"Hong Kong Lesson 1" 22. Why are Legislative Council members becoming more and more radical?

Because the parliamentary and electoral system of Hong Kong's Legislative Council encourages members to become radical. As mentioned above, the parliamentary system makes it impossible for members to gain performance through normal parliamentary means, such as proposing new proposals or new policies, and voters cannot identify their political achievements from members or political parties who propose and push bills through. What lawmakers can do in the Legislative Council is limited to raising some doubts or dissatisfaction before the motion proposed by the government is passed under the escort of the "ruling coalition". And who can get the public's attention when raising doubts or dissatisfaction has become an important means for lawmakers to strive for exposure. The congenital defects of the Legislative Council in billing and deliberation are the institutional basis for some legislators to become radical.

Theoretically, if the performance of MPs is too radical and deviates from the mainstream expectations of society, they should be rejected by voters in the election. In other words, a normal and efficient electoral system can bring a balance to the radicalization of parliamentarians. However, the electoral system of the Legislative Council in Hong Kong is very abnormal, and the model of direct regional elections encourages the radicalization of members. Since the establishment of the SAR, the direct election of the Legislative Council has always used the maximum balance method in the proportional representation system, but in practice it has become a multi-seat single-vote system that is generally avoided around the world. The academic circles believe that the original intention of this system choice is to fight against the non-establishment camp to establish a powerful political party, and it actually achieves this purpose. However, it also brought about another consequence: the fragmentation and radicalization of political parties in the Legislative Council, which in turn deepened the governance difficulties of the government.

Election methods and election results are closely related, and the same public opinion can produce very different parliamentary compositions under different election methods. In 1995, in the last Legislative Council election under the British Hong Kong government, a simple majority system of the single-seat, single-vote system was adopted for district direct elections. Because under this system, only one vote counts as a win, which is the so-called "winner takes all". Suppose a faction in several constituencies receives two-thirds of the votes in each district. Since each district obtains the majority of the votes, the 100% of the seats can be taken. In other words, this system will allow the support of the majority of voters, allowing the factions they support to get more seats, which is academically considered beneficial to parliamentary stability. This election was the only time in Hong Kong's history that pro-democracy MPs held a majority.

It is conceivable that the SAR government will not allow the same election results to appear again. As a result, the government decided to change the electoral system to proportional representation in 1998. In theory, proportional representation can bring about a relatively balanced distribution of seats. Assuming that there are originally five constituencies with one seat each, they can be combined into a single constituency with five seats. Candidates stand for election by list and are allocated seats according to the proportion of the votes received, such as two-thirds of the votes. The top three on the list are elected, and the top two on the list with one-third of the votes are elected. On the surface, this should be a relatively fair approach.

However, in Hong Kong, considering that the entire parliament itself is not elected by universal suffrage, and the existence of functional constituencies makes the distribution of seats itself an advantage for the establishment camp, it would be paradoxical to ask for a relatively fair election method on the side of direct regional elections. This, in turn, brings a relatively unfair party composition to Parliament.

The replacement of the electoral system has obviously changed the party ecology of the Legislative Council. The Democratic Party's largest party, the Democratic Party, won 12 seats in direct regional elections in 1995, but fell to five in 2016. In addition to the seats of the functional constituencies, in 1995, the members of the Democratic Party accounted for 32% of the entire parliament, and in 2016, it fell to 10%, and their influence was not as strong as before.

The consequence of cracking down on big political parties is to create political party divisions and a mountain-topped parliament, bringing chaos to the operation of the parliament. Fragmentation is based on the fact that the maximum balance method makes any list of candidates seeking more than one seat a waste of votes. For example, the New Territories East and New Territories West constituencies each have nine seats, that is, the standard electoral threshold is one-ninth of the total votes, or 11%, and whoever achieves this proportion can win a seat. However, when the number of votes without a list exceeds the standard threshold, the seats will be directly allocated to the list with the highest remaining votes. Generally speaking, only 7% of the votes can secure a seat. In other words, if the goal is to get one seat on a list, candidates don't really need to aim for 11% of the vote, as long as around 7% is enough. But if you want to get two seats on the same list, you need 11% plus 7%, or 18% of the votes to win the second seat.

At this point, any candidate at No. 2 on the list will ask: Why am I so stupid to be No. 2? If I came out and ran for myself, it would be a lot less difficult to get elected than in second place. This system setup essentially encourages every political party to quarrel internally before the election as to who is ranked first on the list, and every time the party loses the second place, there is a great incentive to quit the party and run for election independently. Elected alone. Since only 100 local voters can sign up for the Legislative Council election, the institutional requirements for independent elections are not high, and political party fragmentation can easily occur.

From a historical perspective, in the first Legislative Council election in 1998, there were five seats in New Territories East, and a total of 11 lists for the election. By the time of the fifth Legislative Council election in 2016, there were nine seats in New Territories East, and a total of 22 lists were contested. The number of lists has made it difficult to even hold an election forum, to find a venue where all the candidates can attend together, and the time each person can speak has become very limited. Judging from the results, the non-establishment camp won 27 seats in the fourth Legislative Council election in 2012, of which 19 were from political parties with more than one member, and the remaining eight were independent members or members. From a "one-person party" (i.e. a party with only one legislator). In 2016, among the 29 members of the non-establishment camp, 12 were independent members or from the "one-person party", witnessing the trend of fragmentation.

By the way, in order to avoid dealing with the issue of sorting lists and try to win the most seats, larger political parties sometimes take the initiative to split their lists to run for election, that is, to send more than one list to run for election in the same constituency. This approach maximizes the influence of votes if votes are evenly distributed among the different lists. To do this, organize supporters to vote. Political parties in Taiwan are relatively proficient in this regard, for example, suggesting that voters allocate their votes by month of birth or the last digit of their ID number to achieve an even distribution. Voters in Hong Kong are not accustomed to similar balloting methods, and the more effective method is often to use "responsible areas" to allocate ballots. Taking the 2016 Legislative Council election as an example, Chen Hacken and Ge Peifan of the DAB were elected in the New Territories East, with Chan Hacken in charge of North District and Tai Po, and Ge Peifan in charge of Sha Tin and Sai Kung. As a result, 78% of the votes for Chan Hak-kin came from the North District and Tai Po, and 88% of the votes for Ge Pei Fan came from Sha Tin and Sai Kung. The strategy was very successful. However, this ticket allocation model has not been successful in the non-organized camp. One of the reasons is that the fragmentation of the non-organized camp is more serious and obvious than that of the established camp.

In theory, the issue of fragmentation will impact both the establishment and the non-establishment camp alike. In fact, the establishment camp will accept coordination before being elected, and those who do not obey will not be able to get the support of the election resources of the central government's agents in Hong Kong. Relatively speaking, the non-establishment camp does not have many electoral resources, and thus loses the incentive to unite. Public opinion often criticizes the non-establishment camps for failing to unite or even attacking each other, ignoring that objectively, they have no great incentive to unite, but there are many incentives to split. Partisan disputes are just a symptom.

I mentioned just now that ballot matching can theoretically maximize the influence of ballots. After several elections under the Hong Kong-style proportional representation system, voters have also discovered the importance of ballot matching. When they believe that a candidate has enough support to be elected, or that its support is too low to be elected, they will consider switching to support a candidate in the same camp with a marginal support in an attempt to increase their votes. Influence. Therefore, when the election is approaching, the voices of "emergency" and "abandonment of bail" in the same camp will be very enthusiastic, and the votes will be decided by the voters. However, due to the limited precision of public opinion polls, it is impossible to support rigorous voting operations, and voters are often rushing to allocate their votes according to rumors, so that every term will appear "urgent candidates have more votes, and the originally estimated vote kings are not. Accidental loss". In the general election of 2012, there were three out of five districts where the non-establishment camp received more votes in total, but because of the uneven number of votes, there were fewer seats than the establishment camp.

In short, the Hong Kong-style proportional representation system is actually a multi-seat single-vote system. Each voter can only cast one vote, and the candidates with the first few votes are elected. It is precisely because the multi-seat single-vote system encourages "strategic voting" and cannot reflect the true preferences of voters, many countries around the world have abandoned it.

Returning to the question of radicalization, the Hong Kong-style proportional representation system is the main basis for radicalization. If the election is carried out by a simple majority system in the single-seat single-vote system, in order to avoid the situation of "snipe and clam fighting, the fisherman wins", there will be great incentives for different factions to coordinate two candidates to confront each other. The goal is to win the support of a majority of voters in the constituency. In this case, candidates under this system tend to avoid being too radical in their platforms, so as not to offend dissociated voters in the middle. On the contrary, in the Hong Kong-style proportional representation system, since politicians only need to please around 20,000 to 30,000 voters to be elected, even if they offend hundreds of thousands of voters, it will not affect their chances of winning. Individual MPs choose to go radical, which can better stabilize their support.

It is worth noting that the fragmentation of the Legislative Council itself is the goal that the Central Government wants to achieve. According to Professor Liu Shaojia, who was in charge of constitutional work in the Preparatory Work Committee of the Special Administrative Region Preparatory Committee, the guiding ideology when designing the election method of the Legislative Council was to ensure the leadership of the executive and avoid the emergence of a single large party in the Legislative Council. As mentioned above, in the last Legislative Council election in 1995, the Democratic Party became the largest party with 32% of the seats; in the 2016 Legislative Council election, the DAB won only 19% seats, has been able to become the largest party. Changes in the electoral system have caused the Democratic Party to lose its position as the largest party, while other parties cannot gain an equally influential position. When the power within the Legislative Council becomes more and more dispersed, the Legislative Council cannot become a force within the Hong Kong political system that can counter the central government's interference in Hong Kong's internal affairs.

Regarding the fragmentation of the Legislative Council, there is an important footnote that needs to be added. Theoretically, even if the electoral system makes the Legislative Council numerous, it will not necessarily lead to chaos; Participants must consider other allies and cannot act alone. Back in the 1998 SAR's first Legislative Council election, in order to deal with the unprecedented financial crisis, various factions in the Legislative Council formed an "eight-party alliance" regardless of their political stance to show solidarity to the public in the face of the crisis. Since they have an overwhelming majority of votes in the Legislative Council and have the veto power over the government's proposals, the proposed plans to revive the economy and relieve people's hardships will be accepted by the government. However, the "eight party alliance" failed to continue after 2004. According to the members of the establishment camp at the time, the reason behind it was the opposition of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government. They believed that a strong Legislative Council did not meet the original "executive-led" vision, so they asked the establishment camp to withdraw and become the government's "governing coalition" . From this point of view, the chaos in the Legislative Council is to some extent the result of the central government's willingness to see it and even to actively promote it.

Going back to the trend of radicalization of individual members, many elected members have chosen to regard the parliament as a venue for political performances in recent years, bringing street protest tactics into the parliamentary hall to attract the attention of the media. Their actions are sometimes criticized for not being serious or respecting the solemnity of the parliament. Individual members are often expelled from the chamber after being ruled by the chairman of the meeting that they violated the rules of procedure. But for the supporters of these "rebel parliamentarians", their parliamentarians' "doing things" in the chamber is fulfilling their election promises, and it is a "responsible" performance.

Conflicts in the chambers have also become common as Parliament has become a venue for political performance, with the 2016 Legislative Council swearing-in bill particularly far-reaching. Article 104 of the Basic Law stipulates that members of the Legislative Council "must take an oath in accordance with the law to support the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China and to be loyal to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China" when they take office. express dissatisfaction. For example, after Leung Kwok-hung was elected to the Legislative Council for the first time in 2004, he added other content before the recitation of the oath, and interrupted the recitation by means of punctuation. The Legislative Council Secretariat still stated that the oath was still valid. Afterwards, many MPs used props or clothing to express their political stance before taking the oath. Among them, Huang Yumin took the oath while coughing in 2012, and was only asked by the chairman to re-swear the oath at the next meeting.

In 2016, some elected members followed these precedents and expressed their political positions in various ways during the oath-taking process. However, their actions this time caused widespread political repercussions. As a result, the elected candidates Liang Songheng and You Huizhen were not arranged to take the oath again. The government immediately asked the court to prohibit Liang Junyan from taking the oath for them again. The interpretation of 04 articles has caused widespread controversy. Later, the government revoked the membership of Lau Siu-lai, Yao Songyan, Leung Kwok-hung and Law Guan-cong, who had already been confirmed by the Legislative Council as valid under the oath, through judicial review.

In the final analysis, the fact that the parliament has become a venue for political performances is only a symptom of the problem, and the latter is the institutional failure of the Legislative Council itself, which prevents it from functioning as a normal parliament, thus changing the expectations of members and voters on the parliament itself. To solve the problem, the system of the Legislative Council itself must be substantially changed. First of all, the Legislative Council should completely abolish functional constituencies, eliminate the problem of multiple votes by one person and group votes, and rebuild the recognition of the Legislative Council, so that members can carry out meaningful political work. As for the electoral system, there are also many reform proposals in the academic and political circles, such as implementing a parallel system of proportional representation and a single-seat single-vote system, and changing the counting method of the proportional representation system from the maximum balance method to the highest average method. And setting minimum election thresholds, etc., can reduce the pressure of fragmentation.

Given the current political situation in Hong Kong, neither the parliament nor the electoral system can be ideally revised. Therefore, under the premise that the Legislative Council cannot play a normal role, the Legislative Council Chamber will inevitably become a venue for political performances. After all, at least there are pictures to watch, which brings more social benefits than sitting down and voting for or against. focus on. The performance of the members does not seem to focus on the system, but their behavior just reflects the abnormal system of the Legislative Council.

Further reading:
Ma Yue, Cai Ziqiang (2003): The Political Effects of Electoral Systems: The Experience of Hong Kong-style Proportional Representation, Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press.
Cheung, CY. (2018). Stalemate in the Legislative Council of Hong Kong Disarticulation, fragmentation, and the political battleground of “One Country, Two Systems”, in Lui TL, Chiu SWK, and Yep R (eds) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Hong Kong , p132-155.