Tentative conclusions on democracy & governance
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STV in Tonga?
Not yet, but if plans to shift power from the monarch to parliament go forward, it’s possible. Matthew Shugart blogs.
A small handful of countries have experience with preferential voting systems in Oceania (e.g. LPV). Maybe this is due to an Australian diffusion effect or even election assistance from Oz.
Tonga would add to a set of several current, governmental STV implementations (not including IRV implementations):
- Malta – legislature
- Ireland – legislature
- Australia – upper house, several state and local assemblies
- Northern Ireland – legislature, local assemblies
- Scotland – local assemblies
- New Zealand – some local assemblies
- United States – some local assemblies (Cambridge, MA and, pretty soon, Minneapolis, MN)
- European Union – some countries’ EU Parliament delegations
- India – upper house (indirect)
And that list does not include historical implementations (e.g. briefly in Estonia, for decades in at least 2 dozen US cities, Nepal’s upper house before the republic).
If you don’t know how STV works, watch this video, focusing on the determination of threshold and the count. (Then, if you want to know more, watch a more specific video like this one.)
One response to to “STV in Tonga?”
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The only EU delegations elected by STV are those of Malta and Ireland, correct?
And I always say that Maltese and Australian Senate ‘STV’ come with huge caveats. In Malta, the party with a majority of first-preference votes nationwide is guaranteed a majority of seats. (It is an almost perfect 2-party system.) Of course, that undermines one of the key advantages of STV: that you supposedly need not worry about wasting your vote on an unelectable candidate or party.
And in Australian Senate, “above the line” voting is practiced by over 90% of voters, which essentially converts ‘STV’ into closed-list PR, undermining one of the other supposed advantages of STV: that candidates compete for support and voters decide how their preferences flow if their first-choice is unelectable.
OZ influence was felt in Fiji on this point: the AV system adopted there allows above-the-line voting. It was pretty much a disaster.
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