Making Democracy Work - At a Price
The Hare-Clark System.
There have been many controversies as to whether the
possession of a
vote should be regarded as a natural right or as a privilege to be
acquired by some exertion or exhibition of merit, or as a trust conferred
by the community.
For my own part I believe that it should be regarded
as partaking of each
of these three aspects, and that only those persons who are prepared to
exercise it spontaneously with intelligence and honesty have the right
to
elect the makers and administrators of the law. The man who does not
sufficiently value the suffrage to use it for his own welfare and
protection, and who requires to be tempted in some way to use it, has
ceased to have a right to exercise it for the purpose of creating a
legislature which shall make laws for the government of other people
besides himself.
It may be that it is beyond the wit of man to devise
an electoral system
which shall eliminate every influence that impairs the purity of
representative government at its base, but among a number of more or less
imperfect methods we may find one which affords less scope than the
others for the operation of detrimental agencies, and the use of which
will bring us much nearer than we are at the present time to government
by the most capable.
It was long ago recognised by discriminating students
of political
science that a system which gives absolute power to the chance majority
of the day might produce results as bad as any that have attended the
rule of despots and oligarchies in the past, and to some of them it
seemed that the surest protection against such an evil was to be found
in
a due representation of minorities.
But the representation of minorities would not necessarily
secure the
election of the most capable legislators. It would, however, give
another chance for the election of the most capable; and from this
starting point we advance to the position that the most perfect electoral
system is that which gives the greatest possible number of chances for
the election of the most capable and minimises the opportunities for the
operation of all sinister influences and agencies.
Such a system has, in my judgment, been offered in that
proposed by the
late Thomas Hare, and now generally known by his name. A few years ago
a
modification of it was contained in a Bill introduced into the Parliament
of New Zealand to amend the law relating to Parliamentary elections in
that Colony, but unhappily the Bill did not become law. The proposal was
to divide the Colony into large electorates returning from six to eight
members each, and to apply Mr. Hare's system of election to each separate
electorate.
Under this plan a further modification of Mr. Hare's
method could be
introduced which would enable each elector to give more effect to his
preferences than is possible under the original system, by assigning
progressive values to the successive positions of the names placed by
the
elector upon his voting paper. By means of this further modification the
votes given by every elector for every candidate could be counted and
the
element of chance would be entirely eliminated from the system.
From Clark's paper 'Machinery and Ideals in Politics'.
Clark Papers
C4/F24. What was the point of the Hare-Clark system of proportional
representation? Broadly, it seems, to make democracy work -at least not
badly.(Richard Ely)
Web links:
Inventing
Hare-Clark: the model arithmetocracy - Judith Homeshaw
Tasmanian
Parliamentary Library. Founders of our electoral system, Hare and Clark
|
<
Back