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Ask the Kiwis? I admit that I'm a kiwi and so I don't have a clear perspective, but I've never considered our Parliament to be be particularly unstable. Certainly there's a bit of horse-trading around election time, but not much. The advantage is that parties like the Greens have a much fairer slice of the influence.

I agree. MMP as in Germany and NZ looks pretty good to me (I'm in Australia, with preferential winner-takes-all as the grandparent post would seem to advocate as better). I have never seen any evidence for the 'impossible to govern' line, which seems to be pulled out by big parties with a big desire to retain the status quo (In the UK they even pulled out this argument to much effect against preferential/alternative/instant-runoff voting, which seems crazy from Australia)...

I'd agree that compulsory voting is good though. In Australia we also tend to vote on the weekend, which I think is also important and probably overlooked.

I like the Australian approach. We almost always form a government quickly with the Senate acting as a reasonable check on legislative adventurism. The poms have it better with the House of Lords, but I don't think a similar institution can be engineered ab initio, it's an evolved body. The Canadians tried, I understand they don't regard it highly.

I'd fiddle with the Senate formula to allow more minority parties into the mix (for the past few decades it's settled into a stable tripartite pattern, 2 majors and a minor).

Speaking as a Canadian, the Senate is little more than a retirement program for friends of the party (which party is of little consequence). The party that currently holds power spent years talking about Senate reform, only to revert to the status quo once they got into power. Thus, the Senate rubber-stamps legislation, but no one seriously discusses what goes on in that body, because I think that it is generally understood that it doesn't make a difference.

The current Australian government is a minority government, and they're getting a lot of legislation passed, though you'd never think so if you read the papers. 'minority government' is simply not synonymous with 'paralysed government'.

Also, given that Germany is the main engine-room that's keeping Europe financially afloat, it's clear that it's working there as well.

I don't see that the Prime Minister has to spend time constantly making cooing noises to a pack of grand-standing, pork-barrelling independents as a feature.

It is absolutely possible to govern from a minority party. But it's rare, and such governments tend not to be considered very good. In the pathological case, negotiations can leave you without a government for years. In jurisdictions where the executive is separate, that's not really a problem. In fused jurisdictions, it is.

What are you on about? That's part of politics, whether the grandstanders are in your own party or not.

But you've highlighted an excellent point - you're making it sound like parliament is ineffective, when they've passed more bills in 2012 than any other year in the last decade. In 2012 they passed 207 bills. In 2011 it was 188, and for the rest of the prior decade it hovered between 140ish and 180ish. Despite being a minority government, they are passing a lot of legislation - more than ever before. Hardly paralysed by 'endless negotiation'.

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Statistics/stat...

In all sincerity, "number of Acts passed" is a terrible metric. Like measuring the success of a new plane design by how many tons are being added per year.

2011 and 2012 are outliers for a simple reason: the Carbon tax was being first passed into law and then frequently amended.

The Australian Constitution requires that legislation dealing with appropriations / taxation only deal with that subject. Historical judgements by the High Court mean that every new tax is broken down into lots of little interlocking Acts with very narrow purposes, to prevent a whole scheme being knocked out in a High Court ruling.

You'll find a bump in 1999 Acts because of the GST, for example.

It's not that terrible a metric. Sure, it doesn't say much for the quality of the bills (what does, anyway?), but it does show that work is being done and parliament isn't 'paralysed', as the media would have you think.

Looking at the list in my link, you'd have to be extremely one-eyed to call that list biased towards carbon tax bills. But even if you do carve out those bills (though I'm not sure why they don't count as work), the year is still on the high end of the normal range.

I would have suggested Israel or Tasmania as a better example of the stability problem than New Zealand.

New Zealand is vulnerable to it though: MMP makes it harder to form majorities, and encourages the election of "hacks" - abrasive party people who the system motivates to carve out a brand rather than inclusive electorate-centric members. This pattern also plays out in Gerrymandered electorate systems like California.

    > The advantage is that parties like the Greens have a
    > much fairer slice of the influence.

I understand your point, but disagree with a premise. The way you've stated that thinks in terms of party brand, rather than representatives.

The Westminster system is fundamentally about responsible representatives for the purpose of governing. Members with electorates have an incentive to be mild and inclusive, to keep their electorate happy. Whereas parties have incentive to be abrasive to carve out brand. Electorate systems that favour parties have a jobs-for-the-boys culture.

Look at the US or Australian senate vs the lower houses. Or the UK upper house which is one of the most effective in the world for the purpose of performing quality review despite being not elected. It's also the only upper house I can think of that's not packed with teachers, lawyers and party hacks.

If anything, what we should be seeking is to reduce the reach of parties. For example, the Hare-Clarke system used in Tasmania doesn't have party names on the ballot papers and you're not allowed to hand out how-to-votes outside polling booths. (Tasmania multi-member electorates have a counter-effect to this though, and encourage party strength)

The continual pursuit of democracy for its own sake is not necessarily a positive force. Before the 1948 Australian senate reforms, the Australian senate was elected with each state being an electorate. This meant a high turnover of senators, giving more people a shorter role in public life, and it clearly defined them as reviewers. The role of the senate is murkier now: it entrenches the role of party in political life (through election and balance of power contests), senators have long political lives and it has become a place that otherwise unelectable powerbrokers go to sort out their superannuation (e.g. Graham Richardson, Noel Crichton-Browne).

> The Westminster system is fundamentally about responsible representatives for the purpose of governing. Members with electorates have an incentive to be mild and inclusive, to keep their electorate happy. Whereas parties have incentive to be abrasive to carve out brand. Electorate systems that favour parties have a jobs-for-the-boys culture.

That's a very good point. I wonder if it's possible to have a party-based system which does not encourage extreme brands?

    > That's a very good point. I wonder if it's possible
    > to have a party-based system which does not encourage
    > extreme brands?

I had a long think about this and gave up but came back to it. What I write below doesn't reconcile with parties so well, but I expect it would discourage non-mainstream opinions, or aggressive conduct.

Two mechanisms: (1) compulsory voting, with (2) compulsory preferences for every candidate in the system.

Compulsory preferences. If you make people rank everyone, then they will tend to be harsher on groups they otherwise wouldn't bother with.

Compulsory voting. By making voting compulsory, you get input from people who are apathetic, but likely to be scathing towards people who are obsessed with a particular ideology.

I thought about negative votes as well, but went hard against it - it leads to intrigue and strategic voting, which rewards ingenuine behaviour and gaming.

Another mad option I've thought about: have an upper house, and make parties nominate five people for every upper house position. If the position is won, then the person to fill it must be randomly selected from the pool of nominations (by a computer or similar). I still have some attraction to this.

Actually, New Zealand is a bad example. You've got an odd hybrid of winner-takes-all and PR.

In Australia we do it by having a bicameral Parliament. The Reps is winner-takes-all and the Senate is PR per-state.

There were certainly some issues early on (the thing with list MPs leaving their party but keeping their seat, for example) but I think those have been ironed out now?

I feel like maybe there is too much power given to kingmakers, like the anti-smacking bill for example - the vast majority of the population didn't want it, neither National nor Labour really wanted it, but it got rammed through by the Greens because Labour needed their support to govern. But overall, I think it's still better than the arrangement here (the UK) where the Lib Dems got piles of popular support at the last election but retained relatively little power from it.

Actually the main problem with the New Zealand parliamentary system is the short three year term. The two main parties always get 30-40% chunks of the vote apiece, and from there it is generally just a matter of the largest winner cobbling together a coalition out of agreeable minority parties, of which there are always an ample supply. And, as every cabinet since MMP has been a coalition cabinet, all of the parties have gained extensive experience in how to make these arrangements work. Sticking points are hashed out in the post-election night negotiations and, as far as I am aware, no coalitions have ever fallen apart or gotten into serious squabbling later on. It helps that the minor parties are all pretty pragmatic about their relative lack of negotiating power, and used to trading horses.

It's the short term that really hamstrings the ability of parliament to go through a thorough, protracted legislative review process and pass high-quality new acts. A lot of legislation-in-progress gets shelved as election year approaches, and when the new term rolls round, and the new parliament gets settled in, conditions have changed and the process needs to be started afresh. And legislation that does get passed is often rushed and quickly becomes obvious that as needing revision. The result is in my understanding a recurrent self-reinforcing cycle of low-quality legislation.

It could be worse. The US Congress has 2-year terms for their lower house. There's never a moment when the next election is out of view.

Most Australian states have 4-year terms, some of them are fixed by legislation. Whether or not it improves matters is obscured by the problem that anybody with talent is trying to get into the Commonwealth Parliament. Our State governments are traditionally fantastically inept and frequently corrupt, regardless of party.

Australia also has a law preventing electioneering more than 30 days out from the election. Sure, the pollies are always jostling for media space and saying "we're better than those guys", but they can't pay for political advertising outside the electioneering period - if you're not interested in politics, you won't see much in the media in-between elections. This moratorium on political advertising is one of our most unappreciated laws.

It's not 30 days. It's 3 days.

It's from the Wednesday before the Saturday of the election, until and including that Saturday.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/bsa1992214...

Where are you getting only 3 days from? It's definitely not 3 days from experience. Either that, or every funded political party is breaking the law.

EDIT: rereading your link, it looks like it's 33 days at the local council level, but at the federal level it's 'when the election date is called', which works out to being a similar thing (as it's usually a similar amount of time): the years between elections are free of electioneering.

1. Definitions:

"relevant period" , in relation to an election, means the period that commences at the end of the Wednesday before the polling day for the election and ends at the close of the poll on that polling day.

3A (2), (3) and (4) all include this language:

the broadcaster must not broadcast under the licence an election advertisement in relation to the election during the relevant period.

They vary only to cover different sorts of broadcasters.

You seem to be ignoring the very important word "not". What you're quoting is the exact opposite of what you think you're quoting - the broadcaster must NOT broadcast an election ad during that 3-day period.

I'm not sure what you're driving at.

I quoted it to show that the blackout period is created by the "must not broadcast" phrases. So ... you're agreeing with me? I'm confused.

Then you've utterly misunderstood me. I'm saying that there is no electioneering between elections, only in the immediate lead-up to one - it's pretty quiet here in the intervening years.

What I was reacting to was:

> Australia also has a law preventing electioneering more than 30 days out from the election.

There isn't such a law. (And I misread you, thinking you said that there was a low against election ads within 30 days of an election).

You can campaign your heart out up until the blackout period.

Rereading your link, it seems I am in error. You certainly don't see much in the way of paid political advertising before an election is called though - unlike in the US where there's a frightening amount of electioneering.

My apologies.

No apology is required.

I've heard that the 3-year term is a check on the unicameral legislature and parliamentary system. Essentially, the government has license to "ram through" all the laws they want to, but if it turns out to be a bunch of ridiculous nonsense that the public hates then they get kicked out relatively quickly. Contrast this with the American system, in which the executive branch, the house of reps and the senate are all decided upon independently, often leading to political gridlock.

>My pet peeves are all around voting systems. For instance, voting in most countries is voluntary. That has well-understood failure modes.

I'd contend that voting itself has failure modes, and that making it mandatory is asking for disappointment. I'm not accusing you of this, but I find that many who call for coerced voting expect that this will turn elections towards the results that they'd prefer (their favoured party, in particular). In the end, I'd say that the right to not cast a vote can be as meaningful, if not more so than wasting the time to go cast an actual vote. For many, it is the closest that one can come to a "none of the above" option that they might otherwise prefer.

> I'd contend that voting itself has failure modes, and that making it mandatory is asking for disappointment.

It has failure modes, for sure. There are no systems that meet all the objectives we want.

However compulsory voting tends to moderate politics towards the "median voter". In voluntary voting, only the most motivated voters turn out. Who are they? People with a burning, righteous indignation. Are their policy obsessions going to be about boring, middle-of-the-road administration and policy?

Experience says: not really.

> I'm not accusing you of this, but I find that many who call for coerced voting expect that this will turn elections towards the results that they'd prefer (their favoured party, in particular).

Definitely! In Australia the new Queensland government is proposing to drop the compulsory requirement. A cynic might suggest that this is because younger voters, who turn out at a much lower rate under voluntary schemes, vote for the opposition party.

> For many, it is the closest that one can come to a "none of the above" option that they might otherwise prefer.

In Australia this is done by casting an "informal" ballot. The main problem with NOTA is that you need rules to decide how to count NOTA ballots -- and what happens if NOTA gets a clear majority.

I believe in mandatory voting because pretty much everyone bitches about politics. If you're not willing to do the minimum of cast a vote (in Aus, that's one each of council, state, federal, every 3-4 years) then you don't really have the right to complain. You may not have a candidate to vote for, but you definitely will have one to vote against.

As for a 'none of the above', on a paper ballot, you can write what you want.

Of course, we have voting well organised - here you won't see queues of eight hours to vote like the debacle in Florida. This is despite mandatory voter turnout and paper ballots.

It's nice though, that you put an evil spin on mandatory voting by labelling it 'coerced'. I wonder if you call traffic lights 'coercion'? I personally think of it more as a citizen's responsibility, but I wouldn't try to colour it by calling it 'responsible voting'.

Sounds like the Nick Szabo's argument: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/tradition.html

<blockquote> Post-Hayek and algorithmic information theory, we recognize that information-bearing codes can be computed (and in particular, ideas evolved from the interaction of people with each other over many lifetimes), which are

(a) not feasibly rederivable from first principles, (b) not feasibly and accurately refutable (given the existence of the code to be refuted) (c) not even feasibly and accurately justifiable (given the existence of the code to justify) </blockquote>

Interesting. I hadn't connected those exact dots. Reading Hayek has definitely made me more skeptical of designed systems -- and so has my experience in the software profession (second system effect).

Living in Belgium makes me disagree with you. I think that First Past The Post is better then Proportional Representation.

It seems like you have what we call "optional preferential" in Australia. In practice such systems devolve to FPTP anyway.

Mind you, I don't think any electoral system can paper over such an intransigent cultural division in a country. It'd be like trying to build an electoral system for a combined Israel / Iran government.

Facebook had implemented a way for people to vote on things, and didn't really even get 2% of people ever voting

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/21/facebook-site-governance-vo...

most people didn't know or didn't care