Thoughts on Electoral Reform (6)

A political rape of democracy
SSR on the Banwell Report, 1966

Enn komeraz sa

SAJ on PR, Rodrigues, 2015 

We know that our excellent First Past The Post (FPTP) system generates results that are sometimes too lopsided. But electoral reform cannot ignore fundamental facts. We've looked at a number of them in the first five parts of this series of articles (these have appeared in the Forum section between April 8, 2014 and December 22, 2016). We'll consider a couple more here, revisit a few and offer some fresh insights on three electoral proposals. But first let us have a look at a useful decomposition of the FPTP system.

Breaking the FPTP in Two Parts

It helps to view our FPTP system as a sum of a PR system and a majority prize. It's the majority prize that has provided us with a clear winner in ten out of eleven elections and that too as soon as we had finished counting the votes.

It's again thanks to this prize that we've had stable government after stable government even after the departure of one or more partners. This has saved us from the trouble and the cost of going to the polls a certain number of times. As any attempt to correct some of the imbalances of the FPTP system involves making the prize smaller we need to tread carefully so that we don't compromise the many essential benefits that it provides us.

32% of World Bank Policy Reports Never Downloaded

"... I am not an engineer, I am not a technician and everything that I have done in my life is only law. So, I need expert advice and I am going to put experts and not politicians at the Head of the CEB and the CWA. I am not going to do appel international and all that."

Ivan Collendavelloo, in Parliament, March 2015

"... Nun fini konpran ki nu bizin lasistans de la bank mondyal pu ki nu kapav fer bann bon developman dan sekter delo."

Ivan Collendavelloo, Feb 2016

The World Has No Time
For This Kind Of Nonsense

So reported The Economist at the end of last May. It referred to a study by the World Bank on the popularity of its policy reports. As almost half of them are supposed to at least improve public debate the two authors of the report – Doerte Doemeland and James Trevino – looked at how many times 1,611 of these policy documents were downloaded. Turns out that almost a third was never downloaded. I am not surprised. I got to read a few them over the years and I must say there's a lot of rubbish in there. So I perfectly understand that no one is bothering about so many of these reports. Who has time for crap in this fast-moving, intelligent and hyper-connected world?

Maybe The World Is Wrong?

And that many of her problems would go away if more people read those reports and implemented the recommendations spelled out in there. After downloading them that is. Because after all the World Bank's mission is to end poverty. Maybe that's what Mauritius needs to do to get out of the middle-income trap where we've been stuck for 27 years? And start breathing down Singapore's neck.