March 31, 2014

Dear Sir,

The 2017 elections are a long way off but the word is already out that Bermuda may have a third political party option. Former Premier Sir John Swan provided his opinions and research on the topic has led me to agree with him. There is a political science theory called Duverger’s Law which asserts that there are characteristics in first past the post systems which discourage the development of third parties and rewards two major parties. Duverger’s law suggests two reasons for this. One being that weak parties end up forming alliances and will no longer be viewed as separate, competing parties. The other is weak parties will be eliminated by voters as they leave the party on the grounds that they have no chance of winning.

Duverger’s law does contend that a third party can enter the arena only if it can exploit the mistakes of a pre-existing major party at the expense of that party such as in the US pre-civil war period when Republicans replaced the Whig Party. We can therefore assume that it takes very extreme conditions for a third party to enter at the expense of a major party. This law, which Duverger himself said is not absolute, does back up Sir John’s assertion that third parties fail to do well in Westminster style systems. So it is going to be very difficult if not impossible for a new party to establish itself. But suppose a new party is formed, is that good or bad for Bermuda?

In the essay “How democracy works” physicist and computer scientist Danny Hillis uses computational models to describe the outcomes of the democratic process. Hillis’ theory concluded that if a third party or candidate is added, the democratic process does not necessarily produce the best result as it is very likely that the third or “spoiler” candidate will take away enough votes from a “good” candidate to allow a “bad” one to win. The terms good and bad are not to be interpreted as a saint and a devil. A good candidate is defined as one whose opinions are closest to the will of the voters and vice versa for a bad one.

Using graphs to illustrate his point, Hillis noted “In a multiple party vote, each voter will be able to choose a candidate with opinions close to his or her own, but the candidate who gets elected will be the one that has the broadest constituency, not the one who best represents the will of all the voters. Because the worst candidates pick up the outliers, it is relatively easy for a very bad candidate to win.”

Sounds like Former Premier Swan might be right in saying that what sounds good on paper doesn’t necessarily work out in people’s interest.

ANTHONY DONAGHY