Most european countries use 2 round elections or proportional representation.
In Britain, they use First-Past-The-Post.
Same shit in Canada or Quebec, take a look at Quebec 2022, 3 parties got ~15% of the vote, check the number of seats:
The most idiotic part is that UK actually had a vote to end this shitshow, and they chose not to!!!
How moronic can a population get? Why the fuck did they vote against democracy?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum
Of course the anti democratic British idiots failed to suggest the only sensible option which is proportional representation!
I remember David Cameron being interviewed by John Humphries on Today (the Radio 4 morning news show). Cameron basically lied about what was in the proposal to make it sound like it was some crackpot idea, Humphries did nothing to call him out on it.
Same went for most media coverage really.
It’s almost like it’s a hobby for Conservatives to lie.
Its their job actually
We’re way past hobby territory and into full blown professionals.
Indeed.
It’s almost like it’s a hobby for
Conservativespoliticians to lie.FTFY.
TBF the people that wanted reform had been pushing for PR. AV was a compromise nobody really liked.
The UK voter seems to be roughly as well informed as the US voter.
There are striking similarities.
I currently live in the UK (moved a few years ago), and one of the single most infuriating thing in the culture here is how “we’ve always done it this way” is THE answer when it comes to justifying anything moronic or broken.
I know that resistance to change and attachment to traditions is not a uniquely British thing but it’s markedly worse here than anywhere else I’ve lived.
I was told in history lessons, that it was also why UK didn’t modernize after WW2.
While the rest of Europe modernized, especially Germany that had to rebuild a lot.
But when UK rebuild, they made the same mistakes as the first time all over again, because of tradition as you say.
The Conservative government response to a 2016–17 parliamentary petition demanding proportional representation said that “A referendum on changing the voting system was held in 2011 and the public voted overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the FPTP system.”[209] Tim Ivorson of the electoral reform campaign group Make Votes Matter responded by quoting the petition’s text that “The UK has never had a say on PR. As David Cameron himself said, the AV referendum was on a system that is often less proportional than FPTP, so the rejection of AV could not possibly be a rejection of PR.”[210]
The press widely covered AV as if it was incredibly expensive and didn’t solve any problems, so presented it as if we’d be throwing away beds at children’s hospitals, support for pensioners and equipment for soldiers just to introduce pointless bureaucracy. If the choice was the one most voters thought they were making, then voting against it would have been the sensible option.
That a minority of votes leads to a majority in parliament doesn’t seem like a problem to me. That’s just how it works, nothing wrong with that in itself. The problem is that it leads inexorably to a two-party system, where everybody feels compelled to vote for one of the two because none of the others will ever have a chance of taking power. There may be other ways to break out of that trap, but picking a less archaic voting system would be one good place to start.
Ranked Choice ftw.
Ranked choice is the best for single seat elections: let everyone choose their first choices, and do an instant runoff where people not in the top X at that stage are disqualified and their votes transfered to the voters’ next choice, until there actually is a candidate with majority support among remaining candidates that made it that far.
Parliamentary systems, though, have room for other representative formulas where each voter isn’t necessarily just voting for a single seat to be filled. If you have a system with strong parties, you can vote for a party, each party wins a certain number of seats, and then the party fills those seats with their members according to their internal procedures. This system, however, requires strong parties where members can be controlled by the party.
Single seat elections aren’t necessary in every situation, and it’s worth thinking through which types of representative structures may be better than single-seat districts and when to use proportional representation through multi-seat elections, and how to formally recognize the role of political parties in those systems.
Sounds like a shitty system!
It would be possible to get a majority and take all with only 23% of the votes. The David Cameron Tories won with 27%. We need a PR system.
PR will only work if safeguards can be put in place beforehand to prevent one or more parties (political or individual) in an alliance causing a complete government shutdown every time they don’t get their way.
What are the odds, do you think, that such safeguards would be put in place when the larger political parties prefer FPTP?
It’s good enough for all the parties internally.
It would be helpful if this included an explanation, rather than just an assertion. Can you explain how FPTP allows this, and how proportional representation fixes it?
CGP Gray has a good explanation how FPTP works and how it breaks down and ends up typically collapsing down into a 2 party system or is wildly unrepresentative in multi party systems.
Basically fptp is a winner take all system, whoever gets the most votes wins and beats everyone else in the race. It doesn’t matter if you won by 1 vote or by 1 million votes the result is the same, you won. So if one party can maintain just a slim plurality across numerous districts, they win those districts despite not getting the majority of votes and everyone else’s votes essentially do not count in the greater whole.
You decide to create your own party. The Chocolate Party.
Under FPTP, after intense campaigning, you get 21% of the votes nationally. It’s a huge achievement. 1 out 5 people trusted you. Millions of people voted for you. Sadly, you only won 1 race. You were defeated in the other races. So you get 1 representative in parliament. The millions of people who voted for you ? Their voice is underrepresented.
Under proportional representation, if you win 15% of the total votes, you automatically get 15% of the seats in Parliament. Every single vote matters.
Another negative consequence of FPTP is that it discourages people from creating new political parties when your society is divided.
Many Canadians voted for the liberal party of Mark Carney. Why? Because they didn’t want Pierre Poilievre to be Prime Minister. They don’t like the Liberal Party. But they were afraid that voting Green or NDP would split the votes.
Many americans vote for a Democrat because they fear that if they don’t, the Republican candidate will win. Many americans vote Republican because if they don’t, they fear the Democratic candidate will win. Everyone is afraid that splitting the vote means the people they really don’t want in power will win.
What other European country uses two round elections apart from France?
There is no voting system that fulfills all the Condorcet criteria; they all have some corner case
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
What is your reason for saying that?
Just saying something negative makes it seem like it’s a bad idea, but that just encourages people not to change at all. A voting system that tries to satisfy the Condorcet criteria will be far better than any FPTP system.
It’s easier to tear down than it is to build up. What’s your proposed alternative?
Did you make a similar comment to OP, who only spoke negatively of a well-used and well-understood system?
What is OP’s proposed alternative? What’s a realistic plan to get there?
Did you make a similar comment to OP, who only spoke negatively of a well-used and well-understood system?
What is OP’s proposed alternative? What’s a realistic plan to get there?
Here’s what OP said in the body of their post.
Most european countries use 2 round elections or proportional representation.
Although I’m not sure when they wrote that. The post was edited, so it’s possible that it wasn’t there when you first saw the post, and didn’t re-check the post before writing this comment.
