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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

For the political hackers: note that these victories are made possible by Germany's proportional representation system, which guarantees seats in parliaments to any party which gets more than 5% of the popular vote across the state/city/whatever. Thus parties with broad but shallow support do get represented in government.

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.

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> 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.

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%

Incidentally, I am a Pirate Party UK candidate standing in Edinburgh this May -- http://edinburgh.pirateparty.org.uk/

> The electoral systems in the UK-derived nations (geographic districts only, first past the post)

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'.

Ireland also has a PR-STV system, aswell as multi member constituancies.

The Scottish Parliament actually has an element of PR, so we do get some minority parties with seats:

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!].

Ah, I didn't know Scotland had MMP. Good for you. I was thinking of the U.S., Canada, and UK main parliament.

> It wouldn't surprise me if we have Pirate Party MSPs in a few years

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.

Which electoral system is better is another discussion. Both have their flaws, but a pretty good discription of how elections work in Germany.

One serious flaw of the proportional system, like Italy and Israel both have, 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. 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.

This also happens in the Britsh system with regional parties. For example the Bloc Quebecois have often had way larger political power than their voter base.

Edit: Nothing against the Bloc (I am from Sweden), they are just an example.

And Poor John Major was held to ransom by the hardline Unionist parties in the UK a few years ago.

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.

> 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...

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.

In practice, they use the 5% threshold in Germany to keep the number of parties down to a reasonable limit. Israel doesn't have this limit. I don't know whether they have a limit at all, or whether it's just rather low.

I don't like the arbitrariness of the 5% threshold. But it seems to work.

Last I heard, Israel has a 2% limit.

I agree with you regarding the former.

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? :)

Note that Germany (as well as New Zealand and Scotland) actually has a mixed system for the Bundestag (lower, more important chamber of parliament) where roughly half the seats are determined by a district-based first past the post system and the others by a proportional system, with each voter having two votes.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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%

It sounds nice, but in places like Israel you end up with governments headed by a party that took just about a 15% mandate, coalescing with two partners that took a 13% mandate and a shit-ton of small single-issue parties that got something like 3% each. One Member of the Knesset deciding to swing can topple the government or force a coalition realignment.

On feature of (Nordic party list) PR that irks me: With near perfect proportionality, you loose (geographic) ties to a specific block of voters. Because a large proportion of MPs are elected on the coat tails of "vote magnets" and the general performance of the party, the party becomes more important than the candidate. Owing your mandate to an artefact of the D'Hondt method and not the fact that you got more votes than the other guy does no favours to your attachment to voters.

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.

This isn't really a problem of the proportional system - given a large party narrowly over 50%, relatively small interest groups within the party will start gaining extraordinary weight as well. Just think of the tea party.

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.

An even more extreme example is Japan: the LDP was in power from 1955 to 2009 (except for two years in 1993-1994), with the result that actual policy decisions (as well as who go the highest political offices) were negotiated between factions within that party.

Here in sweden the party decides who are on the list, but the voter can prioritize candidates they like.

> One serious flaw of the proportional system

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.

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.

> what you say is explicitly not true in Italy,

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.

> Coalition governments built on many small parties are often weak.

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.

I mean 'weak' in the sense that they often fall apart, causing lots of waste and shuffling of chairs.

And the alternative winner take all the small party has 0 say. Or I should say, the people have no say. No matter which party we vote for, they are all just different sides of the same coin.

I don't think that's such a huge problem, and I think it may even be preferable than the small party only having proportional power. The reason for that is that if they only had proportional power, small parties wouldn't be able to accomplish anything, ever.

> The reason for that is that if they only had proportional power, small parties wouldn't be able to accomplish anything, ever.

In the case of hammer-and-sickle flag waving communists, or racist apologists for Mussolini, that might be seen as a good thing.

The Economist had a nice line: "Germany is a country that only works in practice."

I don't suppose you have a link to whatever article's that from? I'd like to read it, but google's not bringing it up.

I think it was from the Economist's special report on Germany. See the series of articles starting at http://www.economist.com/node/15641069?story_id=15641069 .

Just to be clear, the pirate party (with 7.4%) is in the parliament, not in the government. The government will most likely consist of a coalition of the parties CDU and SPD, so that the Pirates will be in the opposition.

I am sure you meant that, but it wasn't clear to me.

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