The taming of Trump shows why Burnham’s idea is a system failure
The Daily Telegraph · Dominic Lawson ·
The PM lauds PR but the US midterms and Israel’s coalition deadlock prove first-past-the-post is our greatest guarantor of accountability
On the one hand, clarity; on the other, confusion. These are the radically different consequences of ballots in the two nations linked in the war with Iran. In the USA, the midterm elections, fought exclusively between two parties, resulted in the Democrats gaining absolute control of both legislative houses. Donald Trump urged the public to vote as if he, personally, was on the ballot – and they did.
Meanwhile, in Israel, almost a week since the country voted in a general election, no-one has the faintest idea what sort of government will emerge, nor who will be leading it: the fissiparous nature of the country’s electoral system, once again, makes the ordeal of forming a stable majority in the Knesset akin to one of the trials of Job.
While there are a number of reasons for this divergence of outcomes, the principal one is that the US, in its legislative elections, follows the first-past-the-post constituency method which the American colonies chose to model on the British parliamentary system. The same is true across much of the Anglophone world, unlike Europe. Israel, it is true, has had a particularly “pure” form of proportional representation, in which parties are required to gain only 3.25 per cent of the national vote in order to begin accumulating parliamentary seats (whereas in Europe a minimum of 5 per cent is more normal). But in all such systems, there is a tendency to give disproportionate influence to tiny sectional parties which may well hold the balance of power.
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