The debate over prospective electoral reform is charged with a sense of excitement that I think is misplaced. It sounds at times like talk of a daily tablet that will cure cancer, or a cheap machine that will end climate change, a piece of wishful thinking obscuring what’s at stake.
Proportional representation (PR), it is said, was a gigantic mistake. MPs are beholden to the party bosses who determine party lists, and are thus frightened and compliant, the legislature weak and insipid. A hybrid system mixing PR with constituency representation will bolster parliament’s independence. MPs will be more frightened of upsetting their constituents than of party bosses. They will, for the first time, actually represent the people who voted them into office.
It may end up working that way, but there’s no compelling reason that it should. The introduction of a constituency system could have a host of possible consequences and it’s impossible to predict how things will pan out. One possibility is that certain forms of extreme and distasteful politics, currently reduced to near silence, will come to take an increasingly central place in SA life.
We have a sense of this in the sphere of local government, which already mixes PR with a ward-based system. In Eldorado Park, a pretty toxic party, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), has just won a by-election, coming from nowhere to become a potential kingmaker. Swept to power by a local sense of grievance, it spouts an embittered coloured nationalism, talks menacingly of what it will do to foreigners, and wins votes by dishing out gifts. Everything scary in politics is on display here: racial exclusivism, raw xenophobia and buying the votes of the poor. Its rise has been made possible by the ward system. In pure PR, the PA’s voice would barely be heard.
It might be argued that this is precisely what constituency systems are for. It is because the DA neglected its constituencies that a crazy party was able to step in. If the DA wants its Eldorado Park ward back, it will have to represent its constituents better.
But things don’t really work that way. The genie is out of the bottle. A narrow, xenophobic voice has a megaphone now, and it is here to stay. The DA may have to bargain with it after the next local government elections, then spout some toxic politics to win the ward back.
There is a paradox about this sort of electoral reform. Measures intended to confer more power upon ordinary people often give it instead to extreme voices representing small minorities.
The history of party-political reform in the US and the UK is a case in point. Disenchantment with centralised party machines led to dramatic reforms in how parties selected their leaders. In the US, the primaries system was used to allow swathes of ordinary people to elect presidential nominees. In the UK, the Labour Party abandoned its old corporatist voting blocs and encouraged ordinary people to join the party for a nominal fee.
In both cases the outcome was precisely the opposite to what was intended. In the US, the Tea Party movement captured the Republican Party, pushing it way out to the extreme right. In the UK, Momentum captured Labour, pushing it so far to the left that it became unelectable.
These are examples of political party reform, to be sure, not electoral reform, and the logic is in some ways dissimilar. But the same lesson of caution holds. Bringing structures of representation closer to the ground does not necessarily make them more democratic. It could just as easily promote a distasteful politics few people want.
There is so much to fix in the ANC. But a constituency system is not the right tool. To believe that is really just a wishful fantasy.
• Steinberg is a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre.
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