There are warnings for Ontario in the results of Italy’s election

Electoral reform can have unintended consequences if voters are giving up on democracy, Martin Regg Cohn writes.

Thestar.com
Sept. 29, 2022
Martin Regg Cohen
OPINION

First, a bit of good news from Italy for democracy at large -- a milestone.

Giorgia Meloni becomes the first female prime minister in a country that has long struggled with gender roles. That historical benchmark still eludes

Canada (Kim Campbell took over as PM briefly, but failed to ever win a public mandate of her own).
Now the bad news, in large doses, for liberal democracy at every level -- the millstones.

Even if one cheers for greater women’s representation and rights, it’s hard to cheer on Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party (Fratelli d’Italia). It is as illiberal and anti-immigrant a political force as the country has seen since the fascist era.

Bad enough that Italy is enthralled by populist appeals that tap into veins of resentment and frustration. Whatever your politics, right or left, what’s doubly discouraging is the democratic drift.

Italy is gravitating toward both intolerance and indifference.

Apart from the discouraging result, the diminishing turnout speaks volumes. While more Italians swung to the far right, even more voters couldn’t be bothered casting any ballot for any party at all.

Electoral participation fell to the lowest levels in the country’s history. Which suggests that voters are not only turning away from liberal democracy but giving up on democracy writ large.

Italy is merely the canary in the ballot box. Voter engagement is declining at almost every level -- locally, provincially and nationally in Canada as it is around the world.

The question is how to reverse that trend line. And how to avoid democratic detours or dead ends that leave us no further ahead.

In this week’s Italian elections, voter turnout plunged by nine percentage points to a record low 64 per cent. One of every three eligible voters sat it out -- which stands in sharp contrast to the postwar, post-fascist era until the late 1970s when as many as 90 per cent of Italians made the most of new-found democratic freedoms.

Now, Italy’s regional disparities are dispiriting. In Calabria, barely 50 per cent voted; in Campania and Sardinia, only 53 per cent cast ballots.

Those numbers are reminiscent of the June 2 election that re-elected Doug Ford as premier: Voter turnout fell to 43 per cent, the lowest in provincial history -- down by 13 points from 2018.

That nadir sparked renewed calls for electoral soul searching at home -- starting with scapegoating Ontario’s existing constituency system. The critique is that voters stayed home because they were turned off by a system that awards ridings to politicians who win more votes than any rival -- a plurality, not a majority -- under our “first past the post” (FPTP) rules.

Advocates of proportional representation (PR) say this somehow disenfranchises and thus discourages people who might vote for losing candidates, because there are so many “wasted votes” provincewide. The remedy, supposedly, is proportionality.

The solution proposed for Ontario has long been a jargon-laden hybrid called Mixed Member Proportional, or MMP. The idea is to combine proportional representation with FPTP -- electing members at the riding level, but then awarding additional seats based on the overall popular vote to rebalance the results more proportionately.

Ontarians voted down this idea in a 2007 referendum. All these years later, advocates insist it would be a tonic for the province’s declining turnout, somehow motivating discouraged voters to re-engage.

But the latest Italian results are instructive, for they serve as a corrective. It’s hard to extrapolate from Italy’s dysfunctional democratic experiment -- its parliaments are notoriously fractious and unstable under proportional representation -- but the twists and turns along the way tell their own tale.

Electoral reform efforts in 2015 were followed by a failed constitutional referendum in 2016. Finally in 2017, parliamentarians adopted what the French daily le Monde calls a new “so-called mixed electoral system” -- with mixed results.

In their quest for stability, the quid pro quo was complexity. The current system allocates two-thirds of seats to proportional representation -- with seats awarded using party lists of preferred candidates -- with the remaining one-third of seats reserved for constituency races (waged under FPTP)

Yet voter turnout atrophied, while apathy increased. So much for the idea that revamping our voting system would rescue us from ourselves.

That’s not to say our existing system meets all our needs. I’ve written before that there are solid arguments for and against electoral reform, but the claim to boosting voter turnout remains utterly unproven -- no causality, only volatility from one vote to the next.

The prerequisite to reform is getting buy-in from a majority of the electorate -- not just letter-writing clubs or Twitter trolls. On the evidence, Ontarians have little appetite for the mixed bag of proportional representation on offer in 2007, or the parallel system that failed to produce results in Italy.

Changing the system, hard though it might be, is too simple and simplistic. Motivating voters matters more -- through leadership, authenticity and accessibility.

The Italian result reminds us that voter volatility from one election to another -- triggered by frustration, inspiration, and the desire for change (“throw the bums out”) -- matters far more than electoral design in driving turnout.