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Editorial: Downsizing cosmetic without reform

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lin Cho-shui (林濁水) is in trouble with his party because he refuses to toe the party line on downsizing the legislature. Strictly speaking there isn't a party line yet, since there has been no agreement on the direction the legislative caucus should take. But pressure has been put on Lin by party seniors to support the current bill to halve the number of seats, and he is balking at this. To cut the number of seats will not benefit the pan-greens, he believes, and what the draft law should really be about is changing the electoral system. Lin is surely right here.

The idea that the legislature would function more efficiently if there were fewer legislators has always been puzzling. Why should 113 bitterly divided, highly argumentative men and women be more likely to get things done than 225? And why stop with 113? Why not have 100, or 50, or a dozen? The obvious answer, perhaps, is that democracy is weakened the more the principle of representation is diluted -- too many voices clamoring for not enough attention.

So what is the right size of legislature for Taiwan? Australia, with a slightly smaller population, has 150 members of parliament (MPs) at the federal level, about one MP per 128,000 of the population. Malaysia, with a very similar sized population to Taiwan, has 219 seats in its House of Representatives (one representative per 105,000 citizens) while Romania, also nearly identical in size, has 345 seats in its lower house as well as another 140 in its Senate. On the basis of numbers alone then, there is no reason to think that Taiwanese are over-represented.

Virtues which are touted for the downsizing plan are that there would be fewer "special interests" to cater too -- ie, fewer snouts at the trough -- and that larger constituencies would weaken the power of local political factions. Bigger constituencies would also make elections more difficult for candidates who deliberately make their pitch at small electoral groups -- disaffected Mainlanders, for example, or the clients of some gangster -- knowing they only need 3 percent to 4 percent of the total vote in a constituency to win a seat.

But it is not at all certain that cutting the number of seats will in fact have any such benefits. A far surer way of achieving these goals would be to reform the electoral system to put in place single-member constituencies. It is far easier to find 45,000 people who are partisans of a particular figure -- or have a particular chip on their shoulder, or who are bribable -- from a constituency pool of a million, than from one of 100,000. The root of the nation's problems with its legislature lies not simply in its size but in the way it is elected.

The sad thing is that we are probably not telling anyone reading this anything they didn't already know. That the root of the problems besetting the legislature lies in the way that legislators are elected -- through the multi-member district system inherited from Japan and which that country threw out a decade ago because it was too prone to corruption -- has been long understood by anyone interested in reform.

There is nothing wrong with downsizing in principle, though comparison with other countries suggest it is not necessary. But downsizing without other electoral reform is meaningless. Such reform should be part of the same package. To give priority to the less important part of that package only goes to show how badly the DPP has mismanaged this measure.

All we now see is that the party wants the legislature downsized to show it can get some constitutional change passed, however pointless. The party has opted for effect rather than substance, and we are all the losers for that.
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