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Following is the main part of an article by Professor Panebianco published on "Radical News" of January 1987. We have omitted parts that concerned precise references or answers to positions assumed by certain Italian researchers and politicians, the understanding of which would have called for their quote. Angelo Panebianco is a professor of Political Sciences at the University of Bologna.

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As the public opinion grows increasingly aware of the radical proposal of a reform of the electoral system in the sense of a majority vote, now endorsed by the League for an electoral reform, shaped on the British model, criticism on the part of opponents has predictably become more intense and frequent. To consider such criticism carefully can be useful to explain certain aspects of the majority proposal which have been insufficiently understood, and to better highlight its political implications. (...).

First objection: the uninominal system would not solve the problem of particularism

The uninominal system would not solve the problem of "particularism", that is, parliamentarians' dependence on particularist-lobbyist interests whose major field of action are electoral constituencies. Clearly, the majority system cannot defeat particularism, that is, the pressure of specific local interests on the elected candidates. But no electoral system can achieve this alone (...).

Second objection: particularism favours party power

The fact that there is no necessary link between party power and particularism (...) is proved by the fact that in the absence of party power (for example, in the Anglo-Saxon world, where there is a democracy of parties, not its degenerate form which we call party power) this does not necessarily imply that there is no pressure of local interests on elected candidates. Particularism, in other words, is part of any democracy, regardless of the type of electoral system in force. It cannot be avoided: no matter what electoral system is adopted, many candidates will continue to represent "particularist" interests (even in the case of a national single-member constituency, as in the case of The Netherlands and Israel).

(...) This is a problem related to an irremovable contradiction of modern political representation, a problem which has always been an object of concern for theorists of democracy: it is not enough to establish the limits of the imperative mandate by law, and constitutionally attribute the "representation of the nation" to the parliamentarian to eliminate the pressure of "fractional", particularist interests on the elected candidate.

The majority proposal therefore cannot undertake to solve a similar problem (which, I repeat, has remained unsolved in all contemporary democracies). What it can tackle is another problem, more limited perhaps (...): that of striking party power, which has thrived thanks to the proportional system, and the occupation on the part of political parties of the public sphere, which is guarantied by "corporative" conspiracy and by gains which are perpetuated by the proportional system. And, in this process, impose a simplification of choices, clear-cut confrontations between potential alternative majorities.

To fulfil two requirements

Above all, the majority proposal, by striking the party system, can at the same time fulfil two needs: to give importance, through the single-member constituency, to the single candidate to the detriment of the party (...) and to ensure the conditions (...) apt to simplify the electoral alliances, guaranteeing stable and politically homogeneous parliamentary majorities to the governments.

Lobbies, transformism, majority system

Third objection: with the majority system, Parliament would be prey to lobbies which could sponsor candidates directly.

Frankly, I believe this objection is groundless, because it presumes that there can be Parliaments "without lobbyist infiltrations" (...). Lobbies, on the contrary, sponsorize their candidates in the presence of any electoral system. I believe there hasn't been a single democratic Parliament without "lobbyist infiltrations". Not only: I wish to question not only the judgment of the fact, but also the "implicit" judgement of value. Why on earth should lobbies (...) not exist legitimately in a democracy? Why, in other words, shouldn't the representation of interests, which lobbies are the expression of, have a space in a democracy of the capitalist West? As far as lobbies are concerned, the problem is not of eliminating them; the (only true) problem is that of making their action transparent and visible to all electors. The true threat to democracy lies not in the existence of lobbies as such, but in the often occult nature of their activity. Only thus can the problem of lobbies be correctly posed in a (Wester

n) democracy.

The real difference

The real difference (...) is not between Parliaments "with" and Parliaments "without" lobbies. The real difference is between those Western countries in which the sponsoring activity of the lobbies is relatively visible and transparent, and those countries (present-time Italy is a typical example) in which lobbies' activity develops in the opposite manner, that is, non-transparently. The following step is to ask ourselves why the action of the lobbies in Italy has always been so covert. My answer is the following: the Italian political culture, in its hegemonic components, has delegitimated the representation of "particularist" interests, the ones that are precisely the object of lobbyist activities, thus creating an identification (as typical in the communist and catholic culture) between the normal activity of representation of interests and "corruption".

In such a climate, it was natural for lobbies to be accepted, but only at the condition that they operate secretly, as ensured by the current, lethal combination of preference vote and secret ballot in Parliament and the non-regulation-publicization of financing to candidates.

Only in those countries in which the political culture fully legitimates the representation of interests, can lobbies act in the light of the day. The problem therefore cannot be faced with the typical moralism of the national culture and with anathemas, because this only contributed to the perpetuation of the occult nature of lobbyist activities.

The legitimacy of the representation of interests

The problem can instead be faced first of all by giving a fully legitimate status to the representation of interests, and, on the basis of this, imposing visibility and transparency in lobbies' sponsorship (with special laws, which lack in Italy today).

From this point of view, far from aggravating the problem, the majority proposal can enable several steps in the correct direction: if the candidate is exposed as he is with the single-member constituency, instead of hidden behind his party, it is far more difficult for him to hide any links with the interests protected by the different lobbies.

Fourth objection: the cessation of party disciplines

With the majority system, party disciplines would cease, and as a consequence no stable majorities could be formed, tranformism would dominate parliamentary relations and the relations between Parliament and Government.

It is no doubt true that in the nineteenth century, before modern parties emerged and when the majority system was the most widespread electoral system in Europe (albeit combined with limited suffrage: only parts of the population benefited of the right to vote), the physiognomy of the Parliaments was more or less that (...). The experience of the twentieth century, however, contradicts this hypothesis.

If we exclude the case of the United States of America (a presidential republic with continental dimensions, with which no comparison can be made), party discipline has ceased in none of the parliamentary democracies in which a majority system is in force (Great Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand), nor is transformisms dominant. In all those cases there are parties, and with them party disciplines.

Simply, with the majority system, the existence of the parties must be combined with the importance that individualist political cultures, through the single-member constituency, attribute to the candidate and to his direct relation with the electorate (...). In the era of universal suffrage, parties do not disappear (and with them, party discipline) not even in the presence of the majority system. Nor do the cases mentioned, as a consequence, show relevant signs of transformist tendencies. On the contrary, the candidate's visibility, guarantied by the uninominal system, the fact that he has personally taken a clear and explicit commitment during the electoral campaign, act as a deterrent against transformist hocus pocus: at the following elections, the electors would remember they have been cheated.

Parties do not disappear with the majority system

Parties do not disappear with the majority system: they are nonetheless transformed. The proportional system favours apparatus parties, that is, parties dominated by party secretariats and bureaucracies which control decisions on the formation of lists. The majority system on the other hand favours parliamentary parties, that is, parties in which the effective leadership lies in the parliamentary groups. In the countries of the Anglo-Saxon world, the effective power lies in the hands of the parliamentary leaders, not of the secretariat (which among other things does not have a political relevance) nor of the bureaucratic apparatus. It is evident that if (...) the modern party is identified with the single apparatus party, the possible disappearance of the apparatus party, or its tendential transformation into a parliamentary party, which the majority system has good chances of favouring, is erroneously mistaken with the disappearance of the parties. Hence the error (...) of mistaking an anti-party proposal w

hich aims at transforming the parties, their mutual relations and their relations with the electorate with an anti-party proposal tout-court.

To reduce the weight of bureaucratic apparatuses

(...) The uninominal system, by giving importance to the candidate to the detriment of the party organization, reduces the weight of central bureaucratic apparatuses and shifts the centre of political power to parliamentary groups (this is precisely the Anglo-Saxon experience); the proportional system (...) places the candidates in the hands of the party secretariats and apparatuses. (...).

I we leave out any technical discussion, it is evident that the majority system also (and above all) proposes a choice of value; the choice in favour of a model of political democracy, the Anglo-Saxon one, which the radical party has always (since the time of Cattaneo) proposed as the example to be imitated, from the point of view of the rules of politics.

Without pretending to say that a reform of the electoral system alone can solve all the evils affecting contemporary democracies, we can say that to replace the current party power with a true democracy of parties, to stimulate clear-cut oppositions between potential majority alternatives, to give the single candidates that importance, through the uninominal system, which the individualistic cultures of the Anglo-Saxon world give them (forcing them to assume responsibilities in first person) is, of all systems, the best possible starting point.