Translator: Veronica Quaedvlieg Reviewer: TED Translators admin
British democratic leadership.
Chinese democratic centralism.
German Democratic Republic, GDR.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea.
So what is democracy?
Most people think it is majority of rule.
So in parliaments and referendums,
nearly every decision is taken by a majority vote.
And even if by only a margin of 50% + 1,
the winner gets everything and the loser gets nothing.
Is this fair? Or wise?
Majority rule, after all,
was a part of the problem in Northern Ireland
and, for example in the Balkans,
where all the wars in the former Yugoslavia started with a referendum.
Majority voting, in fact,
is one of the most inaccurate measures of collective opinion,
not least because of the logic:
that if you have a multi-option debate,
then to take only a two-option vote is,
well, unwise if not crazy.
Brexit.
It was a multi-option debate, or should have been.
The UK in the EU, the EEA, the Customs Union or the WTO.
But we only had one majority vote
– in the EU, yes or no? – and it lost, by a small margin.
But majority votes on the other three options
would probably have lost as well.
I’m going to talk about decision-making,
voting in decision-making.
First, majority voting, and then preferential voting.
My mum was an English Catholic,
a member of the minority you might say.
Dad was an Irish Protestant, the same.
I was conceived in Ireland, born in England,
I live in Belfast, a minority of about one.
And I was often asked:
“Are you Protestant or Catholic?” Neither.
“Are you British or Irish?” Both.
But democracy is majority voting, and in conflict zones,
people ask these terrible closed questions:
Are you Serb or Croat?
Sunni or Shia?
Arab or Jew?
Hutu or Tutsi?
But it’s the same in ordinary politics:
Are you for or against?
Left wing or right?
Communist or capitalist?
And because of the relationship
between the Northern Ireland conflict and the Cold War,
I first went to Moscow in 1984.
And with majority voting, it often enables the leader,
political leader, to choose the question.
As in Brexit and in many cases,
the question is the answer, but not in Brexit.
But on other occasions, I’m afraid,
the majority vote does not identify the collective will,
does not identify the majority will.
As often as not, it identifies only the will of he,
it’s normally a he, who wrote the question.
Like Napoleon; he had three referendums,
and he was the only candidate and, by the way, he won.
Lenin did not even get a majority at all;
he only got the largest minority.
He nevertheless called himself a ‘bolshevik’
the word means member of the majority,
'bolshinstvo',
and the others in the smaller minority,
'menshinstvo', he called the ‘mensheviks’.
Next came Hitler with 88, 98 and 99%.
Despite this appalling history, people still use majority voting.
Like in Iran, and they voted for socialism.
Yeah! 99%, brilliant!
Then they voted for capitalism, 99%, brilliant!
Then they voted for neither, 99%!
Crazy.
I’m now going to talk about preferential voting,
and in a pluralist democracy, any contentious debate should allow
for more than two options under debate.
There are, after all, more than two ways
of drafting a constitution, drawing up a budget, and so on.
Secondly, you cannot get the collective will
if people don’t express their individual wills,
if people say only what they don’t want,
if they vote only ‘no’.
As some of them did in Brexit.
But if everyone states what they do want,
– in the EU, the EEA, whatever –
then it should be possible to identify the best, the most popular option.
And it would be possible
if people expressed their opinions accurately,
and that means by using their preferences;
more of this in a moment.
But how should preferences be analysed?
Consider nine people choosing a barrel of drink
on the basis of three options:
Ale, Beer or Cider; A, B or C?
Let us assume 4 people think that ale is delicious,
that’s their first preference,
cider is ok, but they are not too fond of beer
that’s their third preference.
Three people think beer is the best, and cider and ale.
And two people have preferences cider, beer and ale.
So overall, it seems that, opinions on ale are very divided,
on beer a bit mixed,
and maybe C best represents the collective will.
Well, in plurality voting
all the information in the grey is just ignored,
and the winner is ale with a score of 4.
And a two-round system is a bit
like the Austrian presidential elections.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So if nothing gets 50% in the first round,
there's second round between the two leading options,
in which case it’s A and B,
and in which case Beer wins with a score of 5.
A points system is a bit like the Eurovision song contest,
so a first preference gets 3 points, a second gets 2, and a third gets 1,
and you add up the totals and the winner is now cider.
So the outcome, the totally democratic choice,
is either A or B or C.
Brilliant.
Once upon a time,
many years ago, in a far distant land,
there was a totally unelected, democratic, British, House of Lords.
In 2003 a few of the Lords decided that it should be elected,
and some of the others said no, no, no,
it should be appointed, the status quo,
and a few said, what about a compromise?
And they finished up with five options on the table:
all elected, 80/20, 50/50, 20/80 or all appointed.
So a hypothetical Lord J,
whose first preference was all elected, so that would get 5 points,
would probably have a second preference of B, and so on.
Whereas Lady K, whose first preference is 50/50,
might have a second preference of D and a third of B and so on.
Or Lady L, who has a second preference of B, and A, and so on.
If somebody has an illogical set of preferences, with two peaks,
he has probably been bribed, threatened or seduced.
(Laughter)
But if everybody does have a logical set of preferences,
then the collective will, and we just collect all the points,
the collective will always also be logical,
and in this particular graph,
the result is 62% elected, 38% appointed.
Just to finish the fairy story,
the ancient Lords believed in ancient majority voting,
so they took five majority votes, and lost all of them.
Brexit, as we were saying, was also a multi-option debate,
but we only had the one referendum on staying in the EU, yes or no?
But as I mentioned, any referendum on any of the other three
would also be 'no', probably by a much larger margin.
And if we had had multi-option voting,
then 'remain in the eu' would almost certainly have been the winner.
Preferential points voting has a couple of other advantages.
If you vote for only 1 option, it gets 1 point.
If you vote for 2 options it gets 2 points,
and 1 for your second preference.
So in a 4-option debate, if you want your favourite to get all 4 points,
you have to cast your preferences,
but nobody votes ‘no’.
Success depends upon getting a good number of high preferences,
a few middle ones perhaps,
but a very small number of low preferences.
So here’s the second advantage:
the protagonist is incentivised to talk nicely with their opponents.
Preferential voting is accurate, it is also non-majoritarian.
It identifies the option with the highest average preference,
and an average of course involves everybody who votes,
not just a majority of them.
If this were adopted as the international democratic norm,
there would be no further justification for majority rule, anywhere.
Democracy should be inclusive.
The parliament should represent all the people,
and the government should represent the entire parliament.
This is not what we practice, but it is what we preach
to Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq, Kenya, Syria, Ukraine, etcetera.
To conclude, majority voting is divisive,
majority rule can be a cause of conflict.
Bizarrely, hardly anybody in academia or the media,
like the BBC, ever critique majority decision-making.
By all means have a majority vote if the vote is not serious.
OK.
But if it is serious, then any vote should be multi-optional,
like it was in New Zealand in 1992, when an independent commission
drew up a 5-option referendum and the people voted and,
surprise surprise;
they chose a compromise. Brilliant!
So what is democracy?
In 1931, when Mahatma Gandhi came to England for the first time,
he was asked on arrival,
“What do you think of English civilisation?”
And he said it would be a very good thing.
And democracy would be good if it were inclusive.
If everybody was involved or represented
in drawing up the short list of options, and then voting,
and then implementing whatever decisions achieved
a high level of consensus support.
This would require preferential points voting in decision-making,
and all-party power-sharing.
Thank you.
(Applause)