6 ms·
PR makes party tickets central to the electoral system. This plays to the interests of people who are employed around the political scene to carve out a place f
by cturner 13y ago
PR makes party tickets central to the electoral system. This plays to the interests of people who are employed around the political scene to carve out a place for themselves while staying loyal to their sponsor. For this reason alone, it's bad for democracracy even in the academic sense of the word.
But in addition to this -
* It creates a higher proportion of safe seats, which encourages party people to play to their base.
* PR makes it easier for groups to get elected who are pursuing sectional interests.
In short - PR makes politics more divisive compared to something like the Westminster system (single-member electorates). That's bad for democratic systems in a practical sense as well: it contributes to political instability and media circus.
It also promotes deceiptful or just weird practice through the dynamics around preferencing. The recent Australian election came up with some bizarre outcomes in the senate due to the quirks of PR. Tradeoffs to try and correct for this lead to more problems, such as in Germany where CDU voters feel they need to vote for the FDP in some regions to try and get them over minimum quota to avoid a worse option getting through. There's been elections where tickets try to game the elimination order by flowing votes through parties from the other side of the divide, but then get the math predictions wrong: in the senate vote for Victoria in the 2004 Australian federal election - voters for the mainstream left party accidentally elected a Christian values party to a balance of power role in the upper house ahead of the Greens because the party men botched an attempt to stay ahead of the greens in elimination.
There are lots of quick clean wins that most western electoral systems could implement that don't have the drawbacks of PR:
* Boundary-setting by independent electoral commissions. This is huge. For example - the US electoral system tends to have one of the major disadvantages of PR (too many safe seats) with none of the advantages, due to party control over electoral commissions.
* Optional preferential voting allows people to vote for an independent whilst still affecting the likely outcome. Compulsory preferential voting forces people to make a decision even about the electoral order of people they dislike (which is definitely in the spirit of forced democracy of the Athenians)
* Removing party names from the ballot paper while introducing random sorting of names across the ballot reduces the value of party brand and leaflets, whilst evening out the resulting increase donkey vote.
* Restrictions to political advertising: ways that money can be spent, ways it can be raised, cutoffs before the election.
* Mechanisms to reduce the benefit of incombancy over other groups.
- bjelkeman-again 13y agoI have lived in a country with proportional representation (Sweden), and two without (UK, US), and i am working in one with PR (Netherlands). IMHO it seems to me that PR creates a better democracy as sections of society aren't so easily shut off from power as in non-PR countries. First past the post systems seem to create governments with often a marginal lead in votes but a massive majority in parliment. In the Netherlands and Sweden the governments are nearly always formed as coalitions, not by a single party. This seems to me to create a better democracy. A better representation of the vote albeit not perfect by any means. The biggest problem seems to be that virtually no party seem interested in creating a better democratic system. They are just interested in skewing the system for their own short term powergrab.
- cturner 13y ago(I wrote my reply to rmc before reading your reply - honestly!) The countries you're talking about are simply more civilised than the rest of us. Particularly Sweden - you guys are able to execute things that just don't work in other places - PR, very widespread gun ownership with very low crime, stunningly high tax with growth, huge welfare that works, europop. I live in England.
- rmc 13y agoPR makes party tickets central to the electoral system. This plays to the interests of people who are employed around the political scene to carve out a place for themselves while staying loyal to their sponsor. For this reason alone, it's bad for democracracy even in the academic sense of the word. But in addition to this - It creates a higher proportion of safe seats, which encourages party people to play to their base. * PR makes it easier for groups to get elected who are pursuing sectional interests. In short - PR makes politics more divisive compared to something like the Westminster system (single-member electorates) * I'm from Ireland (which has multi-seat-constituancies and PR), and married to someone from the UK (which has neither), and these complaints about PR don't make sense form what I see. IME, First Past the Post (FPTP) that the UK has, has more safe seats than PR which Ireland has. I was suprised to find out that in the UK it's uncommon for candidates to put posters on lampposts for elections. Irish canidates in party safe seats still need to campaign, because they are competing with another candidate from their party as well. "More divisive" doens't make a lot of sense because coalitions are much more common in PR system like Ireland than UK. There hasn't not been a coalition government in Ireland in decades. This means political parties have to work together, and the extremes of each party are tempered by the coalition. What experiences are you basing your claims about the negatives of PR on?