Professor David Farrell:

It is a pertinent question about the electoral system because it comes up regularly as to whether the electoral system is a villain in the piece here. There are differing views about whether the electoral system could be changed and, therefore, we might produce a better form of politics. The problem is - it goes back to what I said at the beginning - that if one is to effect a cultural change one needs to do a radical overhaul in how our governmental and political system operates and, perhaps, changing the electoral system would help. I am prepared to accept that but it is not a magic bullet as is so often portrayed. If we changed PR-STV to a closed list system, we would get away from the ambulance chasing of constituents by parliamentarians but what one might get instead is ambulance chasing of party members by parliamentarians because now one is moving from trying to get as many votes as possible to get elected, to trying to get as many votes as possible to get selected.