German Pirate Party Scores Second State Victory
hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
The electoral systems in the UK-derived nations (geographic districts only, first past the post) expressly prohibit such broad-but-shallow movements from ever being represented in government. If the Pirate Party in a U.S. state got the same percent of the vote, they would end up with precisely zero seats in the legislature. Even if they got double that percent of the vote, they would end up with precisely zero seats in the legislature. Triple? Still zero. The U.S. electoral system is an extremely conservative one, which prevents new political movements from ever being heard in government. There are better ones, such as Germany's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament#2011_result
It wouldn't surprise me if we have Pirate Party MSPs in a few years.
[NB Scotland is still very much a part of the UK, at least for a couple of years or so!].
The Scottish parliament is one of the legislatures we're targetting -- it is good for us brecause it has a combination of (a) low threshold to get elected, and (b) low amount of money necessary to run an effective campaign.
For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote. To form a majority, the large party must strike a deal with the small party, which can dictate conditions... This happens regularly in Italian politics, and I believe in Israel as well.
Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament. This gives a lot of power to the political party itself, and whoever controls it.
Edit: Nothing against the Bloc (I am from Sweden), they are just an example.
Aurgaubly the same happens in the US as the party system is very weak and there is no comback from rebelling against the party line.
Or they simply look for someone on the other side. E.g. in Germany, SPD (social democrats) routinely ignore Left (socialists and communists) and instead deals with the conservative CDU. It's not like they have only one alternative, nor like they need a majority to form a government in most countries with PR.
I don't see this as a downside. If you only get 48%, you don't even have a mandate from a majority of voters. It is only fair that you will need to negotiate with other parties to adjust how you govern to the benefit of a larger part of the population. For that matter, this shouldn't just change at 50% either - having parties representing 50% + 1 dictate policy still leaves half the population subject to the whims of a narrow majority.
> Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament. This gives a lot of power to the political party itself, and whoever controls it.
Why is this a flaw? If voters are not happy with the candidates that are nominated, they can a) join the party and vote for other candidates during nomination, or b) vote for a different party (or form one...). With proportional representation the barrier to starting a new party with a chance of taking a seat is much lowered, and it is fairly common in European politics for candidates that does not get the support of their party to get a list together as an independent and win a seat. Sometimes that even ends up forming the basis of a new party.
I don't like the arbitrariness of the 5% threshold. But it seems to work.
However, the latter to me is just plain insanity. It is a serious flaw in that it is the opposite of WYSIWYG but applied to the most critical of institutions that forms the foundation of your society.
In addition, there is likely a high level lack of transparency and consistency because parties can internally organise themselves however they like and change it whenever and how often they like. Information and transparency changes are always slow to propagate in social systems, especially in time for the next elections. To argue voters should be better informed and act accordingly is ... systemically optimistic, to say the least. There is also the huge opportunity cost of going independent or forming another party.
So, this is, like the OP said, effectively handing over a huge amount of democratic power into a few controlling hands.
For example, even if someone left the political party or were never part of it but simply a powerful patron, they could still retain enormous control over a political party. Do you really want a George Bush, Tony Blair, Berlusconi or some economic magnate or ideologue controlling representation and policy from "political retirement", for example? :)
The downside is that you need really complex rules to reconcile cases where the two results don't match up. This is done by adding extra seats, but can lead to edge cases where a party would actually have gotten more seats if it had recieved fewer votes.
When they have the opportunity. In Italy, in recent years, the choice may have been between the communists and Berlusconi, which in my book is not a pleasant choice to have to make.
My point was that proportional systems can go wrong in certain ways, not that they necessarily will do so all the time.
One should also note that even if one party in Germany were to have more than 50%, they still don't have a very stable power:
Each member of the parlament could vote against his party. So for a stable gonverment, they would need to have a bit more than 50%
I'm fairly new to the UK, but it seems beneficial to me that MPs have exactly one well defined constituency and all voters have exactly one MP (even if it's one they didn't vote for) that represents them in parliament.
In my opinion, the upside of splitting the parties up is that it makes these particular power struggle more visible, and allows parties more flexibility in ignoring interest groups when a majority can be found elsewhere.
No such thing. There are lots of proportional systems, each of which have different proporties.
> like Italy and Israel both have
what you say is explicitly not true in Italy, where the biggest party/coalition is automatically given enough top-up seats to give them a majority.
> is that a small party can be the deciding vote, and have a much larger weight than it merits. For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote.
If the seats were split 48-48-4, then the party wih four seats would have as much power as the other two, since any two parties form a majority. But under PR, legislatures typically aren't split between two big parties and a small one. In Israel, for example, the largest party got 28 of 120 seats.
> Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament.
This is the same as with FPTP: the party decides on the candidate, and if it's asafe seat, that candidate is virtually certain to be elected. There are several systems of PR where voters not parties decide which of a party's candidates are elected: STV and open lists, for example.
Italy has fiddled with its election laws a lot in recent years, and is probably going to do so again, so what may be true right now may not have been true in year WXYZ.
What I say certainly has happened in the past: witness the downfall of the previous Prodi governments, where support from minority coalition partners tanked the government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romano_Prodi#Olive_Tree_and_fir...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romano_Prodi#2008_crisis_and_re...
Coalition governments built on many small parties are often weak.
> the party decides on the candidate
Often through relatively open primaries though. Witness the Republican race on right now. "The Party" likely wants Romney, because he's probably more electable than the others. A lot of people do not want him though, evidently.
Not to say any system is perfect, I agree with the poster who says that they all have problems. To think that one system is "the best" is a bit silly in my opinion.
If by weak you mean "cannot rule without support of representatives who collectively were voted for by most voters" then IMO that's a feature not a bug.
> Often through relatively open primaries though. Witness the Republican race on right now.
That's true. There's no reason why a party couldn't choose list candidates through an open process, however.
In the case of hammer-and-sickle flag waving communists, or racist apologists for Mussolini, that might be seen as a good thing.
Not sure 'UK-derived nations' is a very accurate description. New Zealand for one, has a mixed-member proportional system similar to Germany. Australia has preferential voting (not first past the post) and an upper house with proportional representation. I'm sure other commonwealth states must have diversity in voting systems also, despite being otherwise 'UK-derived'.
I am sure you meant that, but it wasn't clear to me.
This is true for the Westminster parliament. It is not true for other elected bodies in the UK, which use the following electoral systems, and with the approximate share of the vote you need to get elected:
London Assembly, MMP (as Germany), 5%
Scottish Parliament, MMP, c. 6%
Welsh Assembly, MMP, c. 8%
Northern Ireland assembly, 6 member STV, c. 10%
NI local government, 6 member STV, c. 10%
Scottish local government, 3-4 member STV, c. 13%
European parliament,
1 STV constituency and 11 closed lists,
varies between c. 8% and 17%
They're also "the only" party in germany that represents the interests of web-centric citizens. While the conservative parties try to regulate the internet in germany more an more (you know, germany has A LOT of regulations, everywhere) the pirate party is a good alternative.
I'm really happy about this movement, even if they don't land a huge hit after a few years, you can see more younger people getting more interest in politics etc.
Even if they don't manage to push through any meaningful changes at all by themselves, their mere presence seems to be enough to shake up the traditional parties, and show them that they need to be more open and inclusive towards the general public, and particularly younger voters.
The site is called Hollywoodreporter, no surprise.
If anybody ist interested: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,823738,00...
The core discourse is about civil liberties and resentment with the old parties.
They are not an anti copyright group. It's true that they want to see modifications made to overly strict copyright laws and oppose treaties like ACTA, data retention laws, web censorship laws (all of which have been proposed in germany in the last years).
Their core demands are: * Improve overly strict copyright laws * Improve transparency of government (open data, foia , etc) * Improve the educational system to take advantage of the internet and other "new media" in class. * Improve citizen participation in government by having public votes on more issues
They are also about the only party that has some competence when it comes to computers, the internet, etc
So, as a web-centric citizen, it was easy for me to vote for them.
A pretty good article for the germans among us can be found here:
They are anew party with some, IMHO interessting fresh approaches. And if we have a party in the parliaments of one of the biggest economies in Europe oppossing the most wierd initiatives from the content industry, well that can only be great!
In its ideal form, that's something good about the German electoral system. Due to the fact that traditionally most parts need a coalition to form a government, you can have some kind of "mixin" system, i.e. vote for a party because it adds something valuable to the whole effort, not because you could see them govern totally on their own. Especially if the party isn't tied to one particular big sibling, which more and more seems to be the case now.
Anyway, the Pirateparty also has a substantial social democratic background, so calling their stance social liberalism is probably more sensible. (Using the European meaning of liberalism.)
We do seem to like the word "social" here in Germany, even the "right-wing" parties like to use it, albeit not in the strictly socialist sense, of course. No prosperity gospel here. Probably because all the Calvinists ended up somewhere else…
Has anyone with real political influence (so, not them for now ;) addresses this issue? I suppose this was relevant before, but with more targeted parties like the Pirates, I think the faults in our election system seem more pronounced.
The reality is that a party like this is doomed to either lose votes for not having a position on anything else besides copyright, privacy and such, or lose votes by alienating the people who disagree with them on other issues.
For example, anybody can get elected at the Pirate Party atm. Try that in the established parties: I think you have to join in kindergarden and toil for decades before you can make it big in an established party. If you feel strongly about some issue, could you join an established party and hope to get heard? It seems unlikely.
In last months there were so many chances for them, but they missed every one.
For example they organised demonstrations against ACTA, but I never heard anything directly from the pirate party.
My hunch is they simply lack the political shrewdness required in these matters at the moment, but that also makes them more appealing to me, they are not just playing the same old game (yet).
PS: nice nickname :D
If you think ACTA is a bad idea I see no reason not to vote for the pirate party - they have done more for the anti-ACTA-movement than any other party. It could have been more but this does not make them unelectable...
Thank you - I like your nickname as well. .)
If they are so incompetent, but still get 7.4% of the vote, then how will will they do once they get their act together?
Is it because Germany has an electoral system that allows it? [but other nations also allow it]
Or, that Germany is technically advanced, and so one of the first nations to have a sufficiently large constituent of web-centric citizens? (echoes of Martin Luther, opposing the establishment with new communications technology) [but other nations are advanced]