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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge season four, I'm your host, Rich Helppie. We've got a great guest today, Steven Hill. He knows quite a bit about election systems around the world; we're going to be talking about some of those and in particular, Italy. Now I know most people don't think much about Italian politics very often but we recently had an election and all of a sudden the Twitter-sphere and the Blog-o-sphere blew up; it was the worst thing that ever happened according to someówhat's behind that. With us today, we've got Steve Hill to tell us about it. Welcome to The Common Bridge, Steve.
Steven Hill
Thank you, Richard. Great pleasure to be here.
Richard Helppie
Steve, our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. So maybe where did you spend your early days and if you had any education experience, and then maybe a little bit about what your career arc has been and what you're up to today?
Steven Hill
Sure. Well, in 1992, I co-founded an organization called Fair Vote, that's what it's known as today. We specialize in electoral systems and how they impact democracy. I mean, a lot of people don't realize you can take the same votes and [if] you express them through different electoral systems you come up with completely different results in terms of who gets elected. That's kind of an eye opener for a lot of people. So I'm talking about systems, whether using a plurality system or district elections or ranked-choice voting or proportional representation, those different systems will give you different results. So that's an eye opener, and I've written seven books about these topics and more. This is the beat that I've been on for now for about 30 years.
Richard Helppie
Great. What did you do before you founded Fair Vote?
Steven Hill
I was involved in politics, both at local and state level, sometimes running campaigns, just an interested individual volunteering in my community. Professionally, [I] did a lot of different things working in the mental health system and other things until we co-founded Fair Vote. That launched the next 30 yearsóit's been 30 years since the 1992 founding.
Richard Helppie
Well, I think that mental health training probably prepared you well for politics. You're in San Francisco today. Have you always been a resident of the Bay Area?
Steven Hill
No, I grew up in Connecticut, East Coast, lived there for the first part of my life up through college and then moved to Washington State. Lived in Seattle, a little bit north of there towards the Canadian borderóBellinghamóthen moved to San Francisco in 1993, I think it was, and immediately got involved in local politics here, particularly working on electoral systems. In 1996, we had on the ballot, in San Francisco, a system of proportional representation and I ran that campaign. So I had not only to write books and put out ideas and educate about this, but also run reforms for political campaign and ran the first successful campaigns for ranked-choice voting in San Francisco, Oakland, and a number of other cities, and also some campaigns for public financing of campaigns. So I really have been involved in the political reform world for 30 years.
Richard Helppie
Well, we don't know exactly which way this is going to turn but one thing I can tell you almost universally, people don't believe that their elected representatives are very responsive to them nor are we getting the best and brightest into politics, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. So I'm sure there are lessons to be taken away but I do bring people on that have various ideas about what can be done differently; what happened before what's happening now and what might happen next. But let's go over to Italy. How the heck are they set up and why did we get this particular outcome that we did?
Steven Hill
Italy is actually a lesson for us here in the US because if we aren't careful...we use some similar components to our democracy that they use there. In the last Italian election, which just happened a few weeks ago, that really broke down. It had what I call the winner-take-all nervous breakdown. We also use winner-take-all. We've had a few nervous breakdowns, so we can't just roll our eyes at the Italians, we have to look at our own system too. So what happened in Italy is that they actually have two different methods they use to elect their national legislature. They have both our district based system where you're voting for a district representative but you also, as a voter, you cast a vote for what's called a party list system, a national system. In the national party list system, which is proportional representation, it's a really good system for making sure that every party wins its fair share of seats. So if a political party gets 40% of the popular vote, they're going to get about 40% of the seats. If they get 20% of the popular vote, instead of getting nothing, like you get in the US system, you get about 20% of the popular seats of the pieó20% of the popular vote gives you 20% of the seats. So in that election, the party that everyone's now saying, oh my god, the Fascists are back, the Brothers of Italy partyówhich ironically, is led by a womanóthey got 44% of the popular vote. With that percentage, they got about 45-46% of the seats, which is what you'd expect. There were a bunch of other parties on the leftóthe center left and more far leftóthey couldn't really get their act together to form a coalition like the Brothers of Italy party was able to do with other parties on the center right and the far right. The left actually got 49% of the vote but they only got 39% of the seats overall. So with the Brothers of Italy party winning 44% of the popular vote, what happened was, Italy combines it with this district-based winner-take-all system, each district one at a time. Because of the distortions of that system, like we often see in the United States too, they won on 44% of the popular vote, they went overall 59% of the seats because they won 82% of those winner-take-all districts. [Cross talk].
Richard Helppie
Let's see if I can play that back to you. Just...[Cross talk].
Steven Hill
Probably a little bit confusing, a lot of numbers there.
Richard Helppie
What I understood at firstóI'm not sure I got this rightówas you'd vote for a candidate. Let's say that you voted for party ìC," that candidate was represented by party ìCî, but you'd also vote for a party. Let's say your favorite party was "A" although you liked candidate "C" so the candidate would get votes but also the party would get a vote. Did I get that right?
Steven Hill
Now there is a system like that but in this particular system, you actually had two votesóone for your district representative and one for your national party list. So you vote for your district representative and then you vote for the second vote as well so they count up all the votes in that national party list. That's the aggregate nationwide popular vote. You can see that there, the Brothers of Italy won their fair share of seats, as did the left parties. But when you come to those winner-take-all districts, that's where the Brothers of Italyówith 44% of the national voteóare winning 82% of these districts.
Richard Helppie
Let me play that back for you then. So I would go to vote and I would vote for a national candidate or a national party. So I want party "A" but then in my district, I would vote for individual "C" and if individual "C" got a plurality, they get the winner-take-all for that district.
Steven Hill
Exactly and that's the problem. You only needed a plurality instead of a majority. So they should have used something like ranked-choice voting within those districts because what was happening was that the vote was fracturing with lots of parties running their individual candidates. Part of the Brothers of Italy party, their candidates in these districts were winning with 30% of the voteó32%, 35%óbecause all the other parties split the vote. You had all these spoiler candidates that allowed the Brothers of Italy party to win all of these seats in the districts, even though only 44% of the of the country supported them. So when you add both the district seats together and these party lists seats, the Brothers of Italy and their coalition won 59% of the seats overall, even though they only had 44% of the popular vote. The left won 39% of the seats even though they had 49% of the popular vote. So it's a huge distortion that has led to minority rule, basically.
Richard Helppie
Well, there are arguments about protection of minority rights, and I don't know who the original quote was [from], but pure democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting to decide what to have for lunch. There's got to be checks and balances built in. There are differences and things to try to get broad coalitions. I don't know where the roots of this came from, but my understanding is that since 1946, Italy has had 69 different governments. That seems to be a little wild, even by US standards or by any other standard. Are they leading the world in the number of governments they form?
Steven Hill
If they're not leading, they're pretty close to it. They also combined this electoral system, as I've described, with a parliamentary system where the proportional system allows a lot of parties to run. But as we're seeing, they're not necessarily getting their fair share of seats. So you have constant shifting coalitions in order to have a majority of seats and then have the prime minister come from that coalition; that coalition needs to hold together. Often, and in Italy's caseóit's fairly complicated getting in the weeds of Italian politicsóbut a lot of it has to do with after World War II, Italy had the largest Communist party. So the CIA actually got very involved in Italian politics trying to prevent the Communist party in Italy from taking control through elections. They encouraged a lot of this balkanization and fractionalization of the vote by manipulating the electoral system in a way to allow this huge number of parties. In Italy, you need one to three percent of the vote to win a seat. Other countries that use a proportional representation system, like Sweden or Germany or what have you, you need like five percent or higher. So the lower that threshold is, the more parties you're going to have and the less coherence you're going to have to your government. Italy, because all sorts of things having to do with its culture, just stays with this really low threshold and now is put onto this winner-take-all system where you need a low plurality of the vote in the districts and candidates are winning with 30-35% which means 65% of the voters voted for somebody else. So it's just kind of a messy system, it really shows the design of your democracy does a lot and you can come up with the wrong design and have a nervous breakdown, as I call it, of your political system.
Richard Helppie
I took note of the party that the incoming, potentially, prime minister got, I do want to get into that and how the prime minister's actually chosenóprobably not pronouncing her name very wellóGiorgia Meloni, that her party, the Brothers of Italy, captured 25-26% of the vote, and apparently they're still counting, but also the Brothers of Italy formed a coalition with two other parties and that's what brought them up to the 44%. So how does the prime minister get assigned, and if in your area of expertise, what's the difference between what an Italian prime minister versus president might do?
Steven Hill
The way it typically works at a parliamentary democracy is that they often have coalitions that run together, that come together, even before the election. And it's known [that] the Brothers of Italy party is part of this broader coalition, which also included Silvio Berlusconi's party who used to be the prime minister, and it included what's called the League. These are all right, center right, far right parties. So they were able to come together and run together even though they don't have a whole lot in common. There are a lot of question of whether this coalition will even hold together. But what they do then is the party that has the highest vote in the electionówhich in this case was the Brothers of Italy partyóthe president of Italy, which is mostly just a figurehead, but the President does have a few important powers and that president designates which party and which leader of that party has the right to try and form a coalition. So the Brothers of Italy won that right and so that's what has occurred. They are now trying to form their coalition and they'll be able to; whether it stays together or not is another story. In the meantime, on the left, you had a bunch of left parties, but they couldn't come together in a coalition. There were a few of them that did, but others that didn't and so the vote really didn't come together in a way that would allow that 49%ówhich actually was greater than the center right coalition's 44%óto have the opportunity to form a coalition.
Richard Helppie
I see; so it's not like another party got 49% and a group got 44%. Someone got 44óand I don't know what the exact numbers wereósomebody's got 41 and then somebody [else] got eight, or 35 and ten and the remainder. They were fractionalized on one side and that the right of center coalition put together 44 which dwarfed anything that could be put together on the left of center. The only other stat that I read going into this was that the Brothers of Italy went from 4% of the vote in 2018, just four years ago, to 25-26% right now.
Steven Hill
Right. Actually, the other partners in their right coalition lost votes (Rich Helppie: Is that right?) and they all went to the Brothers of Italy party. So I mean, it's just, voters who vote conservative in Italy, they're disgusted with one or the other conservative party so they go to another one; it's like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic kind of thing. The same with a lot of the left parties too. It's really the coalition that is important, because that decides who gets to try to form a government. Before this, they had a center left government. Italians were kind of frustrated with a few things going on with their politics. This was the first election since the pandemic so this was a lot of payback. A lot of governments are going to see payback as a result of the pandemic. We had that in our own country as well. So now the big question is whether this center right party really is a fascist party. I think, when you look into it further, you see it's not. They're just a populist party. They're loud, they're noisy, they like to say outrageous things and they like to poke their thumb in the eye of the system. But at the end of the day they need the European Union, which they talked about leaving, but they're supposed to get tens of billions of dollars from the European Union. I don't think they're going to be leaving the European Union anytime soon. I think a lot of the predictions, they are just headlines and people making a big deal out of something. It remains to be seen what will happen but I don't think...you see this a lot in Europe, in different countries, of the rise of the far right, and everyone says, oh my god, it's the end of something, they're not quite sure what. Often what happens with these populist parties is because they way over-estimate their actual mandate, they start doing excessive things; at a certain point, the voters go, oh, my god, that's not what we meant and then they swing back to the left. It's a pretty consistent pattern. We see it in Austria, we saw it in the Netherlands, we saw it in Germany, these sorts of thingsóSweden is now going through a similar thing. It's just kind of part of the European politics.
Richard Helppie
And that's what made me interested in finding somebody to talk about this because, again, I didn't give much thought to Italian elections or Italian politics, and then all of a sudden, oh, no, we got a fascist, and it was all over. I'm a little cynical when I see that because fascist, that's the new racist; everybody was a racist for a while to the point where, okay, nobody's a racistówhich neither of those are true. And now it was like, all of a sudden, it was a fascist, and I don't think people understand what fascism really is. But also, isn't it illegal in Italy to be a fascist? Am I correct about that, or has that been since repealed?
Steven Hill
Well, you know, one person's fascist is another person's saint, I guess, so I don't...[laughter]
Richard Helppie
So Steven, it's appealing; a system where minority parties could get some representation, you throw out five to ten percent, I'm thinking ten percent of a third party would give you 40 seats in the US House of Representatives. That might make people behave a little better, I would hope.
Steven Hill
I think so. A lot of people think the two parties we have are so terrible, why would we want more? But actually it kind of improves the the atmosphere, because it's not just you against me anymore. I might need the votes from the supporters of other parties. So you have to be careful about your positioning, you have to be careful about your demeanor and how you treat people. I mean, you do see all sorts of incidents in other governments; I'm not going to try to make it sound like this is perfect. But generally when you get away from this "me against you" type of dynamic, it adds something positive to the overall political culture. It's what has been my observation anyway.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. It seems like we have in our country, United States, we have one party that's looking for ideological purity. We're going to run out all the rhinos and get rid of them and track them down and primary them to the point where they can't get elected in a general election except in gerrymandered areas. On the other hand, we have this obsession with identity politics that has run amok and is now starting to devour it's ownóneither [of] which is good for governing. Until we get an alternative that says we're going to act like adults and try to address problems, then we're going to be stuck here. I know that one of the things in Italyójust for example, we were talking about Italyóthey're talking about immigration, well, look, people have moved from continent to continent, from area to area, since the beginning of humankind, and it's going to happen; we're doing it in the worst possible way now [in] every place that people want to come to. [Cross talk.] I just got back from Ireland, and people left there because of the potato famine. People move, people migrate, that's what happens.
Steven Hill
Well, there, I mean, Ireland's going through quite a metamorphosis between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland; the Republic of Ireland is in the European Union, Northern Ireland is not because it's part of the UK. And so there are all sorts of interesting issues going on there right now. The thing I was going to say is, just see how these issues play out in different electoral systems. You look at the issue of guns in the United States and our inability to come to some sort of consensus about what kind of regulation makes sense. It's totally a by-product of the winner-take-all electoral system. A lot of people say it's the NRA, they have so much money, and they just pollute the the political process. There's some degree of truth to that but what the NRA is good atóand the Republican Party leadersóbecause of how we use the one district at a time system, they can stand back, look at the political map, and they can say, okay, it's this district over here, we know we're going to win that one, because that's a heavily conservative area so we don't have to worry about putting a lot of money there. And this district over here, we know we're not going to win that one that's downtown Los Angeles, those are Democrats, forget that one. So they focus on just a handful of what's called swing districts and right now, we can tell you who's going to win 90% of the seats this November; it's just ten percent, approximately, of seats that are our swing districts. So you're talking about 35, maybe 40, seats that are up for grabs. And so that's where the NRA and the Republican leadership are experts at targeting their resources to the handful of battleground swing districts. They're going to decide who has the majority after November. It's not just that they have a lot of money and they're uninterested in any kind of gun controlówhich they aren'tóbut it's also because they're good at motivating the swing voters, the undecided voters in these swing districts. A lot of these swing districts tend to be suburbs, some of them are rural districts. These are people that care strongly about the gun issue more than they care about all the other issues; climate change or health care. They just say, look, you can do whatever you want, just don't take away my gun, and they will vote on that one issue. So the NRA is really good at mobilizing these people because of our winner-take-all system where they can mobilize them in these handful of battleground districts and battleground states on the presidential election. Most presidential elections come down to four or five, six, maybe at most 10 states; all the others are solidly Democrat like California, solidly Republican like Idaho or Utah. This is just the the geographic landscape of our system that lends itself to so much manipulation by well organized interests, like the NRA and others, that are going after these issues.
Richard Helppie
I concur and guns are a policy very close to me. I've actually proposed a system called graduated licensing, it comports with second amendment rights, and it keeps the firearms out of the hands of people that shouldn't have them. It, back tested, would have stopped most of the mass shootings. Yet we've got really one side that almost says take away all the guns, and the other one that says equally crazy things like hey, we're not even going to do a check or make sure somebody needs a permit before they conceal carry. There's so much opportunity to do the sensible thing in the middle.
Steven Hill
Rich, if you look at the polls, the public is in the middle. That's the irony. That's the real shame of the whole thing, is like the public sentiment is there. The political systemóthis winner-take-all political systemóis simply not responding.
Richard Helppie
And similarly, a great parallel is the whole matter around abortion, and that the public is pretty much coalesced in the middle around what the right way to approach that is but here again, we go on opposite poles. And in fact, in my home state of Michigan, here we have a proposal, post Roe, that would reinstate most abortion law as if Roe was still in place, yet our Governor is running as if that proposal is not on the ballot. It makes no sense at all that that's become a partisan thing when it's going to be handled by referendum in this state, at least at that level, but most people are in the middle, and the science and the data is there, but you can't get people off the poles.
Steven Hill
Again, these wedge issues are where these well organized, deep pocketed interests are really clever at...there's a concept in our system, it's called intensity versus preference. You can poll people on a whole bunch of things and they'll give you their answers. You can aggregate the polls and say the American public believes this, American public believes that. But the real question, when it comes to an election, is what will motivate them to vote and what will they vote on? There used to be an NRA board member, Grover Norquist, and he said, we don't care what the public thinks, we want to know what's going to motivate them to vote. We know that certain issues will mobilize voters in the swing districts. One political consultant said, a swing voter, oh, that's someone who knows the least about politics; they're the least interested, if you don't catch them in eight seconds with your sound bites that grab and shake them by the collar, you've lost them. I mean, that may be a bit of an exaggeration but what do you think our system boils down to? It's a handful of swing voters, and a handful of swing districts, and in the presidential election, a handful of swing states. Those are the voters that decide our elections, decide majorities, all these things. Some people criticize proportional representation to say, oh, it leads to extreme parties [like] in Italy and Israel, these sorts of things. They don't realize that in our own system, the most extreme votersóand sometimes the most undecided, uninformed votersóare the ones that are deciding who wins the election. So it's something [that] needs to change in our political system, I think, going forward. That's why I've been involved in things like ranked-choice voting and trying to get other electoral methods used in the United States.
Richard Helppie
We've seen this throughout this experiment in self-government and the American Revolution times; we had a third of the people loyal to the crown, a third of the people that were patriots and revolutionaries wanting to establish independence, and a third of the peopleófor something that's importantóthat were really indifferent or uninvolved. But I think today, there's a vast agreement that we need to do a better job with getting people in with the proper motivation so that they do act better. Steven, you've been great and very generous with your time and patient as we walk through this complicated topic. We started with Italy; is there anything else you want to say about Italy to wrap up? Or on related topics, anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to comment on?
Steven Hill
Well, Italy is going to be a work in progress, we'll see how it goes. I think it'll probably work out better than a lot of people were saying initially but certainly Italy has its challenges. Here in the US, I agree with what you were saying; we really need to figure out how we're going to do things better. I mean, a lot of people like to go back to what the Founders and Framers did, they go back to originalism, as it's called, and yet, if you look at the Founders, they were making upówhole clothóa new political system. They didn't stay with what was done before, they were very innovative. So we need to recapture not what the Founders put on paper back then, we need to recapture that spirit of innovation that they had and bring that to the current day challenges of representation in a multi-racial, multi-everything society. America in 1790 was a very different place than it is today, so we need methods that are going to allow that diversity to be a strength of our nation instead of people fighting over this rare commodity called representation. It's possible that we could have a system where everybody, no matter where they live, has a representative. Other countries do have thatóSweden, Germany, othersóhave methods that I think we cannot copy, but learn from and figure out. New Zealand has a really interesting system. Again, this mixed member system, as its called, with district representatives and national proportional representation. Australia has an interesting system, so we can learn a lot. We are starting to experiment more with ranked-choice voting and Alaska is about to use ranked-choice voting for its elections. Maine is going to [use it] for its state election, so there's more movement on this front than ever before. But we're a big country, it's going to take a while. I hope that we keep with that spirit of innovation because I, myself, think it's exciting.
Richard Helppie
Well, I hear your enthusiasm and I appreciate you taking the time to share it. Hopefully you can come back. We'll talk more about this. We've been talking today with Steven Hill, expert on elections, who for a long time has been committed to changes in the electoral system. Please look up some of his books, his articles, and of course, join us on The Common Bridge. And so with our guest today this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
Understanding the Elections in Italy