JONNY STEINBERG: Proportional representation and its kingmakers keep the ANC corrupt

The drafters of SA’s constitution made a mistake. I don’t mean by this that they made an error of political or moral judgment. I mean they failed to think through an issue clearly and came to a flawed conclusion. The issue in question could scarcely be more important. It is the matter of what exactly representative democracy means.

The constitution stipulates that whatever electoral system SA adopts it must result in proportional representation (PR). It does not say why. But one can easily guess. The drafters must have concluded that PR is superior to any other conceivable system because — well, because it ensures that votes are represented proportionally. So if 5% of those who vote choose party X, then party X should get 5% of the legislature’s seats. Any other arrangement would leave that 5% either under- or overrepresented.

This may sound right, on the face of it, but think about it for just a moment and you see that it is not right. People do not have voting preferences in the abstract, outside of any particular electoral system. Who they vote for is shaped in large part by the electoral system itself.

Take the pure PR system SA has. It encourages the formation of extremist parties with a natural ceiling of a few hundred thousand votes. Why? Because the rewards for them are huge. They can get parliamentary seats, or perhaps even become a kingmaker in exchange for senior cabinet positions, by getting a small fraction of the country to vote for them.

And so, extremist parties representing very few people potentially become enormously powerful, making the country impossible to govern. It is hard to argue that this is what the electorate wants.

The constitutional drafters made an astonishing error. They somehow thought that 5% of the electorate supports party X independent of the fact that there is a PR system. They failed to see that the very existence of party X is an artefact of PR, that under an alternative system party X might never have been formed.

If there is no such thing as a pure electoral preference, how should one go about designing an electoral system? One way is to ask which system will consistently result in the sort of governance that reflects the interests of the greatest number of voters.

As unfashionable as it may sound, the design that does that best is the two-party system. Locked in competition with one another, both big parties are forced to aggregate as broad a coalition of interests as they can. If they fail, they will lose the next election.

It may seem daft to advocate a two-party system when SA is resolutely tired of big, established parties. But think about it a moment. Under PR the ANC could conceivably govern for another 20 years in a coalition with the EFF, the PA or some future extremist party inevitably delivered by PR. Only it will be far worse than the current ANC because it will be beholden to political forces even more volatile and unreasonable than the ones in its ranks.

Surely we would rather have a system in which the ANC faces one big rival, and if its vote drops below 50% it is out? Sitting on the opposition benches, hungry to regain power, it would be disciplined to become a broad-based party once more, because that will be the only route to reacquiring executive office.

In other words, the ANC too is an artefact of the electoral system in which it finds itself. In a PR system it has licence to go rotten and still govern. In a two-party system, if it goes rotten it loses.

If we are chained to a PR system, why not up the threshold to 15%? Imagine if the EFF had to broaden its base or die; or the DA had to consolidate its support in the black working class to ensure its survival.

The only parties left would be those that truly attempted to represent a broad coalition across race and class. That’s how it should be.

• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.