Arguments against Alternative Vote

Since people keep finding my earlier post on AV and proportionality when searching for "arguments against alternative vote", I thought it was probably time to actually set out the list of those arguments. (Arguments in favour of AV get a separate page, though in some cases whether an argument is positive or negative depends on what you're looking for in a voting system)

You should probably skip the rest of this post if the merits of various electoral systems don't interest you.

For each point, I'll describe a problem with Alternative Vote (AV) (which might not necessarily be a problem for you personally), and say which other voting systems can be used to avoid this problem.

Since a lot of the recent interest is probably to do with the upcoming referendum, I'll also explicitly say how the other referendum option, First Past The Post (FPTP), does on the same problem.

All voting systems are inevitably flawed in some way - there is no one perfect correct way to count votes. So picking a voting system is about considering the problems of the possible voting systems, and ignoring those that you don't think are problems.

• AV is not proportional
• AV is not monotonic
• AV allows tactical voting
• AV is biased against extreme candidates
• Selecting a preference order is complex

I also list a few things that are not arguments against AV, but are sometimes presented as such.

AV is not proportional

Because Alternative Vote is only suitable for electing a single candidate, to elect multiple candidates to a body, to use AV you need to divide the electorate up into multiple constituencies, each electing only a single candidate.

This operation means that generally the strongest one or two parties get by far the highest number of seats, with other parties getting far fewer or even none. The distribution of the voters within the constituencies can also make a large difference, with parties with geographically-concentrated support doing better than parties with geographically-separated support.

Two parties could get identical numbers of first preference votes (and indeed second and further preference votes) across the electorate as a whole, but could get vastly different numbers of seats.

In the UK this effect significantly benefits Labour and the Conservatives (by a similar amount), and harms every other party.

To avoid this, use...

The only sensible voting systems that can avoid this problem are ones using constituencies returning multiple candidates. Either Single Transferable Vote or one of the List Voting systems will give a result where the number of candidates a party gets is roughly proportional to the number of voters for that party.

What about FPTP?

I cover this in far more detail in the earlier post. In summary, neither AV or FPTP are proportional systems. Which gives the result closer to proportionality will depend on fine details of party affiliation, geographical distributions, constituency boundaries, and so on - and will probably vary from election to election anyway.

There is no reason to pick AV over FPTP, or FPTP over AV, on the grounds of proportionality - if you don't want proportionality, pick either. If you do want proportionality, pick a different system if you can, or find another way to decide if you can't.

Let's call this one a draw.

AV is not monotonic

Monotonicity is an obscure property of voting systems, but it's generally considered quite important. It states that, if candidate A is currently winning the election, and a number of voters change their votes to be more favourable to candidate A, this should not cause candidate A to lose the election.

Or, more simply: getting more votes shouldn't make one's situation worse. "Monotonicity" is also called "Non-perversity", for obvious reasons.

AV, unfortunately, is not monotonic. Consider the following small election with three candidates - Alice, Bob and Cath - and a few voters. To make the example simple, all the voters follow one of three patterns for their ballot papers.

Here are the votes

Number of ballot papers	First preference	Second preference	Third preference
10 voters	Alice	Cath	Bob
9 voters	Bob	Cath	Alice
8 voters	Cath	Alice	Bob

There are 27 votes, so 14 votes are needed to be elected. No-one has 14 votes yet, so Cath, who has the lowest number of votes, is eliminated from the election. The second preference of Cath's 8 votes are looked at, and they're all for Alice. The votes are added to Alice's total, and on the second round of counting she is ahead 18 votes to 9, which is enough to win the election.

But what would have happen if Alice's campaign had been a bit more effective, and two of the Bob voters, rather than putting Alice last, had put her first, Bob second, and Cath last?

The new vote totals are

Number of ballot papers	First preference	Second preference	Third preference
10 voters	Alice	Cath	Bob
2 voters	Alice	Bob	Cath
7 voters	Bob	Cath	Alice
8 voters	Cath	Alice	Bob

Still no-one wins on first preferences alone, but rather than Cath being the last-placed candidate, Bob is. So Bob is eliminated instead, and those 7 votes get transferred to their second preference candidate - Cath.

Cath now wins by 15 votes to 12 on the next round of voting. By getting some voters to give her a first preference rather than a third, Alice has ended up losing the election!

How big a problem is this in practice?

It sounds very serious, but fortunately, in practice, this doesn't happen that much. (If it did, no-one would ever use Alternative Vote).

[Edit 7 April: For a more detailed analysis of how common non-monotonicity is, see the later post. You can also use the swingometer to find out which seats might be affected.]

In almost all cases, getting more votes will improve a candidate's chances of winning the election.

The major reason that it isn't a problem is that it's both rare and very unpredictable. Unless you have almost perfect polling, seeing when an election might give a non-monotonic result is very difficult. In the situations where your candidate ends up in a non-monotonic 'trap' and loses, it's possible to get out of the 'trap' by picking up extra votes or by losing some votes - and it's always safer to try for even more votes.

The consequence is that it's a rare election that's close enough to have this behaviour at all, and an exceptionally rare election where another candidate can actually take advantage of it. (The exception is when the vote is not a secret ballot, and later voters can incorporate earlier votes into their plans - in this case, a sufficiently quick-thinking candidate might just be able to use this)

To avoid this, use...

...just about anything else. Single Transferable Vote has the same problem - though even less predictably. Every other voting system that I know of is monotonic.

What about FPTP?

FPTP is monotonic. AV is non-monotonic in rare situations. If monotonicity is important to you, FPTP has a narrow advantage here.

AV allows tactical voting

'Tactical' voting is where a voter completes their ballot paper in a way that is not their real preference order, with the aim of getting a better result than they would have done if they were honest.

For instance, in the election above where Alice wins, Bob's voters generally do not like Alice. If some of them put Cath rather than Bob as their first preference, then Bob still won't win, but neither will Alice, and Cath is at least preferable.

It's easy in theory, but it's rarely actually done in practice, because it means deliberately throwing away a good position in the election to benefit a different candidate.

So, for instance, in a Labour/Conservative marginal in the UK, where Labour are going to be ahead on first preferences, and the transfers of votes from Lib Dems and minor parties are not predicted to close the gap completely, people who would "honestly" put the Conservative candidate first might instead put the Lib Dem candidate first, and push the Conservative candidate down into third place. Conservative transfers of second preferences are likely to be overwhemingly in favour of the Lib Dem rather than the Labour candidate, so the Lib Dem wins rather than the Labour candidate.

(This example works equally well with Labour and the Conservatives reversed, by the way).

That's the theory. In practice, though, it only works in seats which are extremely marginal to begin with. In those seats, the choice is between:

• throwing away a good second place (or even first place if your polling is a bit off), and so letting the third-placed candidate win.
• campaigning harder for second preferences from the third-placed candidate and winning on transfers yourself.

It's generally considered better to lose narrowly in second place - and so be a definite contender for the seat next time, with all the central party resources that implies - than get knocked back into a distant third place and have the party focus its resources elsewhere next time.

It's also really difficult to campaign for - Labour candidates going around saying "Vote Lib Dem to keep the Conservatives out" are going to get very odd looks (and probably thrown out of the party, too).

To avoid this, use...

It's very difficult to find a voting system which isn't at all susceptible to tactical voting. For single-seat constituencies, Condorcet is the best option. For multiple-seat elections, any PR system will be almost immune, but not completely.

AV isn't bad for single-seat elections, though - I think only Condorcet is more resistant.

What about FPTP?

Both FPTP and AV are susceptible to tactical voting, but FPTP has it far worse.

In AV, the tactical vote is to throw away a possible first or second place to improve the chances of a somewhat acceptable winner coming up from third. It's very difficult to do correctly, and no-one is likely to try.

In FPTP, the tactical vote is to throw away a possible fourth or fifth place (or weaken a third place), to improve the chances of the better of the top two. It's relatively common and somewhat effective.

If you want to avoid the need for tactical voting, AV is by far the better of the two.

AV is biased against extreme candidates

Is this a flaw? It is if you are extreme.

Extremist candidates are not going to get 50% of the first preference votes (if they were doing that well, it would be somewhat misleading to call their political views extreme in the context of that election). Because they're so extreme, though, it's also very rare that anyone will give them a decent preference for transfers, which means that they're very likely to go out of the election in an early round.

To avoid this, use...

Any proportional representation system, except those which require a high minimum percentage of the vote to get any seats.

What about FPTP?

FPTP and AV both have a tendency to benefit parties around the centre, but these tendencies behave in different ways.

FPTP benefits the two largest parties near the centre (in the UK, Labour and the Conservatives), and makes things very difficult for anyone else.

AV also benefits those parties, but gives a smaller benefit to parties between the two biggest (such as the Lib Dems).

Its effect on parties that are not extremist but are outside the space between the big two is hard to tell, but the evidence suggests that AV would make things a little easier (though not much) for most left and right parties such as the Greens and UKIP, but would make things much harder for extremists such as the BNP.

Which of the two systems you prefer on this basis probably depends on who you consider extremist, whether you are one yourself, and whether you think having a few extremists elected is good or bad for the government as a whole.

Selecting a preference order is complex

It's certainly true that numbering candidates in order of preference is more complicated than just picking a single favourite candidate.

Depending on the design of the ballot paper, this may also cause accessibility problems.

To avoid this, use...

Either a non-preferential system such as FPTP or a List system, or a system such as Approval Voting where voters place identical marks by all the candidates they approve of.

What about FPTP?

FPTP ballot papers are a bit easier to complete. Whether this matters to you depends on how difficult you think the electorate are likely to find "number the candidates in order of preference, starting with '1' for your most preferred candidate.", and how much impact you think voter education is likely to have on this.

In an optional-preference AV system, which is the one proposed for the UK, the problem is less severe as there's no need for voters to specify more preferences than they want to (and they can only specify one, if they want).

False arguments against AV

Edit: 2 April 2011 - since this post was written, another false argument has come up: Would elections be decided on BNP second preferences? (My conclusion: no more than they are now)

AV requires voting machines or other electronic or mechanical voting assistance"

No. AV was invented and used long before any of that technology existed. Most of the AV elections I've participated in have used normal paper ballot papers, counted by hand, without any problems at all.

"AV is complex to count"

No. An AV count will usually take longer than a FPTP count unless the result is very obvious, but in practice not by much. It will be considerably quicker than the count for most other election systems except List systems and FPTP. Also, while the count will take slightly longer, the counting process is not significantly more complex than that for FPTP.

I've participated in several AV counts, and been in charge of a few. While the voting process is a little more complex, the counting process is not.

"AV gives some people multiple votes"

No. Alternative Vote is intended as an alternative to holding multiple rounds of run-off voting, by collecting all the information needed on a single ballot paper. Rather than holding the votes on separate days, requiring multiple rounds of elections, and delaying the final result by weeks, the voters preferences are collected, and used to find out what would have happened - the ballot paper acts as a proxy for the voter.

(In US English, Alternative Voting is called Instant Runoff Voting, which makes this somewhat clearer)

A typical ballot paper might read as follows (the voter has chosen not to use all their preferences):

Alice	3
Bob	-
Cath	1
Dan	2
Elli	-

This means:

1. In the first round of voting, vote for Cath.
2. If there's a second round of voting, and Cath hasn't been eliminated, vote for Cath again. Keep voting for Cath if possible.
3. If Cath gets eliminated, vote for Dan instead in the next round.
4. If Cath and Dan both get eliminated, vote for Alice.
5. If Cath, Dan and Alice all get eliminated, don't bother showing up for the next round of voting.

Rather than the voters having to go back and forth to the polls every week until someone gets 50% of the votes, the voters fill in a ballot paper that acts as their proxy in the voting. That ballot paper will then vote in every round it can until either someone gets 50% or it runs out of instructions.

Every voter gets one vote each round, if they want. (People who don't specify all their preferences won't get a vote in future rounds once their specified preferences run out - which might never happen, of course - just as people who don't show up to vote in the later rounds of a run-off election don't get a vote)

AV doesn't give some people multiple votes - it gives everyone one vote, but means that people who are happy with the way their vote is going don't need to go back and keep saying that.

AV will lead to permanent coalition government

No. It's difficult to predict the effects of a change in voting system, but the only recent UK general election in which AV would have been likely to give a coalition government and FPTP didn't anyway is the 1992 general election (and given that Major's Conservatives lost their majority by the end of that Parliament anyway, it might be more accurate to say that AV would only have given a coalition sooner in that election).

Australia, which uses AV, has had considerably fewer coalitions¹ than the FPTP-using UK. Conversely Canada, which uses FPTP, has had considerably more coalition governments than either the UK or Australia.

Whether AV or FPTP leads to coalition governments depends far more on the strength of the third and fourth parties than on which of the two systems is used.

AV would make coalition governments marginally more likely in the UK, but only very marginally. Majority Conservative or Labour governments would still be the norm.

Footnote

¹ Edit 17 March: As Tim Roll-Pickering points out in comments, this depends on what you count as a coalition. To be more specific, short-term alliances between parties for the duration of a single Parliament, needing to be agreed only after the votes are cast and the majorities known, are not significantly more likely under AV in the UK context. Long-term alliances made possible by a change in voting system are a different matter, and beyond prediction for now.

Friday Links

• [trigger warning] Hanne Blank: Why I Don’t Read Those Links You Send Me
• [trigger warning] Modus Dopens: Personal care and sustainability
• s.e. smith: Notes From the Urban/Rural Divide: Public Transit and Cuteifying Disability
• Garrulous Law: Prisoners’ Votes and the ECHR
• Reni Eddo-Lodge: On things we are not allowed to say…
• [trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: The Tories, still the party of Section 28
• [trigger warning] We Mixed Our Drinks: Please, let's stop victim-blaming (for the umpteenth time)
• Richard Exell at Liberal Conspiracy: How many disabled people are fit for work? Not as much as ministers claim
• Lisa Ansell at Bright Green Scotland: ‘Fight’ against the cuts will demand respect for difference
• Diary of a Goldfish: More nonsense about the Work-Shy
• [trigger warning] Resist Racism: Teacher sprays kids with air freshener
• HarpyMarx: More rough justice ConDem style
• [trigger warning] incurable hippie at Where's the Benefit?: Hate from the Government, Hate on the Street.
• Where does my money go - a graphical look at government budgeting
• Jess McCabe at The F-Word: Record numbers of women claim Jobseekers’ Allowance as unemployment rises
• [trigger warning] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: Being an Atheist Doesn't Make You Enlightened

And finally, in perhaps the first and only unequivocally positive idea of the coalition government. HarpyMarx: Here comes Larry the cat....

The cost of democracy

The No to AV campaign, apparently lacking good arguments in favour of First Past The Post, has claimed that AV would cost too much.

Plenty of other commentators have already pointed out that their claims are absurd - including the cost of the referendum itself as a cost of AV is the sort of accountancy that would get you investigated for fraud if you tried it on your corporate expenses; paying a huge amount for unnecessary vote counting machines₁ that we wouldn't actually buy; and so on.

The idea that a relatively trivial sum should be used as an excuse not to run a democratic process in one of the richest countries in the world has also been widely criticised, and rightly so. Next Left, for instance, points out that extrapolating the votes in a seat from a statistical sample would be even cheaper - Isaac Asimov's Franchise being the end of that road. (I didn't put cost saving as an explicit advantage of Vote From Hat, but perhaps I should have).

What's been missed, at least in the commentary I've read so far, is that while the principle that democracy is too expensive is repulsive to most Britons, we do it all the time - not in the choice of vote counting system, but in the operation of our vote collection.

At the last general election, there were several cases of disenfranchisement through underfunding - shortages of ballot papers that would have cost more to print; people being turned away from polling stations because local authorities didn't want to pay enough polling staff to meet the Electoral Commission recommended minimum staffing levels; intentionally using inaccessible polling stations; failing to spend time and money reviewing the accessibility of polling stations and fixing the problems, and so on. For some people with disabilities, the idea that it's not worth paying money to allow them to vote is well established.

I certainly believe that if you're going to have a democracy, you can't then put a maximum price on establishing a universal franchise - you pay the costs happily.

If First Past The Post is to be considered superior to Alternative Vote - a stance I disagree with, of course - it should be on the grounds of its ability to democratically reflect the will of the electorate, not on the grounds of cost. But let's apply that to other areas of electoral administration too, not just the vote counting system.

Footnote

1. The Meek variant of Single Transferable Vote, because it recursively adjusts the transfer values to get the optimal result (rather than the near-optimal estimates used by other STV variants), can only be counted by computer. Every other vote counting system I'm aware of, including most STV variants, can be done entirely by hand.

   A computer-assisted count - using generic laptops or desktops the local authority already has to run a spreadsheet or OpenSTV, not expensive specialised hardware - would make things considerably easier for most Single Transferable Vote variants, Borda, and Range Voting, but even that isn't necessary for Alternative Vote.

Friday Links

• Lisa at Where's the Benefit?: Absolutely Outrageous!
• Diary of a Goldfish: ADHD and DLA Fraud
• [trigger warning] Restructure: The ethical corollary of “sex is a basic human need” is that rape is justified.
• Chitra Nagarajan at BlackFeminists: Let us talk about racism when discussing identity, belonging and multiculturalism
• Marissa at This is Hysteria: Racism isn't ironic
• [trigger warning] s.e. smith: Social Justice Matters: The Dehumanisation Track
• [trigger warning] Sunny at Pickled Politics: Didn’t realise putting people on a terrorist ‘watch-list’ was that easy
• [trigger warning] Sparky at Womanist Musings: Homophobia exists, ultimately, because most people let it exist
• Media Orchard: Study: Obesity Linked to Headlessness
• Mind: Work Capability Assessment still not up to the job

Quorums and democratic legitimacy

The House of Lords has amended the AV referendum Bill so that the referendum would require the votes of 40% of voters to be binding.

This is extremely anti-democratic, but of course so is the Lords in general, so this is hardly surprising. (For all the Commons' faults, a similar amendment there was resoundingly defeated by cross-party consensus)

The obvious problem with a quorum for any vote where one of the options is to do nothing, is that if the quorum is difficult to reach, it's often more effective for those opposing change to not vote than it is to vote no.

40% will be difficult to reach. Only general elections get that high a turnout in the UK (and then not always in every constituency). If we assume, implausibly, a potential turnout of 60%, comparable with a modern general election, then if at least a third, but less than half, of voters oppose it, they can "win" by collectively not voting.

Lower the turnout further, and it becomes even less possible for a vote for change to succeed.

This does raise the question, of course, of what would be done in a situation where the turnout was good (for a non-general election) but not exceptional - say 20% - almost all of which was in favour of change because most of the status quo voters had stayed home. Parliament - especially the Commons, which voted against the quorum requirement in the first place - would then be under great pressure to pass further legislation to implement it anyway.

I think quorum requirements in general are a really bad idea. They're only useful in a situation where it's plausible that a minority interest group could call a vote with so little publicity and/or notice and/or accessibility that hardly anyone who opposed them knew what was going on, and so a minimum attendance to prevent this is required.

The rest of the time, they're either unachievable, leading to an organisation that can't make changes because it's impossible to get the votes to do it, or they're trivial - ten people out of thousands - and thus rather pointless.

In this situation, it's rather implausible that the referendum could be called without sufficient publicity or notice, and while some of the polling stations will be extremely inaccessible to some voters, that's not an issue that a quorum figure is going to fix.

So, essentially, if the Commons don't amend this back out (and the Lords have filibustered long enough on the Bill that they don't have time for a long argument without delaying the referendum) the vote is certain to fail.

That a narrow majority of the Lords care so much about the electoral system used in an election that they can't even vote in that they're willing to stoop this low to rig the result (rather than campaign for the result they want) is a strong sign that they need replacing with a fully-elected house as soon as possible.

Coda

[trigger warning]

Parliament recently discussed Anna Soubry MP's (Conservative, Broxtowe) Anonymity (arrested persons) Bill, which would have made it a fairly serious offence to report in the press on the arrest of a person who had not yet been charged, except where a court order allowed this.

Various points were raised in the debate, including:

• the possibility of abuse of this by making it difficult to discover patterns in arrests, or making it difficult to discover that a politically-sensitive arrest had been made;
• practical difficulties of enforcing this form of reporting when news travels rapidly on the internet, and by gossip within geographic communities, outside of the scope of the press;
• the risk of legislating in general to cover a problem that affects only a tiny minority of cases;
• that a token fine is unlikely to dissuade a newspaper, but a custodial sentence for the editor is conversely rather harsh;
• that it would be difficult to bind foreign media available in the UK, of which there are many.

All relevant points, of course, on both the undesirability and the impracticality of a general ban on this sort of reporting.

Other than the Bill's sponsor, and the Minister (Crispin Blunt MP) responsible for this area of legislation, though, I'm not sure that a single one of the (mostly-male, mostly-coalition) MPs speaking in this debate raised any of those points in any of the previous debates on reporting restrictions in rape cases.

(A pattern mirrored in the internet debate of those proposals, where the usual "free speech"/"freedom of the press" advocates were largely absent from the discussion when it was only about rape cases.)

Friday Links

• [trigger warning] International Journal of Epidemiology: The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic? and The Fat Nutritionist: Fat / Counterfat
• PortlyDyke at Shakesville: Questionable Standards
• Ideologically Impure: Why the left needs feminism
• A paper from 1945 on The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp
• Lisa at Where's the Benefit?: More Mail Lies
• s.e. smith: Medical Billing and the Veterinary Approach
• [trigger warning] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: My point, here it is

Friday Links

• Echidne at Echidne of the Snakes: Pregnancy Policing
• Guardian: Library clears its shelves in protest at closure threat
• Rumbold at Pickled Politics: Daily Mail thinks criminals should reoffend or claim benefits
• DavidG at Where's the Benefit?: The Inept Leading the Clueless: JCP, JSA and Disability and Lisa: National Protest Against Benefit Cuts - Party and Picnic in Triton Square
• [trigger warning] s.e. smith: On Growth Attenuation and ‘Moral Compromise’
• Jender at Feminist Philosophers: Education Maintenance Allowance
• [trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: Another litany of prejudice and bigotry
• Lisa Ansell: False Economy
• Andy Godfrey: Mainstream consensus, Katy Perry and being “rational”
• Queen Emily at Questioning Transphobia: Re-watching movies
• Kate Belgrave at The Daily (Maybe):Women and the cuts
• [trigger warning] Laura Woodhouse at The F-Word: 16-year-old girl convicted following “false rape allegation”
• Helen at Hoyden About Town: Poor Journalism nearly causes Road incident
• Lisa Wade at Sociological Images: Cultural Differences in Cognitive Perception
• Renee at Womanist Musings: #Hollaback and Fighting Street Harassement

Also, no specific post - rather the whole thing: [trigger warning] MicroAggressions

Buses, and the point of public services

The local County Council has had a major budget cut from central government. Part of dealing with this involves reducing or removing the subsidy they provide for certain services which would not be commercially viable.

While they say that this does not necessarily mean the service will be withdrawn, both of the major bus operators have said that they cannot afford to continue more than a few of the services without a subsidy.

Sunday services and evening services are facing the majority of the cuts, mainly in rural parts of the county.

There are two things related to this that I want to draw attention to, and they apply to all sorts of cuts that the government is making or requiring local councils to make.

Firstly, as reported in the local free paper:

About a fifth of all bus services in the county are not commercially viable. But the council believes more than 95% of bus passenger journeys would be largely or entirely unaffected by the cuts.

Obviously most passenger journeys are not going to be affected. Most journeys are made on busy routes, which don't need a subsidy. The point of public subsidy of bus routes - and indeed public funding of many things - is to make affordable services that would not be possible on a pure market model, but which are necessary to many people. To say that most journeys will be unaffected is true, but not relevant.

Lots of people who rely on the bus services to get about are going to find their movement restricted, and that leads on to the second point: cuts to public services have a knock-on effect on the private economy.

We're told by the government that public spending is preventing private spending. Well, in this case that's clearly not true - it's not as if there would be private operators on these routes without the public subsidy: the private operators have said so themselves.

But furthermore, this public subsidy helps private spending. Cut the evening services, and people won't be able to get into the urban centres of the county then - or won't be able to get out later without spending several times the cost of a bus ticket on taxi fares.

So people going into towns in the evening for the nightlife are a bit stuck, as are people who go into town to work in the pubs and clubs providing that nightlife, or in other evening shift jobs in shops where they clock off after 8pm when many services are being withdrawn or cut back. The local private economy takes a dip as a result.

They could get a car and travel that way, but that's a large cost to themselves so won't be practical for a lot of people who were relying on the buses before, and it also increases congestion and exacerbates the lack of parking in town centres, which makes things worse for everyone. And, of course, having got the car, they then don't need the bus to get around on weekday mornings and afternoons either, so that's fewer bus passengers, and perhaps some of the more borderline unsubsidised bus routes start to slip out of profit too.

Reduced private expenditure leads to reduced tax revenue, so the whole cycle starts again.

By supporting necessary but not commercially viable services, public funding helps both the public and private sector, both of which are likely to take severe damage in the next few years.

This is not the time for insubstantial opposition, Labour

The government proposals to reform Disability Living Allowance are extremely worrying. They've been strongly condemned by numerous disability rights groups and charities. There is a petition to Maria Miller MP, the government minister responsible for the consultation, asking for the proposals to be withdrawn, which you might be interested in signing.

What's also worrying is that Labour, as the main "opposition" party, doesn't seem to be doing much to actually oppose these changes. There have been a couple of ministerial statements about some of the details, but the broad proposal to reform DLA - and significantly reduce eligibility - seems to be being accepted by Labour, with Douglas Alexander MP (the Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions) stating that:

Labour’s position is clear: we want to work with the government to reform Disability Living Allowance and introduce a new gateway as set out in the Budget.

I've written the following letter to my MP to try to get Labour to oppose the plans, or at least to find out why they aren't already doing so.

As usual, feel free to modify it for your own MP if you want, though this one more than most of my letters is very much written for a Labour MP, and would need considerable modification for tone to be suitable for a coalition MP.

You can write to your MP online using Write To Them.

Dear [MP]

The Department of Work and Pensions are currently running a consultation on the Disability Living Allowance, proposing to replace it with a "Personal Independence Payment". While the DLA system is flawed, the coalition government's proposals will make the situation even worse.

The proposal is based on flawed assumptions, claiming that the award of DLA discourages people from working. While there is a correlation between low employment and receiving DLA, this hardly implies causation. People with disabilities are both likely to receive DLA and less likely to be employed due to either the nature of their disabilities making many forms of employment impossible, and/or a refusal by employers to make the necessary adaptations and other discrimination in the workplace. Concluding from this that DLA contributes towards unemployment is absurd.

The consultation claims in paragraph 14 of Chapter 1 onwards that DLA is "not fit for purpose", but nowhere in the following paragraphs is it explained why. Instead, statements are made to imply this. Here, the real purpose of the reform becomes obvious. Paragraphs 14 and 15 note that receipt of DLA has expanded considerably since its introduction, but why this is a bad thing is not explained.

Their aim, as other public statements by government ministers have made clear, is to reduce the number of people receiving disability benefits. They have stated that one of the aims is to reduce the number of people claiming disability benefits by around 25%. They have put forward no evidence, however, that the people in this 25% - over half a million people in total - do not need the support that DLA provides. Meanwhile, the fraud rate for DLA is the lowest of any benefit.

We can therefore conclude that the people currently receiving DLA have a genuine need for it. To introduce a new scheme that would leave up to a quarter of them without the money they need to lead their lives is a cruel decision, made with thought only for the bottom line and not for the people who will be affected, many of whom will have to give up their jobs, or their homes, or their independence, if their DLA is removed.

This fits with the general pattern of this coalition government so far, cutting vital services not because it is necessary but because their ideology demands it. This proposal, targeting people with disabilities, is particularly insiduous, because of the increased barriers to participation in the democratic process, through lobbying or protest, that many of them face.

It is clear that they intend to make the assessment for the "Personal Independence Payment" considerably harsher than that for DLA, which itself has been criticised for being too restrictive in its criteria.

There are additional cut-backs in the document, such as the removal of mobility allowance for those in publicly-funded hospitals or care homes (but not from those rich enough to afford private treatment - a reverse means-test), or the inclusion of assistive technology in an assessment of eligibility when the benefit may be necessary to afford that equipment in the first place.

Could you state whether you will personally oppose any reforms to disability benefits which are intended to reduce eligibility and so leave hundreds of thousands unable to afford basic necessities, and whether the Labour party, as the main opposition to the coalition government, intends to present a united opposition to these plans?

Yours sincerely,
[me]

(I am, of course, indebted to sites such as Where's the Benefit?, The Broken of Britain and One Month Before Heartbreak for much of the information used when writing the letter)

Friday Links

• HarpyMarx: In defence of libraries
• [trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: Speech has consequences
• [trigger warning] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: Let's Get This Straight
• s.e. smith: Small Business Owners Are Not the Enemy and What Does ‘Middle Class’ Even Mean?
• Renee at Womanist Musings: Was the Standoff on Yonge Street, an Exercise in Racial Profiling?
• Frances Moore Lappé at Yes! Magazine: The City that Ended Hunger
• [trigger warning] Jess McCabe at The F-Word: Police officer given two life sentences
• Reni Eddo-Lodge: The New Banter
• TransGriot: Nepal And India To Count Trans People In Their 2011 Censuses

Also, Fuck Yeah, Disingenuous Liberal (because of what the attitudes it criticises, some of the posts contain triggering language).

Principles and power, with diagrams.

Broadsnark's "The Power of Principle" is an excellent description of the trade between having principles and having power. If you haven't read it already, it's well worth reading.

I agree with that, but it's a strongly-debated point. After all, if the current government is doing lots of bad things, wouldn't it be good to have someone even slightly better in? The lesser of two evils, as the cliché goes. So why doesn't sacrificing principle for power work?

Here's my theory as to why things work out that way, with diagrams.

Some simplifications, and why they're okay

Okay, so let's start by making a big simplification: we'll just consider one political issue, and assume that it's one that strongly influences people's votes. In practice, the effect below tends to happen to lots of policies together, so it's not an important simplification - when you consider every issue at once, the same thing happens. The members of the electorate then have various opinions about what the solution to this issue looks like, which are distributed in some sort of distribution.

I've drawn this with "left" and "right" because I think the diagram is more readable that way than with "up" and "down". There's not necessarily any connection on this issue with the traditional left-wing and right-wing positions, though, and the argument I'm making will generalise to issues where the options can't be expressed on a linear scale¹, or indeed in Euclidean geometry.

Diagram 1: A distribution of opinion. Somewhere between normal, flat, and lumpy.

Exactly what the distribution looks like doesn't really matter. There are usually going to be more people around the middle than at the edges, and it's not going to be completely smooth - there'll be peaks here and there that represent popular solutions.

Let's also assume that in general people vote for political parties close to their own opinions where possible. There's plenty of room for misinformation about who actually supports what policy to creep in, but since both sides are trying it the net effect is going to be relatively minor.

Let's also assume a 2-party system with a non-proportional² electoral system that makes it very hard for a third party to break in anywhere, as we have in the UK (even with the rise of the Lib Dems) or in the USA. This is a fair assumption because it's what we have.

So, next picture: two of the big peaks of opinion distribution near the centre are occupied by the major political parties - the Oranges and the Carrots.

Diagram 2: Same as the first, but with the Orange party occupying the peak to the left of the centre, and the Carrot party occupying the peak to the right of it.

There's then a general election. The Orange party loses the election, and the Carrots party enters government.

Why running to the centre works in the short-term

This is the point where the "principles or power" argument comes in to play. Obviously, it's really bad for the Carrot party to be in power. There's no real hope of another party coming out of nowhere to save the day, at least not by next election, so to get the Carrots out, the Oranges have to get in. But the electorate has just been presented with the Oranges, and didn't like them - it preferred the Carrot policies³.

So, to "be more electable", the Oranges move their policy along a bit towards the centre.

Diagram 3: The Carrot party is still on the right peak, but the Oranges have moved their position into the valley between the two peaks.

At the next election, the centre point between the Orange policy and the Carrot policy is in a different place. The key swing voters in between the two parties are now going to cast their votes a bit differently, with the Oranges picking up more of their votes than before. They might lose a few votes from the left-most end of the distribution, too, but they can afford to: votes they lose from the left go to an inconsequential rival or abstentions. Votes they take from the right come off their major opponent's totals. They can afford to lose almost twice as many votes from the left as they gain from the right and still come out ahead.

For instance, if there are 100 voters in all, and 53 voted Carrot and 47 voted Orange, then by convincing 10 Carrot voters to vote Orange, the scores become 43-57. A 6 vote margin has been changed to a 14 vote margin in the other direction. If Orange loses 12 voters from their left as a result, they're still 2 votes ahead of the Carrots at 43-45, despite losing more voters than they gained.

So, by following this strategy, the Oranges are able to regain power at the next election.

So why doesn't everyone just end up in the centre?

Over in a formerly-smoke-filled but now nicely air-conditioned room at Carrot Headquarters, the party green-wigs need to decide on a strategy. They have two choices.

1. They can do what the Oranges did to them, and move closer to the centre, to try to retake power. There's not a lot of spare space to move into, though, without dropping this as an election issue at all, which won't actually do them much good. And you need to have some space to manouevre for the 2:1 multiplier you get from winning swing voters to actually be possible.
2. They can take a longer-term view, and move their own position to the right. That's probably closer to where they wanted it to be anyway, before an earlier pragmatic Carrot leader decided that on top of the peak was a good place to be.

Diagram 4: The Carrot party has also moved off its peak to the right, re-opening a wider gap between the two parties.

The Carrots pick option 2, and lose the next election too. There's probably some internal squabbles at this point, but they wait them out.

... and then, the plan pays off.

Because public opinion is not static. It's fluid, and on some issues it can change really quickly in the right circumstances. Like advertising, if you say something for long enough to enough people, some of them will listen, and change their minds. If a party states a particular policy, its supporters become more likely to support that policy.

Consider, for instance, at this YouGov poll (PDF) from December. On page 7, there's a question about whether short prison sentences or community sentences are more effective.

In general, imprisonment is the stereotypical Conservative policy. They have the reputation for being "tougher on crime". So it was in some ways an unexpected announcement of Conservative policy that they would want to go for community sentences. In the poll, though, Conservative voters split 36:44 in favour of community sentences.

Perhaps the stereotypes are wrong? Public opinion often isn't what it's claimed to be. Are the Conservatives playing to their base after all?

This time, though, there's something else at work: compare that poll to this other poll (PDF), also carried out by YouGov, only a month earlier.

In this poll, Conservative voters are split 57:35 against the use of community sentences. In a month, there has been a 30 point swing in Conservative voter opinion. Additionally, there has been a 19 point swing in general voter opinion (which includes the Conservatives). From being a policy that had the weight of public opinion against it - and think tanks warning the government away from it - it's now one that the public is roughly split on.

There are differences of question wording between the two polls, but these mainly consist of the later poll having a tiny neutral summary of the purported advantages of each choice (which I don't think is particularly significant), and the later poll attributing the community sentences policy to the current government (which may well be a significant wording difference, but one that strengthens my point if it is)

I don't think public opinion is quite that fluid on most issues - sentencing policy is in general not an issue of major importance to most voters - and in general that sort of change takes years or decades rather than weeks, but it definitely happens over time.

So, how does this affect the diagram?

Diagram 5: The distribution of public opinion has shifted, with the peaks moved towards the parties' new positions.

The next election, the Carrots win it, by about the same margin as they won the election back in Diagram 1.

So, the Oranges have to do something. It worked last time, so they move their policy off the peak, and closer to the Carrots.

After a couple of cycles of this, what happens is of course that the Oranges have ended up fairly close to where the Carrots were originally. At this point, the Carrots can start moving slowly back towards the Oranges, both picking up votes themselves, and trying to make the new consensus one that sticks so that they don't have to defend it in future. The result: the Carrots have spent a fair proportion of the time in power, the Oranges will be implementing their policies anyway while the Carrots are out of power, and the Carrots can direct their energies to winning the next argument.

It took a little more than a single election cycle, but the Carrots have most definitely - by sticking to their principles - won. This is why, as Broadsnark said:

The people whose power lasts are those whose power comes from their principles, not from selling their principles out. It’s not naive to think that people shouldn’t sell their principles to power. It’s naive to think that someone in power who has sold their principles can do us any good.

So, the Oranges have power - and are using it to implement Carrot policy. Whether they count this as a success depends entirely on whether they went into politics to get power or to advance their principles. Meanwhile, the people who liked the Oranges' initial policy are stuck out on their own, without any formal representation, and now have to work hard to draw the Oranges (and ideally the Carrots, too) back towards them.

I've given this example with political parties, but it really works for anyone trying to make a difference to anything - in the long term, the successful people are people who've convinced opinion to follow them.

What if the Carrots are really bad?

Some governments are so bad that even letting them be in power for one term is going to be disastrous, and it's worth paying a high price to keep them out. The problem with this argument is that you can't keep them out forever.

Governments in the UK lose an average of 3 points of popular vote between elections. Virtually none have actually gained popularity between elections. Sooner or later, the accumulated frustrations of the population are going to kick them out no matter how well they're doing.

The opposition will be back in power eventually and you can't stop this. It's not worth delaying it a few years if the cost is implementing their policies anyway.

There are in a democracy ways other than being the official opposition to make it politically unviable for the government to do something, anyway.

(This only applies if you trust the opposition to hold another fair election, of course, but if you don't there are bigger problems)

Wouldn't this just lead to no-one compromising on anything, and nothing getting done?

Maybe.

In practice, though, no. There's a major difference between compromising on what gets implemented now, and compromising on your underlying principles.

To illustrate this, say there are two issues (A and B), with three possible policies (A₀, A₁ and A₂, with A₁ being 'between' the other two policies, and similarly for B).

If A₂ is the current situation, a supporter of A₀ could team up and compromise with supporters of A₁ to get A₁. It's not what they actually want, but it's closer to it. And if between them they can make A₁ stick, then maybe in a few years it'll be possible to get mass support for moving to A₀.

This is a good compromise, and isn't inconsistent with having principles and keeping them.

Suppose, then, that this support of A₀ also supports B₀. The current situation is A₁ and B₁. A supporter of A₂ and B₀ offers to help with getting B₀ in exchange for help in getting A₂.

Assuming that A and B are both major issues - if A is "who pays for lunch?" and B is "should we invade Norway?", this doesn't hold - this is a bad compromise. To take it, the principle of A₀ will have to be sacrificed.

In between the two is an offer to support B₀ if you don't campaign for A₀ and accept A₁ as sufficient (assuming A₁ is currently true) - at least in public.

I think this is still generally a bad deal - both sides of the deal want (or at least, aren't opposed to) B₀ already. So you could probably get B₀ another way without giving up the possibility of A₀. There might be cases where it's worth taking, though, if B₀ is likely to be the sticky position, and so you can go back to working towards A₀ relatively quickly once B₀ is done.

The reason that the good compromises are good is that they don't stop you working on moving mass opinion towards your position. The reason the bad compromises are bad is that you have to shut up and contribute towards making things worse, which means that when you decide you've had enough, you've been digging your own hole for the last few years and have to fill that in first.

Only making good compromises means that political alliances on one issue aren't necessarily going to be the same as the political alliances on a different issue. There's nothing wrong with that, either, though it can take some getting used to.

Conclusion

The way to win, in the long-term, is to have principles, to stick to them, and to argue for them consistently and convincingly. There are plenty of situations where the short-term gain is from abandoning some principles to help others: beware.

Having short-term political power, in the way the default thinks of "political" and "power" is not necessarily useful, and may in some cases be actively counter-productive to principled success because the costs of getting it are too high.

Footnotes

¹ If I was better at drawing, there would be a picture of an opinion surface in two dimensions to demonstrate this. Please imagine your own.

² In a proportional system, the incentives are different, and the advantages to sticking to your principles are much clearer. It's the main reason that I want one.

³ Not necessarily true in a non-proportional system, but let's assume that like the UK and USA, the tendency is to expand differences in the popular vote, rather than reduce them. Elections where the winner of the most seats and the winner of the popular vote differ will result in a very different - and generally messier - political dynamic anyway.

Absolute or relative need?

The BBC are reporting that the proposed cuts to Disability Living Allowance could break the Human Rights Act. It's worth a try legally, though I doubt it'll work.

There's a quote from Maria Miller MP (Conservative, Basingstoke), the Minister for Disabled People at the end of the piece.

We are dealing here with a benefit which as I said is one of the largest benefits that's paid in the UK and that we need to make sure it's getting to the people who need it most.

"Need it most"? "Need it" would be a much better attitude to take to these benefits (and indeed benefits in general). Someone's need for additional cash to support themselves is not diminished just because some else has an even greater need.

Of course, given that there is a consensus between all major political parties that DLA is too easy to get - despite it already being refused to people with severe disabilities - there's not much hope here.

Much more information about the proposals and their flaws is at Where's the benefit.

Friday Links

• tigtog at Hoyden About Town: There’s enough normativity-policing in the world already, thanks
• Hangbitch: Disabling users
• Spark in Darkness: BBC, our existence does not have to be BALANCED by hatred.
• s.e. smith: [trigger warning] The face of exploitation and I Can’t Help Myself; It’s Innate
• DavidG at Where's the benefit?: The Devil is in The Details
• Restructure: White racism creates more sexism in the world.
• [trigger warning] The Curvature: Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Diary of a Goldfish: Bad Legs versus The Stairs

Where did that analogy come from?

There's been quite a lot of talk recently about how the various protest movements against the government that are springing up (well, it's doing lots to protest about) are "open source". Here's a Left Foot Forward post, for example.

As someone who's both organised protests and developed open source software, my reaction to the analogy is extreme bafflement.

The idea behind the analogy is that the "new protest movement" is open, transparent, decentralised and largely non-hierarchical, with everyone able to contribute in the ways that they are most suited to.

Which is fair enough. Legitimate ideals, and they seem to be reasonably effective in practice too, but the areas in which it's actually similar to open source software development projects are areas in which it's also similar to just about every other protest movement ever, so the analogy just doesn't work.

Open source software development is considerably more hierarchical than the stereotypes suggest. It has to be, if it's to actually develop useful software. For any complex piece of open source software - any of the big ones with widespread name recognition like Linux or Firefox, but much smaller ones too - there are a core set of leaders, who make most of the decisions about what the long-term aims of the project are, and all the decisions about which individual contributions go in to the project.

The advantage of open-source over closed-source is not that it doesn't have leaders and hierarchies, but that a popular rebellion against those leaders and hierarchies doesn't have to start from scratch when providing a replacement. Nevertheless, someone disagreeing with the current leadership will have a difficult and time-consuming task on a large project in getting enough supporters, hardware and hosting budgets, and so on, to make a "fork" of the project viable. Successful forks are extremely rare, though hypothetical ones are pretty commonplace.

But there are definitely leaders and a hierarchy, because once a software project gets complex, there is an intense need for quality control. Contributions that aren't up to the necessary standard, or which just aren't considered useful, don't get in.¹ That sounds much more like a "traditional" centralised protest movement to me.

Similarly while the outputs of an open source software project may be transparent, the process is not necessarily so. There can be a lot of "back room" discussion about controversial decisions.

As far as the actual similarities between open source software development and "open source" protests go, you'd be hard-pressed to run a protest without them.

• Everyone can contribute? Most protests work on that basis, since they want the numbers. The more common problem is that protests aren't selective enough and let in unrelated people who try to make the protest about something else.
• If you don't like the direction, "fork" it? No protest movement has yet, as far as I know, tried to patent the concept of protesting against a particular thing. This is automatic. Unlike with software, there's not months of dull and boring work to be done before you get back to something vaguely resembling the original if you start from scratch.
• Sharing of ideas/materials? Again, most protests don't try to trademark their slogans, or to threaten with copyright infringement people who modify their sample letters to MPs before sending them.
• Transparent output? By definition, yes. Once you've seen a protest you're at liberty to copy its methods or slogans for your own. As with open source software, though, you might not be aware of the tangled route it took to get to that finished state.

• "Many eyes make all bugs shallow"? A protest has no underlying "source code"² that one can inspect for bugs. The output of the protest is the original form. As with closed source books, where you don't need access to the original typesetting to spot the typos and layout errors, "bugs" in a protest are open to anyone to find regardless of the protest organisation.

  Transparent organisation can make the "bugs" obvious before "release", just as many bugs are found and fixed in development versions of software before they ever make it into a formal release, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be fixed.

  Meanwhile, just as allowing the public to help test planned releases is not limited to open-source software, being transparent about future protests and listening to suggestions and criticism is not something that non-hierarchical movements have a monopoly on.

Call it "decentralised", or "non-hierarchical", or "chaotic", or "anarchic", call it "crowd-sourced" if you must, but don't call it "open source" because it's not in any meaningful way similar to that (indeed, the social network tools used to organise most of the actions are largely corporate-owned and closed-source).

Footnotes

¹ The idea is that the hierarchy and the leaders are a meritocracy of sorts: if you do enough good work for the project you'll be invited to join them. The Geek Feminism blog has some good articles pointing out that - as with everything else - the definition of what counts as "good" and "work" is default-biased

"Democracy", however, is generally not something that open-source software projects use or need.

² The actual openness of the source is not a major factor for finding bugs in most projects. Just about all of the bugs reported for projects I've been involved in have come from users using the software who'd never read the source, not from people who happened to read the source and thought "hey, that'll never work". For any successful project, the proportion of its users who have the time, skill and energy to read the source for bugs is approximately zero.

Likewise, I've never found a bug by reading open source code. I've found bugs by using software and then been able to report them to the developers complete with a cause and a fix, in a few cases, and this is a useful advantage of open source software - especially those pieces of software such as system tools likely to be used by people who can program. More usually, despite in theory being able to read the source and provide a fix, I've just told them about the bug and let them get on with it.

But anyway, on this metric our Parliament is "open source": read the draft Bill, write in with a "bug fix", and the "developers" might well accept it before "release".