Let be AV-ing you

 It's day of the local elections and I'm not voting.

But - UKIP tweeps and others out there concerned about my lack of civic engagement take note -  I am going down the polling station today - to have my say in the UK's referendum on adopting the Alternative Vote electoral system (or not).

The consequences, advantages or disadvantages depending on your point of view and what you think democracy should deliver, are fairly and clearly summed up in a briefing paper by the Political Studies Association.  On my reading, AV is not a big deal, preserving the basic, highly disproportional majoirtarian logic of first-past-the-post and (as far as simulations can tell) excluding smaller parties but boosting the Liberal Democrats.

So, not something you would really want to vote for unless you were a dyed-in-the-wool LibDem; felt reallocating preferences to many voters' second or third choice candidate to generate a diminished 50%+ majority for the winning canidate really was a major democratic improvement ;or are convinced that politically AV will be a first step to further  electoral reform along more proportional lines, or that the Liberal Democrats will  revert to their imagined role of the 1990s and became natural and easy coalition partners for Labour in a 'progressive pact'.

Personally, I'm not, I don't and (on both of the last two counts) I severely doubt it.

So -  after doing some short-term partisan guesswork about what might most damage the cohesion of a coalition government I really don't support - I'll be voting No.

I'm a little surprised to have ended up with this decision - although I repeatedly come back to  - and good citizen that I am (honest) I've tried to tune in to the debate. But the rival campaigns, low profile and mostly confined to the TV and radio studios and internet have, frankly, both been been pretty dire. Both have tended to present AV as if it were a proportional system ('fair votes' for the Yes campaign, a entree to parliament for the BNP for the No side), although both have touched on preference reallocation mechanism, the proposed new system's only truly innovative feature. The Yes campaign argue that it ensures genuine majorities (see rather witty beet v graphic below), the No campaign that preference re-allocation it is complicated, doesn't eliminate tactical voting and can generate equally perverse results. Some invoke Arrow's paradoxes

Interestingly, figures from the Party Labour  - now the most likely recipient of my vote if they had a candidate around to around to vote for -  lined up on both sides of the campaign, but, oddly, have lacked any very distinct or clear message. for or against Those in the desperately worthy Yes campaign repeated the rather tired Fair Votes ,some-reform-better than-none mantras, while those on the more brutal, kick-ass No side have recycled the equally tired pro- first-past-the-post arguments (the best of which centre on the ability to 'kick out the bums')  in ways indistinguishable from those campaign's mainly Tory backers.

Left-wing blogger (and author of a soon to be published UCL PhD on the concept of Chavs) Owen Jones, however, advances a more interesting argument  distinctly of the left opposing AV

 "... because I think it will institutionalise mushy centrist politics. I think that’s exactly the aim of many of its staunchest supporters, because they are ... mushy centrists and want an electoral system most likely to ensure their ideology dominates."

and more concretely because he sees it as faciltating the type of LibDem-Labour alliance that some people are as mentioned, actually, still hoping for and which  this left-wing take on things sees as an important (if never realised) element of the New Labour project.

The obvious objection is that AV would have delivered Tony Blair a bigger landslide in 1997 that FTTP, although I guess it could be argued that a weakened Blairite forces couldn't repeat this trick on the same scale

Here, however, as it often does, my mind veers off to Czech(oslovak) politics and, concretely, to the AV-like electoral system promoted in 1990-1 by President Václav Havel in preference to list PR, which he (rather accurately as it turned out) would empower political parties and produce a core of legislators with little connection with localities (the fabled 'constituency link' as it is called in British debates). However, Havel also favoured it because it felt it would promoted centrist candidates, who would benefit disportionately from second preferences, and prevent ideological polarisation.

He also hoped it would help prevent well organised parties with concentrated support from overcoming divided liberals - the scenario the beer versus coffee poster outlines, although a daft ine for most reasonably developed democracies where pro-beer forces would be consolidated into a  Friends of Beer Party  that would romp home easily under FTPP (perhaps on a public crawl programme).

Like much of what Havel advocated,  his electoral reform project - actually a  form of the Supplementary Vote (asking for first and second preferences only)* - never really stood a chance and was quickly voted down  by the country's emerging parties - although, in a certain, it lives on in the two-round, first-past-the-post system used for the Czech Senate, whose logic loosely parallels the 'instant runover' in SV). 

In the Czech context, Havel was in hindsight was probably right: there are no deep class cleavages  in Czech society and  perhaps because of that the country's ideologically strident but depressingly corrupt parties have continually struggled to generate clear, stable majority of left or right, resulting  centrist politics by default. 

But, as Carsten Schneider's excellent heavy-duty political science book on democratic consolidation argues, what matters most is the democratic fit of electoral system to a particular society. British (or perhaps, anticipating the de facto detachment or independence of the other nations, should I say English society is not the Czech society and perhaps a more polarised politics between loose blocs of left and right is a better fit. 

Perhaps the real issue is not electoral reform - even the kind of elegant mixed system that I might turn out to vote for - but decentralise political power to locally elected bodies and  to loosen up party structures, which seem as closed and narrow as anything Havel feared.

* Note Havel's proposal was technically a mixed system - I guess we might call it  a kind of SV+ - as they also contained a rather elegant proposal for proportional 'top-up' seats for votes in constituencies where combined first and second preferences did help elect winning candidates in individual member constituencies. My old notes suggest that under Havel's proposal fall voter's first and second preferences were simply to be added together (giving everyone a second vote), rather than re-allocating the votes of all except the two leading canidates.

Cutting edge stuff

To minimise exposure to the royal wedding, I spent part of the weekend reading Gabriel Weston's short semi-autobiographical memoire-cum-collection of short stories Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, the tale of an English graduate turned surgeon and how things really look from behind the surgeon's mask. Its a finely described, slightly detached account of  surgery; life and death, good and bad decisions by doctors; and medical and social hierarchies that structure their world. There are also beautifully written and finely gory passages about surgery. Most striking though is that surgeons need not only steady, sure and fine hand in cutting people open and quick and calm judgements in critical situations - the biggest danger when things do not go according to plan seems to be patients bleeding to death on the operating table - but also to know precisely their level of competence and incompetence: the  moment when they need to recognise their limits ask for help and call in someone more specialised (who may in turn need to go through  the same process and call up someone still more specialised).

Academics, of course, do not cut people open - although I have eviscerated a few books and PhD theses in my time - and, generally speaking, do not kill people, if they do things wrong. But I couldn't help wondering if academia and academic research there  not be an equivalent mechanism.

Civic Democrats: Teenage kicks or mid-life crisis?

The principal party of the Czech centre-right, the Civic Democrats (ODS), have been celebrating the 20th anniversaty of their foundation. The party founded, by Václav Klaus in April 1991 from the right-wing anti-communist majority in the disintegrating Civic Forum movement, can probably lay claim to being Central and Eastern Europe's most enduring  newly formed post-1989 party. Certainly as far as major political players on the centre-right are concerned probably, only Hungary's Fidesz's can compete and in Fidesz's case ideological mutation in the mid-1990s from anti-communist liberal to conservative nationalist probably gives ODS the edge , even if the Czech Republic's more proportional electoral system has (thankfully) never seen ODS stack up Fidesz style absolute majorities in parliament.

However, the party's celebration of two decades as a political force, at which it was addressed by  current leader Prime Minister Petr Nečas, it founder and current Czech President Václav Klaus and 2002-10 leader  and ex-PM Miroslav Topolánek, seems to have been a rather more angst-ridden , divided and downbeat affair, than similar celebrations ten years ago. Then, having come through financial scandal under founder-leader Klaus and seasoned its Thatcherite neo-liberalism with dose of Czech nationalism, it was looking forward to election victory in 2002. It lost that election and, despite winning big in vote terms in 2006, has never managed to put together a stable majority government since. 1996 Ideological and strategic divisions - and the unsolved dilemma of how to manage its relationships with powerful informal networks of political ly connected business interests - were all on show at the event, which seems to have been the Czech right-wing version of the Three Tenors, albit with considerably less harmony on show. 

They are also thrown into sharp relief by the current woeful state of Petr Nečas's coalition, whose large  majority in parliament looks a good deal less solid given splits and relevations from within junior coalition party the populist anti-corruption party, Public Affairs (VV), where the waters have been muddied by accusations that the spilt in the party was not just due  to VV being in the pocket of ABL security firm , but was engineered in factions in ODS (although this seems less well documented that the role of ABL and its founder busienessman Vít Bárta in taking over VV as a vehicle).

For Klaus ODS's woes lie in its move under Topolánek away from his own patent mix of neo-liberalism and eurosceptic nationalism to embrace the political centre and themes such as civil sociey and environmental protection. Far better to do pragmatic power sharing deals with the left, than allow such ideologcal contagion. Having flirted with flat taxes and fiscal populism (does anyone remember the Blue Chance programme?), through a mixture of trail and error Topolánek adopted precisely this course as a means of broading ODS appeal, which despite touching 35% under his leadership, was not sufficient to deliver a workable majority - and tended to mobilise the left -  leaving him reliant on small parties like the declining Christian Democrats and faction-ridden Greens. 

Photo: Petr Novák, Wikipedia

Both parties exited parliament in the 2010 elections, leaving a new political landscape charcterised by an ODS drastically weakened by the rise of reformist challenger TOP09 and the need to ally with the opaque and unknown VV. This, Topolánek (opposite) argued, was really a step too far and agreed with Klaus that the usual emergency option of pragmatic co-operation with the Social Democrats, who are at least a known quantity, was preferable. The recent and farcical reshuffle of the Czech government and the bizarre hard-to-deal with behaviour of VV deputies and officials - none of whom seem to talk to each other without secretly taping other and offering some may-or-may-not-be-true revelation that crops up on the front pages the next day - makes the point.

But the issue running in parallel with the question of how expansive and centrist the Civic Democrats should or shouldn't be is that of corruption and clientelism. One interpretation of Czech politics  is simply to see the country's various parties (with the possible exception of the Communists) as   corrupt vehicles for shadowy, informal politico-business networks: this is, for example, forms the master narrative of daily  The Final Word commentary that accompanies the daily English press resume The Fleet Sheet, which speaks in a seemingly well informed way of the Czech Republic as an 'electro-state' dominated by powerful vested interests  (of which power generation company ČEZ is the most powerful) grouped more broadly into 'Five Families'.I deological divisions between parties and political programmes are, in this view, a mere facade as shadowy figures get their claws into parties and politicians, extracting billions one way or another through various soft, untransparent and uncompetitive deals  involving public property and policies which subvert the public interest.

Election poster attacking new anti-corruption parties 2010

There is plenty of evidence of an anecdotal, journalistic kind that such relationships exist. The press is full of it and poltiicians themselves report them. In the dying days of his premiership Topolánek condemned political 'godfathers' within (kmotří ) - powerful regional bosses tied to networks of vested interests, subverting the s(upposed ly) bottom-up democratic national organisations the Civic Democrats have traditional prided themselves on. But the real extent and scope of such relationships and the way they relate to programmatic/ideological issues that voters and politicians themselves spend a lot of time: on academic political science shows that parties offer basically ideologically coherent programmes and that voters register this and vote on them accordingly in ways which reflect wealth, class, education and age. In forming coalitions, parties clearly negotiate on programmatic issues, as well as the who-gets-what-ministry concerns that the simple model of pure corrupt clientelism would suggest. In the end, the Last Word model - even if we assume that it is based on the purest and most reliable of inside information - seems only to offer half the story, all too remincient of the darkly conspiratorial view of the world offered by the Czech far-right in days when it was electoral force. (Communists would probably also find it a good read, although with perhaps too little mention of global capital).

Pete Nečas      Photo: Aktron/Wikimedia Commons

What matters more, however, is the 'social fact' that parties - and certain partiers in particular such as the Civic Democrats - are seen as toxically contaminated by corrupt clientelistic networks. It would be interesting to try to quantify and track over time the public's views on the Civic Democrats and separate it out from the Czech public's massive and growing distrust of parties and politicians in general - but tack in Prague, the Three Tenors touched on this second, probably now more intractable problem for the party, which seems to overlap for public and politicians alike with Machivellian politics of smears, plots and spin of the type well illustrated by recent events around VV. None had very convincing answers. 

For Klaus - forgetting the financing scandals of 1990s - the problem seems to be one of  ideological slippage and lack of political backbone, belief and mission, creating the space for faction fighting and corrupt interest politics. For Topolánek, it was dealing with Public Affairs, legitimising what everyone knew  - or shrewdly suspected -  from the start to be a pocket party serving business interests with naked ambition of advancing private commerical interests. But VV would, of course, never have become a political force without the apparently burgeoning politics of 'godfathers', which he was unwilling or unable to prevent. Nečas's message was to recognise that voters have been looking for novelty but of Keep Calm and Carry On: the party was down but not out and its organisation, experience and programme would carry it through.

And the Civic Democrats' contribution to Czech democracy over the last two decades? Stable, conventional  model of party politics; a new liberal pro-market ideology defining the Czech centre-right; being there when the big decisions were made and getting some of them right, they all agreed. Having written on that elsewhere, I won't disagree. But, while Topolánek saw ODS as immature 20 year old with teenage lack of focus,  the party, in fact, seems dangerously flabby and middle-aged. 

In the end, I do wonder if the Civic Democrats will be around in recognisable form in another twenty years. Or another ten.

Chronicle of a (party) death foretold

I am not always the most astute of pundits, but as the dust settled a year ago even I could see that the Veci veřejné ('Public Affairs'), the anti-establishment, anti-corruption party that was the surprise package last May's Czech elections would - to borrow Kevin Deegan Krause's phrase - live fast and die young. And, as I write, VV seems to be on its political deathbed, rapidly expiring from an outbreak of splits and scandals, extreme even by local standards, that seems to be the political equivalent of ebola fever  - and may yet carry away the Czech government centre-right coalition  government of Petr Nečas in which VV is a junior partner. Expulsions and splits have seen four of VV's 24 deputies leave the party; its chief sponsor and de facto leader Vít Bárta resign as transport minister; and its two bigger partners demand that Mr Bártaand cronies from the ABL security firm leave the government.

Vít Bárta/ Fotobanka ČTK

The problem? Revelations in the media over recent days, have bluntly confirmed  - with documentary and audio evidence - what most people suspected all along:

1) that, nothingwithstanding claims to a postmodern party of electronic direct democracy run through snazzy electronic referendums of members and sympathisers, Mr Bárta controlled and orchestrated the whole organisation;

2) that he used extremely an extremely basic method of party management to keep leading deputies on board,  of the kind that any City of London banker would recognise: he paid them huge sums of cash;

3) that he   backed VV as a project to foward his Napoleonic business ambition for his security company ABL, rightly recognising that public sector contracts were a lucrative source of cash and required political contacts;

4) that VV was conceived as an essentially local project,aimed at securing influence, indeed control, local councils in two Prague boroughs and was conceived as a kind of insurance policy or plan B, to run in parallel with efforts to gain influence in local organisations of the Civic Democrats;

5) that Mr Bárta is a ruthless operator keen on industrial espionage and subterfuge, including the creation of  'pseduo-competitors' to maintain an illusion of transparency and competiton in tenders, and that he transfered some of these techniques to political activities using his company to track the activities of local politicians in Prague.

Given that Veci veřejné's appeal and origins were one of anti-corruption, transparency and taking on political dinosaurs - its name better translated as Public Interest or Res Publica and it was originally a local community politics initiative in Prague formed in respons to murky ways local municipal housing was being privatised deal - there would seem to be no way back, especially as Mr Bárta, who is clearly a strategic thinker of some skill, was foolish enough to put his strategy down in writing.

 Now the only question would seem to be which way the collapsing structure will fall and how many of its deputies will be recoverable, reliable and usable for the two main parties in centre-right coalition, the Civic Democrats (ODS) and TOP09. This is a totally a forlorn hope. There are some impressively able young er people and political marketers in the VV fold, as well oddballs, ABL cronies and second rank figures well out of their depth (like the party's notional leader and hapless Interior Minister, the former investigative journal Radek John) and for a working majority the other two parties would need about 10-12 ex-Večkaři.

From a more nerdish political science point of view it seems a shame that this most unusual and interesting political phenomenon - closer to the 'pocket parties' created by businesspeople in the Baltic state or (it now seems) the phoney virtual parties of the former Soviet Union - is soon to be no more, although its death may be drawn out, mucky and unedifying. Perhaps most telling is that far from being corrupted and eaten into by holding power, the whole project was tainted and corrupt from the start, subverting the political appeal of anti-corruption and anti-establishment  politics to perpetuate and develop the very phenomena it was fighting against. Perhaps I shouldn't be too worried, however, as other will no doubt be trying out and improving upon Mr Bárta's business model in the choppy electoral markets of Czech politics.

They say cutback, we say... червен картон

Sofia, 26 March 2011 Photo: BSP TV

According to news reports, some 16,000  marched through the streets of Sofia under the auspices of the opposition Socialist Party to protest against unemployment and depleted public services. Allowing for differences in population size, this equates to a march about half the size of the Saturday's  250, 000 strong trade union sponsored protest in London, but not all bad for a relatively a weak civil society stemming from all the usual post-communist legacies. And a mildly imaginative rouch with the theme of giving Bulgaria's government a red card (червен картон). A day later there are blockades by car drivers angry about the price of fuel following the next day and demonstration about nuclear power plant construction are also in the pipeline no pun intended). Characteristically, perhaps all three are organised by political parties, rather than civil sociery organisation and, unlike in London, the radical left,  marginal in the region at the best of times and workerist, so there are no anarchist casseurs or direct action activists occupying smart shops in Sofia - and Socialist leader Sergei Stanishev is no Ed Milland (although possibly that should be the other way round)

London, 26 March 2011 Photo: Ben Hall

The Czech Republic does rather better in terms of turnout and civil society capacity with a 40, 000 strong protest against government austerity in Prague last September, which allowing for the CR's 10 million population, compares well with Saturday's TUC march  - and strikes toboot. Perhaps, however, that should be less a source of pride for the Czech labour movement - which plays a smart game, but is in structural decline (as Martin Myant, a far from unsympathetic observer, outlines in the latest issue of Czech Sociological Review - than a warning for Brits: Prague's centre-right coalition government has pressed on regardless, more sensitive to its own internal tensions and a beating from the electorate, than to the massed ranks of the Czech public sector on the streets of the nation's capital. The UK's - or perhaps I should say England's - more rampantly anti-statist traditions make it still more easy to shake off the concerns teachers, nurses, social workers and students, especially when it is pitched vaguely a march for The Alternative that no one can meaningly and identify anarchists and UK Uncut add to the fog of war. No one, thankfully, has quite persuaded the bulf of Czechs that the social market and the welfare state belongs on the scrapheap of history.

The quality of governance is not strained

Prof. Bo Rothstein of Gothenburg's University's Quality of Government Institute  is a supporter of the Glorious Blues. Not Chelsea, but sixteen times Swedish champions FF Malmo. His presentation to SSEES's politics centred on Anti-Corruption Indirect Big Bang Approach  was, however, strictly Premier League stuff. The issue, as he explained to our medium sized but on-the-ball audience, was in fact one less one of politicians taking the occasional (or not so occasional) backhander as of institutions in much of the world delivering or not delivering basic public goods such as clean water and  health, which left some people literally dying of corruption  - and of repeated failed attempts to find a magic bullet to slay corrupt, inefficient institutions and the informal structures that underpinned them. 

Both marketisation and democratisation had failed in this role, often merely transforming the problems into slightly new guise (or even aggravating them). As Robert Putman had realised individual-level incentives  based on expectations of other people locked in corrupt (and non-corupt) behaviour - although unlike Putnam he did not think that associationalism was related to social capital., meaning there was no easy  macro- institutional fix - or even a not-so-easy cultural one. Sadly, therefore corrupt, dysfunctional institutions were in many ways the norm and well governed Weberian states in Europe and North America the exception: why it should be asked was Sweden with large bureaucracies and large welfare programmes was not (as it should be) a cesspool of corruption and patronage-driven instability ?

Rally backing Indonsia's anticorruption committee - Photo Ivan Atmanagara

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The answer his research (and new book - forthcoming with Chicago University Press later this year) suggested he key he argued - awkwardly from a normative point of view - was, rather than (electoral) democracy,  liberal state impartiality (and/or citizens' sense of it) constituted the most effective means of dealing a 'big bang' blow (over a 10-20 year timescale). Delving into the Swedish (and British/Scandinavian)  experience to find how corupt tax-farming and aristocratic rent-seeking in public office turns into squeaky clean public admininistration (Swedish foreign arms sales excepted) through historical case studies had proved inconclusive: several historians sent into the archives to do the job had (intellectually speaking) disappeared iwithout trace and drowned in the mass of documentation. It seemed, however, that an indirect strategy, partly triggered by political choices and partly by the imperatives of technological modernization was the key

Questions centred on whether his understand of democracy was not, in fact, a diminshed subtype (along the lines of Zakaria's notions of democracy-as-elections) and whether the British colonial legacy played a role. As for patriotic Brits it did not: the new book contained a paired case study of Singapore and Jamaica in the new book (also available here as a working paper) examined how - despite seemingly better prospects Jamaica had sunk into corruption and stagnation, while ethnically divided Singapore had prospered although as one questioner suggested with a population the size of Brighton and Hove, the island state was an outlier rather than blueprint for the development of good governance.

All in all, big answers to big questions with a refreshingly wide range of cases and mehthods, rather than political science navel gazing we usually too often go in for.

Coffee and blue horizons

Spring sunshine, view of the Downs, coffee bar across the car park. Sussex University is a virtual Nirvana. But what is the ideological identity of the European Conservatives and Reformists group? Market liberalism in economics reckon my collaborators. Comparision with the moderate anti-liberal declarations of the European People's Party (EPP) and the market versus civil society fence-sitting the equivalent document for the European Democrats, Liberals and Reformists would suggest so. But what does our old friend Wordle have to say about it?