The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada's Electoral System

Dennis Pilon The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada's Electoral System Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2007Reviewed by Osvaldo CrociElectoral systems are mechanisms to turn votes into parliamentary seats. Different electoral systems have different consequences or, to put it another way, maximize different values. Thus, plurality systems are more likely to yield majority governments and thus maximize the value of stability. Proportional systems, instead, usually lead to a fragmented party but maximize the value of political representation. Most political scientists agree that there is no ideal electoral system. Its choice is simply a matter of which values one wishes to maximize. Dennis Pilon disagrees. He argues that plurality systems are not easily reconcilable with democratic values or, as he puts it: Those who would highlight stability and majority governments as the key values in designing electoral systems at the expense of representing our political differences favour values that limit democracy and political contestation (p. 9).There is little doubt that by adopting a proportional Canada would not only maximize different values ... but would also trade the negative consequences of the plurality which are well-known in Canada with those of the proportional one which are not.This is a strong statement which Pilon fails to anchor on solid political philosophical grounds, limiting himself to assert, in my opinion unconvincingly, that terms like 'majority governments' should mean ... that the government actually represents a majority of the people (p. 2). This book, however, cannot be dismissed as a plaidoyer for proportionality even if Pilon is one of the founders of Fair Vote Canada, an advocacy group that works towards the adoption of some form of proportional electoral for all levels of government in Canada. The author's stated preferences or values do not make it a simple political tract. Although not without some flaws, it is a learned and scientifically rigorous work that can be profitably read both by political scientists and the general public.After discussing the characteristics of the major types of voting systems, Pilon offers an indepth and accurate analysis of the way in which plurality systems work, focusing in particular on their shortcomings. While I completely share Pilon's critique of plurality systems (Croci, 2011), I find it difficult to agree with his analysis of proportional systems. Pilon, in fact, concentrates on how proportional systems maximize his preferred values but hurriedly dismisses their shortcomings. To minimize the tendency of proportional systems to yield short-lived governments, for instance, Pilon argues that Italy's fifty-one different governments between 1946 and 1994 were reallymore akin to cabinet shuffles in the Canadian system (p. 53), brushing over the fact that most of these re-shuffles were the result of changes in the coalition of parties supporting the government in Parliament or to intra-party factional squabbles, two of the usual consequences associated with proportional electoral systems.The book then turns to examine the politics of electoral-system reform, a topic that has rarely been explored in the literature on electoral systems. …

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