There’s a growing debate emerging around electoral reform here as people are increasingly fed up with First Past the Post producing huge single party majority governments with just over 40% (sometimes even less) of the vote. I’d be okay if we had PR, but like everything, it’s not perfect. What are some of the pros and cons that you find in your countries?
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Well the main advantage is that you have a greater range of parties to choose from that have actually chances to succeed. In Germany there is a 5 % threshold that parties have to exceed in order to get seats in parliament but there are still 6 parties that have good chances to go to parliament.
Of course this leads to the fact that we almost always have coalition governments because no party is likely to get the absolute majority. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a debate on its own.
What I would improve in Germany would be to introduce the possibility to rank the party lists. In the current system you can just accept a list in the order in which it was set up by the party. I think in the Netherlands for example you can pick your preferred candidate from the whole list and thus also improve the chances of those at the bottom of the list.
Advantage: there are lots of parties available to choose from so it’s easier to find a party that’s close to your views. No “lost” votes, or there technically are but it numbers in the tens of thousands not hundreds of thousands or millions
Disadvantage: there are lots of parties available to choose from so coalition forming can be hard especially in recent years when the % of votes going to big parties has massively decreased and the number of representated parties has gone up. And people from outside of the major urban area (Randstad) often feel underrepresented
Disadvantage: you can have many different parties. The Netherlands currenly has 20 different parties in parliament. This is also due to us not having a threshold. It’s almost a miracle ‘only’ 4 parties were needed to form a majority government.
Benefits of many different parties is that you can choose one that fits your beliefs very well. You don’t have to settle because other parties don’t stand a chance of being elected (well, still kind of but a lot less than with first past the post).
The biggest disadvantage: it increases partisan discipline. Every sinlge Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Corbyn must run and win a constituency in order to be an MP, also MPs in the UK rebel far more, than here, single MPs are basically voting machines passing everything the leadership wants. In Poland, it’s totally up to the partisan leadership whether your career is over or not- high places on a list basically guarantee a mandate, so they reward, blind loyalty and sticking to them.
The biggest advantage is that it’s slightly more representative nationwide, but also not ideal- if your support is more located in certain district you’ll get more mandates than if it’s more widespread(for example- PSL is a agricultural party, so it gets better results in rural districts, which gives them more mandates), also vaste votes are a thing here too, especially considering smaller parties which don’t make the threshold
The main disadvantage is that the MPs are not held accountable. They are elected in closed lists and we can’t choose the order in which they are elected. In a FPTP system, if you don’t like that MP, even if you like the party, you can just not vote for them.
Another disadvantage is that your constituency is not represented. For example, with FPTP, I could vote for my MP and if they don’t do a good job representing my city, I don’t vote for them anymore. There’s a huge problem in Portugal with centralization, where people are leaving their towns and cities to move to Porto and Lisbon and PR doesn’t help that, since the governments don’t think fixing this problem gets them any seats.
The advantage, of course, is that the number of seats is proportional to the number of votes. In Portugal this doesn’t *really* happen because some districts have only two seats, which means that you have to vote in the main parties, otherwise your vote won’t count. This could be fixed with a compensation circle, which is being discussed for years and already implemented (with good results) in the regional government of Azores’ elections.
Another huge advantage is that there is no gerrymandering. The idea that someone can win an election just by changing the borders is disgusting and way worse than the electoral college or the over-representation of states in the US senate, imo.
Finally, more than voting for the parliament, you are truly voting for the government. With FPTP, if you don’t like your MP, but want their party to form government, how do you vote? With PR, you don’t think about that and just vote in the party that could form the government, or the government coalition, or just support it.
Well the parliament actually represents how the people voted, that’s a huge advantage. It’s also easier for new parties to establish themselves so more variety so you don’t get stuck in a two party system like the US. That’s the issue with many of the first past the post system, winner takes all when in reality they didn’t actually get all votes so why should they take all?
Positives: as the German commentor says, it diversifies politics and gives a more proportionate spread of MPs. It also gives more people a say in politics, as their votes may actually matter in the larger picture. The odds of a single party (such as the tories in your case) just brute-forcing laws through are reduced significantly, since it’s practically unheard of to win a straight majority. Coalitions represent a more nuanced government, and the parties in government can hold each other accountable
Negatives: there can occasionally be some rather bitter compromises that need to be made to form a coalition. Sometimes a minority government will form, which can have a really tough time getting things through (not quite what you guys call a “hung parliament”, but the effect is roughly the same, if they don’t have a good negotiator). In the British system there’s some degree of constituency representation in national parliament (you see it regularly in PMQs, and I remember trying to write multiple British MPs, when I lived there, and got the answer that only *my* MP is allowed to act on such correspondence), which is not really the case in proportional representation
The one i hear thr most is that because parties always need multiple other partiee to cooperate with it will always drag the plans of the government to the middle which makes change very hard. Now this is more a problem with the Dutch electoral system rather than all pr systems because most have a minimal requirement like 5% to be allowed into government. The Netherlands doesnt have this so we have 22 parties currently in government with atleast 1 seat
I believe the difference is largely determined by treshold, defined by law or not, which voters see determining chances for their candidates to get inband have a say. With no treshold parliament is fragmented, parties elected may change often, there may be issues with their ability to agree on decisions. First past the post is at the other end of the spectrum usually – few large parties can get in, so they are always elected, politicians tend to gravitate towards those, rather than establish new ones based on their own political views. Inbetween these is probably the best option, where a few parties get in, there is more stability, but it still can be reasonably expected that if new political factions form then they would get elected if they would establish a new party.
I think treatment of individual politicians amd theor ability to act actually varies by each country’s legal tweaks to election system and political culture e.g. here we are allowed to vote on candidates within party’s list, other countries may not have that. There also was problem here that at times new parties would form led by a single star candidate that would just pull his followers in, to prevent this a form of voting in districts was introduced, but in our case it doesn’t seem like it has solved the problem, but rather has ensured that we cannot vote on all candidates.
Spain didn’t switch its system, but recently we moved from 2 big parties alternating in power to up to 6 more or less big national parties.
I guess UK would still keep a huge representation of the biggest parties in the parliament with a small representation of the smaller ones.
Pros:
* political discussion is enriched with more points of view
* you can vote to a party that is better suited to your preferences (still no party will be 100% what you’d want them to be)
* no party can form a government on their own, and they have to seek for consensus on biggest decissions.
Cons:
* Definition of “proportional” is not as obvious as it might seem. There are multiple systems to calculate how the votes are translated into representatives, and all of them have pros and cons on their own.
In Spain the seats are distributed proportionally, but at a provincial level (you vote for the representatives of your province), the number of representatives for each province is determined based on the population of the province, being most provinces rather unpopulated, it makes very different to vote from a province with 37 representatives (such as Madrid) where small parties can still send representatives or from a province with very few representatives like Soria, which has only 2 of them and you know that there will be a maximum of 2 represented parties.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Diputados_por_circunscripci%C3%B3n_%28elecciones_al_Congreso_de_los_Diputados%2C_2019%29.svg
* it was a pro but also a con… no party can form a government or make important decissions on their own… this also makes room to some unstability. If there’re no clear support for a government, you can start a spiral of re-running elections until there’s a result that allows to form a government.
* There might be multiple parties but they are often aligned in blocks, the most common in Spain being left vs right.
* There’s space for populist parties. I mean, they can make it in countries with no proportional systems, but nowadays you might have them in non-proportional countries, and you will have them in proportional countries. The populist discourse transforms politics and helps transforming the way in which politics are made. Now in Spain it seems like politics have been transformed in marketing.
I actually did political science in uni for an entire semester where we talked about this a lot, so I have a pretty clear opinion on it. I personally, without wanting to jerk myself off too hard, think that the German voting system is actually one of the best ones out there as it combines some advantages of both FPTP and PR.
The main problems with first past the post (FPTP) voting are that it (a) doesn’t do a very good job of representing the entire population and (b) favours a two-party system. This is because, if one region chooses one representative to fill the seat for their region, the candidates with the largest share of the vote will take the seat, the votes for all the other parties are rendered effectively meaningless. Even if candidate A receives 51% of the vote and candidate B 49%, you’ll still have 49% of people in the region who are not represented at all. Someone who won by a very large margin does also get one seat just like someone who only barely won their election. This is why FPTP voting is sometimes described as favouring a “tyranny of the majority”, because the minority does not get any political representation. The big advantages however are that every region has their own designated representative that people can complain to if they’re unhappy and that it is very easy to “punish” your representative for doing a shit job by voting them out. However, the FPTP system usually makes it very easy to get a majority because most of the time one of the parties will receive an absolute majority.
The main problems with proportional representation (PR) are that (a) because of party lists, there is usually no direct representation of certain regions and (b) it becomes much harder to get rid of a certain member of parliament if they do a shit job, because voters usually have no influence over who is in what rank on a party list. But the advantages of course are that there is usually a larger political landscape with more parties and that every vote actually counts, even if they’re in the minority. Absolute majorities however are very rare with PR, usually parties will have to compromise and form a coalition in order to form a government. This can lead to parties being much more restricted in how much of their policies they can actually pass, even if they’re part of the government, because what they can pass is largely dependent on what the other parties in the coalition allow them to pass. So the government that comes out of PR may not be as stable as that of FPTP, because there’s always the risk of the government falling apart due to disagreements between the different governing parties.
Now on to the German system: Like I said before, the German system combines PR and FPTP. Essentially, every citizen has two votes on the ballot, the first one is for a candidate of their region (FPTP) and the second one is for a party (PR). This is where it gets a bit tricky, because as you can imagine, most people don’t vote for the same party with their first vote as they do with their second vote. A left-leaning person may vote for the green party or the socialist party (left party) with their second vote, but for the candidate of the social democrats with their first vote, because there isn’t really a chance that a candidate of their favoured party could win the first vote, while the social democrat has an actual shot at winning the direct mandate. So now every district sends their directly elected members of parliament to the Bundestag, they all get a seat. But because the first and second votes aren’t the same, the seats are now not distributed according to the proportional results of the second vote. So what we do is we increase the total number of seats in our parliament until the parties are represented according to the second vote again. Last election for example, the christian democrats received 143 out of 299 direct mandates, which means they won about 43% of all direct mandates, however in the second vote they only received 19%, so we needed to give the other parties a shitload of additional seats in order to reduce the proportional size of the christian democratic party. This has the huge advantages that every region has direct representation, a direct representative, while at the same time the will of the voters is represented proportionally accurate. The disadvantages are that our parliament does not have a fixed number of seats, but the amount of seats changes every time according to our election results. In fact, they keep increasing (and could keep doing so almost infinitely, right now parliament has 736 seats), which in return means that Germany already has got one of the largest parliaments in the world and therefore also one of the most expensive ones. Although we did change the rules a bit so that up to three direct mandates don’t have to be compensated for anymore in order to decrease the size of parliament. This is however of course a shift toward FPTP and it benefits primarily the larger parties which is why it was also a very controversial change.
I personally don’t really mind having a very large parliament though. Sure, it is expensive, but what kind of democracy would we have if we did not think the best possible representation is worth that extra money?
PS: If I’m not mistaken, our two-votes system was actually implemented by the parliaments of Scottland and New Zealand too.