#216 – Why governments in Britain and elsewhere can't get anything done – and how to fix it (Ian Dunt on The 80,000 Hours Podcast)

By 80000_Hours @ 2025-05-02T15:43 (+9)

We just published an interview: Ian Dunt on why governments in Britain and elsewhere can't get anything done – and how to fix it. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.

Episode summary

When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants change jobs every few months, and MPs don’t grasp parliamentary procedure even after decades in office — is the problem the people, or the structure they work in?

Today’s guest, political journalist Ian Dunt, studies the systemic reasons governments succeed and fail.

And in his book How Westminster Works …and Why It Doesn’t, he argues that Britain’s government dysfunction and multi-decade failure to solve its key problems stems primarily from bad incentives and bad processes. Even brilliant, well-intentioned people are set up to fail by a long list of institutional absurdities.

For instance:

1. Ministerial appointments in complex areas like health or defence typically go to whoever can best shore up the prime minister’s support within their own party and prevent a leadership challenge, rather than people who have any experience at all with the area.
2. On average, ministers are removed after just two years, so the few who manage to learn their brief are typically gone just as they’re becoming effective. In the middle of a housing crisis, Britain went through 25 housing ministers in 25 years.
3. Ministers are expected to make some of their most difficult decisions by reading paper memos out of a ‘red box’ while exhausted, at home, after dinner.
4. Tradition demands that the country be run from a cramped Georgian townhouse: 10 Downing Street. Few staff fit and teams are split across multiple floors. Meanwhile, the country’s most powerful leaders vie to control the flow of information to and from the prime minister via ‘professionalised loitering’ outside their office.
5. Civil servants are paid too little to retain those with technical skills, who can earn several times as much in the private sector. For those who do want to stay, the only way to get promoted is to move departments — abandoning any area-specific knowledge they’ve accumulated.
6. As a result, senior civil servants handling complex policy areas have a median time in role as low as 11 months. Turnover in the Treasury has regularly been 25% annually — comparable to a McDonald’s restaurant.
7. MPs are chosen by local party members overwhelmingly on the basis of being ‘loyal party people,’ while the question of whether they are good at understanding or scrutinising legislation (their supposed constitutional role) simply never comes up.

The end result is that very few of the most powerful people in British politics have much idea what they’re actually doing. As Ian puts it, the country is at best run by a cadre of “amateur generalists.”

While some of these are unique British failings, many others are recurring features of governments around the world, and similar dynamics can arise in large corporations as well.

But as Ian also lays out, most of these absurdities have natural solutions, and in every case some countries have found structural solutions that help ensure decisions are made by the right people, with the information they need, and that success is rewarded.

This episode was originally recorded on January 30, 2025.

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

Highlights

The UK is governed from a tiny cramped house

Rob Wiblin: Why is it bad that the PM and the beating heart of British government is 10 Downing Street?

Ian Dunt: Well, it’s a house. It’s just a house. I mean, why the f***…? You know, this is a government of a major industrial state. Why on Earth would you put its government in a house?

And the only answer to that question is because you suffer from a form of pathological national sentimentality. There’s no other reason to do it. I mean, everyone knows why it’s there: because it’s unthinkable that we wouldn’t have the door. We like the door, number 10. You know, everyone knows the door, and foreign leaders come and they want to be seen by the door. And that’s it.

But what they are describing is a museum. That is what that is useful for. You cannot just try and govern a proper major economy from a house. And not even a modern house — I’m talking like a 17th century townhouse. That’s what this is…

We see teams split over three floors, and they’re supposed to work together, but of course they can’t. Instead what ends up happening is it works according to a system of professionalised loitering. And again the system takes over. You know, you arrange it, but the system will take over.

You think, “I need to just be where the action’s happening” — so people just kind of hang around. That’s what they do in government: they hang around, hoping to be there where the conversation is taking place in sort of huddles, typically around the prime minister.

Their seating arrangements are based not on any kind of reasonable assessment of how you can get anything done, but just by thinking, “How do I get the most facetime with the prime minister, and how do I act as a barricade to stop other people getting facetime with the prime minister so I can control the information that person is getting?”

These are not rational ways of organising a major project of any type, let alone running a country. And yet we persist in doing it — because we are so deeply sentimental as a country.

Rob Wiblin: … Can you elaborate on the harmful effects that it has?

Ian Dunt: Firstly, if you can’t have a team operating together, it’s really hard for them to communicate in the pursuit of the project that they’re in.

By the way, the chief of staff in pretty much every administration since the 1960s has tried to change the situation. It doesn’t matter whether they’re left wing, they’re right wing, they’re liberal, they’re authoritarian: every single one of them gets into that house and goes, “No, we can’t. We can’t run it here. This is crazy.”

So starting with Harold Wilson in the ’60s and ending with Dominic Cummings, who was chief of staff for Boris Johnson, they’ve all tried to move it out. Dominic Cummings succeeded to a certain extent: he brought them into the Cabinet Office about five minutes away, and set up a whole team there. But then immediately you just don’t have the communication. It’s fine to say it’s five minutes, but at the time that decisions are being made on a day-to-day basis — very quickly, in a matter of seconds — five minutes turns out to be a really long time, and it completely shatters the sense of a team and its ability to communicate.

So over and over you find that it proves deeply suboptimal to trying to run any kind of professional organisation.

Rob Wiblin: …So why isn’t it fixed?

Ian Dunt: I think it is sentimentality. I really don’t think it’s much more than that.

Replacing political distractions with departmental organisation

Rob Wiblin: You mentioned earlier that the prime minister finds it extremely difficult to avoid just firefighting constantly whatever happens to be in the news that day, and to focus on longer-term structural reforms, or even just implementing their basic direct policy agenda, like fixing the potholes. …

Why can’t Keir Starmer say, “It’s very hard for me to keep on top of all of the different things that are going on. I need proper staffing. I need people who are thinking five years ahead, I need people who are thinking one year ahead. I need people delivering the policies that we’re trying to focus on now.” How is that not in his interest? Can’t they get the budget for it?…

Ian Dunt: We have enough resources there for the prime minister to work effectively if they come up with effective working arrangements. We have, as you’ve just said, policy unit, delivery unit, strategy unit. We know how to deploy these units effectively, which are essentially one of them for communication; one of them for short-term delivery on objectives over the next year; and one of them thinking, blue skies over a five-year horizon, what can we do now?

We have a pretty good idea of how to set them up. We can conjoin them with the private office in Downing Street … to keep the coordination working between the departments in the centre.

And then we bring the massive bureaucracy which is in the Cabinet Office, where you’ve got about 2,000 staff. They’ve always been more the prime minister’s people than they have been for the cabinet. … You can deploy that resource. And in fact, prime ministers do.

It’s about how do you organise it? And partly, again, that is cultural machismo. We have had for so long, people around Downing Street, they walk around, they’re always just so macho. Keir Summer is not a macho guy, but the people around him… are. They’re part of that culture.

Rob Wiblin: Macho in what way?

Ian Dunt: …If any of your listeners have seen The Thick of It or In the Loop — these kind of comedies about how British politics operates — one of the key characters there is the director of communications, in this case, who just walks around just basically screaming at people. It’s like, “I’m gonna kill your mother and wear her skin as a mask to your f***ing political funeral.”

And that’s basically the language that British politics is conducted in. Just very brutal, sweary, nasty, aggressive. And I’m not gonna lie: I love that s***. I was brought up in it, and I find it very amusing indeed. Nevertheless, it’s not a particularly effective way of operating.

When at one point someone with a different mentality went into Downing Street, things improved. That person was Michael Barber, who was running the delivery unit in Blair’s second term. And he said in an interview with me, “I talked to all the other people that had this kind of job, and I just did the opposite of what they’d done.” They just did the shouty-shouty. And he was like, “You think that you’re doing s***. You’re not. You’re using up prime ministerial power. I want to amass more prime ministerial power.”

So how did he do it? He had two rules on conversations with his team and ministers where he thought they were failing. Rule #1: you will use plain language and be honest, which often means a very difficult conversation where there’s proper failure going on. Rule #2: you will leave that room with the relationship in a better place than it was when you went in. And these two things can happen at the same time. …

And that cultural change meant that they were getting huge improvements in A&E waiting times, in rail performance in autumn, in literacy and numeracy skills for kids. They started getting real results during that four-year period. It was by having a completely different cultural approach, a completely different management approach — and by grounding themselves fundamentally in evidence and in realistic targets that reflected broader institutional health, rather than the kind of posturing that we’re used to in Downing Street.

The profoundly dangerous development of "delegated legislation"

Rob Wiblin: Parliament has passed legislation that basically gives permission to the executive to write its own legislation independently —

Ian Dunt: Oh, god.

Rob Wiblin: — and sometimes run this past the legislature, and sometimes to barely even do that. I think this is called “delegated legislation.”

Can you explain how that works, and how it allows the executive to kind of bypass consulting with Parliament?

Ian Dunt: Yeah. This is a profoundly dangerous development that’s taken place…

Delegated legislation literally means what it says on the tin. So you write a law that says, in certain circumstances, we’re going to delegate the power to create legislation from the parliament to the minister. Essentially, they become their own little mini tinpot dictatorship, and they just get to do what they like.

We had it for a bill in 2018 on healthcare. It was during Brexit. It was intended to take the current reciprocal arrangements we have on healthcare with European countries and allow us to paste them over to provide continuity in the case of a no-deal Brexit. That was what it was supposed to do.

But instead of bothering to write the legislation, they just said, “You know what? We’re just going to write a few lines that says the minister’s got the power to come up with any healthcare arrangement with any country, anywhere in the world at any time.” So it’s a bill. It’s technically legislation. What the legislation says is the minister now has complete power over international…

And he can just do it as he wants. No checking with Parliament, no scrutiny, no ability for the Commons to really stand up to him in any realistic way. He could just do whatever he damn well pleases.

When one of the Lords committees looked at that, they went, “You realise that this bill allows the secretary of state for health to fund the entirety of mental health spending in Arizona?” There is no limit to what they could decide to do on the base of it, because there is no restraint in what has been allowed in terms of executive power to the minister.

We have whole areas of law that have fallen almost completely into the vortex.

And now, to be honest, the secondary effect of this is it’s gotten even worse. We have something called tertiary legislation — which is where they just hand over executive powers to other bodies. The tax revenue body, HMRC, for instance, is one of them. And it just says they can just start producing legislation whenever they damn well please as well.

No democratic input into that whatsoever, no scrutiny whatsoever, just churning out new bits of law — which, by the way, you can go to prison under these laws, and yet no one’s bothered to put it in an actual Act of Parliament.

Do more independent-minded legislatures actually lead to better outcomes?

Ian Dunt: Let’s be clear at the start: no one in this portrait of British politics comes out of it well. If we have ineffective MPs, we also have ineffective people writing their legislation at a government level. So whichever way you start finding that legislation being influenced, at the moment, we’re going to have people who don’t have a very deep understanding of the scenario that they’re looking at involved in the legislation. So yes, it’s a problem that MPs are the way they are.

We start to think about, if we give them more responsibility, what are the changes that we might see? Like with select committees, once select committees got created, really quite extraordinary things started to happen. We had a system where it was like, we’re not encouraging you to fight with the other side all the time; we’re encouraging you to use your independent mind to look at the evidence.

We found that MPs who were more likely to want to work collegiately were more likely to apply for a select committee. They’re attracted by that institution rather than the rah-rah, fighty-fighty stuff in the main chamber. And that once they entered the select committee system, they started to be more prepared to vote against the government overall. They started to be even more independent minded. So first of all, you’re attracted to the institution, then the institution encourages you in certain aspects.

Then if we just at least take the punt of equipping MPs with the information and the powers they need to give it, as I was referring to in that American example, civil service support, so that you can actually understand the legislation in front of you — rather than the current whip system, which is designed to obscure the legislation in front of you — if we start giving them the organisational support to rebel, then we start giving them the incentives to just think independently for themselves, then we are likely to see an improvement in behaviour.

I can’t demonstrate this, because obviously it’s a counterfactual. … But generally speaking, in life in general, the more respect and support you give someone, generally, the more impressive you will find the behaviour that you have incentivised in them. Whereas if you control and suffocate and incentivise them for ignorance rather than enlightenment, you will tend to get very different outcomes.

So, look, it is not cast in stone. That stuff can flip up on its head. And politics is the business of unintended consequences. But I think you’d have pretty good reasons to feel confident about pursuing that course of action. …

What we find over and over again when we look at European states — I’m thinking of places like Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany … is collegiate approaches and pragmatic approaches: “We appreciate you want to do X. We would prefer it if you approached it in Y or B, or A rather than C — because we’ve got these issues with C, and you could alleviate our concerns.” And because you don’t have that huge majority in those legislatures, the government kind of has to listen, it has to start making those compromises.

These countries, you look at them right now, they’re s***shows at the moment. I’m not going to claim that any of these places are utopias. Germany right now is facing an election that is almost existential in what is taking place. It turns out that the Netherlands is just as vulnerable to populist takeover as anywhere else, and Denmark has similar problems.

So like the rest of the Western world, they are facing these issues. But the quality of the legislation — and to be honest, the quality in many cases materially, and in terms of public services, of people’s lives — is vastly better than it is either in the UK or the US.

MPs waste much of their time helping constituents with random complaints

Rob Wiblin: MPs spend about half of their time doing constituency work, which is talking to people who live in their seats who have some or other problem. … You describe how this means that they don’t have time to do their actual job, which is having systems nationally that prevent these problems from occurring in the first place. Instead they’re just firefighting the results of the failings at a fundamental level. …

You describe an extreme case of someone saying the wrong toilet seat was delivered to them. Presumably they have grander visions for what they might accomplish at a national level —

Ian Dunt: Don’t bet on that.

Rob Wiblin: [laughs] Well, perhaps that’s the issue. But this is one where I was like, wouldn’t MPs appreciate getting support from a group that would specialise in doing this job well, so that they could then focus on their constitutional role?

Ian Dunt: I think so. I also think it would be profoundly countercultural to them to think about this idea. They’re very used to it working this way. And to be fair, for good reason: that has been historically the case for a long time. When we think of the rooms in Parliament, like places that are called lobby, central lobby — it’s because that’s where people went to lobby their MP to get them to act for them.

You know, you look at the Levellers during the English Civil War: that’s where they went to lobby their MP. You look at the suffragettes, during the fight for the female franchise: that’s where they went to lobby their MP. So this idea of you go to your MP, that is deeply imbued in the English psyche. So this is profoundly weird, I think, to suggest.

And yet there has to be a breaking point, where you can’t do your f***ing job if you’re spending the whole time answering someone who’s in an intractable payments dispute or something to do with property where there really isn’t a solution to this thing. And you certainly shouldn’t be demeaning your office by being part of it.

However, I have to say, I think MPs do kind of like it.

Rob Wiblin: It allows them to actually sometimes accomplish something, where perhaps they can’t in Parliament, because they’re so disempowered.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. That’s it. It’s such a sick feedback loop. But their job in Parliament is robbed of all meaning because the whips just tell them what to do. They have no role. They’re totally infantilised, humiliated constitutionally and professionally there.

Then they go off and you do the constituency work and it’s like, “S***, I can help. This person didn’t get their welfare payments and they deserve it. This person’s held in an immigration detention centre. Maybe I can get them out. I would feel pretty good about myself if I’d spent today getting someone out of an immigration detention centre. If I try and do that work on legislation, A, I’m going to destroy my career because the party’s never going to give me a more senior role because I’ve thought independently, and B, I anyway won’t make any difference.”

So on that basis, it’s not hard to see why they’re more pulled towards the constituency work, and that’s probably the bit they less want to reform. If you were to say to them, “We’ll get rid of any pretence that you have to evaluate legislation,” I suspect they’ll be more likely to take that reform than the one that I’m proposing.

How to keep expert civil servants

Rob Wiblin: Could you elaborate a little bit on what would be the most important things to change about the incentive structure for civil servants pursuing a career, and shifting the kinds of skills that are rewarded, the career strategy that’s rewarded?

Ian Dunt: …You basically just need to be able to reward people for picking up skills and picking up knowledge and deep subject expertise. Like a financial reward for sticking to where you are, for trying to get good people doing the things that they do.

So anytime you talk to a minister, and actually a lot of people in the Civil Service, they will have stories of the person who’s paid almost nothing and is the linchpin. And they’re just not rewarded. They’re not even socially rewarded.

The ministers that find them are very often the ones that choose to do walkarounds, rather than just sitting in their office. It’s quite easy to just sit there and let the Civil Service take over. They do walkarounds and they’re like, “Oh, so all the interesting bits in those reports that I see come from this bloke over here, and this bloke hasn’t had a pay rise in 15 years.” …

So we know the solutions to these problems: you just have to be able to reward people for doing the things that we need them to do, rather than things that we find superfluous or actively unhelpful to what we’re doing.

And the best way of ensuring that that takes place is to provide the resources and the structure, and then to hand the responsibility to the decision maker — to basically the person at the top of the department, which is the permanent secretary — and say each year, “You have to account for why have you got a turnover at 25%. This is not McDonald’s, so why the f*** is that happening in your department?” That has to be the situation, the culture and the systems that you put in place. …

Rob Wiblin: You mentioned that it’s not only specialist skills that aren’t rewarded, but — and I think this is a very common phenomenon in the private sector as well — to get promoted you usually have to become a manager. …

I think you see that across many organisations. But that’s another reform that you’d like to change: that you can get promoted within a non-management track.

Ian Dunt: Yeah. To be honest, for public sector and for private sector the same: trying to decouple this idea of management and reward is absolutely crucial. There’s so many areas where it’s like, no, they don’t need to manage more people — they’re just doing a really good job. So sometimes they’re not even needing to get any further skills. You just want to f***ing keep them, you know what I mean? Just keep on doing what you’re doing.

Rob Wiblin: Retention matters.

Ian Dunt: Right, exactly. So it’s this idea of reward, and making reward fast and making it meaningful for people when they go the extra bit for your organisation — again, whether you’re private or public. Something that you can do for them, ideally that week. Not the promise of “Stay on, and in two years’ time…” No, what can you do for them that week that will make sure that it’s there?

Our instinct so often with managing people is punishment. Which is partly why I’m not that interested in firing civil servants. Yes, of course you should have the capacity to do that. But that natural intuition we have towards firing and punishment, rather than instant reward people that are doing good work: if you’re running an organisation and you’re not thinking about this s***, then something is going badly wrong.

Unlikely heroes in the House of Lords

Rob Wiblin: For all of the non-Brits here, and I suppose some of the Brits as well, can you explain what the House of Lords is? Because it’s this quite odd institution that doesn’t really have analogue in many other countries.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, it’s the second chamber. … For years it has just been this strange, anomalous, very conservative institution. Some of the people there are hereditary peers, so they’re basically there by bloodline. A sort of remnant of the feudal age. Others are life peers, where they’re made a peer early on and then they stay there for the rest of their life. But they never have to pass an election. No one in the House of Lords is elected. There is no democratic element to the House of Lords.

And it is by far the most effective part of the British constitutional system, which troubles a lot of people. And for my own kind of liberal North London friendship group, it’s disgusting that I keep on saying that it’s very effective — because this is not a popular view, as you can imagine.

But you just have to go on the evidence that is in front of your eyes. And when it comes to the evidence in front of our eyes, it is a profoundly effective revision chamber. It is where legislation is changed, amendments are proposed. Governments sometimes accept them, sometimes they’re forced to take them on board, and we start chiselling away these small daily changes to legislation — tiny, innocuous things, not very colourful, not the kinds of things you man the barricades for, but that actually come up with effective, functioning law.

Why is it happening? There’s a couple of reasons. First one is, out of nowhere, almost by accident, we have expertise in the House of Lords. Tony Blair introduced these crossbench peers. They’re not a member of any party; they’re not Labour, they’re not Conservative. They have to have accomplished extraordinary things in their professional life — often it’s been law, it’s been business, it’s been defence, it’s been charities. And they get brought in, and suddenly it’s just like someone actually knows what the f*** they’re talking about.

And it’s true, you see the way the government responds when legislation is in the House of Lords. It’s honestly like it’s the first time they’ve even looked at their own bill. When these guys come out to play, it is seriously impressive. When you’re talking about changes on welfare, on benefits, you have proper experts in social security there who will tell you what the consequences are — to people’s lives, to the legal ramifications of what you’re trying to do, the chances of you ending up in court, what the moral consequences are — in detail. In bone-dry detail, they will look at this stuff clause by clause, sentence by sentence.

Rob Wiblin: And they’ll stick with it. They won’t just end it after a couple of hours because they run out of time, I think. Because they decide their own agenda, right?

Ian Dunt: Exactly. They control the time. Unlike the Commons, where the government just tells you how long you’ve got to do it, they say, “We’re going to spend six days. You see how you like it. We’re going to take as long as we damn well please. We will look at it in proper detail.”

And they have no party loyalty. No one can just come and go, “You have to vote this way because you’re Labour” — this sort of insane way that we operate in the elected chamber, where we think we really want MPs of conscience and independent judgement, and then as soon as they get in there, it’s like, “You better vote the way you’re told or else you can kiss goodbye to your career.” No, these guys will just vote however they damn well please…

The second thing is that the government has no majority in the House of Lords. And that’s basically why it works — because suddenly, when the government can’t just force through its agenda, it has to listen; it has to convince people. There’s a cultural trait that takes over in the House of Lords where if anyone starts just shouting party political slogans, they’re basically just made to sit down — because it is not a house for dogma; it is a house for expertise and for detail and for independent judgement on legislation. And for those reasons, it functions depressingly well.

Proportional representation and other alternatives to first-past-the-post

Rob Wiblin: The enormous, nuclear, improbable reform that you suggest is switching from our first-past-the-post electoral system — which is just where whoever gets the most votes on a first preference basis becomes the MP in a given small local area — to proportional representation, where basically parties would get seats in the parliament in proportion to the number of votes that they got nationally. A completely different system.

I think that would definitely upend the political culture in the country. Why is proportional representation better, in your view?

Ian Dunt: Because it forces parties to work together, really. I should say that the obvious argument is the most important one, but the one that I find least interesting, which is that it actually counts the f***ing votes. So generally speaking, in the UK we don’t count between two-thirds to three-quarters of the votes. We just ignore them…

If you vote for someone who didn’t win, we ignore that. That’s usually about 45% of the votes… They’re counted, but you have no representation. It has no impact on what happens in Parliament.

If you vote for the person that did win, after the point that they’ve won, those votes also just tumble into the void of nothing… Let’s say you’ve got the 21,000 votes that you need: every vote after 21,001 is wasted. You get surplus votes just piling up, enough to get an extra five MPs for each city.

So in each case, you think we’re not counting the votes. And that, in a democracy, seems like a significant problem.

Rob Wiblin: The UK electoral system is particularly insane.

…And you have this crazy ramp-up now, where if you get about 25% of the vote, you get very few seats in Parliament; if you get 35%, you have a massive majority.

This is just no way to really represent the public well. It also massively matters how broadly distributed versus concentrated the vote is. …

Ian Dunt: However, the thing that really interests me for this is just that idea of getting parties to work together… Whenever you introduce proportional representation, the same thing happens in every country. You basically split into about seven groups: you get far right, you get a communist party, you get a green party, you get probably two or three centrist parties, you get a centre-left party and a centre-right party — because that is how political thought breaks down in a modern industrial society. …

…Imagine what happens now with social care. Imagine that they come up with a proposal for social care that has defeated parties in Britain for decades now. Suddenly we’ve got three parties that have bought into this. So next time Labour falls down, but the Greens and maybe some socialist party that signed in on it, they have to be part of the coalition next time.

So because you’ve got that continuity of the parties that buy in across the range, you’ve got a much better chance of having structural long-term reforms that can work. On that basis I think it’s a far more attractive system than the one that we have right now…

Rob Wiblin:Proportional representation makes sense in theory because the parliament will reflect the range of views that you have in the population. But … a structural weakness that I see with proportional representation: that the importance of small- to medium-sized parties can fluctuate enormously just depending on fairly random changes in vote distribution.

What evidence is there that proportional representation is the solution versus other alternative electoral systems that we could contemplate implementing?

Ian Dunt: I think that’s absolutely right… it’s a genuine flaw. And you find especially people that spend a lot of time looking at Israeli history become really critical of proportional representation — because particularly in Israel, it’s an absolute f***ing nightmare. …

There’s also a bigger danger with proportional representation, which is the sense of a back room stitchup. You know, you will go out to vote, and then after vote there’s like a f***ing two-month process where all the parties go — you’re not really invited to that meeting — and they figure out how they’re going to work together. And in a time where we’re all dealing with the danger of populism, and you want everything to look as unstitched-up as possible, that process can be kind of difficult.

Rob Wiblin: You want voters to feel like they’ve had some direct control, rather than that their influence was obviated at some later stage when a bunch of people got into a back room and changed it all.

Ian Dunt: Yeah. I mean… their strength is entirely on the basis of the vote that they were given… literally representing the amount of votes that they got. That’s the amount of chips that they have on the table, the amount of strength that you can give them. …

One of the things I like about particularly models of proportional representation… is that there are systems where you can maintain constituency link as well. And they’re quite simple to operate: all you’ve got to really do is just expand the constituency so you’ve got more MPs in it, so you’ve got greater opportunity for a representation of a proper vote, and then allow people to work together on the back end.

There are of course flaws to that, but I think that the potential things that you gain from it — in terms of policy; in terms of people feeling like their vote actually counts, that it actually matters; …and in terms of the way that you can address some of the really dangerous things that happen to policymaking… — all of that means that on balance I think it looks like a much stronger system than the one we have now.

Rob Wiblin: Setting aside theory, the countries that have the clearest proportional representation systems, you’ve got Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, and maybe you can name some others: would you say… they have the best functioning legislatures? That this really feeds into having world-class governance?

Ian Dunt: Yeah. I mean, there’s counterexamples. We’ve just mentioned one of them with Israel. I think you could do another with Italy. But then you look at places like Denmark, like Germany: really impressive.

We also have to be clear about something: you’re dealing with a lot of variables, right? Even if we were just to take the variable of state power versus central power, which is obviously a very chief one that you would find in the Germany example.

And you also then have that weird stuff around culture. For its own very specific reasons, Germany is very suspicious of charisma in political leadership. You know, for good reason…

That notion is really hard to put in a spreadsheet. So of course it would be foolish of me to just start pointing at electoral systems and go like, “You see what happened? That’s what fixed it!”

We can, however, say that there is a reason that no country on Earth that didn’t have it has adopted first-past-the-post as the system that we have. And the loads of countries that, when they stopped being dictatorships — like Ukraine for instance — adopted first-past-the-post, pretty quickly went, “No, hang on a minute. We need a proportional system. This is not a very effective system.”

Rob Wiblin: Are there any systems other than proportional representation that you have a fondness for, that you think would at least certainly be a step up on what we have?

Ian Dunt: I’m a bit wary when they start becoming too complicated. … But if you sit down with a voter and it’s going to take you 20 minutes to explain how the system works, you’ve got a f***ing problem.

So what tempts me the most is just expanding the constituency. I like how easy it is. I like the fact that per capita you’ve got the same number of MPs, that you have a more intuitive link with your MP — because you think, “Who am I going to go to if I have a problem? Probably the one of the party that I voted for. I probably won’t go to the one of the party that I hate.”

I like the way that it’s all quite easy to explain using normal language, without having to bring in any mathematics. …

Rob Wiblin: Isn’t it quite a risk that you often do end up with grand coalitions in a country like Germany, and then voters feel like their will hasn’t really been represented and it’s all just elites running things behind the scenes? That seems particularly worrying right now.

Ian Dunt: And yet, where is that kind of view just as strong? Britain, the US. You know, if we have a thing about suspicion of the elites and back room stitchups, the US is f***ing prime example of that kind of narrative, and it doesn’t have any of these arrangements.

…

Rob Wiblin: We have an interview from years ago with someone who was working to promote approval voting within seats. I’m not sure whether you’re familiar with approval voting: you keep the one member, one constituency thing, but you’re allowed to vote for as many members as you want. So basically with each person you get to say yay or nay, and whoever has the most yes votes is the one that gets elected. …

Basically you can vote for the person who you like the most, and for the person who you think is likely to get up. And it makes it easier for insurgents to come in. It makes it easier for people to express what they actually like. This is a different approach of opening things up.

Ian Dunt: It’s also funny that it plays in the same area that I always find quite attractive: finding voting systems that are trying to disentangle your pragmatic from your ideal self. The classic thing you see in France is that having a two-stage process just means the first time that everyone votes with their heart, and then afterwards everyone’s like, “Does that look good to you?” And everyone’s like, “No, that looks f***ing horrific. It looks like apparently the fascists are going to get it” — and so the second time everyone votes with their head.

These experiments are kind of fascinating and useful in their way. I have to say again, as ever, I think simplicity is our friend when it comes to electoral reform. And the simplest explanation is usually the most effective.