4 ms·
Yes, and yes. It has some real advantages (it's nice being able to vote for someone that actually agrees with you AND not have your vote be wasted), but my exp
by Lazare 10y ago
Yes, and yes.
It has some real advantages (it's nice being able to vote for someone that actually agrees with you AND not have your vote be wasted), but my experience in New Zealand is that:
1. It enhances the power of parties and thus increases partisanship
2. It allows small parties to play kingmaker. In the NZ case, the perennial kingmaker party is corrupt and virulently nativist.
If, hypothetically, you were concerned about the partisanship, corruption, and nativist policies of current American politics, PR may not be the panacea you hope. I think it was quite unlikely for the American system to yield Trump as president (we just got very unlucky) but it would be quite likely for a PR system to yield Trump as a kingmaker with a vastly outsize influence on the policy of the resultant government. That's not obviously better, on balance.
- waqf 10y agoThanks, I was expecting a rebuttal based on experience with PR but this is a particularly interesting one. Actually I'd be interested in seeing some kind of delegative democracy system like Liquid Feedback. It has some features in common with PR (mostly the emphasis on having to negotiate a coalition given the voting results), but I'm hoping it wouldn't share the problems you outlined?
- waqf 10y ago> Trump as a kingmaker with a vastly outsize influence Hmm, now you mention it, didn't something like that happen to the Weimar Republic?
- dragonwriter 10y agoArguably, it's what failed to happen; Hitler ended up leading a minority government with the largest party (well, tied with the Communists), no one acted as kingmaker with a small party putting some other coalition over the top extracting concessions for that boost. There was kingmaking of a more personal kind going on behind the scenes, but not of the minor-party-exercises outsized influence kind.
- dragonwriter 10y agoThe kingmaker effect happens in the US system with factions within major parties, it's just less visible to people who don't deeply study politics, because the factions are less visible than actual parties in a multiparty system. Enhancing the power of parties is a function of systems that establish proportionality by party list (either wholly or by MMP) more than it is directly of proportionality (proportionality vs. a duopoly-reinforcing system encourages party cohesion, because it reduces the cost of people splitting off to form their own party because they dissent from existing parties, but that decreases rather than increasing the power of parties, in that the party majority or leadership -- outside of party list systems -- has less that they can threaten wayward members with to keep them in line.)
- stuaxo 10y agoI don't know, sure it is obviously better than him being the actual president ?