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Comment by gargan | Hacker News Reader

It's the opposite of what you say. Proportional representation isn't accountable because you don't know what coalition you're voting for - coalitions are done in backrooms after the election. Winner takes all is more accountable because the coalitions are done before the election (aka political parties). Parties are made up of different factions and they're agreed before the election.

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I guess you don't live in the UK, because winner takes all is far worse for backroom deals. The deals just end up being between factions within the same party!

Deals and bargaining all happen AFTER a party takes power and completely hidden until a government can't pass their own bills like the Labour attempt to reform welfare.

With proportional representation the deals are made in order to form a government, BEFORE it has power, and are between separate political parties.

Sure there may be agreements that are not all made public, but these are much harder to keep in the "backroom".

You take what happened in the two elections previously (and I know technically we don't vote for PMs, but they drive the agenda of the party).

2015 we voted for Cameron, ended up with May then Johnson 2019 we voted for Johnson, ended up with Truss(!!) then Sunak(!)

This time everyone voted for Starmer and got friend-of-Epstein Mandelson via McSweeney as a cut-out.

PMs don't drive the agenda. The UK is one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. The people driving the agenda are billionaire and multi-millionaire donors.

PM is a sales job, not a strategy job, and increasingly ridiculous PMs have been selected because the donors have had enough of liberal democracy as a concept. If it stops working - which it pretty much has - there's going to be less resistance to removing it altogether.

Which is why there's resistance to Digital ID. There's widespread distrust - with reason - of the political establishment right across the divide.

Slightly different point really - every leader has someone behind them (which is why we have the term Thatcherism, not Josephism).

The point really was about parties themselves being coalitions in all but name.

I think he's right, actually. It rings true with what we see here in the Netherlands. People don't feel like they're "throwing their vote away" if they vote for a minor party, so politicians can't have a laid back attitude.

There are efforts to make this happen in the us starting locally and working up. The states are left to decide how they implement elections on their own with a couple of exceptions. There is a tragedy of the commons aspect to it though, as if some states adopt proportional representation but not others the ones that do not adopt it gain advantage. Ranked choice voting is taking hold much faster than pr in the us, and it is pretty slow too. It can happen though. Both are viewed as being left leaning, which doesn't really make sense to me.

Yep and the coalitions are famous for exemplifying the concept of "poldering:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model

If their minor party doesn't end up as part of the governing coalition, there's no sense in which people feel like their vote wound up having no effect?

That's not really true. It just means there is a gradient of success rather than outright success or loss. Particular portions of what you voted for may be successful. First past the post means you take it all or leave it all, policywise, small things are likely to fall through the cracks.

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