Would love to see explanations of downvotes since this is factually true...
I moved from a proportional-representation country to a FPTP one (Canada) and it's so much better to have a specific individual who is my MP.
Back where I was born, there's a grey and anonymous party list of people selected by extremely dubious internal party political means. I never felt the slightest bit represented; and the political process was completely opaque.
Now I have a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office.
Comparing FPTP to a worse system and decided FTPT is awesome while ignoring its known and widely discussed flaws surprises me. Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.
Do you realize how alienating this shit is to a centrist?
Its not they disagree with _me_, they disagree with the overall state of political science and its years of research into the outcomes of systems, not just what people "want"
Whenever I see something is not open for debate, I view it with a lot more skepticism. Almost always, this type of framing, to make an idea untouchable, leads to abuse. We saw this in a lot of the “trust authorities” type messaging in the pandemic.
The studied and understood outcomes of FPTP systems in the real world have all shown similar issues trending towards 2 party systems, being susceptible to vote splitting on one side of the spectrum and leading to 'strategic' instead of 'idealistic' voting.
There are worse systems by far, and better systems. Ignoring the bad because you can think of a single worse system is ignoring reality.
What? Of course it is! There are physicists looking for the unified theory who hypothesize that there may be a unified way of understanding all the forces. IANA physicist by any stretch so maybe I've misunderstood the Great Courses and books I've read, but gravity is actually quite poorly understood to us currently.
But the broader point about things not being open for debate is dangerous, and I think you unintentionally demonstrated a real-life reason why. If we stop questioning gravity and trying to understand it's cause better (which IMHO primiarly happens through reasoned, intelligent debate) then we stagnate, and stagnation can be dangerous as from there it's a short hop and a skip to regression.
If you want to make the argument though that some things aren't open for debate, I think there are stronger cases, like the Cartesian "I think therefore I am" is hard (though not impossible) to argue against because it forces the thinker to make arguments for their own non-existence, which is a tall order for a person who by definition must exist in order to do so.
That was my point. Gravity as a force exists, but the understanding of that force is still being developed. We might even change the name, but there is no doubt the force exists.
I should have worded it better. Extrapolating from that is probably not achieving much.
Also what came to mind was picturing Einstein doing his thought experiment where he was in an elevator at various levels of acceleration, and his observation that there was no way to tell the difference between the force felt from gravity vs. the acceleration. That to me feels a lot like quesitoning the "existence" of gravity! But I don't think we're really disagreeing, more were just operating with different definitions in mind of "existence."
Appreciate the discussion!
Maybe this issue is technically open for debate, but the enormously strong consensus from experts in the field weighs to one side of the issue.
The Anonymous Party list, and opaque process are not inherent factors on any of the replacements for FPTP, in fact the only one WITH the list was supposed to be an open list, and that was the system with the least political support.
Ranked/alternate voting, STV and other options directly address the issues with FPTP without introducing the drawbacks of MMP/unelected leaders being selected for seats.
Countries with multiple small parties frequently seem to collapse into political torpor where nothing ever changes.
2 parties means power tends to jump back and forth due to the recent ruling party doing badly vs the opposition actually providing an alternative and compelling change. This means parties tend to "lose" more than actually "win" elections.
2 dominant parties when one side of the spectrum is split among 2-3 parties tends to allow a smaller minority to achieve stronger governments which is not representative. I.E the split on the right in the 90's allowed the Liberals to have many successive majority governments despite less than 50% of support for many of those elections. In the aughts the alliance and PC merger turned that around and now the NDP and Liberals tend to split the left to a degree and the right can win a strong majority with 35-38% of the actual vote. This doesn't benefit any side long term.
"getting things done" isn't always the best metric for a political party, especially when they don't have the public support for their changes.
STV or various other methods that allow proportional results while maintaining current representation and government size were the best outcome, but didn't benefit the liberals so they dropped it.
Ranked voting is a majoritarian variant of FPTP that doesn't fix many of the flaws of FPTP. There is still the flaw of "favourite betrayal" that induces a need to vote "strategically".
Single Transferable Vote involves ranking candidates but is a Proportional System.
STV does a much better job of it and is why I was strongly in support of STV over AR/MMP or other options.
You are all in the same boat in a sense that’s more local and less abstract than with proportional rep.
Which is why voting needs to be effective, and FPTP is exactly why there are so many "safe" ridings for the various parties.
You're mixing things up. FPTP isn't what gives you "a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office" and prop-representation doesn't prohibit having one either.
In fact, in a first-past-the-post system with a minority government you often end up giving disproportionate power to the third place party, in terms of the popular vote (in this case the NDP) because they hold up the government and can make significant demands in doing so. This has been absolutely borne out in Canada.