Parallel Voting
Schee posted a link to this article on the new voting system which so affected the Taiwanese legislative elections. (See my last post on this.)
Several countries now mix proportional representation with voting for individual candidates, as Taiwan now does. However, it turns out there are two different models for how the mixing works: the one-vote model Additional Member System (AMS) [UPDATE: See comments below for further clarification.] used in Germany, and the parallel model used in Japan. Not unsurprisingly, considering their close historical relationship, Taiwan has copied the Japanese system. Here is some background on the differences, courtesy of a 2004 BA thesis [link to PDF download] by Joe Michael Sasanuma:
The multimember district electoral system was replaced with a new system on March 4, 1994. The Japanese call the new system heiritsu sei, or the parallel system, because it mixes the single member district (SMD) system and the proportional representation (PR) system, which has become a popular electoral system in recent years…
In most countries that have adopted the mixed system, like Germany, the single member district tier affects the distribution of the seats among the parties in only the most unusual circumstances; the SMDs are designed mainly to give voters a specific representative that they can identify as their own. The Japanese system is called “parallel” because, unlike the German system, there is almost no connection between the single member district tier and the PR tier in how the seats are distributed; the party’s sum is determined by the number of seats it wins in the SMDs plus the number of seats won in the PR. Voters are given two votes, one for the SMDs to vote for their preferred candidate, and the other for the PR tier to vote for their preferred party. The candidates on the PR tier are elected based on the number of PR votes—not SMD votes—that the party receives. Indeed, it is quite a bit of irony that when it was normal to give voters multiple votes, as in a multimember district, Japan only gave one, and now when it is normal only to give one vote, as in the mixed system, Japan gives voters two.
Taiwanese blogger Ivanusto supported mixed SMD and PR voting, but argues that the decision to copy Japanese model was a mistake.
First, he looks at the results of the proportional vote. Parties with less than 5% of the vote are excluded, so although the initial round was 51% for the KMT, 31% for the DPP and 12% other, because no other party got more than 5% the final round came to 58% KMT, 42% DPP. There are a total of 113 seats in the new legislature, 73 single-member districts, 34 at-large seats chosen according to the proportion of the vote each party receives on the second ballot, and 6 seats set aside for the indigenous community. That means that the 34 seats are divided up according to the 58-42 ratio, giving the DPP 14 at-large seats in addition to the 13 single-member districts they won. Similarly, the KMT won 20 at-large seats and 61 single-member districts. (A couple of small parties getting a few seats here and there. See the chart above, where the SMDs are in orange and the PR in blue, with the totals in the pie chart.)
Now, in the German system, the total number of seats for each party would first be decided by the proportional vote rather than apportioned out according to a second ballot. That means that out of 113 seats, 42% (the percentage the DPP got) would be 47 seats. And the KMT’s 58% would have gotten them 66 seats. So, the KMT would only have received an additional 5 at-large seats, not 20 as happened yesterday. And the DPP would have been given 34 at-large seats, for a total of 47.
Ivanusto goes on to discuss some of the particularities of the German system, such as the occasional necessity to add additional seats, or the choice to vote for a person or a party (instead of having to vote for both), etc. Now, voting systems is complicated stuff, and I’m biased for not wanting to see any one party have total control, but from what I can understand it seems to me that the German model better represents the will of the voters than the Japanese system the Taiwanese chose to use instead.
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Comments
Isn’t it impressive that smaller parties got near 12% of the ‘political party’ vote? I don’t know how much of it was for the New Party. The New Party spent a lot of money on advertisements. In Taipei they had ads on almost every bus(I don’t know about the rest of Taiwan). The other smaller parties had almost no budgets and with the new voting system voters must have known they had little chance of being elected.
Adam, that’s a very good point. You cold almost look at that 12% as a protest vote. Including those who didn’t even show up, that would make the true voting rate much less than 50%. My feeling about all this is that electoral voting in Taiwan is the expression of a particular variant of identity, rather than voting about political ideology or class interest. The decline in voting rate is a statement about the declining in significance this holds for voters. Your point raises the issue that it’s an even less important factor in most people’s lives than I had previously believed.
As the author of the thesis who is quite honored to have been mentioned in the blog (and surprised anyone cared about the piece), I would like to briefly comment.
Having studied politics for a long time, and elections in particular, “will of the voter” is a very hard thing to define, as the Democratic Party in the United States is currently learning in their super-delegate mess of their primary system. But that is a discussion for another time.
The reason why the Taiwanese and Japanese system creates such a drastic departure in number of seats allocated from a strictly proportional system is, in essence, due to the heavy “wasted vote” which results from single member districts, where winning 51%-49% is as good as winning by 80%-20%. It is, for sure, somewhat unrepresentative of the preference of the people. It also tends to exaggerate electoral results, since winning by 2 percentage points is treated the same (at least in the SMDs) as winning by 30. This means that in the subsequent elections, a small shift in voter behaviour would dramatically shift the number of seats won by parties. It is not necessarily bad. While such a shift may misrepresent the real shift in voter preference, it gives the winning party a semblance of a mandate that small shifts in seats cannot produce. There undoubtedly are political benefits to a decisive election.
You may also find, as Japan has, that this system creates tremendous pressure towards a two party system. Single member districts do not favor small parties; it is the proportionate system which keeps them viable. Japan intentionally adopted the current system to foster a two party system, which largely has been a success. People have begun to complain there are not enough parties. I argue two (competitive) parties, and only two, are not only sufficient, but necessary.
But that is likely a discussion for another time.
As a sidenote, Edinburgh above made a reference to the STV-PR vote. I briefly discuss the system and its comparison to Japan’s old system (the SNTV-PR) in my thesis on page 39-40.
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
The PR voting system used in Germany to elect the lower house of the Federal Parliament (the Bundestag) and the parliaments of several of the states (Lander) is known as the Additional Member System (AMS) or as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). You describe the German version as a “one-vote model”. But in fact, in the Federal Parliament elections every elector has two votes: one for a candidate in the local constituency (electoral district) and one for the list of one political party. That looks like a “two-vote model”.
We use a regionalised version of AMS (MMP) to elect the Scottish Parliament, but AMS (MMP) has many problems. A much better PR voting system would be STV-PR. For a comparison between the two, in the context of electing the Scottish Parliament, see:
http://www.fairsharevoting.org/Fairshare%20Submission%20Arbuthnott%20Commission%2022%20Mar%2005.pdf