Keep the conventional wisdom to yourself: representative parliamentary democracy isn’t about winning; it’s about governing.
And despite the fact that media in the United Kingdom and all across the globe have fixated on the tight race in yesterday’s general election by forecasting a hung parliament, it doesn’t mean they exist.
That’s right: hung parliaments are a myth.
What isn’t a myth is the abundant supply of partisan members of parliament with an unfounded sense of entitlement who are unwilling to co-operate with one another.
But that’s a reflection of partisan politics, not representative democracy.
True, close elections can produce political deadlock or a tie regarding certain legislation but that’s where the speaker of the house comes in. Besides, parties (and even individual members) are free to caucus with others or enter into more formal power-sharing relationships — until that government no longer enjoys the confidence of the house or its term expires. Rinse, repeat.
The system works.
Except when it doesn’t. And that’s because we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that majorities are natural and minorities are dangerous. If that sounds familiar it’s because we use the exact same metric to divide parties on issues: protection for some groups; protection from others.
For example, take our approach to youth: we’re repeatedly told that they’re idle and at risk to commit crimes. But since there are generally less of them and they can’t vote anyway, youth-targeted tough-on-crime legislation enjoys wide appeal.
The same goes for immigration: we lack progressive reform because parties appeal to the settled at the expense of the landed.
We don’t pick the best ideas; we pick the ideas that best appeal to the broadest majority. And we like majorities because we think they’re decisive.
Except they aren’t — not unless the electorate decides to award a single party a landslide victory and they have enough votes to railroad everyone else in the house. But that’s the exception, not the rule. And it’s close to tyranny — tyranny that’s typically rewarded with a swing in the opposite direction on election day. Like the Canadian cliché about elections reminds us: we don’t vote governments in, we vote them out.
But that’s not really what our representative system of government is designed for, so maybe it’s time we took a less absolute approach to parliament or picked a different, more populist system.
Regardless of whomever is declared the winner in the UK election and whatever power-struggle ensues before a government is formed today or over the days to come, the outcome will depend on members’ ability to put governance ahead of party — not the apparent failure of the electorate to award a landslide under the spectre of undoing it all in five years.
The media could easily create an incentive for better behaviour by challenging members to make parliament work, but that would involve abandoning a myth they’ve helped nurture and perpetuate.
