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Excuse me, this is far too sensible to be used in politics.
Especially American politics. Especially on the right, presently. They’re unofficial motto is “if cheating isn’t working then you’re not cheating hard enough.”
This is Canada.
Perhaps politics being hard to understand or interact with is a sign the system of politics should be replaced.
Ah! I believe I’ve found the flaw in your analysis… you assume that our party want any of that. You see we’re in power and don’t want to share, so. No.
See there you go, now with a pat on the head go back to playing with your Model Legislature.
/s
I think I could support STV but not party-list PR. Frankly, I hate political parties for the way they force my elected representative to “toe the party line” against the interests for which I elected them in the first place! STV is okay because it does not give parties any more power than they have under FPTP.
Ideally I’d like to see political parties abolished. The founding fathers of the US feared the damage parties would cause to the system they were building. They turned out to be right!
PR gives more power to smaller parties as opposed to big ones. Here in Australia we have STV but not PR, and it still sucks. Our democracy is almost as broken as America’s. Most people on the left agree with the Greens more than the larger Labor party, but our votes for the Greens don’t count. We live in labor/liberal districts, and our votes transfer to Labor. Which is better than letting Liberals win, which is why we haven’t fallen to fascism like the US has, but it still sucks. In the last national election, Greens got 12% of the popular vote, but only 2.6% of the seats. Less than a quarter what they deserved! Labor loves non-proportional representation, because it keeps the two party system running. If we had PR, there would be less power in the hands of big parties.
Israel has true PR and look what they’ve done with that: a coalition of small, far-right parties and one moderately large one.
Well of course a democratic Israel is going to be fascist, that’s the will of the people. Israel is full of Europeans who decided to go colonise the middle east and live in stolen homes for religious reasons. It’s high purity distilled fascism. Expecting Israel to turn out lefty is like brewing moonshine in a toilet and expecting sparkling vitamin water to come out.
Only about 27% of Israeli Jews have recent European parentage (as of 2015) and that dropped from 30% in 2008 (and dropped by about 14,000 people in absolute terms). I think if anything this shows that European Jews are either leaving Israel or otherwise not reproducing nearly as quickly as long-ancestry Israeli Jews (which grew from 37% to 44% in the same time span, an increase of 700,000 people).
Source: Wikipedia.
Furthermore, in terms of political support in Israel, the left-right split falls down largely ethnic lines:
The bases of the right-wing parties are non-dominant and low-socioeconomic-status Jews, Mizrahim, Russian immigrants, the National Religious, the ultra-Orthodox, and offspring of the Revisionists, who are more nationalistic and less liberal than the economically better off and Ashkenazi supporters of the Center-Left
Source: Oxford University Press.
So it’s pretty much exactly the opposite of your claim. The people supporting far right governments and the expansion of settlements in Israel are ethnically middle eastern Israelis or Russian-descended Jews, not European Jews or their descendants, many of whom are leaving the country or protesting against the government from within Israel.
Proportional representation
A useful facet of proportional representation is that it often results in you having multiple representatives (shared with more people) rather than only one (“Academics agree that the most important influence on proportionality is an electoral district’s magnitude, the number of representatives elected from the district.”). That means you are much more likely to have someone to represent you at least somewhat rather than having a 50% chance of having nobody to represent you. This has been a major selling point for electoral reform for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqWwV3xk9Qk
A TED-Ed video suggests that to “choose a defining fight” is useful. If people ask for “proportional representation” it would still be important even if we had an equal chance of ending up getting single member districts with STV or large electoral districts that elect multiple members with party-list proportional representation (list-PR)! With better representation, I expect we will find it easier to implement further improvements to state institutions.
I personally think “proportional representation” (PR) and “better representation” will be much easier terms to use to rally support than “single transferable vote” (STV) and “not having to worry about how anyone else is voting” (which would be assisted by having independence of irrelevant alternatives), since the meaning of the former is surely much clearer to the average person. STV / other voting systems with desirable qualities are good to advocate for, but it seems even “random dictatorship” is in some ways better than plurality voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs#Comparison_table), so I expect summarizing “improving the electoral system” with the term “proportional representation” will be more likely to make my life better than advocating for STV specifically.
Note that some implementations of party-list proportional representation violate voter’s privacy (“In 2014 a German citizen, Christian Dworeck, reported this lack of secrecy in Swedish voting to the European Commission” (I suspect Israel uses a similar system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFbBuD32DqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IvDkWGqwI)), and I probably wouldn’t specifically advocate for it. However, I will definitely advocate against having any electoral district elect only a single representative or using plurality voting. I can complain about party-list proportional representation, but I can’t presently say it leads to worse representation than what we generally get in Canada or the USA.
Parties
My understanding about how political parties came about is that people started voting on bills in order to influence how people voted on other bills (“I’ll support your bill if you support mine”), rather than considering each bill by its individual merits. An interesting phenomenon is that people also tend to dislike “omnibus” bills where a large number of changes result from a single vote, even though that at least formalizes the process of getting people to agree (it achieves the same thing but with one vote rather than several). These things seem to be hard to avoid, and parties provide other benefits due to being able to more efficiently provide certain benefits to multiple candidates at once, so I’m more focused on getting better representation with or without parties rather than focusing on parties specifically.
“In modern times the votes were unanimous” for electing the king of Germany or king of the Romans, and it seems to me that the point of having a representative nowadays is to empower someone who promises to vote in your interest, so it’s a little confusing to me that people were/are surprised that people will make promises about how to vote in order to achieve their political goals.
Parties are quite ingrained in many electoral systems, so I think focusing on them rather than a more general criticism of poor representation will lead to less effective advocacy. Some entities I expect would be described as “parties” are even funded by the European Parliament:
Missed opportunity for chart to go all meta and have a slightly larger piece say, “some people don’t like it and it might upset them so you shouldn’t want it, which shouldn’t matter because a plurality of this chart wants it…”
Or something meta that’s more clever.
Question: How do you implement proportional representation without sacrificing the ability of the voters to choose specific candidates?
Primaries and/or ranked choice voting allow for people to know who exactly it is they are choosing to have represent them. Proportional representation generally means that the people are only choosing what party they want, and the party gets to decide who will be their representative. There’s any number of reasons why you might support a party in general but oppose a specific politician. I’d much rather have a system where people can potentially weed out terrible candidates, rather than leaving it to the party to decide.
The closest you can likely get without getting overly complex is Single Transferable Vote/Ranked Choice Voting. No system will be precisely proportional and some voting systems work better depending on the governance system in place (I.e., size of electoral districts, number of seats/seats per district. legislative makeup, etc.).
Copying a previous comment of mine:
I like a variation of the German system (not sure if it’s used everywhere in Germany though).
Keep the map and election as is, add seats to the chamber, once the results are in add MPs until the chamber is proportional, they’re selected by adding the party’s leader first then the candidates from their party that had the highest % of vote in their district then the next one and so on.
That means districts where first and second place were close would get two MPs which might swing the next election in the second place’s favour if they do a good job representing their district. It also means the party only gets to choose one of the MPs that are added this way (the leader), the other ones are chosen by the electors.
Someone added that the party leaders could even be added to the list of MPs separately, the moment there’s one MP elected for a party the leader is present in the chamber, otherwise the second a party has enough votes to have a seat it first goes to the leader. They would be there for the country, not a specific district.
add seats to the chamber
Who as going to pay for all the chairs? :)
There’s more than one way to do it. You can simply have open party list proportional representation, where people vote for who gets on each party list and in what order. Then in the general election everyone picks parties and the seats are awarded proportionally according to the lists that were chosen by the voters.
Or, you can have a open election with any number of candidates running for office from any number of parties. Voters pick candidates using a method that lets them choose as many as they like, like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting. Then the seats are awarded to the winners, with the awarding method being the thing that creates proportional representation.
With the first way it’s extra important that candidates appeal to the party’s base. With the second way there’s potentially multiple strategies for winning a seat.
At this point, we could move to a direct democracy system, and maybe move away from a representative democracy .
The closet country to a direct democracy is Switzerland and they still use PR
Agreed. It’s a fabulous idea, but I’m pretty sure only one state awards electoral votes proportionally.
With 2/3 of the states controlled by fascists and their enablers, it is sadly never going to happen.
We are not in a democracy, no matter how much people love to use the D word.
It’s a good thing the community is called “FairVote Canada”. It’s not a good thing that Canada’s current political leader is more of a showboy than a politician.
two states, nebraska and maine, distribute some electoral college votes by congressional district.
but even if the so-called ‘wyoming rule’ was in play, where the smallest state dictated the size of a congressional district and the increased size of the house of representatives as a result—no presidential election outcome would have changed, with the possible exception of 2000 (which was decided by scrotus, not votes).
It seems the first time PR was used was in 1855. Canada and the USA are late (it seems that most of the places I’d be okay with living use proportional representation), but catching up sooner would be better than catching up later!
I’ll draw a parallel to another revolution: supposedly only two wars were fought to end slavery, in the USA and Haiti (everywhere else seems to have banned slavery with just legislation and compensation, for example in Britain), and I’d rather keep the number of wars over proportional representation at 0 rather than risking having a higher number, so advocating emphatically is important regardless of circumstances.
