Italian for Beginners
I have often written about what I believe to be the disadvantages of having more than two political parties represented in Parliament. In particular, here I had written that:
It could be argued that a two-coalition system can achieve [the moderation of the political debate] just as well as a two-party system. I believe it can do so only to the extent that the coalitions behave like parties (as the Conservative-Liberal Unionist coalition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries did in the UK). Seconda Repubblica style coalitions are unstable and tend to lead to situations where the tail wags the dog. The very fact that extremist parties of all hues end up being incorporated and legitimized is, I think, a bad thing in itself. It would be much better, in my humble opinion, if their voters are recruited by the moderate parties, who would take whatever legitimate interests they may have into account in order to acquire and keep their support.
I think that what's happening right now in Italy bears this out. But I also think that the source of Italy's current crisis is not just the extremists. The Prodi government was also betrayed by centrist life senators, some of whom may be interested in a new centrist coalition or in a centre-left coalition that excludes the Communists and the Greens. Whatever the merits of these options, they are not what the electorate voted for. For example, those who voted for the UDC did so because they thought that that party was the Christian-Democratic component of the centre-right coalition. Should UDC join any other coalition during this legislature it would essentially be betraying its voters' trust.
Those who wish to introduce full proportional representation in Malta in the hope that this would lead to the entry of Alternattiva (and possibly other small parties) in Parliament and to the splintering of the main parties would do well to take note of what's happening a few kilometres north of our shores.
5 Comments:
The possibility of members of parliament voting against their party exists within a two-party system as well as in a multi-party system. What many of us forget is that in electoral systems like the Maltese one, voters vote for the candidate and NOT the party. So MPS are (at least insofar as the Constiturtion goes) free to vote against their party. The Italian experience is not a terrible one. Governments don't last forever as they do here. Is that really so bad?
It's quite true that our MPs are not, in theory, bound to vote with their party but they have, in fact, almost always done so. In other systems (such as the various Anglo-Saxon ones), while there are defections, this phenomenon is usually not sufficient to change governments half-way through a legislature.
With regard to the length of time a government spends in office, I have no special preferences there - although in theory I think that in an ideal world (with two, constantly competitive, alternatives before the electorate) it would be something in the 3-8 year range.
What worries me most is not when governments fall after one year but when an elected coalition falls and it is replaced by an arrangement that the electorate wasn't informed about before the election. Or, worse, when no coalition is presented to the electorate in the first place and the parties just decide among themselves later on how to split power. That's a serious 'democratic deficit', as I see it.
Personally I think that the best option would be for the Italians to appoint a caretaker government and then plan for early elections. Hopefully the electorate wil tend to swing towards the centrist parties on both sides of the fence. Currently the extreme left parties are wielding far too much power in proportion to their electoral base.
Having said that, we might very well have a repeat of the last election's results, but perhaps the italian voters will see the folly of voting for parties which are so radical.
With regard to PC's cocern about an election coalition failing and then being replaced by an arrangement the electorate had no knowledge of before the election - this is possible. However I would presume that if, say a party, promised to be tough on crime in its pre-electoral manifesto and then made a coalition with another party which was very soft on crime, the electorate would not return that first party to power as it would feel betrayed.
Yes (to Deepdiver), I too think that an election would be fairer than a change in the coalition. However, I'm not sure that if the electorate were to strengthen the moderates on both sides, this would make the system work better. I think that if those on both 'edges'of the two coalitions are stronger, then those coalitions will be less stable. Probably, stability would be best served by a strengthening of the main parties on each side (Forza Italia and Democratici di Sinistra). Mind you, I have absolutely no problem with centrists ideologically, but outside a two-party system they tend to make bipolarism difficult to manage as they're always tempted to build a great centrist force that would presumably govern forever, as the old DC used to do.
As for parties being punished by the electorate for major betrayals of their political mandate, this certainly does happen but such parties are usually able to compensate to some extent by winning voters that they couldn't appeal to before. The fact remains that their original voters would have been shortchanged.
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