4 ms·
The first point indicates a lack of familiarity with the actual history of PR systems. The resulting problems are actually the opposite: very small clusters of
by toyg 3y ago
The first point indicates a lack of familiarity with the actual history of PR systems.
The resulting problems are actually the opposite: very small clusters of voters typically end up wielding a disproportionate amount of power. That's because PR invites people that are ideologically affine, to run separately, effectively campaigning against their "friends". It's obviously better, for any given politician, to be the head of a 5% party than being a "rank&file" in a 30% one. The resulting fragmentation has to be later recomposed with alliances to form a government, which will go on bickering constantly; and it often results in executives that can count on very thin majorities, increasing overall uncertainty to bad overall effects (instability, higher borrowing costs, etc). Such executives then have to spend inordinate amounts of political (and often monetary) capital, appeasing very narrow interests. One of the most infamous expression of such dynamics is the Italian experience from 1948 to 1994, but also France before Napoleon III, Weimar, etc.
This is why modern PR systems end up with forceful thresholds, where a party with less than 2 to 6% is kept out of parliament - but that's literal, direct disenfranchisement, not particularly better than the indirect one resulting from FPTP.
IMHO the better approach is FPPT but with ranked voting to reach 50%. This reduces the worst distortions of FPPT (i.e. "winners" literally hated by 60-70% of the electorate), while promoting a balanced approach to minority interests.
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago> The resulting fragmentation has to be later recomposed with alliances to form a government, which will go on bickering constantly; I mean what are political parties under FPTP other than alliances to form a government? Bickering is rather common within them. Democratic politics always requires a broad coalition of different interests and groups to assemble a majority. I'm not convinced voting system changes that much, but tensions may erupt in different ways under different systems.
- toyg 3y ago> Bickering is rather common within them. "Within" being the key word. It's a completely different level, believe me. The last 6 years of UK political life have been exceptional, and the overall sentiment is that they were pretty bad. They were also absolutely run of the mill from a PR perspective: a new executive every few months, elections every 3 years or so, a constant fight to reconcile fundamentally un-reconcileable positions, extreme public brinkmanship, etc etc. PR will fix nothing of that, it will only make it worse.
- shkkmo 3y agoI would point out that some of the issues you've called out are particular to a parliamentary system. The USA forms executive governments differenty. The closest analogy would be the speaker of the house, where the USA has already seen significant infighting recently. Where I think a broader range of parties would benefit the US system is reducing the degree by which measures and bills are passed and opposed along consistent party lines. With more parties, there would be coalition building that would encourage more negotiation and cooperation.
- ensignavenger 3y agoThe US House Speaker was voted out primarily by Democrats, not Republicans. There were only a handful of Republicans that voted to remove McCarthy. It took the Republicans a while to get enough voted to replace him. Certainly plenty of infighting in both Democrat and Republican parties, but the Speakership contest was the entirety of the House Democrats allying with a very few extremest House Republicans.
- shkkmo 3y agoYes, that's useful information to those who aren't familiar with the situation but I would say that the way the Democrats voted in lockstep is a great example of the partisan lack of compromise that a two party system encourages.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoIndeed and it’s also good to not look at the grandparent comment and draw any sort of false equivalence here. The sort of problems grandparent describes certainly do exist in PR systems, but GP is describing a system that gets it something like 90% right vs FPTP which is completely and utterly broken beyond repair