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Comment by muuh-gnu | Hacker News Reader

In other news, former German president Roman Herzog, member of the (for now) largest party, the Christian Democratical Union CDU, suggested that having new parties like the Pirates entering parliaments is bad for overall democracy because it is increasing political diversity, and should be combated by again increasing the election threshold, which is now at 5%. According to the interview he gave recently, increasing political diversity in the parliament decreases support of a goverment and the chancellor, which could destabilize a country, meaning less dissent in the parliament, more stable country.

The two big parties are basically getting threatened by the internet and are obviously ready to go nuclear by threatening to simply team up, get supermajority required for a constitutional change, and "optimize" the political diversity down to 2 or 3, US style, maybe even 1, by simply throwing the annoying emerging competition out of the parliaments.

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This has to be understood in historical context. Germany has had a very Bad experience with an excessively fragmented parliament in the Weimar republic, which led to constant Government breakups and reelections, paralysing the country politically and paving the way for someone who promised to do away with all that sissy democracy stuff...

That's why the 5% threshold was established.

> This has to be understood in historical context.

Thats what he said. How do you know that he honestly sees this as a problem for the country and not just a problem for his party? He is literally advocating getting rid of political competition and decreaasing the overall possible choice for the electorate, so you have to be really really sure that he is honest and has no horse in this race, but as a member of a party which wouldnt be affected by the change but immensely profit off it, he has one.

people can have more than one reason to say something. In fact, that's the case more often than not.

That's what is being taught at school in Germany.

But there are a lot or people who say that it wasn't the number of parties, it was the lack of democrats.

(Democrats, not the US party. People who support democracy.)

The poor performance of the republican (form of government, not the US party) system was one of the reasons for the lack of democrats.

There's truth to both reasons mentioned here and they aswell as several others certainly added up to the failing of the Weimarer Republik. It's not as if you have to narrow it down to one specific reason.

In fact the constituion back then was very progressive and ambitious, even by todays standards, but with the lack of support even in official positions (e.g. Justice, Army sticking with the former structure and personnel) it didn't last very long.

Add to that the people's wide spread opinion of being burdened with unfairly tough first world war reparations and the regular abuse of emergency law ("Notverordnungen", not sure if the translation is correct) and there are a lot of ears listening to the ideas of the NSDAP.

This may be true for most things in life, but if there's one subject that can't be explained with only one aspect or reason, it's the republic of Weimar. It's decline is the sum of several unfortunate developments and circumstances.

Google translate says "emergency decrees" for "Notverordnungen", which I would agree with. "Emergency law" is an ok but (to me) slightly confusing translation. I think a more common American English phrasing would be "abuse of emergency powers". ("Emergency powers" appears to be "Notverordnungsrecht".)

That is, imo, a very simplistic explanation of what happened in the Weimar republic. The interwar period were complex and convoluted times

The military overspend during WWI and draconian terms that the winners impose over Germany destroyed the economy of the country, creating a spiral of hyperinflation[1], both led to an inevitable second conflict, as Keynes pointed in "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" that was written many years before the WWII

[1] A great book about Weimar hyperinflation cycle is "When money dies: The nightmare of the Weimar collapse"

I did not intend or claim to provide a full explanation, just explain one significant factor that is relevant to this topic.

However simplistic, it’s hard to deny that in the public understanding of German political history, that’s the generally accepted explanation for political stagnation and crisis in the Weimar Republic.

Similarly, the German public understands hyperinflation as leading to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. There was a genuine and severe hyperinflation crisis in the years after World War I, but the main economic reason for the Nazi ascendance to power in the early 1930s was actually a period of _deflation_ and mass unemployment. The Nazi rise to power coincided with an inflationary policy (Germany exited the gold standard in 1931), in part supported by the Nazis, that decreased unemployment and increased economic growth.

This is why it’s kind of funny when the current inflation aversion of German policymakers is attributed to a national trauma about hyperinflation. It’s true that the hyperinflationary period 1919-1923 was deeply painful for Germans and you can understand that they don’t want to repeat that, but surely the consequences of the deflationary period leading to the rise of National Socialism were worse.

(That doesn’t mean that Keynes was wrong, but a story that sees hyperinflation leading to WWII is probably too simplistic. It’s more like hyperinflation → gold standard → Great Depression → deflation → Nazis gain more seats → leave gold standard → Nazis gain absolute power.)

See http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/06/30/197736/austerit...

As an Israeli, and in continuance with netcan's good comment above, I could certainly see that happening here as a result of fragmented parliament.

edit: I say it not to reflect on Israeli society or politics per se, but to agree that fragmented parliaments cause such problems.

More parties being bad for democracy is extremely funny.

It would be nice to see a total abolition of parties, in fact in most democratic constitutions the word 'party' is never mentioned.

People should vote for other people, not for parties.

> It would be nice to see a total abolition of parties

Abolishing the formal definition of parties wouldnt help, because like-minded people would still team up and form de facto parties, so nothing substantial would change.

> People should vote for other people, not for parties.

In Germany, you have both. There are two votes, the first one is for people, the "direct candidates". The second is for the whole party, which again is represented by a list of candidates determined by in-party elections.

In the US, party affiliation is listed on ballots. Removing that affiliation might start subconsciously breaking people off from thinking every member of the DNC and RNC are running on some unchanging monolith platform of the party.

> People should vote for other people, not for parties.

I would like to take this concept even one step further. People should not vote for other people. They should vote for ideas and concepts.

> They should vote for ideas and concepts.

Isn't that why parties were invented in the first place? I mean, at least in theory.

In a certain fashion, yes. Parties have helped to bring ideas and concepts to life. In a world where it is hard for people to communicate easily, often and in real time, they are probably the best tool available. A big problem of parties is that you always have to buy the whole package. What if you favor a rather conservative standpoint in one area but a more progressive one in another. There is no way you can have that. This is one issue addressed by the "Liquid Democracy" concept for example.

Then you have "the winner takes it all", creating a bipolar system like in the US. No thanks. Parties give some structure in the public debate, and thus are necessary for a democratic discourse.

The US has political parties, the two dominant ones keep the rest out creating an illusion of choice.

It's the worst example of party politics.

Some elections in the U.S. are nonpartisan, meaning that no parties are recognized by the electoral officials, or listed on the ballot. For example, the Nebraska state legislature is nonpartisan, and so are a number of cities' mayors, Houston being the largest.

That doesn't keep people from de-facto running as party representatives, though. They can't put their party affiliation on the ballot, but they can say in their speeches which of the national parties they prefer, and parties can issue press releases explaining which of the candidates they support. So it tends towards a two-party, first-past-the-post situation.

It's first past the post voting that discourages niche candidates / affiliations. When you only have a single non-transferable vote, it's wasted if you place it on a niche candidate that doesn't get enough votes. So you're more likely to cast your vote for one of the top two or three mainstream positions - or rather, what you think is mainstream, what you think everyone else is thinking, influenced by visibility from media spending etc.

If you have a proportional system, where you can more truly state your preferences yet have your vote count even if your first preference doesn't succeed, you end up with more diversity. Downsides include greater tendency for coalition governments and potentially less clear mandates for decisive governments.

When you only have a single non-transferable vote, it's wasted if you place it on a niche candidate that doesn't get enough votes.

This is a self fulfilling prophecy.

People should vote for third parties more often! The mainstream ones suck!

No way, and "waste" my vote? I'd rather hold my nose and pick someone who has a chance!

(6 months later, when the guy voted in is officially hated)

Man, people should vote for third parties more often, this guy is horrible..

And it's this conversation and line of thinking that ensures that (in the USA), it's the same old crap, day in and day out.

There's a saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results..

The minimum possible number of parties is one.

Actually, people should vote on ideas, not people. Which is why I support more flexible concepts of decision making, such as the Liquid Democracy model the German PP uses internally.

We're ultimately going to converge against a leaderless system, without parties, politicians and all that other nonsense. Technology will eventually enable functioning anarchy, and we're just seeing the start of it.

Actually, people should vote on ideas, not people.

Problem there is that there is no such thing as a person who holds every single one of your views. By voting for the guy who, say, believes the internet should be hands off, you could also be voting for a guy who believes something like abortion is eeeeeevil, or that fiat money is bad, or that minorities should be marginalized, what have you.

Hence the voting for people, since you have to choose which of the pluses and minuses are more important to you.

But that is exactly my point. Choosing a single representative for all your believes, be it a person or party, is stupid, for the reasons you presented. That's why we should vote on ideas. Technology can and will enable this, and we should try to embrace that. Sure, the powers that be might not like being made obsolete through technological advancements[1], so we've got more than just a few battles ahead of us, but I'm positive we can pull through. You ultimately can't fight progress, and that's a good thing.

[1]: Best current example: The copyright industry and their increasingly desperate death throes.

More parties can certainly make for more extreme politics. If you look at parliamentary countries with low thresholds, you see politics like Israel's. You have three major parties (Labor, Kadima, and Likud), and a host of minor parties with a few seats. In order to form a government, one of the major parties will often have to ally with an extremist minority party much further to the left or right. In order to secure that coalition, the major party will have to make policy/portfolio concessions to the extremists.

More parties can mean more extremes in parliament, and more coalitions that depends on making concessions to extremists.

It may be more democratic in theory, but in practice it does not push politics toward the center, but instead enables the extremist fringe.

I'm from Israel where the threshold for a parliamentary political party is 2/120. It does come with a cost.

Especially if you include parties with just a chance of passing the threshold, you theoretically more likely to find a party that represents your position. In practice though it encourages parties that represent certain ethnic/interest groups. It creates instability. It also means governments are alway coalitions where small parties are constantly threatening to bring down the government, especially the ethnic/interest parties with a narrower set priorities.

What is even worse: He is not only a former president (Bundespräsident), he was a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (Bundesverfassungsgericht)!

If he's so upset he can always adopt some of their policies.

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