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STV doesn't fix the problem that the people who seek election and are capable of winning often are the last people who should govern. It just gives more proport

by wl 5y ago

STV doesn't fix the problem that the people who seek election and are capable of winning often are the last people who should govern. It just gives more proportional representation.

whoknowswhat11 5y ago
Exactly - where we are the people running are either a) totally bought (big business, unions etc). b) very strong opinions Makes for weird politics in the end.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Your average person has some pretty strong, weird opinions, too. I'm all for governance by lottery in theory, but I don't have a rosy outlook on the outcome if we went straight there without a few generations of near-universally effective public education
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    >Makes for weird politics in the end. - When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. -- Hunter S. Thompson The trend continues where there remains almost no chance of getting someone with actual leadership ability into important leadership positions. Real leadership is so rare and had been needed more badly than ever for so long, people have been thoroughly conditioned en masse to accept the poorest of substitutes. Especially since the system has been insidiously gamed so that recognized non-leaders could have a shot to begin with, and it has only gotten worse & worse from there. When a real leader comes along they bear no resemblance to what has now become accepted as a familiar party representative, whose only advantage today is a pop culture following with no higher objective than to join the bandwagon and over-run every alternative voice. Nobody even recognizes a real leader any more if it's not someone having a formidable machine constantly hustling to manipulate popular opinion in hyperbolic ways. And when you've got that, you don't need a person of worthwhile substance to be the center of attention, you can move the target and get a block of voters to prefer only non-leaders as electable candidates. Well every random citizen in good standing might not actually be leadership material themself, but the odds are infinitely better without a doubt now.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> STV doesn't fix the problem that the people who seek election and are capable of winning often are the last people who should govern. It can to a significant extent by eliminating the lesser of two weasels problem, substantially altering the effective methods of campaigning and the kinds of people who can win. In any case, “just gives more proportional representation", isn’t a small thing. Proportionality produced by the electoral system is, when looked at across established modern democracies, a very good predictor of how happy the electorate is with the policies of their government and government in general. There's a reason its usually people deeply embedded and versed in a particular deeply non-proportional system (usually the US one) but who haven't invested much energy in understanding comparative electoral systems that either come out with wacky ideas like “let’s get rid of elections entirely” or who express deep-but-inevitably-disappointed faith in some rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic scheme like rearranging something about how districts are drawn with no other changes to the US system on the other; while on seems super radical and the other seems super incrementalist, they are both symptoms of knowing one particularly broken system.of elections and thinking the space of meaningful options is limited to variation within that system or outside of elections entirely.

by wl 5y ago

STV doesn't fix the problem that the people who seek election and are capable of winning often are the last people who should govern. It just gives more proportional representation.

whoknowswhat11 5y ago

Exactly - where we are the people running are either a) totally bought (big business, unions etc). b) very strong opinions Makes for weird politics in the end.

klyrs 5y ago
Your average person has some pretty strong, weird opinions, too. I'm all for governance by lottery in theory, but I don't have a rosy outlook on the outcome if we went straight there without a few generations of near-universally effective public education
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  >Makes for weird politics in the end. - When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. -- Hunter S. Thompson The trend continues where there remains almost no chance of getting someone with actual leadership ability into important leadership positions. Real leadership is so rare and had been needed more badly than ever for so long, people have been thoroughly conditioned en masse to accept the poorest of substitutes. Especially since the system has been insidiously gamed so that recognized non-leaders could have a shot to begin with, and it has only gotten worse & worse from there. When a real leader comes along they bear no resemblance to what has now become accepted as a familiar party representative, whose only advantage today is a pop culture following with no higher objective than to join the bandwagon and over-run every alternative voice. Nobody even recognizes a real leader any more if it's not someone having a formidable machine constantly hustling to manipulate popular opinion in hyperbolic ways. And when you've got that, you don't need a person of worthwhile substance to be the center of attention, you can move the target and get a block of voters to prefer only non-leaders as electable candidates. Well every random citizen in good standing might not actually be leadership material themself, but the odds are infinitely better without a doubt now.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> STV doesn't fix the problem that the people who seek election and are capable of winning often are the last people who should govern. It can to a significant extent by eliminating the lesser of two weasels problem, substantially altering the effective methods of campaigning and the kinds of people who can win. In any case, “just gives more proportional representation", isn’t a small thing. Proportionality produced by the electoral system is, when looked at across established modern democracies, a very good predictor of how happy the electorate is with the policies of their government and government in general. There's a reason its usually people deeply embedded and versed in a particular deeply non-proportional system (usually the US one) but who haven't invested much energy in understanding comparative electoral systems that either come out with wacky ideas like “let’s get rid of elections entirely” or who express deep-but-inevitably-disappointed faith in some rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic scheme like rearranging something about how districts are drawn with no other changes to the US system on the other; while on seems super radical and the other seems super incrementalist, they are both symptoms of knowing one particularly broken system.of elections and thinking the space of meaningful options is limited to variation within that system or outside of elections entirely.