Electoral maths vs Electoral math

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1 November 2009

Over at the Herald, Peter Hartcher breaks down the maths involved in electing an Australian government:

There is a simple electoral arithmetic underlying Kevin Rudd's handling of boat people. The Australian electorate breaks into three basic chunks. On average over the years, some 40 per cent vote Labor. On the other side, about 40 per cent vote for the Coalition. And the other 20 per cent sit in the middle, switching from one side to another from time to time.

Crudely put, the party that can persuade most of that 20 per cent to swing its way wins government.

It is crudely put, but Hartcher accurately identifies the outcome:

Labor believes voters on the left are pretty much captive. They have nowhere else to go. They could go to the Greens, who are calling for the 78 asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking to be brought to Australia immediately.

But even if they were to vote Green, Labor would very likely recover their support through the preference system. So the lost primary vote from the party's left would flow back into Labor's catchment on the all-important measure of the two-party preferred count, the one that decides who wins government in the central struggle of Labor against the Coalition.

But disenchanted voters at the right-wing end of the Labor spectrum will migrate directly to the Liberal or National parties, which are still perceived to have a Howardesque tough-on-boat-people character. They are lost Labor votes that will add directly to the Coalition tally on election night.

So when the interests of the two groups, the base and the swingers, come into conflict, Rudd will almost invariably emphasise the swingers and chose the more centrist or right-leaning option.

In America, because they don't have mandatory voting, the maths is different, and this results in very real differences in the way their government works. We'll ignore for a moment that the numbers in the States don't conform to the 40-20-40 split Hartcher identifies in Australia (if that even is the split here) - a shrinking plurality of Americans identify as Democrats, a larger proportion of Americans identify as independents and more Americans identify as conservatives than moderates or liberals. The basic point is that some chunk of the population is usually going to vote Democrat, another chunk will usually vote Republican, and a third chunk in the centre is willing to go to the dance with whichever suitor shows up looking best on the night.

In this way, America is just like Australia. But unlike here, voters in the United States who would never vote for their disfavoured party have options: they can stay home and not vote at all, or they can vote for a third party. And since these voters - the base - are more likely to be politically engaged with their party, their lack of enthusiasm may multiply and cost the party more than that one voter's vote. Perhaps that voter won't volunteer to man the phones and help turn out other voters. Perhaps she won't feel like donating to the party this year, affecting the funds it has to promote its candidates. That's why, for instance, the former President George W. Bush was so eager to keep the religious right happy (even though I don't believe he did that much to advance their interests): because they devoted their time, votes, and energies to re-electing him. And that was part of the problem John McCain had against Barack Obama last year; conservatives just weren't that enthusiastic about getting him elected.

To be sure, the American maths (or, if you will, the "math") still benefits the centre. Every Democrat voter the Republicans can convince to cast a ballot for them brings a net gain of +2, because switching a vote increases the Republican tally by one while simultaneously diminishing the Democrat tally by one. It works in reverse, as well, of course. But while plucking a voter from the other side is twice as valuable as convincing a member of the base to come to the polls instead of staying at home, turning out a member of the base is still gaining a vote the party would not have otherwise received.

The real influences a voting system like this has can be seen in the health care debate. In August, the public option looked deader than dead; Democrats were singing "Danny Boy" in its honour and sending flowers to its widow. And yet, the liberal base could just not let it go, and because a hostile base will cause all kinds of electoral problem down the track, here we are in October and the discussion is not even about whether the Senate bill will include a public option, but what exact form the public option will take.

Of course, other influences were at play as well. Liberal senators like Jay Rockefeller, who aren't constrained by strict Westminster-style party discipline any more than their centrist party-fellows, started making their unhappiness at the Democrats' concessions known, in a way that would be quite impossible for a left wing Australian Labor Party member to do outside the closed-door confines of the party room. Similarly, an Australian politician with enough ideological conviction and personal appeal can pull the country in the direction of his party's base, even while Hartcher's centre twenty percent retains its reservations - as John Howard did with the GST. But all things being equal, the American political system is set up to allow a far greater range of views to influence policy than the Australian system.

That is not to say the Australian system is without its advantages. Our moderating, mandatory-voting centre ensures energetic, well-funded and unrepresentative interest groups have a tougher time hijacking debates. Our system ensures party members have to spend less time on fund raising, because they don't have to worry about turning out the base. But there is something to be said for a democracy of the American sort, that makes its decisions by paying heed to more than just the small sliver of voters in the centre who are willing to change their minds every now and then.

Tags: Health Care, Voting