Take it from Italy’s past, don’t tinker with US electoral systems

The predictable post-election wave of calls for reforming or eliminating the Electoral College has crested, although we can expect continuing reminders of the quirks of our electoral system. There is no denying that the Electoral College was intended to address specific American realities when the Constitution was being written in 1787. And there weren’t any other electoral democracies around in those days to look to for inspiration and ideas.

It’s sometimes overlooked that in 2004 we could have had yet another disconnect between the Electoral College outcome and popular vote totals.

{mosads}With 60,000 flipped votes in Ohio, John Kerry would have won the presidency with almost three million fewer votes than George W. Bush. Presumably that result would have been quite suitable to most people unhappy with how things turned out in 2016.  

However one feels about the Electoral College, though, its abolition would require amending the Constitution, and that is not going to happen.

It is actually a good thing, in my view, that the U.S. election system is not easy to change, especially when it comes to the highest-stakes elections. It is one thing to talk about a reform in the national interest, but in fact quite unreasonable to expect political parties and other organizations involved in a reform effort to see it as anything other than an effort to promote their specific interests. A cautionary tale is coming these days from our friends and allies in Italy.

Since the early 1990s, Italy has experimented with various electoral systems for its two houses of parliament, which in essence “elect” the government.

The Italian Constitution does not specify what system to use for electing legislators, but the drafters of the country’s 1948 constitution clearly favored a proportional system, in which a party’s percentage share of the vote would determine the share of seats it held in the legislature.

In the postwar Italian system, even small parties could make it into parliament, and coalition governments became the norm. Proportional systems are very good at representing the specific political preferences of voters, less good at producing stable, long-term governing majorities. Italian voters, however, lived quite happily through dozens of government reshuffles. Very few of them sincerely wanted a return to the strong executive power of the Mussolini era, and the political system reflected that.

Since that system imploded, however, with the end of the Cold War, followed by corruption investigations that destroyed the parties that had governed for over forty years, the Italians have tried various approaches to creating more solid and stable governing majorities, able to deal better with an increasingly complex international scene.

From 1993 to 2005, they tried a somewhat more British-style electoral system, with most legislators elected by simple majority as sole representative of a given district, while retaining some proportional distribution of votes as a lifeline to small parties. Distinctly confusing.

In 2005, the Berlusconi government pushed through a new electoral law that returned fully to proportional representation, and was intended to assign a hefty bonus to the biggest vote getter – a guaranteed majority of over 50 percent of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate.

In the end, this system did not have the anticipated huge benefits for Berlusconi’s center-right coalition. They lost very narrowly to the center-left in 2006, though they won handily in early elections two years later.  

In 2013, the law worked again to the benefit of the center-left, when it narrowly beat Berlusconi’s center-right coalition in nation-wide totals and got a solid majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The region-by-region system for Senate elections, on the other hand, produced only a very narrow plurality for the center-left, with the populist 5 Star Movement running a strong third.

Matteo Renzi, leader of the center-left Democratic Party and prime minister from February 2014 to December 2016, tried a major restructuring of the political system. It didn’t work.

Voters rejected his efforts to revamp the Senate, and the Constitutional Court, which performs part of the functions of the U.S. Supreme Court, has just heavily modified Renzi’s 2015 law on elections to the Chamber of Deputies. It was intended to favor the big political parties, like his own, by introducing a second round of balloting between the two biggest vote getters from the first round, with the winner receiving — wait for it — a bonus to ensure a solid majority.

The parts of the law still in effect do foresee a prize for a party that manages to get 40 percent of the vote in the one round of balloting, to guarantee it 54 percent of seats in the Chamber. The Democrats and the 5 Star Movement are both polling around 30 percent, far from the 40 percent threshold, but the constitutional referendum in December indicated how undercounting of populist votes by pollsters is a problem in Italy, not just in the U.S.

The current obsession of the Italian political mainstream, not surprisingly, is to make sure that the electoral system does not produce a governing majority for the populists in the next parliamentary elections, which have to take place by early 2018.

It’s a complicated story, and not an encouraging one. When Italy’s political leaders started fiddling with the electoral system back in the early 1990s, they opened the proverbial Pandora’s box.

The stated objective of providing governments with more solid majorities in parliament, and presumably the ability to act in more determined and incisive fashion, makes sense.

The problem is that all the multiple revisions of the electoral system have been intended to serve the specific, sometimes transitory, interests of the political forces that have pushed them through. This risks feeding popular disgust with governing elites, which is a powerful driver of support for populist movements.

Those in democratic societies who feel a compelling desire to modify electoral systems should look carefully at the Italian experience, and weigh the risks of going down a similar path. Sometimes it truly is better to do nothing.

Examples are abundant. Rather than relying on re-engineering of electoral systems, we should focus on doing a better job of politics.

Eric R. Terzuolo served twice at the U.S. Embassy in Rome while a member of the Foreign Service, and later taught international affairs and political science at the University of Rome 3.

The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.