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Comment by rza | Hacker News Reader

Voting is not working. As far as the media is concerned, there are always going to be only two candidates, both of which are in bed with corporate lobbyists. Without every voter doing significant research on their own to make meaningful third-party voting blocs, that will not change. Money determines the primary candidates, and that money comes from the same places year after year.

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The fundamental problem is not the media (for all the problems the media has and produces), it is the electoral system, as is demonstrated by the comparison with the greater number of competitive parties in all the democracies that also have profit-oriented corporate media but do not a national legislature elected by plurality or majority/runoff elections.

Italy has one of those proportional parliaments. It's not exactly a utopia.

No place is "exactly a utopia", but the issue was the media being blamed as the root cause of the partisan duopoly in the US, which is pretty clearly not the case.

OTOH, systems with greater proportionality in representation also tend to have higher public opinion of how well the local government works, which is probably not coincidental; for a good general survey, see Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

> systems with greater proportionality in representation also tend to have higher public opinion of how well the local government works

Maybe they tend to, but when they drew that graph, Italy is definitely an outlier. People are not at all fond of how the government works, putting it mildly!

Very proportional systems have large problems of their own too, including all the "horse trading" that goes on to form a coalition. This can and does involve a party that got, say 10%, driving a very hard bargain with the party that got 45%, giving far more relative weight to the people who voted for the 10% party.

You're right that the media is not The Problem, no argument there.

> Maybe they tend to, but when they drew that graph, Italy is definitely an outlier.

Granting that, why bring Italy up them?

> Very proportional systems have large problems of their own too, including all the "horse trading" that goes on to form a coalition.

Horse trading goes on to form a winning coalition in two-party systems, too (the major parties in electoral systems that create a two-competitive-party dynamic are, invariably, coalition parties); the difference is that, in such systems, the disporportionate power of the needed-to-win segment is less than in two-party systems, because its much easier -- because the factions are formal parties that you can negotiate with -- to swap coalition partners and form a new majority coalition if a minor partner wants too much.

(That's also, really -- outside of systems like the US where you've got an FPTP electoral system forcing pre-election coalition building -- a bigger issue in unitary parliamentary systems vs. separation of powers systems -- because having a majority coalition in parliament is a more significant issue in unitary systems whereas in separation of powers systems, ad hoc coalitions on particular issues can function in the legislature without requiring a stable "ruling" coalition in the legislature. So, if you are looking at an FPTP separation of powers system like the US, its a problem that moving to a proportionally-elected but still separation of powers system alleviates rather than making worse.)

> Granting that, why bring Italy up them?

Because I live here and it's a very good example of proportional systems not being strictly better than what we have in the US.

> swap coalition partners and form a new majority coalition if a minor partner wants too much.

Easier said than done in many cases.

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