Tally Room mail - the origins of electoral systems (Patreon)

A busy election season is now winding down, and I've had time to finish a bunch of post-election analysis and begin to look ahead to the next event. This has also allowed me to do a bit more reading, and I keep coming back to the topic of how we developed the electoral systems we have today.

Most Western democracies shifted towards universal male suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th century, with women's suffrage usually happening a little bit later. This triggered quite a dramatic shift in the political make-up of the elected parliaments that had previously existed, and this in turn lead to quite a lot of democracies shifting away from a majoritarian electoral system towards proportional representation. There's quite a lot of writing that theorises about why this happened in some countries but not others.

You can see this trend in Australia in the early 20th century - while each colony had a different party system, there was generally competition between different groups of local notables. In NSW this developed into the conflict between Free Trade and Protectionist. In Victoria and Queensland distinctive conservative and liberal forces developed, and then collapsed into a more confusing mess of parties.

It all was shaken up by the emergence of Labor - first winning seats in NSW in 1891, and emerging in the other big colonies around the same time.

Between 1890 and 1910 Labor became a major force around Australia and a process of fusion led to a single non-Labor opponent in each state. At a federal level this was achieved by a merger of the Free Trade (later Anti-Socialist) and Protectionist parties. In NSW, the Progressive party that had succeeded the Protectionists was wiped out on the electoral battlefield and the successors to the Free Trade party went on to form the Liberal Party.

This same process played out all over Western Europe, with Socialist or Labour parties disrupting the dynamics of Liberal and Conservative parties. The process happened a bit later in New Zealand, arguably never ended in Canada, and played out in a different way within the US Democratic Party.

The first theory I saw about the switch to PR revolved around the dilemma of liberal parties expecting to be squeezed out by Socialists to their left deciding to switch to PR to allow for this long-term survival. But Australia is rarely mentioned in this context. It makes me wonder why we didn't see Alfred Deakin's liberals seek out a proportional system as a method of survival (although the Barton government did originally propose PR for the Senate in 1902). Instead Deakin eventually became leader of a merged Liberal Party, but one where their old Free Trade rivals were more dominant.

But I have then read other theories that have presented the situation as more complex, and playing out in different ways in different countries. Some of the insurgent left parties were strongly opposed to PR, while others supported it. Some of those parties were successful in stopping PR, while for others it was passed despite their opposition. One historian argued convincingly that the Socialist or Labour parties in a stronger electoral position and with stronger links to unions tended to be more pro-majoritarian, while weaker left parties supported PR.

Likewise "the right" didn't just start out as the same Liberal and Conservative parties everywhere. Indeed that's not what we had in Australia, with both parties of the right claiming the liberal mantle and the conservative label being less popular. Some countries had splits between urban and rural conservatives, or between secular and Catholic parties on the right, and that played out in their positions on reform.

Electoral reform is rare, and when changes are made they can be set in place for a long time.

While PR has made regular progress in Australia outside of the houses that form government, in the lower house not much has changed in the last century. Tasmania has used Hare-Clark since 1909, and since an experiment with a similar system in NSW in the 1920s, mainland lower houses have consistently used some system of single-member electorates.

In that time we have seen PR implemented for the ACT Assembly, and for reformed upper houses in the Senate and every mainland state bar Queensland. We've also seen PR advance in local councils, although not consistently and not without backwards moves. But there usually needs to be a trigger for reform.

When I advocate for proportional representation, I always have commenters who condescendingly explain to me that reform is never going to happen and it's a waste of time. I don't think we're about to see the House of Representatives switch to PR, but I also don't think these things happen in a linear way. Rather I think opportunities arrive when big shocks cause changes, and when those opportunities come along I think it's important that we've done the thinking, educated people and made the arguments.

Australia's party system has been changing for a while, but that change accelerated dramatically in 2022. It doesn't look like that change is going away at the next federal election. Indeed it seems quite possible that we could have just as large, or larger, crossbench in 2025, and that crossbench could hold the balance of power. As the system has changed, it has proven to be less stable and less reliable than it once appeared to be. The single-member system can produce large changes in seat results off small change in vote results. A low-magnitude PR system that produces relatively accurate representation but doesn't encourage could actually be more stable and predictable. And while the current system for now is over-representing the major parties, that may not continue to be the case if their vote drops further.

I guess what I'm saying is, be ready. These things don't look likely to happen until they do.