By Tim Roll-Pickering, who is a research student at Queen Mary, University of London.
The current Australian general election will attract more attention in the UK than usual because Australia uses the Alternative Vote (AV, known as “Preferential Voting” down under) voting system. Many will be looking to Australia with an eye to our forthcoming referendum and already people are asking what outcomes the system produces.
It’s important to stress that no two countries’ politics are exactly alike. Australia has a few features in their wider party system that differ from the UK, which can produce alternative outcomes including:
- In federal elections it is compulsory to number all candidates to cast a valid vote (at state level there are several variants; the UK is likely to be offered the “optional preferencing” system where only one candidate needs to be numbered)
- Voting is compulsory
- All candidates who poll above the 4% deposit threshold receive state funding
- There is no significant third-force party in the House of Representatives, in part because third-force parties focus on the Senate (elected by PR)
- With the recent collapse of the Australian Democrats there is no significant centrist party
- The conservatives in Australia are formally two parties, the Liberals and the Nationals, but for most purposes they present themselves to the electorate as a joint entity called “the Coalition”
Nevertheless it is possible to see how the AV experience in Australia has met up to some of the points often debated here including.
Can one party can get most votes and another most seats?
This has happened in two of the seventeen UK elections since the war (1951 & Feb 1974), an 11% failure rate. Once it resulted in a hung parliament, the other in a majority government.
For Australia the comparable figure is not the number of first preferences a party receives but the “Two Party Preferred” (2PP) vote which takes the ballot papers all the way to a voter’s preference between the Labor Party and the Coalition. Of the twenty-five Australian elections since the war, no less than five have seen one party win the majority of the 2PP vote and another the majority of the seats (1954, 1961, 1969, 1990 & 1998), an astounding failure rate of 20%.
This phenomenon has also happened at a number of state elections and there have been calls for seats to be drawn in such a way that on a uniform swing the effect does not recur. But swings are often not uniform and so it can be a futile effort. The South Australian state parliament has implemented this measure; yet in this year’s state election Labor won a majority of seats despite trailing the Liberals by 3.2% of the vote.
Can extremists get elected?
We’re often told that the Alternative Vote will do an even better job than First Past The Post of keeping out extremist parties because all the other voters will transfer against them. Well at its height the One Nation party, the nearest Australia has had to a BNP, won no less than eleven seats in the 1998 Queensland election (using the “optional preferencing” version), five of them where they were outpolled on first preferences. What destroyed One Nation as a force wasn’t the voting system but the way the mainstream parties responded to it.
Does one side have a partisan advantage?
Yes, and which side has changed over time. AV was introduced in 1918 (by a conservative government for partisan reasons) and for the next sixty odd years it tended to advantage the conservative parties. This was both because the Coalition parties could simultaneously contest the same seats and jointly fight Labor, but also because for a time the Democratic Labor Party, who broke away from Labor over Communist influences, used their influence to encourage their voters to transfer against Labor.
However since 1980 all that has changed. In the last three decades preferential voting has delivered the Coalition just 5 seats where they trailed Labor on first preferences, and Labor 61. (See Antony Green: Preferential Voting in Australia for more details.) At the last election Liberal Prime Minister John Howard lost his own seat despite polling the most first preferences. Some of this is down to changes in the nature of smaller parties – the right leaning Democratic Labor Party’s place has been taken first by the centrist Australian Democrats and now by the left-wing Greens.
I’ve only been able to skim through the details in this piece but I hope it answers some of the questions I’ve seen people raising so far.