"... unstable governments... "
No. of elections 1945 - 1998
PR: MMP Germany 14 PR: party list Italy 14 Norway 14 Finland 14 Netherlands 16 Belgium 17 Sweden 17 Denmark 22 Plurality (first past the post) United Kingdom 15 Canada 17
10/09/2007
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13 Comments
Italy had 14 elections. So what? They've had many more governments in that time.
Two problems: Australia has elections every 3 years, and it's mandated by law, so has nothing to do with stability.
Second, Australia doesn't use plurality (first past the post) method - it uses alternate vote (preferential balloting) for the lower house, and PR for the senate.
and pity your poor American cousins
why look how "unstable" we must be, we've had TWENTY-SIX elections since 1945 :-)
Emmett,
Quite right -- it's a misleading comparison. I'll take Australia off the list.
And in Italy there hvae been 38, count em 38 diifferent Prime Ministers since the post war republic was formed.
They would change governements based on coalitions and not going to election.
A misrepresentation of the data. Elections arent necessarily a sign of an unstable government, but a change of government is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Italy
Italy has unstable governments, to the extent that the Prime Minister, the head of government, changes quite frequently.
I'll leave that to you to decided if thats a good thing or a bad thing, but stable it isnt.
I agree with Stephen's comment and thanks for saving me the time to write it.
Germany has had only 8 chancellors since 1945.
See here
On the flipside, Italy's had 37 ministries (I confused this before with Italian Cabinets, which there are even more of).
The list
I have said in the other thread that Germany is probably the poster child for MMP.
It has a higher threshold for MMP 5% vs 3% and I suspect a political culture that wishes to avoid extremes, based on cultural memory.
It may also be a more homogenous society, can't say I have heard of any German seperatist movements....they may exists but they clearly dont have much impact.
I said in the other thread that the appeal that MMP would have out of the German situation for our host is a party like the FDP. Unable to garner enough geographic to get a seat but able to gather enough ideological votes to garner PR seats. The FDP is a libertarian-consercative party. Think right wing economically and fairly liberal socially.
Before moving to an MMP or any PR variant you need to take into account political culture, which just hasnt entered the debate at all.
3% is way too low, 5% makes me feel better about the result. But justr like one shouldnt assume that a PR system ends like Italy one shouldnt assume it will end like Germany.
Understand the appeal but not now. Electoral reform is not the kind of thing one should do based on this level of debate or without a good reason to change.
And a 3% threshold is way too low....5% is the minimum, that on its own is a reason to not go forward.
Italy had 14 elections. So what? They've had many more governments in that time.
Well, Italy and Israel both use solely list members.
Ontario will use 30% list members, 70% normal MPs.
And a 3% threshold is way too low....5% is the minimum, that on its own is a reason to not go forward.
I could either way on this. But provincially, looking at the political reality as you say, the Green party only got 2.8% of the vote. And the Green party is the fourth most populous party in Ontario. They wouldn't even get on the MMP list! I'm trying to see why that's a problem here....
Re Greens at 2.8%....Are we trying to engineer a result? Or are we trying to address an alleged process problem?
The act of implementing MMP would change how people vote. The greens would get more votes based on the apparently large number of people who dont vote for them but would, "if their vote mattered".
And if they didnt? Then maybe not as many people felt left out after all....
I dont want MMP, but if you had it then a good filter is what you need to prevent the problems the critics, such as myself, state. Anything below 5% is too light a hand on the brake in my opinion. Voting and elections are a system with feedback, as a party reaches a threshold, or drops below it, the electorate and the press treat them differently. Look at what happens when an opposition party passes the governing party in the polls, more atention is paid to someone who will win. Except in the recent Ontario election where press examination of the apparent Liberal re-election has gone apparently unexamined.
Thresholds matter.
Besides, if you cannot get 5% of the electorate to vote for you dont you think the view is somewhat irrelevant in the bigger picture under some form of PR.
How about we let Ontario pilot MMP for 10 years or so - maybe put in a sunset clause that requires another referendum in 10 years to revisit the issue. Then we can compare the results of the Ontario experiment to a federal FPTP system and FPTP in other provinces. A nice experiment - test and control. Now we just need to create some real metrics to measure effectiveness. I suggest cost of government, frequency of change of government, provincial economic performance (corrected for global markets, of course) and extensive polling to gauge voter engagement with the political process. The problem with political science is that it's never conducted as a science with proper controls and metrics. I wish we'd start basing policy on a scientific basis rather than lunging from one initiative to another without ever examining the results to see if they accomplished what they promised.