The Electoral System
The electoral laws, like those relating to marriage and rent, keep cropping up in the local political debate from time to time, even though significant developments usually occur only about once a decade.
With the recent agreement between the main political parties regarding the the electoral laws, and the talk about Josie Muscat being about to launch a new political party, the issue of what political system will work best in Malta has returned to the fore (see, for example, Fausto's posts here and here and this week's article in The Times by Alternattiva's Secretary-General) and I'd like to give my 2-cents' worth on the subject at greater 'length' than I have done already here on this blog.
In this post I'll start with what I view to be the basic origin of the 2-party system (basically why a semi-PR system is functioning like a first-past-the-post system), and then in later posts I plan to compare the electoral system with the possible alternatives and finally to give my views on the actual actors.
In Malta's case, the two-party system developed as a result of two basic facts. The first was the electoral system, which could actually handle three or four sizeable parties (or small regional ones). The small size of the island and the absence of strong regional identities (outside Gozo, which is after all, only one district) has meant that only sizeable national parties could survive in the longer term. As for national parties, while the system could indeed handle more than two, it nevertheless creates a virtually insurmountable barrier to entry for new parties and ensures a quick exit for parties in decline. With the exception of pre-WWII Labour, most successful third parties since 1921 have either been regional (the Gozo Party, the Jones Party and, to some extent, the Partito Democratico Nazionalista of 1921), or else splits from, or remnants of, the main parties (the MWP, the PĦN, Ganado's PDN and Mabel Strickland's PCP). The DAP are the only exceptions and they existed only briefly during the early post-war years, when the parties of the former 'semi-duopoly', the PN and the CP had been temporarily knocked out by World War II and the death of Lord Strickland respectively.
The second, and more important, reason for the present situation was the Labour Party. Until WWII, the system had not resulted in a clear 2-party system. However, with the extension of the franchise, the creation of the GWU and the sudden disappearance of the Constitutionals, the Labour Party became far stronger than all the other parties combined. Their natural support remained in the region of 55-60% well into the 1950s. Following Mintoff's take-over, the party also moved further to the left than it had ever been before and at that stage was having difficulty tolerating other points of view on the island. So, the perceived issue for non-Labourites for the next 40 years (at least) became how to avoid a one-party system. Fine distinctions between two-party and multi-party systems were not foremost in people's minds. The PN grew gradually to become the mass party it is today only in response to the Labour Party's strength. Indeed, I have no doubt that were the Labour Party to disappear tomorrow, the Nationalist Party would find it extremely difficult to hold itself together.
If the two parties appear to resemble each other, it is mainly because one of them exists to counterbalance the other. The system is a duopoly in a technical sense but I feel that the label 'MLPN' is misleading if it is taken to mean that the two parties habitually act in concert or are 'one party masquerading as two' as a friend of mine once put it. It is, on the contrary, an intensely competitive duopoly and one in which only one of the competitors has a truly independent existence as a mass party.
3 Comments:
Great post Piet and my disagreements are only minor.
First, why did we get STV? Because in the tradition of "divide et imperat" the Colonial authorities wanted a system where the Constitutional Party would be a contender and where the proto-Nationalist Party would be more prone to split. The move succeeded ... for sometime.
(The Brits did the same in Ireland -- they thought it would lead to the creation of Protestant parties, which didn't happen. In contrast, they gave Canada, Australia and New Zealand First-past-the-post).
The second concerns your point on third parties. IMHO there was only one real third party in Malta (or, at least, one that can be said to have scored some success): the pre-WWII Labour Party. The rest, those which did cause a blip on the electoral radar, were splits. The Gozo Party, the Jones Party and DAP were all Nationalist Party splits.
In fact, that's one thing STV encourages. Not, strictly speaking third parties, but splits. Check out what, ultimately, convinved Ganado to split from the Nationalist Party in 1958: the possibility that he ask his supporters that they give his candidates the higher preferences and then continue on the other parties "ta' taht l-umbrella".
It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the direction of causality, but I think it is significant that in British political system the two main parties resembled each other the most in the 1950s (at the time of "Butskellism") when the two party system was then at its height.
So yes, technically MLPN is correct but not much more than that.
For a market the size of Malta a healthy two-party system is probably optimal - so long as the responsible press play an active role in weeding out and consigning those with latent militant (though sadly often populist) tendencies to the recycling bin of history.
Had Arthur's Scargill's miners suceeded in bring down the Thatcher government in the early 1980s, the political world today would have been an infinitely poorer place. No Blatcherism, no third way, certainly no fourth way and nor would John Prescott ever have made a meaningful contribution to human development.
Probably.
I agree with most of your points there, Faust. Particularly interesting point about the system being conducive to party splits. I certainly think that there are cirumstances where that may happen (a situation where cooperation with the mother party is possible - as in the 1960s - or one where the electorate is quite sophisticated) but in other situations I'm not so sure that our system (as opposed to pure PR) gives breakaway groups much encouragement.
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