Question: Can Northern Ireland in the 1960s be considered to have been a democracy given the prevalence of gerrymandering?

Answer: This is an interesting question and the short (but imperfect) answer is ‘yes’. Based on the definitions of democracy that we have looked at, Northern Ireland would have qualified as such:

• Robert Dahl’s minimalist definition requires only that a country is high in terms of inclusion (i.e. that the bulk of the population can vote) and contestation (i.e. that voters have a meaningful choice over who they vote for), and both of those conditions were met in Northern Ireland.

• The Polity IV scale measures regimes in terms of:
  • the competitiveness of executive recruitment;
  • the openness of executive recruitment;
  • the constraints that exist on the executive;
  • the regulation of political participation;
  • the competitiveness of political participation.

In Northern Ireland in the 1960s, multiple parties competed in elections for the executive (both in local and national elections), anyone could (with minor nomination requirements) become a candidate with a prospect (albeit slim, though this is the case in most (all?) democracies) of becoming part of the executive, the executive was limited (in the sense that it was subject to the rule of law and could be voted out), elections were regulated and subject to the rule of law, and parties competed for votes. So, the criteria for democracy are broadly met by this definition too.

However, as always, things are not that simple. We will also cover the concept of electoral integrity, which is essentially about the fairness of elections. We can easily argue that gerrymandering in Northern Ireland was unfair and, indeed, that it impacted on the ability of the population to meaningfully choose the overall winning party in elections. This was because boundaries were drawn in a way that grouped large sections of the electorate together in some districts (restricting the number of representatives that they could elect) whilst ensuring majorities of smaller sections of the population in other districts (thus increasing the number of representatives that they could elect). Given that the case of Northern Ireland conforms to the above two definitions of democracy but clearly had significant problems of implementation, I would probably describe it as a flawed democracy at the time.

The above conclusion is however, at least in part, a judgement on my part. You could make the case that the gerrymandering was so severe that it meant Northern Ireland was not, in practice, a democracy (i.e. a majority had the value of their votes suppressed in some places whilst a minority in those same areas had the value of their votes exaggerated). Of course, if we go down this route then we need to think about where we would set the boundary of our definition. In other words, how flawed does the implementation of democracy have to be before we conclude that it is, in fact, not a democracy? Would we say that the UK, with a single member district plurality (i.e. non-proportional) electoral system, in which multiple governments have been elected against the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, is not a democracy? Ultimately, this is not very different from the judgement that went into saying that countries that score -6 or below on the Polity IV scale are dictatorships, those that score 6 or more are democracies, and those that score between 5 and -5 are anocracies. In other words, there is always an element of judgement in categorisation, and we should be ready to explain why we reach the conclusions that we do.

Question:  I read in the Huber and Gallardo (2004) article that the “alleged stability of majoritarian systems masks the substantial turnover within the cabinet itself”. I was wondering what specifically was meant by “alleged stability”, please? I was under the impression that majoritarian systems, by not providing tools for dealing with the problems it created (no vote of no confidence), was less stable than consensus democracies or PR systems.

Answer:  The Huber and Martinez-Gallardo article centres on challenging pre-existing definitions of stability (which focus on the time that passes between cabinet formation and collapse), and providing alternative ways of conceptualising stability (focusing on ministers’ experience of being in cabinet, and of holding their specific portfolios). The alleged instability of consensus systems is based on the more frequent collapse of cabinets due to one or more coalition partners leaving government (due to disputes or disagreements between parties). Of course, because consensus systems tend to have PR electoral systems, they are more likely to produce coalition governments (because no single party is likely to receive a majority of votes in elections), which then makes it more likely that there is a coalition partner to leave the government and cause the cabinet to collapse. As the article mentions, the French Third Republic, Weimar Germany, and Italy are taken as evidence of this tendency.

However, by presenting their alternative measures of (in)stability, they show that majoritarian systems such as the French Fifth Republic are not as stable as proposed. It is thought that they should be stable because they are more likely to produce majority government that lasts for the whole of its term (i.e. the cabinet will not collapse because there is no coalition partner who can quit). However, as Huber and Martinez-Gallardo show, majoritarian systems are not as stable as thought when we consider the experience of the ministers in cabinets (both in terms of the time they have spent in cabinet, and in charge of their specific portfolios). This is because, whilst cabinets may be less likely to collapse in majoritarian systems, they may well be reshuffled at the discretion of the prime minister (or equivalent), meaning that the turnover of cabinet ministers can be high.

So, their argument does not relate to the lack of a vote of no confidence in particular. Crucially, the presence of absence of a vote of no confidence is actually to do with whether the system is presidential (no vote of no confidence) or parliamentary (vote of no confidence), rather than strictly whether it is majoritarian or consensus orientated. Remember, of course, that a parliamentary system may be more majoritarian (e.g. the UK) or consensual (e.g. Germany) based to a notable extent on their electoral system. A presidential system will always have the additional consensus requirement that the president must approve bills passed by the legislature but may still be more or less consensus orientated depending on the electoral system used for the legislature.

Question: Why does median voter theory require that there be only two parties? Is it not always electorally efficient to align with the preferences of the median voter?

Answer: This is a good question and the answer centres on parties outflanking the party that positions itself at (or nearest) the median voter. So, let’s imagine a two-party system with a left party and a right party, in which the left party has positioned itself almost at the median voter whilst the right party is further away. Of course, the latter party picks up the votes of everyone in the electorate to the right of their position, as well as everyone to their left who is closer to them than the (almost-median) position of the left party. The left party does the same for all voters to their left and everyone between them and the median voter, as well as picking up the crucial median voter (because they are closer than the right party).

Now let’s imagine that a new left party enters the electoral arena to represent those voters on the left who feel alienated by the central position of the original left party. The new party will pick up all the votes to the left of their position, and all the votes of those to their right who are, nonetheless, closer to their position than that almost median position of the original left party. So, the left vote is split and the right party, which remains unchallenged on the right, can win without positioning themselves at the median voter. The right party can still count on everyone to their right (and those to their left who are closer to them than they are to the median) but the original left party cannot count on the votes of everyone to their left. In other words, they have been outflanked on the left as well as on the right, and there are not enough votes around the median to deliver victory. Of course, this depends on the precise positions of the parties because there are, in a normal distribution, more votes to be won around the median voter. So, if the new left and original right parties move to the extremes it still makes sense for the original left party to go to the median, where there are more votes.

Of course, all of this turns on other assumptions including, for instance, that voters turn out to vote. If parties moving to the median would alienate voters on the left or right to the extent that they stopped voting then that would also undermine the simple calculus involved in moving to the median voter (hence the idea of shoring up the base).