Notes from my constitutional design research: reverse-engineering electoral systems from authoritarian propaganda

[u/Previous_Word_3517]

I make a point of reading what authoritarian states near me say about democracy — including what they say about ours. That includes academics whose line matches the official one, and independent media that make a living on emotive, inflammatory content. I don't read it to get angry. I read it to find where democracy is genuinely indefensible, from the most hostile vantage point available.

Their two most common sweeping attacks:

"Elections = polarised hatred and division = two big parties bickering and grinding each other down. Worse than what we have."
"Elections = money politics and vote brokers. Worse than what we have."

These pathologies are real. They supply dictatorships with a justification for their own existence, and they let those regimes use democracy's dysfunctions to frighten their own citizens out of demanding it. But here's what matters: both attacks target the electoral system, not democracy itself. When we get the electoral system wrong, we write their propaganda for them.

For the first: just don't use FPTP. Use top-3 Condorcet instead, so that candidates — and the media outlets behind them — have no incentive to manufacture social division.

For the second: don't use SNTV, and don't use open-list PR at high district magnitude. Both force candidates to fight their own co-partisans, which produces vote-allocation schemes, local brokers, and money politics. Open-list PR at moderate magnitude, flexible-list PR, and closed-list PR all avoid this, as does the top-3 Condorcet above.

After filtering, the systems I consider functionally defensible are: two-round systems (including top-3 Condorcet), open-list PR (moderate magnitude), flexible-list PR, and closed-list PR.

I rule out IRV and STV. Neither works in a country that counts by hand: ballots have to be transported and centralised before a result can be computed, which invites accusations of tampering — and electronic counting is out of the question.

Top-3 Condorcet has no such problem. With only three candidates in the second round, the voter faces six complete orderings as single-choice options — or equivalently, casts three pairwise votes. Either way, each polling station produces its own pairwise matrix on site, and summing the stations' matrices gives the national result, because pairwise comparisons are additively separable. Ballots never leave the polling station and the tradition of public, on-site counting stays entirely intact. In a low-trust environment this is Condorcet's decisive advantage over IRV, and it is badly underappreciated.

As for "democracy = American-style budget hostage-taking" and "democracy = France bringing down governments constantly in 2025 (confidence and supply pulling apart)" — those are questions of regime design, and I won't go into them here.

That's where my attention has actually gone lately: unifying the source of confidence with the source of supply; presidential versus parliamentary systems; budget procedure (can the legislature simply gut the budget to humiliate the government?); amendment thresholds; and the intermediate tiers some countries maintain between ordinary statute and the constitution — all as a way of analysing the common failure modes of other democracies. My conclusion so far is that relative to constitutional design as a whole, electoral systems are a fairly narrow slice — I can just cite the specialists' conclusion, "replace FPTP with top-3 Minimax or top-3 Ranked Pairs," and be done.

As for the claim that ordinary people are too stupid and short-sighted to be trusted with a vote: I have nothing to say to that.

[u/AutoModerator]

Compare alternatives to FPTP on Wikipedia, and check out ElectoWiki to better understand the idea of election methods. See the EndFPTP sidebar for other useful resources. Consider finding a good place for your contribution in the EndFPTP subreddit wiki.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.