AV or not AV?

 

Voters are to be given the choice between either retaining the current system - 'first past the post' - or moving to a preferential voting system, the 'alternative vote' (AV). In the former, the candidate securing most votes wins. In the latter, voters number candidates preferentially, the least popular are eliminated one at a time, and their votes redistributed according to the second preferences, until someone gets more than half the votes, and wins.

The opposing campaigns have both been guilty of making spurious claims and of seeking to draw their energy from public anger against politicians. Both camps have enlisted a slew of celebrities in an attempt to ignite public interest, but it remains stubbornly unlit.

What neither campaign admits is that the systems are very similar - close cousins, if not siblings: both operate on the basis of single member constituencies, and therefore suffer from many of the same advantages and disadvantages.

AV doesn't eliminate 'safe seats', which are a product not of voting systems but of entrenched and predictable voting patterns. Neither system makes a virtue of proportionality, nor gives space to smaller parties who attract a significant number of votes spread thinly (the Green Party or UKIP, for example). Hung parliaments are marginally more likely under AV, but are no certainty - especially when the Liberal Democrats perform poorly. Now, I'm not a betting man, but...

To say a change would make little difference is not to say that it would make no difference, but the debate is symbolic of a fundamental disagreement about how a democracy achieves the aim of ensuring that power is exercised legitimately and how it is called to account.

Are elections about ensuring that all interests are represented in Parliament? Or are they about picking a small team of senior ministers, who make - and take responsibility for - all the key decisions?

Under the former view, any system which tends to diffuse power can be said to be an improvement, because good politics is about acknowledging diversity and finding consensus. Under the latter, good politics is about leadership and accountability, and our systems should offer a freer rein for the winners but with the surety of accountability on Election Day.

The question at play in the debate is not just whether to say yes or no to AV, but what vision of democracy is more realistic, coherent, or consistent? And, perhaps, we might add, which is more Christian?