting and Proportional Representation (PR) voting. Among most places that debate this PR is seen as infinitely better than FPTP with zero downsides. I’m lukewarm towards both, but for the sake of contrarianism I’d like to discuss one of the few benefits of FPTP.

First of all what are these? FPTP is the voting system in America and most of Britain. Each election has some number of candidates, whichever candidate gets more votes than the others wins. Importantly, simple FPTP does not require a candidate to get the *majority* of all votes cast, they only have to get more than any other individual candidate (what’s called a plurality). In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton did not get a majority in almost any state. Take Ohio, for instance where he only won 40% of the vote, but this was enough to win because George HW Bush got 38% and Ross Perot 20%.

In PR however, this is different. A very abridged version of the German system is that in 2021 the SPD of Germany got about 25% of all the votes, and therefore got 25% of all the seats in Parliament. How very proportional.

Now, naturally PR doesn’t make much sense when electing a single entity. In the 1992 election we couldn’t have a result where Bill Clinton got 40% of the presidency, George HW Bush got 38% and Ross Perot got 20%, that just doesn’t make sense for a singular position. But this is also why people think we should be parliamentary instead of presidential so whatevs. Instead I’d like to point towards the one benefit of FPTP that I think is underappreciated and deserves mention, and that’s the ability to Vote the Bastards Out.

Vote the Bastards Out is something I would define as when a single candidate is so terrible that they themselves are the object of the voters’ disdain, more-so than their party. In this case while the voters might not object to a substitute candidate from the same party, they would very much object to this particular candidate. In this case the voters can express their disagreement by voting against the candidate this election, but in the next election they can still show their preference for the candidate’s party by voting for a replacement candidate. This is important I feel because in PR systems I’ve seen, the candidates who go to parliament are controlled by the party themselves. Don’t like this particular candidate? Tough, they’re top of the list and will get in so long as the national party meets its threshold.  This allows for a system where party politics can insulate high ranking members from voters’ disdain.

If party politics can insulate members from the voters in this way, then the voters’ choices can become constrained.  They may prefer to vote for a certain party due to sharing values, but not want to reward the Bastard who is a high ranking member of that party and will be first on the list to get a seat in parliament.  If time after time the Bastard remains at the top of the list, then time after time the voters face this choice between their values and their personal disdain.  With FPTP this choice hopefully only comes up once, once the Bastard is voted out they resign in disgrace.  With PR, as long as the Bastard is a high ranking member who will retain their seat, then this choice keeps coming up again and again, there is no way for voters to punish only the Bastard without also punishing the party as a whole.

That’s overall my feeling, I don’t want party politics to be able to insulate any candidate from the voters.  I think every candidate should be personally responsible to the voters as much as possible rather than being able to ride in on a party wave.  Now of course in FPTP in America there is strong party ideology, many people will vote for a party regardless of candidate.  But I think recent elections have shown that there is still an amount of candidate preference.  The best example I can think of is the 2016 election in which Donald Trump received less votes than Hillary Clinton (Trump  63 million, Clinton 66 million), meanwhile GOP House members received more votes than Democratic house members (GOP: 63 million, Democrats 62 million).  Donald Trump was clearly seen as the Bastard in that election and the amount of voters who voted Hillary but did not vote for a Democratic congressman seems to prove that.  It was only because of ANOTHER vulgarity of American elections (the Electoral College) that Trump squeaked by, he should not have won based on the popular vote.  However if the American electorate had gotten a true FPTP result they would have had President Hillary and a GOP house of representatives.  But if America had a parliamentary PR system, in which the executive is chosen by the legislature, then we would have had a GOP majority in the House and they could have chosen Trump as their Prime minister even though he was toxic to the electorate.

Now we got Trump anyway, but that was the fault of the Electoral college.  I would much rather have a national popular vote based on FPTP, and I don’t think PR is the antidote to this that advocates think it is.