> None of the countries using PR suffer from the sillinesses arising from FPTP
Frankly, I'd be surprised if they did. It seems much more likely that they'd suffer from the problems of PR instead.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if they did. It seems much more likely that they'd suffer from the problems of PR instead.
- Clusters of minority populations tend to not get as much representation, because they are but a small voice in a bigger ocean of voices.
- Representatives can't focus on representing a smaller geographic area, including field offices, outreach, constituent services, etc as easily, because they have to represent a much broader geographic area.
- A lack of community ties, as representatives are representing a broader geography, the representative is less likely to know the names, places, and small cultural quirks associated with the communities they represent.
The resulting problems are actually the opposite: very small clusters of voters typically end up wielding a disproportionate amount of power. That's because PR invites people that are ideologically affine, to run separately, effectively campaigning against their "friends". It's obviously better, for any given politician, to be the head of a 5% party than being a "rank&file" in a 30% one. The resulting fragmentation has to be later recomposed with alliances to form a government, which will go on bickering constantly; and it often results in executives that can count on very thin majorities, increasing overall uncertainty to bad overall effects (instability, higher borrowing costs, etc). Such executives then have to spend inordinate amounts of political (and often monetary) capital, appeasing very narrow interests. One of the most infamous expression of such dynamics is the Italian experience from 1948 to 1994, but also France before Napoleon III, Weimar, etc.
This is why modern PR systems end up with forceful thresholds, where a party with less than 2 to 6% is kept out of parliament - but that's literal, direct disenfranchisement, not particularly better than the indirect one resulting from FPTP.
IMHO the better approach is FPPT but with ranked voting to reach 50%. This reduces the worst distortions of FPPT (i.e. "winners" literally hated by 60-70% of the electorate), while promoting a balanced approach to minority interests.
I mean what are political parties under FPTP other than alliances to form a government? Bickering is rather common within them.
Democratic politics always requires a broad coalition of different interests and groups to assemble a majority. I'm not convinced voting system changes that much, but tensions may erupt in different ways under different systems.
"Within" being the key word. It's a completely different level, believe me.
The last 6 years of UK political life have been exceptional, and the overall sentiment is that they were pretty bad. They were also absolutely run of the mill from a PR perspective: a new executive every few months, elections every 3 years or so, a constant fight to reconcile fundamentally un-reconcileable positions, extreme public brinkmanship, etc etc. PR will fix nothing of that, it will only make it worse.
Where I think a broader range of parties would benefit the US system is reducing the degree by which measures and bills are passed and opposed along consistent party lines. With more parties, there would be coalition building that would encourage more negotiation and cooperation.
Germany addresses them by doing a FPTP pass and then filling the remainder of the parliament such that the overall parliament has PR according to a second, independent vote given at the same time. This creates some other issues again, but works surprisingly well for the most part.
It was successful enough that it also served as a blueprint for the Eastern European countries once the Soviet Union fell.
Always puzzles me why these three countries never took the opportunity to learn from their very own experiment.
It's very difficult to change the existing system because the people currently in power are there because of the way the system is built, so any change will almost by definition be disadvantageous for the people who have the power to change it.
Which in the US is actually 51 separate governments consisting of the Federal government which only has enumerated powers, and also the 50 sovereign states.
In NZ, citizens vote for a candidate in each of the 60 electoral districts and so they get the representative that they vote for. Similar to Germany? Also our citizens vote for a party, and the other 60 seats of parliament are filled from lists of candidates (one list created by each party). The 60 seats are allocated to candidates from the lists, selected so that that we have the same percentage of members in parliament to match up the percentages of party votes by citizens.
New Zealand gets members of parliament that were chosen by the party. That is a problem because those members have no constituency: citizens can't really vote out someone (because a party selects some of its members).
I personally think that a critical feature of democracy is being able to vote out someone we dislike. I'm sure we can think of undemocratic countries where they would love to vote out a disliked politician. MMP fails here: citizens can't vote out some of our members of parliament.
the party list gives disproportionate (force multiplied) political power to a few key players in each party.
The second problem is also a feature: we often get small parties that get outsized influence. To get 50% control of parliament multiple parties join together in a coalition. Coalitions are an emergent property of MMP: and coalitions create some terrible incentives for parties to do misrepresentative things.
Outsized power is misused particularly by one celebrity politician with 5% of the population voting for him. The guy is a tool.
In theory a small party should be able to focus on a single cause. In practice, The Green Party gets 10% of the seats but it then refuses to form a coalition with our "conservative" party. The Green Party gives up its minority power, because the thei politicians are too strongly greenie and they won't compromise. The idiots fail to make green tradeoffs against economic policies. They are idiots because the planet is strictly worse because of their political failings.
New Zealand avoids the worst excesses of a two party system. However MMP is no panacea: politicians do the same political things.
In theory a left wing and a right wing party should form a coalition together to run the country. In practice such a coalition can't form.
Humans are shit at making good compromises.
Also with respect to "can't vote out a list MP" I think this is exaggerated. "Bad" MPs are very common in constituencies in many countries. They are often hard to get rid of since they have local support and control their local party organisation. Whereas a list MP can be pushed down or off the list placing even if they cannot be made to resign their seat.
You can't vote out a constituency MP if 2/3s your neighbors like him. Or will always vote for his party no matter who they put up as a candidate.
There are lots of practical reasons why geographical constituencies make sense. But nobody ever questions them as the natural way to group voters in elections. I've always wondered what politics would look like if constituencies were based on other criteria. For example, age group, profession, gender, marital status & number of children, or income-bracket.
But with a party list system, there can be a perception that the party machine has more control over who gets elected. If a party can realistically expect a vote share of 20-30%, and ten candidates are being elected proportionally, then the top two candidates on the list are pretty much guaranteed a seat, whether or not they work or campaign very hard. This puts a lot of power in the hands of the people who decide the party list.
But to be honest, FPTP has a very similar problem with safe seats.
A cluster of a minority population might be able to elect 1 of 5 members, instead of being shut out.
Representatives would still represent the same geographic area and have the same community ties.
The main argument against is the difficulty of running the House with ~3000 members. There isn't a room big enough, and there isn't time for all to get their 5 minutes to speak on each bill. That said, there is no constitution requirements for either. Changes would have to be made to accommodate.
This is largely solved by the districtized version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_repre...
In fact I had been writing up a little paper about another system like this, but I've been busy with other things.
For instance because you have the electoral college in the US you have the possibility of the electoral college going in the opposite direction of the popular vote. An event like that reduces the mandate of the winner.
If a PR system or single transferable vote or something like created events that were hard to explain on the news that's trouble.
This would be true if not for gerrymandering. Look at minority populations in states like Texas and Alabama and then look at the distribution of state and federal representatives. These voters are packed and cracked and would have a greater voice in a proportional system.
> A lack of community ties, as representatives are representing a broader geography, the representative is less likely to know the names, places, and small cultural quirks associated with the communities they represent.
My house rep lives 100 miles away from me in a town with very different demographics than mine. I am very confident that he does not know the cultural quirks associated with my community, except that he thinks that we are all cultural marxists indoctrinating children to be communist heathens.
I generally follow a political philosophy that the larger the geography of the political body, the fewer laws they should make, and the less those laws should impact daily life of most individuals. For example, (in the USA) the Federal government shouldn't make as many laws as the State, and the laws they make should focus on Federal issues, like national defense and interstate commerce. States shouldn't make as many laws that impact daily life as the counties and cities do, etc. Likewise, more taxes should be levied and paid (as a proportion, not necessarily in aggregate) locally than nationally.