Those can have some serious problems in practice too.
I spent a number of years in Italy, and several come to mind that I saw there:
* Representatives are beholden to the party, not to some local area.
* Smaller parties can play 'kingmaker'.
I spent a number of years in Italy, and several come to mind that I saw there:
* Representatives are beholden to the party, not to some local area.
* Smaller parties can play 'kingmaker'.
It has some real advantages (it's nice being able to vote for someone that actually agrees with you AND not have your vote be wasted), but my experience in New Zealand is that:
1. It enhances the power of parties and thus increases partisanship
2. It allows small parties to play kingmaker. In the NZ case, the perennial kingmaker party is corrupt and virulently nativist.
If, hypothetically, you were concerned about the partisanship, corruption, and nativist policies of current American politics, PR may not be the panacea you hope. I think it was quite unlikely for the American system to yield Trump as president (we just got very unlucky) but it would be quite likely for a PR system to yield Trump as a kingmaker with a vastly outsize influence on the policy of the resultant government. That's not obviously better, on balance.
Actually I'd be interested in seeing some kind of delegative democracy system like Liquid Feedback. It has some features in common with PR (mostly the emphasis on having to negotiate a coalition given the voting results), but I'm hoping it wouldn't share the problems you outlined?
Hmm, now you mention it, didn't something like that happen to the Weimar Republic?
There was kingmaking of a more personal kind going on behind the scenes, but not of the minor-party-exercises outsized influence kind.
Enhancing the power of parties is a function of systems that establish proportionality by party list (either wholly or by MMP) more than it is directly of proportionality (proportionality vs. a duopoly-reinforcing system encourages party cohesion, because it reduces the cost of people splitting off to form their own party because they dissent from existing parties, but that decreases rather than increasing the power of parties, in that the party majority or leadership -- outside of party list systems -- has less that they can threaten wayward members with to keep them in line.)
The second is just making visible a problem that exists even in the US system with intraparty factions.
Similarly, for the second, the US has two very strong political parties and this would really only change House of Representatives (one portion of one branch of the federal government) so the kingmaking power would be extremely limited as the vast majority of the Senate & Presidency would still end up with the stronger parties.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...