martin14 martin14:
llama66 llama66:
Call me crazy, but wouldn't proportional representation end Majority goverments, and force the parties to work together? (In theory at least)
I have been in Europe long enough to tell you without hesitation:
You don't want PR.
The small parties, having to cater to one interest loudmouths, and the
under the table corruption that has to be done to get support to make a government
has the turned the whole system into an unbelievable clusterfuck across many Euro
countries.
Trust me, the best arrangement is in Belgium, where it is so screwed up,
they usually don't have a government these days.
FPTP is really the best way.
Holy shit, stop the presses but I fully agree with Martin here. FPTP is the best way to go.
All of these Utopian proposals for "power sharing" governments where all the parties get to hold hands, sing kumbaya and jointly govern are recipes for disaster.
First, as Martin says, with proportional representation, you get these coalition governments made up of a bunch of tiny special interest parties, each with a small fraction of the votes.
In these systems you tend to still have the 2 or 3 'major' parties that can each get maybe 20%-40% of the votes but they have to make backroom deals with the fringe groups in order to form a coalition representing a majority. So the fringe groups end up wielding a lot of power as they will threaten to leave the coalition and end the majority if they don't get certain concessions. The end result is that government policy ends up reflecting a lot more religious, ethnic, and single-issue interests. Something as simple as a bill to expand a highway becomes a bill to expand only half the highway, outlaw abortion on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and provide a billion dollar subsidy to a mountain-top indoor shrimp farm.
Second, a coalition government is basically "decision by committee" so everything is a compromise and nobody is ultimately held accountable. Each party just turns to its respective voter base and says "don't blame me, I had to compromise with the other parties in the coalition, this is the best I could do!" In FPTP, if Trudeau doesn't keep his promise, you can blame him. He doesn't get to say that he did his best but couldn't get consensus from the other groups. This is similar to the problem that the US has, where the White House and Congress and Senate can just endlessly point fingers at each other and the voter is unable to figure out who is to blame for what.
CKA Uber 
CKA Moderator 
The elected ones simply make policy, but it's the deputy ministers in the CS who are respected and don't change every 6 months who get things done.
CKA Super Elite 
