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I would like to point out a couple of things.quote:The United States, Canada, and Great Britain are the only Western democracies that continue to cling to winner-take-all arrangements. First, a point of pedantry. This is not strictly true; the French system has two rounds (to ensure that the winner in each district gets at least 50% of the vote) but is not proportional; En Marche and its ally the Democratic Movement secured a solid overall majority and 60% of the National Assembly with 49% of the national vote. On a wider level, please do not think that PR by itself will be a cure-all. You know what PR means? PR means hung legislatures with no absolute majorities and nobody in clear control. PR means that if you want to get anything done, you need coalitions. Lots and lots and lots of lovely coalitions. Coalitions require weeks and possibly months of negotiation and horse-trading and understanding between different parties to form compromise agreements that are never going to totally satisfy anyone who voted for the parties that form them. Sometimes it means that nobody can agree, and then you need either to accompany it by ditching the set-in-stone coordinated American election cycle, or else accept the very real possibility that you are baking four-year total gridlock periods into the foundations of the system. How's that going to go down in the current American political atmosphere, where a Republican is an evil RINO if they try to raise taxes on anyone ever, and a Democrat is a spineless traitor if they aren't passionate advocates of single-payer? If nobody is allowed to openly compromise, they can't form a coalition, nobody can govern, and you still have gridlock. At the start of this decade it took Belgium nearly two years to form a new government after elections. The King of Spain had to call for fresh elections in 2016 after six months of negotiating went nowhere (mostly because the new insurgent leftists and the old-guard centre-leftists hate each other worse than the Judean People's Front), and it then took another five months to form a minority right-wing government that's been trying to solve a secession crisis by hitting it with big sticks. Also, do not think that PR will automatically benefit the left. Consider the Germans. Germany had a federal election three weeks ago, and they're now settling in for a protracted negotiation period. The German left-wing voter in that election had an absolute bastard of a choice. The main left-wing party is the traditional option of the SPD. However, if you voted SPD in 2005 or 2013 in an effort to keep the centre-right CDU out, guess what? The SPD and CDU, as the two largest parties in the Bundestag, formed a grand coalition with the CDU's Angela Merkel as Chancellor. (In 2009 she was able to go into coalition with a smaller right-wing party.) So now what do you do? You could just be sensible and German and keep calm and vote for the Chancellor. To the apparent left of the SPD we find first the Greens, who may or may not care more about their green policies than their left-wing ones, and who might go into coalition with the CDU soon if they get over their hatred for the minor right party the FDP, who would also have to be a partner. Then there's Die Linke. They're the direct successors of the ruling party of East Germany whose representatives are mostly still old enough to be dogged by often-accurate accusations of having been Stasi informants, and the stink of this is continually dragging them down. Then there's a motley collection of oddballs and also-rans who can't get near the 5% threshold for representation, and by this point you might as well vote for the German version of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which at least has a seat in the EU parliament. There is a very real possibility that introducing PR into American legislatures results in a bunch of unsatisfying grand coalitions led by people in the mould of Joe Manchin and Dick Durbin, while the Tea Party and the Bernie Party fulminate impotently in opposition, neither of them able to get near to 50% by themselves and neither of them able to compromise enough to work with the continuity Democrats or Republicans. (On the plus side, it also makes it much more likely that the RENT IS TOO drat HIGH guy might win an independent seat somewhere, and I'd pay a *lot* of money to see him as the kingmaker of any legislature you'd care to name.) I don't dislike PR, in whatever of the many forms it takes around the world. It's an empirically fairer way of deciding elections than FPTP. Just don't imagine that you can go down to IKEA and get the Swedish flat-pack electoral system. PR has its own issues and you need to figure out how to design them out, or deal with them.
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Oct 9, 2017 02:45
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 22:24 |
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