"... hordes of extremists... "
Parties currently represented in the German Bundestag:
Christian Democratic Union (centre-right): 180 seats Christian Social Union (centre-right, so-con): 46 Free Democratic Party, (centre-right, free-market): 61 Social Democratic Party (centre-left): 222 seats The Left (left-socialist): 54 Alliance '90/Greens (left-environmentalist): 51Current representation in New Zealand House of Representatives:
Labour (centre-left): 50 seats National (centre-right): 48 New Zealand First (populist): 7 Green Party (left-environmentalist): 6 Maori Party (aboriginal): 4* United Future (centrist-Christian): 3 ACT (centre-right, free-market): 2 Progressive Party (left): 1 *NB: 7 seats are constitutionally reserved for Maori voters.The situation is even worse in countries with pure PR systems. Get a load of the Swedish Rikstag:
Social Democrats: 130 seats Moderates: 97 Centre Party: 29 Liberal People's Party: 28 Christian Democrats: 24 Left Party: 22 Greens: 19Aiieee!! Or what about those crazy Dutch:
Christian Democrats: 41 Labour: 33 Socialists: 25 People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (liberal free-market): 22 Party for Freedom (conservative free-market): 9 GreenLeft: 7 ChristianUnion (so-con): 6 Democrats 66 (social-liberal): 3 Reformed (so-con): 2 Party for the Animals: 2At last! A single-issue party. But there were supposed to be dozens... MORE: And don't even mention Ireland, with that cockamamie STV system. Why they must have hundreds of parties. Well, six, anyway:
Fianna Fail (centre-right): 77 Fine Gael (centre-left): 51 Labour: 20 Green: 6 Sinn Fein: 4 Progressive Democrats: 2So there you have it. Go PR, and it means Sinn Fein will get in.
10/09/2007
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18 Comments
I wonder why is AC so obsessed with that issue.
He was just as obsessed over STV. AC has pretty promiscuous views when it comes to electoral reform -- anything but the current spouse.
Gordon Gibson's piece in the Globe this weekend was a breath of fresh air; someone who wants electoral reform, but realizes MMP is a bad idea.
Today's SC poll shows that MMP is going down.
I think there are some good arguments for PR here against the usual complaints, but in Ontario it will favour left-wing parties only. This reduces its appeal to the bulk of the electorate. I think PR works better in BC (the referendum got 56% there which will likely be higher that the final result in Ontario) because Libs are more centrist and the Social Credit and Conservative parties are more fringe and mirror the splintering on the left between the NDP and Greens.
Belgian Chamber of Represenatatives
Christian Democratic and Flemish – New-Flemish Alliance: 30
Reform: 23
Socialist Party: 20
Open VLD: 18
Flemish Interest: 17
Socialist Party Different Spirit: 14
Humanist Democrat: 10
Ecolo: 8
List dedecker: 5
Green Party: 4
National Front: 1
They can't all be moderates.
So you need 75 seats to pass legislation. Can you figure out who's governing? If you guessed anyone at all, you're wrong!Because they can't figure it out. Haven't been able to since June 10. It's been 4 months. No government.
Belgium, a bilingual and multicultural country , has seen their system exploited so that there is an english and french version of the Greens, multiple socialist parties with seats, and absolutely no compromise because no matter what happens, they really can't suffer a meltdown on par with the 1993 PCs, '97 Liberals in Nova Scotia, or NDP in every election after Ed Broadbent.
PS
Use the search option on this site and enter "Belgium"
Good Times.
Belgium is a) not MMP, b) insane. I doubt they have an English Green party, but they certainly have French and Flemish versions of every party, because their whole political system is divided on linguistic lines -- also regional, linguisto-regional, and so on. It's madness, and it would be even crazier under FPTP -- with twenty-odd parties in the race, you could win a riding with 5% of the vote.
Nice strawman, Andrew.
Just a minor point: of course you know that the CSU of the Free State of Bavaria and the CDU of the rest of Germany are so far apart politically that they don't run candidates in each other's terrirory, i.e., the CDU in Bavaria, and the CSU in the rest of Germany.
"the CDU in Bavaria, and the CSU in the rest of Germany."
It's the other way around (CDU in the rest of Germany, CSU in Bavaria), but who's watchin'?
And that Belgium situation is just nuts!
Germany has a number of constraints put in place to prevent extreme parties
1) At least 5% of the vote or
2) Win 3 ridings
If you acheive neither then none of your votes get thrown into the PR pool...oh my wasted votes! call 911.
The barrier helps. I can see why the German experience would appeal to AC. You get some non geographic like minded representation, PArties like the FDP are of the libertarian side of conservatism, but unable to generate enough local, or geographically based, support to get an actual seat. The greens are the same. Mile wide but an inch deep.
I havent found how big the ballot is in Germany. And of course there is a unique culture there that abhors the extreme, given what it produced in the past. Weimar was PR with no minimum I believe.
You would need to identify how much political culture has an influence over this system.
But the current threshold of 3% is way too low and MMP should be rejected on that alone.
Of course I am not fond of PR to begin with. But I will admit that if we had to I could live with something more akin to the results out of Germany.
However, I still say you need to be careful comparing pluarlistic societies versus ones that are more homogenous. Italy is still an issue where you do have significant geographically based splits, usually some seperatist party, there are a number of them in Italy.
600 political columnists in Canada with the attention span of a mayfly, and then people complain when precisely one columnist gets passionate and systematic in his examination of an issue. Feel free to go back to Paul Jackson if it makes you feel better, folks.
The main problem with the Bundestag, of course, is that it is crawling with Germans. Is that what we want for our politics? Is it?!
Paul,
passionate I can get in the movies. Political columnists worth reading I expect to get knowlegeable and stay rational.
The main problem of the Bundestag is that it is crawling with political parties who have the country sewn up tighter than a bull's hole in fly time, if you'll pardon my French.
Bah! I can't believe I said English instead of Flemish. Gotta start using that preview button. Though, I'm glad we all think Belgium is insane.
If MMP comes to Canada it would be horrible. In Ontario alone, it's not all bad, except that I'd prefer all MPPs to be elected. It just seems more democratic to have MPPs elected.
This could happen if the party list was determined by voters, where a losing candidate who won the largest number of votes (or percentage of votes, depending on how you feel about northern ridings) is placed on top of his/her party's list, instead of the mini-Senate being proposed now.
PR based on appointments is only semi-democratic, and list MPPs wouldn't have any reason to go against party line to serve their riding. Voter-determined lists would be more democratic and less patronage-y. It's a word.
Sadly, our choice is between a system where MPPs are accountable to their riding, and one where a quarter of them are not.
Vote for FPTP. And since we have a Liberal majority coming, everyone who lives in a safe riding should vote for a suitably wacky party that will discredit PR even more, and give hope to the Natural Law Party of Ontario. One day the NLP and Rhinos shall unite the crazies. I wonder if Howard Hampton wants in...
Repost from another blog post Stephen:
This is ONTARIO we're talking about, the 3% threshold is necessary to even get the 3 large parties to even worry about their monopoly being broken by a new party with new ideas:
http://www.wastedvotes.ca/?q=node/2/Ontario/LATEST/0/TOP
Check the Full Results in that page. Where are these parties you're worried about that are even anywhere close to getting 3% of the vote?
Ontario is in no way like Italy and probably far more staid than Germany even.
Mike Jr:
Seeing as the list has to be ranked and published at the start of an election campaign. It is an ELECTED list.
The true appointments in our system come from Cabinet positions which Canadians have absolutely no say in . The list is much more democratic than that.
Especially when you consider AC's article on MMP. The number of list seats a party gets varies from election to election. This means that anybody running only on the list can get turfed if their party does well in the local seats next time. The interplay between list and local seats makes MMP lists work very differently from what you might expect. For the Better.
Aamir,
See my response in the breeding like rabbits comments.
So are we engineering an end result? Greens would get over 5% in the MMP, people will change their vote if they are disaffected as you say. If they dont then I guess they arent.
But the goal isnt about encouraging new parties, it was supposed to be about results that are more representative of the elections. If you have to scrape all the way to 3% then maybe the existing parties serve the Ontario electorate well and all of this is really unecessary.
If 5% is good enough for the Germans why isnt it good enough for us?
3% = 135,000 votes
5% = 225,000 votes
90,000 vote difference but filters out the nuts and the neer do wells.
It isnt the parties I see or know that concern me it is the unknown ones.....If you cant get 5% of the electorate to agree with you you are really at the far part of the tail and dont really deserve to have your view represetned at a place like the legislature. You have more work to do to convince yourfellow citizens of the validity of your issues and positions.
But if MMP doesnt pass we dont have to worry.
Stephen, here's one German ballot from their last election:
Here
Dunno from what district or lander (state) it's from, I just see Wurzburg up at the top.
Stephen,
"You have more work to do to convince your fellow citizens of the validity of your issues and positions," if you can't scrape more than 5 per cent of the vote, you say.
Problem with plurality is that even if you do your work and convince a significant portion of voters (say, 20 per cent) that your policies are appealing, you'll likely earn far fewer seats than you deserve.
There are plenty of examples of this close to home, of course. Or we could look at New Zealand, where that country's third party (Social Credit) collected 21 per cent of the vote in 1981, only to receive 2 per cent of the seats.
What a democracy!
Dan,
My comment was on the 5% versus 3% barrier in Germany, to then compare a plurality system is a change. However...you are correct that in any given riding you win with a plurality of votes. ANd when all the idvidual races are summed you can get odd results.
But anomolies exist in all of the systems. So this isnt about comparing perfect to imperfect but comparing different degrees of imperfection.
Now in FPTP you can get representation with a lot less than 3% of the total vote if you can win your riding. And winnng a riding isnt an unfair test of either personal or policy popularity. Independents do get elected and re elected. Why does this get dismissed?
Once again, if the large majority of people in this province want to change then we will change. In the absence of that it remains the same. If it doesnt change it doesnt make the government any less legitimate. It may to you, but it is a democracy so so what.
The old saw that more people voted against isnt correct either. You can vote for a party because you have a preference, but the fact that there are no riots the next day indicates people "against" someone. Voting is a positive act, who do you want, not who you dont want. (although some try to do that but the mechanism is a measure of yes not a measure of no)
I guess we could always run elections based on who gets the fewest negatives, that would be a very different ballot and election.
Stephen, I just don't know where you're getting the idea that 5% would be fine but 3% would be chaos. Especially when you take Ontario's voting history into account. Low threshold means greater accountability for parties, better proportionality and frankly Ontario is more than stable enough to handle it.
And the issue here is one of voters. Voters who want to vote for someone other than the Liberals in Dalton McGuinty's riding for example.
How about the extremists within parties, rather than extremist parties? It seems like elections from party lists rewards the party stalwarts, who are typically quite ideologically motivated. The same people might have a hard time passing the scrutiny of a local election under FPTP, where more moderate views are required. For example, it's easy for a Green Party member to fervently advocate anti-logging policies when they're selected off a list, rather than being forced to win a seat in a district where people are actually employed by forestry.