There has been much talk, some of it dangerous, about how to stabilise municipal governments in the age of coalitions.
Smaller parties, some of them with only one elected person, become kingmakers when no party has an overall majority and larger parties must compete for allies to achieve a ruling majority. After a coalition is formed, it can be collapsed when tiny parties switch sides, often lured by promises of lucrative offices such as mayorships and membership of executive councils.
One proposed remedy is to levy penalties on councillors who collapse coalitions opportunistically, though such penalties would clearly have to carry more weight than the incentives being offered to defect. Another is enforced waiting periods before party switching.
An idea that is gaining traction is mandatory coalition agreements, which might include legally binding terms of office, compliance with procedures such as mediation, and restrictions on motions of no confidence.
The danger here is that a coalition set in stone can lose touch with political realities on the ground. If a week is a long time in politics, as UK prime minister Harold Wilson noted, five years (the standard life of all elected assemblies in South Africa) is an eternity. Coalitions must be able to adapt to changing conditions, policies and personalities.
In his 1774 speech to the voters of Bristol, Edmund Burke drew a famous distinction between a delegate and a representative in parliamentary democracy.
He argued that a delegate is one who is expected to act according to direct instructions from those who voted for him. However, an elected representative should not simply obey the immediate wishes of voters as if he were a messenger. “Your representative owes you,” said Burke, “not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
Delegate or representative, Burke assumed that the person elected was accountable directly to the voters. This was the principle of the constituency system used for white elections in apartheid South Africa, inherited from Britain, where it is still used.
However, under the proportional representation (PR) system used now for elections in South Africa, the elected person does not owe their seat to the voters of a particular town or suburb. The power is with the party, which is allocated seats according to its percentage of the total votes and distributes them as it sees fit.
That is why our MPs and MPLs are merely delegates under Burke’s definition: they must obey the party bosses or be replaced. Often, they are the municipal pawns in a wider political game played by their parties.
Our municipal councillors would be far more likely to behave as true Burkean representatives if they had to answer directly to people in their wards, and so be more likely to do what is right for their city than seek self-enrichment. Direct election (which survives for some municipal seats) would also instantly eliminate representatives of tiny parties that get as little as 1% of the overall vote.
Unstable governance is not the fault of small parties but of a PR system that simultaneously gives parties too much power and makes fractured representation inevitable.
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