Power without Scrutiny

Under its current electoral system, Spain encourages voters to do what marketing encourages them to do on their outings to hypermarkets: judge the brand, not the product. Take the Madrid Assembly, which oversees the regional government of a single Spanish province. As provinces, drawn on the map in 1833, are also Spain's electoral districts, there is a single electoral district for elections to the Madrid Assembly, and one hundred and twenty seats. Are the media, the party rank-and-file, and voters able scrutinise candidates individually? (Three major parties run three-hundred-and-sixty candidates; a fourth party is likely to do likewise in the next regional election.) Can they judge the work of regional MPs individually--judge four years of work by one hundred and twenty people?

Now imagine the region divided into one hundred and twenty seats, with a population of just under 60,000 each, using a mandated alternative vote system for both party primaries in each district and for the regional election itself. The party rank-and-file in each district would chose one individual out of however many threw in their hats; in such small districts, internal party campaigning would be quite cheap, and in any case expenditure could be limited by law to keep the process modest and fair. Electors would choose from among four major-party candidates and an unforeseeable number of minor party candidates. Each election would constitute a referendum on the continuity of the sitting member for the district after four years of legislative and advocacy work.

If it is not the point of elections to choose representatives--to choose people--we might as well adopt a virtual system, giving each party buttons to push in parliamentary votes rather than bums on seats. As it is, most of those bums are unknown to voters, and all of them are beholden more to their party bosses than to the constituents they are supposed to represent.