The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (249 page)

single transferable vote
(STV)

A system of
proportional representation
in use in Ireland, Malta, and for some elections in Australia; also popular among clubs and societies. A number (usually between three and seven) of seats are filled simultaneously. Each voter lists the candidates in order of preference. First preferences are counted. Those candidates who have achieved at least the
Droop
quota (V/ (
n
+
1
), rounded up to the next integer, for an
n
-member seat in which V valid votes have been cast) are elected, and their ‘surplus’ votes are transferred to the next candidate, if any, on those voters’ lists. Surplus votes are weighted: thus, if the Droop quota was 1,200 and a candidate obtained 1,400 first preference ballots, each of those is assigned to the second preference named on it with a weight of 200/1,400. When no further candidates can be elected by this route, the candidate with the fewest first preferences is eliminated and his or her second preferences transferred with a weight of one. The process continues through redistribution of surpluses where possible and eliminations otherwise, until
n
candidates have been elected. The main property of STV is that each faction or party is guaranteed as many seats as it has Droop quotas of first preference votes. A secondary property, in evidence in Ireland, is that it encourages candidates of the same party to compete against each other; as they cannot normally compete on ideology, they tend to compete on the conspicuous provision of local services. STV is more popular among electoral reformers than among social choice theorists. The latter complain that the concept of ‘wasted vote’, on which the rationale of transfers depends, is ill-defined, and that the elimination process is arbitrary and non -
monotonic
.

 
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The property that the available options can be ranked along a continuum in such a way that every voter's preferences can be represented in one of three ways:

(1) she likes the ‘left'most option best and each successively more ‘right'ist option less the more ‘right’-wing it is;
(2) she likes the ‘right'most option best and each successively more ‘left'ist option less the more ‘left’-wing it is;
(3) she likes some intermediate option best and each other successively less as it becomes more ‘left’- or ‘right’-wing.

‘Left’ and ‘right’ are so printed because the continuum need not be literally from
left
to
right
. If single-peakedness holds, the median voter's favourite option is the
Condorcet
winner, and will win a simple majority vote against any other. If it does not hold (for instance, because some voters consider the ‘centre’ option the worst, however the options are arranged along the continuum), then there may be a
cycle
in majority rule. See also
Condorcet
; Black .

 
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Translated as ‘ethical life’ from the writings of
Hegel
. It refers to the ethical norms which arise from the interaction of a person's own subjective values and those objective values present in the institutions of society. When these values coincide man, according to Hegel , is free.
IF 

 
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The condition in which the life, liberty, and fortune of an individual is held within the absolute power of another. The English word derives from
Slav
, because Slavs were frequently slaves in the Dark Ages. The first challenges to slaveholding arose in ancient Greece, and
Aristotle
produces a somewhat embarrassed justification of slavery, arguing that some people are slaves by nature. As has often been remarked, the movement for American independence produced the Declaration of Independence with its claim ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness’. But the Declaration was written by the Virginian slaveholder Thomas
Jefferson
, who never got round to freeing his own slaves in his lifetime. First the slave trade and then slavery were abolished in the British Empire and in America during the nineteenth century through a combination of principled argument, political advantage, and the Union victory in the American Civil War (1861–5). Slavery is still reported to exist in a number of countries, notably Myanmar (Burma).

 
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(1723–90)
Scottish philosopher and founder of classical economics. Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Smith spent his most of life in Scotland and formed a bridge between the Scottish and French
Enlightenments
. After his youthful studies at Glasgow, where he probably studied under the leading figures of the early Scottish Enlightenment, Smith went to Oxford, from which he concluded that ‘In the University of Oxford the greater part of the professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching’. Thereafter, Smith had little intellectual or social contact with English people or institutions. As a Scot with closer ties to France than to England, Smith much resembled his close friend David
Hume
. From 1752 to 1764 Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow;
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759: hereafter
TMS
) arose from his lecture course there. In 1764 the offer of a post as tutor to a young aristocrat enabled Smith to resign his chair in Glasgow and travel in France, where he met the
physiocrats
, before returning to Scotland to work for ten years on
The Wealth of Nations
(1776: hereafter
WN
). His innocent revelation of the dying Hume's stoical atheism in 1776 ‘brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain’. In 1778 he became Commissioner of Customs for Scotland. This curious choice enabled him to see at first hand the distortions of trade and (what would now be called)
rent-seeking
that always surrounds the politics of tariffs. There are no signs that Smith felt unease at doing the sort of job—and doing it very conscientiously—which his economic and political theory castigated as worse than useless. His last public role was as Rector of Glasgow University (1787).
The unity of Smith's thought is more clearly seen now than it once was. The moral sentiment on which he placed most trust in
TMS
was sympathy. Sympathy—the knowledge that one shares others’ feelings—is presented as the basis for co-operation, both in fact and normatively: ‘O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us | To see oursels as others see us!’ (Robert Burns ,
To a Louse
: Burns probably knew Smith's work, and the phrase ‘if we saw ourselves as others see us’ is Smith's). But
TMS
does not go so far as to say that there is enough benevolence to make the world go round unassisted; and it introduces the idea of the invisible hand in a passage describing how the investment of the surplus of the rich unintentionally benefits the poor. Smith's return to the invisible hand in
WN
moves the stress further from sympathy towards self-interest. Although ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’, still each individual's pursuit of his own gain leads him ‘by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’. ‘Sympathy’ for Smith has a wider meaning than in modern English, and in the wide meaning all these phenomena show sympathy at work. Like
TMS
,
WN
is partly descriptive and partly normative. It opens with a description of the
division of labour
, which Smith sees as the foundation of the wealth of nations. In his famous opening example, a workman in the ‘trifling’ manufacture of pins might at best make twenty pins a day if he had to do all the operations himself, whereas even an ‘indifferent’ factory where ten men worked, each on a different task, could produce 48,000 pins a day. Therefore the process in which labourers hire themselves to capitalists, who organize industry on the basis of the division of labour, makes everybody in a capitalist society richer than even the richest members of a non-capitalist traditional society. From this Smith argues towards his general prescription in favour of capitalism,
laissez-faire
, and free trade.
Every school of political thought has found an Adam Smith to suit it. To
Marx
, Smith advanced the
labour theory of value
, making mistakes which it fell to Marx to correct. Marx also accepted that Smith was right descriptively about the division of labour, but failed to understand the
alienation
to which it led. Defenders of
laissez-faire
have found a spiritual father in Smith, but their opponents have also found sustenance. Smith believed that defence, public works, and education ought not to be left to the market, and defenders of protectionism and of government intervention can quote Smith in their support.
Both of Smith's books are full of ironic asides (
‘Place,
that great object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the labours of human life’,
TMS
; ‘the discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters’,
WN
). The asides seem to make him a precursor more of the
public choice
school than of any other school of political or economic theory.