In Part 1 of this post, I outlined the basics of Hungary’s new electoral law.  Now I turn to the question of what we should make of the changes introduced.

Before I get going, I should say that others have been following Hungary’s electoral reform debates over recent months and years more closely than I have.  I offer my impressions here partly because I know many non-Hungarian-speakers want to know more than they can at present about what has happened, and partly in the hope of initiating conversation with those in Hungary who know much more than I do.  I hope you will point out errors, omissions, and points that I ought to think about in more detail.

The key question in thinking about an electoral reform concerns whose interests it is designed to serve.  Is it imposed by the government to protect its own interests (what I have elsewhere called elite majority imposition)?  Is it agreed among politicians more widely (elite settlement)?  Or does it reflect pressure from below, which politicians feel compelled in greater or lesser measure to accommodate (elite–mass interaction)?

A quick look at the final parliamentary vote on the bill shows that this was not a case of elite settlement: the governing parties (the centre-right Fidesz and its Christian Democratic vassal, the KDNP) were united in support of the new electoral law, while the opposition parties were equally united against it.  One opposition party – the far-right Jobbik – voted against the bill.  The other two – the socialist MSZP and the green/liberal LMP – boycotted the session and headed instead for a demonstration outside parliament.

That’s not to say, however, that all aspects of the bill were contested.  The opposition parties all supported a sharp reduction in the number of deputies: as government supporters frequently pointed out during the main debate on the principles of the bill on 2^nd December, Hungary’s parties have long promised a reduction in the size of Parliament without delivering.  There was also general agreement on the introduction of special representation for minorities.  Four of the five parliamentary parties – all except the LMP – supported the shift to single-round elections in the single-member districts.  And all agreed that, if single-member districts were to be retained, there was an urgent need to redraw constituency boundaries.  No redistricting had taken place since 1990, with the result that the largest districts were three times the size of the smallest.  The Constitutional Court had ruled in December 2010 that the prevailing district structure was unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, two aspects of the bill appear designed to serve Fidesz’s own party interests.  The first is that the new system is more majoritarian than the old.  As I noted in Part 1 of this post, that is partly because the proportion of single-member districts (SMDs) is greater than in the old system and partly because winners’ surplus votes are now included in the transfer of remainder votes from SMDs to lists.  One estimate, which seems to be widely accepted, is that, whereas the old system translated Fidesz’s 53 per cent vote share in 2010 into a 68 per cent share of the seats in Parliament, the new system would have given it 76 per cent of the seats.

Fidesz justifies this move in two ways (I’m drawing again here and in the next few paragraphs on the parliamentary debates on 2^nd December).  First, in terms of the mechanics of the new system, it argues that including winners’ surplus votes in the transfer ensures that all “wasted” votes from the SMDs are treated equally.  Fidesz’s Lajos Kósa said:

The goal of the new method of counting remainder votes is that no vote should be lost – that every citizen’s vote should count.  The bill thus treats all votes that are not used in the single-member districts equally.  Only some of the votes cast in single-member districts are needed to win a seat.  The bill’s goal is that every vote should be used: those cast for losing candidates in the same way as those cast for the winner that were not needed to obtain the seat.

This part of the bill was ridiculed by opposition deputies: the MSZP’s Zsolt Molnár, for example, likened it to giving social security benefits to bank directors.  And, indeed, the government’s reasoning is very strange.  If the equality of votes is an aim, that surely needs to be gauged across the outcome of the election as a whole: few voters pay much attention to how their votes are treated at particular stages of the count process.  And in terms of the outcome of the election, the new system manifestly treats votes more unequally than the old: disproportionality, as already noted, is markedly higher.

Of course, disproportionality can be justified if it produces more effective or more accountable government.  And this is Fidesz’s second argument.  Lajos Kósa continued:

The question of proportionality and governability is a key question for every electoral system.  In considering it, we must recognize that each of these values can be realized only at the expense of the other.  Increased proportionality endangers the formation of a governing majority, while realization of the majoritarian perspective reduces proportionality. … I believe that the bill offers an appropriate solution to this.

But none of Fidesz’s speakers explained why governability requires even greater disproportionality than already exists in Hungary.  Every parliament in Hungary over the last twenty years has lasted its full four-year term.  No election has been followed by problems in government formation.  Voters have been able to throw out the existing government and replace it with a wholly new coalition in four out of the five elections since the first post-communist election in 1990.  As the far right’s Dóra Dúró said in Parliament on 2^nd December, “Election results have not caused problems for governability in Hungary, whereas proportionality – or, rather, disproportionality – has been much more of a problem”.

Fidesz points out that some European countries have entirely majoritarian systems, and if these are classed as democratic then, a fortiori, so too must be a system that combines majoritarian and proportional elements.  But this argument is again tendentious.  The UK – the example most commonly cited – has relatively entrenched parties that retain stable bastions of support even in lean times.  As a result, no government has commanded two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons since 1945 – never mind the three-quarters share that Fidesz could have won under the new Hungarian rules in 2010.  By contrast, the parties’ weaker entrenchment and the greater homogeneity in voting patterns in Hungary mean that a popular party can virtually sweep the board in the SMDs: Fidesz won all but two SMDs under the old rules in 2010; the MSZP and their allies won all but ten in 1994.

In Hungary’s circumstances, therefore, a pure SMD system would be wholly indefensible: it could at some elections prevent the existence of any meaningful parliamentary opposition.  The new mixed system also risks leaving Hungary without adequate checks against majority power.  No justification has been offered for why that might be needed.

The second highly contentious aspect of the system that seems designed to serve Fidesz’s interests is the new structure of single-member districts.  Article 4 of the new electoral law states that SMDs must not cross county boundaries, must comprise contiguous territory, and must contain roughly equal numbers of eligible voters.  It goes on to state that district electorates should deviate by no more than 15 per cent from the average (unless that is necessary to respect county boundaries and maintain contiguity) and that Parliament must act if any deviation rises above 20 per cent.  An annex to the bill then sets out each district in precise detail.

The general principles set out in the bill are perfectly reasonable.  As government speakers repeatedly pointed out during the parliamentary debate, they conform to the principles laid down by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission in its Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters.

What none of those speakers cared to point out, however, is that the Code of Good Practice goes on also to suggest procedures for drawing up precise boundaries.  It says:

When constituency boundaries are redefined – which they must be in a
single-member system – it must be done:

• impartially;
• without detriment to national minorities;
• taking account of the opinion of a committee, the majority of whose members are independent; this committee should preferably include a geographer, a sociologist and a balanced representation of the parties and, if necessary, representatives of national minorities.

The third of these points has not been followed: there is no information at all on how the government has drawn the map described in the new law.  Furthermore, it appears that the first principle has been violated too.  During the parliamentary debates, the LMP’s Gergely Karácsony showed two graphs: you can watch the clip here and see the graphs here.  The first graph plots Fidesz’s share of the votes in 2010 in the new SMDs on the y-axis against each SMD’s population on the x-axis.  It shows that the districts are smaller where Fidesz’s vote is higher, suggesting that the boundaries have been manipulated to Fidesz’s advantage.  Interestingly, the second graph (obtainable by clicking on the arrow to the right of the first graph), which plots the same data using the old SMDs, suggests that, although variation in district size was much greater under the old system, the bias against Fidesz was smaller than the bias in Fidesz’s favour that has now been introduced.

I have not been able to verify these figures – which do, of course, come from one of the opposition parties.  Nevertheless, they fit closely with others: analysts writing on the Haza és Haladás blog find, simulating 2006 election data with the new SMDs, that the average number of voters in districts where Fidesz were ahead by more than 5 per cent is 74,639, while that in districts where the MSZP were ahead by the same amount is 80,428.  They find evidence of various other boundary manipulations in Fidesz’s favour and conclude, largely on this basis, that “this is not a democratic electoral system”.

To draw up district boundaries in a non-transparent and partisan way is a gross abuse of democratic principle.  Fidesz will probably get away with it: such abuses are common in several other SMD-based systems, and Hungarian politicians have a depressing tendency to compare Hungarian practice with what happens elsewhere rather than with what should happen.  But we should be clear all the same that Fidesz is skewing the system to its own advantage.  Furthermore, by placing the district boundaries in the electoral law – a law that can be changed only with a two-thirds parliamentary majority – it is seeking to entrench its unfair advantage for the future.

Overall, then, this is basically a case of reform by elite majority imposition: the government has designed an electoral law that will serve its own power interests against the opposition of all parties outside government and with little real involvement from the wider public.  Everyone agreed that an overhaul of the electoral system was necessary, but the government has used this opportunity ruthlessly for its own purposes.

The only possible qualification to this picture concerns the reduction in the size of Parliament from 386 to 199 members: why would Fidesz deputies back such a change if they were thinking only of their own electoral interests?

I look forward to hearing others’ thoughts on this.  One point may be that the unanimous support for the bill from the government benches shows how far Fidesz is controlled by its leadership.  But is there also a concession here to public opinion?  In other countries, including the UK and Ireland, reductions in the number of deputies in the past year have been justified on the basis that, when public services are being cut sharply, politicians should feel the pinch too.  The same reasoning was expressed in the Hungarian Parliament on 2^nd December: Fidesz’s Gergely Gulyás, for example, said, “At a time when the country’s difficult economic situation demands sacrifices from numerous parts of society, it is particularly justified and rational for Parliament to set a good example”.  More often, however, Fidesz deputies simply pointed out that parliamentary downsizing has been promised for twenty years but never achieved.  This justification appeals to a populist discourse according to which Fidesz is the party that can slice through the lethargy of a corrupt and self-serving elite to act in the interests of the ordinary people of Hungary.

In this respect then, Fidesz is pandering to popular distaste for politicians.  But it is doing so in a way that does the party’s leadership no harm.  To use the language introduced by political scientists Steven Reed and Michael Thies, act- as well as outcome-contingent considerations matter here.  In all respects, however, it appears that the government has worked out what will serve its own power interests and has taken as much of this as it thinks itself able to get away with.

While most of us have been preparing to hang up our stockings, Hungary’s parliamentarians have been hard at work: on Friday alone they passed fourteen new laws.  One of these was a new electoral law – the first significant overhaul of the Hungarian electoral system since the country’s first post-communist democratic elections in 1990.  In this post – the first of two on the new electoral law – I will outline the changes that have taken place.  The second post will analyse the politics underlying the new law and consider what it tells us about the state of Hungarian democracy.

As a precursor to that, I should note that the new electoral law cannot be understood in isolation from the many other reforms that are taking place in Hungary today.  The fourteen laws passed on Friday brought to 359 the total number of laws and legal amendments that have hurtled through Parliament since the current government came to power in May 2010.  Among these laws is a new – and highly controversial – constitution, as well as a range of other measures that significantly alter the balance of power.  The US government has expressed serious concerns over whether the government’s policies respect media freedom, the independence of the judiciary, and a range of other core democratic values.  Last weekend, the EU and IMF broke off negotiations with the Hungarian government over concerns that new proposals would violate the independence of the central bank.  On Monday, the Princeton constitutional lawyer Kim Lane Scheppele concluded that Hungary was “sliding into authoritarianism”.  Days later, the Media Council – whose members were all nominated by the government –  withdrew a popular liberal radio station’s frequency without clear justification.  On Friday, while all those laws were passed inside Parliament, noisy demonstrations took place outside.  Eleven opposition MPs were among those arrested by police.  The core accusation of the demonstrators and the government’s many other critics is that it is concentrating power in its own hands to a degree that violates the principles of democracy.

So what of the new electoral law?  Perhaps its most eye-catching element is a sharp reduction in the number of deputies, from 386 to 199.

Beyond this, many of the fundamentals remain the same: the system is still, as it was, a mixed system, comprising both single-member districts and party lists.  It is still what the political scientists Matthew Shugart and Martin Wattenberg call a Mixed-Member Majoritarian (MMM) system with partial compensation.  That is, the two parts of the system are not coordinated so as to produce a proportional outcome overall, as under the Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) systems used in Germany, New Zealand, and Scotland.  But nor are they run entirely separately to each other, as in pure MMM (or parallel) systems.

There are important changes, however, in the details.  I should say that I have not yet been able to find a copy of the law as finally passed by Parliament.  On the basis of the original bill and the government’s press release on Friday, however, the important details seem all to be clear.

Under the previous system, deputies were elected in three tiers: in single-member districts (SMDs), in regional multi-member districts, and in a nationwide district.  Voters had two votes, at the SMD and regional levels.  The 176 single-member districts used a two-round system: a candidate could win in the first round only if she or he secured an absolute majority of the votes cast.  The regional list elections were entirely separate from the SMD tier: here, up to 152 seats were allocated to party lists (which were entirely closed) in proportion to the regional votes.  The Droop Hagenbach-Bischoff quota was used for this allocation, subject to a 5 per cent national threshold (raised from 4 per cent after the first election in 1990).  The system’s compensatory component came, finally, at the national tier.  The votes counted here were, first, all those votes cast in SMDs for candidates who were not elected and, second, remainder votes from the regional tier.  The same 5 per cent threshold applied as for the regional tier.  At least 58 seats were available for allocation at the national level, to which were added any seats not allocated in the regions.  The d’Hondt formula was used to allocate seats among the parties.

The new system is somewhat simpler than this.  There are now only two tiers: 106 seats are filled in single-member districts and 93 are elected from national lists.  Furthermore, the SMD seats are now filled in one round, using simple plurality, rather than two.  Voters still have two votes: for a candidate in an SMD and for a national party list.

Perhaps the most complex – and certainly the most unusual – aspect of the new system concerns the allocation of seats at the national tier.  In large part, the principles underlying the old regional and national tiers are combined.  Thus, the votes cast for party lists are counted, and to these the “unused” votes from the SMDs are added.  This time, however, the “unused” votes include not only the votes cast for unsuccessful candidates, but also all those votes cast for winning candidates that were not needed to secure those candidates’ election.  That is, one vote is added to the number of votes won by the second placed candidate in each SMD, this is subtracted from the votes secured by the winning candidate, and the votes remaining are then transferred, along with all the losing candidates’ votes, to the national tier.  Seats are then allocated to parties using the d’Hondt formula.  Lists remain closed.

Overall, the compensatory element in the new system is weaker than that in the old.   That is partly because the single-member districts now comprise 53 per cent of all the seats in Parliament, compared with 46 per cent before, and partly because of the inclusion of winners’ surplus votes at the national tier.  I shall analyse these effects in more detail in Part 2 of this post.

Three other features of the new electoral law are also worthy of note.  First, the franchise is extended for the first time to Hungarian citizens who do not have a place of permanent residence in Hungary.  Many of these are Hungarian speakers living in the former Hungarian territories that were lost when Hungary was reduced in size in the wake of World War One.

Second, special provisions are made for the first time for national minorities living within Hungary’s borders.  A national minority can gain a seat from the list tier of the system if it secures one quarter of a Hare quota of votes (a little less than 0.27 per cent of all the list votes cast nationally).  Minorities that do not reach this threshold will still be entitled to a non-voting parliamentary spokesperson.

Third, the conditions for candidacy and for putting up a party list are also changed.  Previously, it was necessary to gather 750 signatures in order to run as an SMD candidate.  The government originally proposed to raise this to 1,500, saying that the number of SMDs was being roughly halved, so it was right to double the signature requirement.  Many opposition deputies pointed out, however, that the number of SMDs was not being halved: it was being reduced by only two fifths.  The government compromised, and the signature threshold was raised to 1,000.  Under the old system, a party could stand a regional list if it ran candidates in at least a quarter (and at least two) of that region’s SMDs, and it could stand a national list if it ran lists in at least seven regions.  This meant, in effect, that, in order to run a national list, a party needed at least fourteen SMD candidates, backed by at least 10,500 signatures, spread across at least seven regions. Now a party can run a national list if it has at least 27 SMD candidates across at least nine regions – requiring at least 27,000 signatures.  This clearly raises the hurdles to running a national list.  On the other hand, now voters can support a party with their list vote even if that party had no SMD candidates within the region, whereas previously a party could win list votes only in those regions where it also had the required number of SMD candidates.  So the barrier to gathering votes nationwide for your national list is lower.

So much, then, for the basic description of the reforms.  What should we make of them?  Do they fit into the general pattern of ever greater concentration of power in the hands of the government or do they stand outside that?  I shall pursue answers to these questions in Part 2 of this post.

Go to Part 2.

Last week, as promised in the coalition programme, the government published its proposals for allowing voters to recall MPs who are found guilty of serious wrongdoing.  The draft bill and accompanying white paper set out procedures whereby a recall petition will be opened either when an MP is jailed for up to twelve months (longer jail sentences already lead to automatic expulsion) or when the Commons itself decides that a miscreant MP should be censured with the threat of recall.  The petition will be administered by returning officers.  If at least 10 per cent of eligible local voters sign the petition within an eight-week period, a by-election will be held.  The sitting MP will be allowed to stand in the by-election, but will have to prove his or her continuing local support in order to retain office.

Before getting into the detail of these proposals, it’s worth remembering what has sparked them.  Recall was a complete non-issue in the UK before the scandal over MPs’ expenses.  As I’ve written elsewhere, when Californian governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003 and replaced with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the British press was almost united in its condemnation of what it viewed as populist theatre.

That began to change in early 2008, when, in a precursor to the main expenses furore, Derek Conway was found guilty of serious abuse of the allowances system.  Many – notably including a group of backbench Conservative MPs – complained that there was no mechanism for voters to get rid of their wayward representative.

Little more was heard, however, until May 2009, when the Telegraph began publishing its dossier of expenses claims.  By the end of the month, recall had leapt from obscurity to become received wisdom.  All three main party leaders had backed it.  Polls had indicated overwhelming public support.  The momentum was carried forward to the 2010 election manifestos and the coalition agreement that followed.

Two main questions are being asked about the government’s proposals.  First, is it right to restrict recall only to cases of “serious wrongdoing”?  Shouldn’t voters be able to remove their MP whenever they feel that MP is not up to scratch?  Second, if the restriction is justified, is it right that MPs themselves should be the arbiters of when wrongdoing has occurred?

Some say that recall should be an option at any time.  Peter Facey, from Unlock Democracy, writes:

A proper recall system empowers citizens, not MPs or the courts. It should be up to local people to decide what issues should trigger a by-election.  By contrast, the proposals only allow MPs to be recalled if they are convicted by a court or hung out to dry by the House of Commons.  In their present form, these proposals are not worth the parliamentary time it will take to debate them.

During the protests over tuition fees last year, the National Union of Students began to campaign for the recall of Lib Dem MPs.  One student leader was quoted as saying, “in a democracy, when someone makes a pledge, you expect them to honour and fulfil that pledge. … If they flip-flop or do a U-turn on this issue, they are betraying the electorate.  It is a fundamental democratic principle that we should be able to remove them.”

A rule that allowed recall when pledges are broken would certainly not be helpful: election manifestos would need to become legally enforceable documents, which would only lead politicians to strip them of meaningful content.  So presumably the claim here is again that voters should be able to recall an MP whenever they see fit.

Several arguments suggest this course would be undesirable.  First, the presence of mavericks on the backbenches – people who are willing to swim against the tide and say unpopular things – greatly enlivens political debate and can help to save us from sclerotic groupthink.
Second, we should not want our political leaders to be slaves to public opinion.  It would be absurd to suggest that public attitudes are always well grounded.  Politicians sometimes need to take decisions that will make them unpopular in the short term.  Third, allowing recall of cabinet ministers on policy grounds would give undue power to the voters who happen to live in those ministers’ constituencies.  As I wrote in A Citizen’s Guide to Electoral Reform, “the good people of Witney are as entitled to their views as the rest of us, but the prime minister should be formulating policy for the country, not for one wealthy part of it”.

It clearly isn’t healthy for democracy when politicians break promises.  But a better solution is to scrutinize the promises more effectively when they are made.  It was always clear that the Lib Dems’ pledge on tuition fees was undeliverable, and that should have been exposed at the time it was made.  None of the parties made their spending plans clear during last year’s election campaign, because they knew that honesty would cost them votes.  Before we demand extra means of exercising control over our politicians, we should make sure we don’t punish politicians for telling us the truth.

A linked concern is that introducing recall in a restricted form will discredit the system.  Peter Facey says, “For all its promise, it does not in practice offer the voter any more power over their MP than they have at present.  By raising people’s expectations, it can only entrench cynicism.”  Michael White worries, similarly, that “the bill will create expectations that cannot easily be fulfilled”.  He draws the opposite conclusion from Facey: it would be better, he says, not to have recall at all.

It is not clear to me that introducing limited recall would, on its own, make such a difference here: after all, students were already demanding recall of Lib Dem MPs last year, before even a draft bill existed.  What does matter is that the mechanism for triggering recall command public confidence.  If public demands for recall are perceived as being blocked by an illegitimate process, further cynicism will indeed result.

That leads on to the second big question.  The government does not propose to interfere with current Commons procedures for disciplining MPs.  Thus, whether an MP is guilty of such “serious wrongdoing” as justifies triggering the recall process will be decided by a committee of MPs – the Committee on Standards and Privileges – whose report will be subject to endorsement by the Commons as a whole.

We should first clear away two unfounded criticisms of this plan.  The first is that it somehow breaches the coalition parties’ promises.  Sadiq Khan, Labour’s Justice spokesperson, says:

The fact that MPs have a final say in whether a recall petition is triggered, unless an MP commits a crime punishable with a prison sentence, is certainly not what the Tory or Lib Dem manifestos promised. This is yet another broken promise from this Tory-led government.

A range of commentators – including Christopher Hope in the Telegraph and Alex Stevenson at politics.co.uk – have followed the same tune.  In fact, however, no promise has been broken.  Both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems proposed in their election manifestos to allow recall in cases of proven “serious wrongdoing”.  Labour proposed recall of “MPs who are found responsible for financial misconduct”.  None of the parties said anything about the mechanisms by which the presence or absence of wrongdoing would be determined.  In fact, as I wrote in A Citizen’s Guide to Electoral Reform, it always seemed likely that the government would propose to maintain the current procedures.  So let’s not get sidetracked by mock outrage about broken promises.

The other unfounded criticism is the claim that the MPs will always protect their own and never allow the public a voice.  Alex Stevenson says the Committee on Standards and Privileges “is one of parliament’s most mysterious, inscrutable committees”.  He adds, “There’s a real fear that behind that screen the independence of its decisions could be compromised.”  Matthew Sinclair from the TaxPayers’ Alliance says, “So long as they have enough friends in Parliament, and avoid doing anything so flagrant it actually gets them sent to prison, they will be safe from these toothless provisions for a recall.”

In fact, the Committee on Standards and Privileges does a good job.  Its work is underpinned by the work of the independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who investigates complaints against MPs.  It does regularly sanction miscreant MPs.  Furthermore, MPs have little interest in protecting individual members whose actions harm the reputation of parliament as a whole.  As I noted above, after all, it was a group of MPs who initially called for recall in the wake of the Derek Conway affair.  It seems almost certain that recall would have been triggered in Conway’s case, and probably several others arising from the expenses scandal in addition to those that finally led to custodial sentences.

Nevertheless, for two reasons, in independent procedure for establishing wrongdoing would be preferable.  First, the procedure should be one that is free so far as possible from any danger that political considerations or ties of friendship will play a role.  It may be all too tempting for MPs to cast out colleagues who have been publicly vilified, even if their misdemeanours have been minor.  It may be tempting to retain a colleague whose future prospects seem particularly bright.  An independent process would offer a better guarantee of focusing solely on the relevant facts.

Second, an independent procedure would stand a much greater chance of commanding public confidence.  Popular cynicism towards politicians is often unfounded, but it is not about to disappear.  MPs will be shooting themselves in the foot if they cling on to the principle of self-regulation in the face of such public attitudes.

There is much talk in the government’s white paper of the Glorious Revolution and the enshrinement of parliamentary self-regulation in the 1689 Bill of Rights.  Even more anguish on this point is expressed in a recent report by the Commons Procedure Committee on the innocuous idea of adding two lay members to the Committee on Standards and Privileges.  But the Bill of Rights is intended to protect parliament from interference from the executive and the courts.  It is not intended to protect a cosy club.  The club currently does rather a good job of governing itself, but that is not good enough in our modern democracy.  It is high time that MPs, like the rest of us, were subject to independent adjudication of allegations of wrong-doing.

Taking this route would enhance their reputation.  It would also strengthen the government’s proposals for recall.

Alan Renwick’s current research into political reform debates in the UK is generously funded by the Nuffield Foundation, to whom he is grateful.  All views expressed herein and any errors are, of course, his own.

“Human rights” is a term we hear often when listening to our politicians. It’s now used when discussing almost any political subject: international relations, immigration, crime, healthcare and the legal system, to name just a few. The Human Rights Act, in force since 2000, is now a cornerstone of our legal system, though some would like to abolish or replace it.

But new research shows the extent to which this level of debate is a fairly recent phenomenon. As part of Alan Renwick’s wider research project into changing patterns of debate about political reform in the UK, I have been looking through Hansard records of parliamentary debates since the Second World War.  From analysis of all bills, debates, questions and statements in the House of Commons and the House of Lords from 1945 to 2005, a remarkably clear and consistent trend towards talk about human rights emerges. In the 1940s, the terms “human right” and “human rights” were used in Parliament around 15–40 times every year. As the graph below shows, by the 2000s, this had increased to 400–600 times – a huge change.

Source: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers database: http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk/home.do

 

Several interesting observations can be made.

Firstly, even such human rights talk as existed in the 1940s and 1950s is not really comparable to usage today. The human rights of Attlee and Churchill focused on international relations, in particular the use of human rights in the United Nations, and regarding the Soviet Union. There are very few cases of discussion of domestic human rights.

Secondly, we can observe sudden increases in usage that are interspersed with periods of relative stability. The first is in the 1974–78 period, when annual talk trebles from 68 to 203. This may indicate that the election of the 1974 Labour Government brought discussion of human rights to Parliament. The second spike mirrors this jump: the 1996–2000 period sees talk on human rights in Parliament go from 335 to 562, again following the election of a Labour government and the passage (in 1998) of the Human Rights Act. This spike continues to grow, eventually rising to 613 in 2003. These spikes have come about with the election of governments with agendas involving the promotion of human rights. The rights discussed by Wilson and Blair were clearly different from those of the 1940s and 1950s, involving domestic rights of the British people. These jumps didn’t just see a huge rise in discussion of human rights but its entrenchment in British political discourse: very little fall back follows these spikes as human rights becomes a long-term hot topic.

A notable exception to this comes around 1968 under yet another Labour government, when a spike saw human rights talk more than a double, only to fall back to average levels within two years.

The third finding is less obvious but for me the most interesting. Human rights discourse generally increases under Labour governments, particularly when such governments legislate on rights. But there is a noble exception. The 1979–97 Conservative Government, while never producing a spike, did govern over a consistent and gradual increase in human rights talk. 1979 saw 159 mentions, 1985 saw 240, 1991 276 and finally 1996 351. This increase is interesting because the Thatcher and Major governments did little on human rights. It could perhaps be explained by the opposition Labour and Liberal parties pushing for human rights measures, but other research into political reform we have conducted suggests that governments, not oppositions, generally drive reform agendas. All other political reform discussion declined in this period yet human rights talk almost doubled. This is something our research will investigate further as it progresses.

Overall we see human rights discourse in the sixty year period climb and climb, fairly exponentially. It does this consistently, with few significant drops, which sets it apart from other topics, such as Lords reform, electoral reform and freedom of information. It will be interesting in the coming years to see whether this pattern continues. Will human rights talk continue to infiltrate more and more topics of political discourse in the UK or will a plateau or turning point eventually be reached?

Finally after a busy teaching term I’ve got a chance to add some thoughts to the great post and articles by Jon Western and Joshua Goldstein on humanitarian intervention.

Bottom line: I think Jon and Joshua make a robust case that not only can intervention work, but that the international community is learning effectively how to go about it. As they argue, it is a technique of statecraft that is being refined and better understood. It might not necessarily transform societies on every metric of human well being, but prompt military action combined with due attention to the rule of law, security and institutions can fend off predators and give oppressed peoples a chance – a breathing space - to rebuild. East Timor, Sierra Leone, and who knows, maybe even Libya testify to this.

Nevertheless, when interventionism becomes a hard general principle based on moral duties, it can too readily eclipse the wider strategic picture and call for military action in a vacuum, with the perverse result that security is reduced elsewhere. And while a positive duty to protect might well result in a successful protection of a community, it also can have the unintended effect of abetting counter-atrocities.
Like much foreign policy debate in the US and also on the other side of the pond, the issue of intervention can suffer from the tendency of those on either side to rush to binary positions. Those tempermentally uneasy with intervention can be just as guilty of this as interventionists. Unless we are careful, the principle is wrenched out of any context and like the hollow catch-word of isolationism, the debate can degenerate into a contest between ‘teams’ and rigid dogmas, not a careful analysis of intervention in a wider context.(NB Jon and Joshua don’t do this – they argue that the doctrine and practice of R2P has contributed to an overall decline of worldwide violence). But the language of absolutes – of strict obligations – does violence to the discipline of strategy, of balancing morality with power, commitments with resources, the ecological effort to relate all parts to the whole.

To take the case of Libya, as others have argued here at the Duck, NATO’s Operation Unified Protector was the decisive act in making possible the overthrow of a tyrannical regime. As Jon noted, ‘In the absence of NATO’s air campaign we would not be witnessing the celebrations today. The Libyans wanted to, but probably could not have, settled it by themselves.’

True enough. We might also add that without NATO’s intervention, we probably wouldn’t be seeing the torture or illegal detention of black Africans under the new order as reported by Amnesty International and the United Nations. If not intervening where we can amounts to a kind of complicity in what follows, the states that intervened are complicit in those atrocities, indirectly. We might think we have a responsibility to protect, but that should be tempered with a responsibility to first do no harm. We might approach civil wars as a conflict between predators and victims, but they are just as often vengeful power struggles that are hard to comprehend in stark moral terms. Was rescuing a large population worth the subsequent suffering of a smaller group? Perhaps, but by speaking the language of responsibility and rights, we set a standard we will (or should) be judged by.

But even if the Libyan war went perfectly and did not have this tragic internal consequence, how will this action shape the wider security environment? From the point of view of Tehran or Pyongyang, the West once again has attacked a regime that either did not have a WMD or nuclear deterrent, or had peacefully renounced it. As David Patrikarakos argues,

Hardliners in Iran have learned an important lesson from recent history. They have just seen Gaddafi overthrown after giving up his nuclear programme in 2003, the same year that Iraq, which never had a nuclear weapons programme, was invaded. And they remember that in 2001 the US invaded Afghanistan on the grounds that it harboured and funded the Taliban, while making Pakistan, which also harboured and funded the Taliban, but had nuclear weapons, a major ally in the war on terror. The message is simple: nuclear weapons mean security.

Of course, we can’t be sure that we ‘know’ how strong this causal link is, and that the war on Libya has played a role in accelerating Iran’s nuclear programme. But its possible enough to give us pause. And it probably has added a strong ‘plus’ to the argument for acquiring a nuclear deterrent in places like Iran. It would be a bitter irony if an intervention conducted in the name of human rights and wider security had the perverse result of making Libya more unsafe for black people and adding impetus to nuclear proliferation.

To set conditions, through a frequent use of military power as a tool of liberalism and regime change, that make nuclear insurance attractive - to set the conditions for spiralling insecurity and arms buildups into the bargain – would not only be dangerous but surely inauspicious for the cause of human rights. Libyan lives matter. So too does disarmament and non-proliferation. Means matter, ends matter, consequences matter, both intended and otherwise.

So it is probably better to approach these issues in a state of prudence rather than binary absolutes. Prudence as it is classically conceived recognises the conflicted nature of most political situations, and negotiates between competing interests, with an eye for the limits of power and the ever-present potential for self-defeating behaviour. Not acting, to be sure, can also be imprudent. To act or not to act, or to choose which tools to use and when, remains a hard call. But at least a prudent way of thinking can turn attention to the relative as well as the absolute, and the bleak reality that good intentions are dangerous things indeed.