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> I would support directly electing MPs. Then political parities report directly to us! Been there. Watch out for these traps: a. FPTP (first-past-the-post):

> I would support directly electing MPs. Then political parities report directly to us! Been there. Watch out for these traps: a. FPTP (first-past-the-post): this is a truly horrible system. In a FPTP system, the person currently occupying the position (regardless how corrupt) has a huge advantage, and it pushes everything towards a two-party system where there isn't a third option (then, all they need is to give you two equally bad options, and you're screwed for good). It's also easy to introduce "distraction candidates" to just chip away votes from competition. b. Even two-rounds or instant-runoff "winner takes district" system is not ideal; what happens here is that the small parties are strongly disadvantaged. You _need_ to have a very strong local voice, to win any one district. So for instance a general party that tries to talk to educated youth won't make any dent - they're spread across regions, and likely won't get past 10% anywhere Proportional systems have huge flaws but really are the lesser evil. Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party). And/or primaries for parties/ to decide the list of candidates & the order in the list, for said candidates.

tremon 6y ago
Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party) As an example how this is implemented in NL: in elections, all individual candidates are on the ballot, organized by party (yes, the papar ballot is massive -- one of the main criticisms of this system). The candidates are ordered by preference as determined by the party itself, and in general, if a party wins 8 seats during election, that means the top 8 candidates on the ballot take their seat. The lead candidate (also the face of the party campaign) is ranked #1, and people usually vote for #1 if they only care about voting for a party, not an individual. But people can vote for a non-#1 position (called a preferential vote), and if a specific candidate receives more votes than a pre-determined threshold, they're bumped on the candidate list. This allows voters to influence the resulting body composition not just by party, but by individual member. Some stats from the last national election are on the Dutch Wikipedia page (but not included in the english translation) [0]: - 150 seats in total - 46 candidates have met the preferential vote threshold in total - 3 candidates could not take seat because their party won 0 seats - 4 candidates took seat at the expense of a (initially higher-ranked) candidate from the same party - the remaining 39 candidates would have taken seat anyway because of their original party rank [0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samenstelling_Tweede_Kamer_2017-heden https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samenstelling_Tweede_Kamer_201...

tremon 6y ago

Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party) As an example how this is implemented in NL: in elections, all individual candidates are on the ballot, organized by party (yes, the papar ballot is massive -- one of the main criticisms of this system). The candidates are ordered by preference as determined by the party itself, and in general, if a party wins 8 seats during election, that means the top 8 candidates on the ballot take their seat. The lead candidate (also the face of the party campaign) is ranked #1, and people usually vote for #1 if they only care about voting for a party, not an individual. But people can vote for a non-#1 position (called a preferential vote), and if a specific candidate receives more votes than a pre-determined threshold, they're bumped on the candidate list. This allows voters to influence the resulting body composition not just by party, but by individual member. Some stats from the last national election are on the Dutch Wikipedia page (but not included in the english translation) [0]: - 150 seats in total - 46 candidates have met the preferential vote threshold in total - 3 candidates could not take seat because their party won 0 seats - 4 candidates took seat at the expense of a (initially higher-ranked) candidate from the same party - the remaining 39 candidates would have taken seat anyway because of their original party rank [0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samenstelling_Tweede_Kamer_2017-heden https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samenstelling_Tweede_Kamer_201...