Irish general elections under a List System
I have written a small program to generate the outcomes of elections held under a list system, as used in national elections in most countries in Continental Europe, and in European Parliament elections in 27 of the 28 member states. I have input recent Irish general election results into the program. This note includes results and commentary on my research.
I won't go into the method of allocating seats here. Look up the D'Hondt method on Wikipedia. It's a roughly proportional means of awarding seats to lists that favours larger vote-winners somewhat. There are assumptions underlying my choice of vote totals - namely, that each party/alliance runs a single national list and each independent candidate runs alone on his/her own national list. Data comes from Wikipedia and ElectionsIreland.org. Let's take 1997 as a starting poiint; we can assume Fine Gael decided electoral reform was a neat idea and it got through a referendum somehow. 165 seats are allocated among the parties, with the remaining seat allocated to the previous Ceann Comhairle. I'm not including numerical comparisons with actual seat tallies because independents are effectively wiped out, making direct comparisons invalid.
1997 General Election: FF 72 - FG 51 - Lab 19 - PD 8 - Grn 5 - SF 4 - DL 4 - Soc 1 - Lowry 1
FF-PD secures 80 seats against 74 for FG-Lab-DL. The most likely outcome seems to be a FF-PD-Green government, with 85 seats. But bear in mind that the Green movement was far more radical in 1997 - Ms McKenna, formerly of that parish, was still an MEP. For the younger people reading this note: DL was the Democratic Left and PD were the Progressive Democrats. Lowry is the remarkably popular former Fine Gael minister Michael Lowry, who is a big vote-winner in Tipperary. He won just over 0.65% of the total national vote. No parties get into the Dáil who didn't in real life, but the allocation of seats is far more proportional to the vote.
PR-STV blunder: In real life, Democratic Left wins 4 seats on 45K votes. Sinn Féin wins 1 seat on 46K votes. The reasons? Democratic Left votes were almost exclusively located in large urban areas; Sinn Féin was still not securing transfers from those who voted for other parties as their first preference.
2002 General Election: FF 76 - FG 41 - Lab 19 - PD 7 - Grn 7 - SF 12 - Soc 1 - Ind. Health 1 - Lowry 1
FF-PD has 83 seats. That's a majority, just about, which contrasts with the large majority they won in reality. Fine Gael collapses to nowhere near their actual 2002 level. Labour fails to retain DL support after the merger, and Sinn Féin makes a much bigger breakthrough than either of the other two small parties that gained four seats in real life. That suggests a transfer of votes from DL straight to SF, but most SF representatives were in rural constituencies, so the actual pattern is more complex. The PD revival of 2002 was clearly an artefact of the bias towards local concentration of votes under the STV system. The most notable member of the Independent Health Alliance was Finian McGrath and it's likely that he would be in the Dáil on these figures.
PR-STV blunder: In real life, the Progressive Democrats win 8 seats on 74K votes. Sinn Féin wins 5 seats on 121K votes. The reasons are, once again, related to PR-STV quirks. PD votes were concentrated in their (heterogenous) heartlands, whereas SF did fairly well across the country. Transfers seem to be less relevant in 2002.
2007 General Election: FF 73 - FG 48 - Lab 18 - PD 4 - Grn 8 - SF 12 - Soc 1 - Lowry 1
The "Alliance for Change +1" of FG-Lab-Green wins 72 seats, but the government wins 77. FF-Green-PD now has 85 seats again, so the likely result is similar to real life: a reluctant Green Party takes over from the PDs as the Chief National Mudguard. Under a list system, the Progressive Democrat meltdown of 2007 is more like a big loss. On the left, Joe Higgins is now in, and Finian McGrath is now out, but bear in mind the IHA wasn't active in 2007, so he may well still be in if the list system encourages continued activity by the Alliance. And Michael Lowry, the man who some would describe as symbolic of the clientelist nature of PR-STV, is still in Leinster House! (or more likely, still in his constituency office)
PR-STV blunder: The Greens win 6 seats on 100K votes. Our old friends in Sinn Féin win 4 seats on 143K votes. Once again, the voices of Sinn Féin voters across the country are unheard simply because they don't live in close enough proximity to one another.
Summary of results
The governments of the last twelve years would be broadly similar under a truly proportionate electoral system. The exception is that 1997 would yield a coalition of strange bedfellows - in 1997, the Greens were still a radical protest party and the PDs wanted to smash the state.
The results under a list system would be somewhat different. FF and FG results seem to be stable in the long term. However, it is clear that both Labour and the PDs were on a consistent downward trend for many years. As I write, Labour is looking vibrant again and the PDs have folded. The Greens, on the other hand, have been moving upwards as the centre-left and liberal incumbents declined. Sinn Féin has the right to feel "hard done by" under the current system - they are persistently underrepresented by STV. There has been a quiet isolation of Sinn Féin by potential coalition partners, assisted by their low seat total. They would be much more difficult to isolate if they had a total of 12 seats and the guarantee of full Dáil speaking rights that goes along with it. Independents and small parties can still win seats if they get a decent number of votes. Over 10K should do it.
My own opinion is that the introduction of the list system would benefit Irish politics, but I haven't made up my mind yet. These numbers at least tell us that the composition of governments would not need to change drastically in order to accommodate such a reform.
This is an edited version of a note originally posted to Facebook.
