bilateralrope wrote:
Opening the parties up to attacks of "they don't really support x, because if they did they wouldn't have voted the way they did on these bills".
True, but IMO it's still guaranteed to happen.
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bilateralrope wrote:
The government party would then respond with: We only worked with them on issues x, y and z. Issues where their agenda matched ours.
In NZ the parties cooperate with each other when their agendas align. Apparently there are a lot of bills that pass with support from National and Labour (our two major parties), though I don't have any statistics on that. Just two examples a bill to block 0 hour contracts and a bill to make homes more affordable.
I'm not aware of any parties opposing something because of who said it. Instead we have National just copying parts of Labour's policies when it's convenient. It happened in 2011 and again last year
On the other hand there are countries such as Israel where under Proportional Representation fringe parties / groups do seem to have a lot more influence then they ought to.
Also, while New Zealand is a Commonwealth country it is generally speaking less diverse geographically and culturally speaking than Canada. We've had some pretty stark divisions here over the years and its rather frequent for mainstream parties to vote against things simply out of spite. Perhaps not to the degree of American politics (yet) bit its very partisan atm. IMO allowing fringe parties into the game and having them play as kingmaker may not be the best idea.
That's not to mean I'm against MMP, I just feel there needs to be some cutoffs.
bilateralrope wrote:
One electorate seat works as a cutoff. 2 or larger doesn't work because you have to decide what happens when a party only gets one electorate. I can't think of any solution that could be considered democratic.
Fair enough.
bilateralrope wrote:
To form, yes. But a party can then lose their electorates while maintaining their party vote.
An actual example from the NZ. In our 2014 election the NZ Greens got 10.70% of the party vote, but 0 electorate seats. The only time they won an electorate seat was the 1999 election, their first year in parliament, where they got 5.16% of the party vote. They managed to gain party vote while losing electorates.
The main reason I don't like the 5% cutoff is the NZ 2008 election:
- NZ First got 4.07% of the party vote. But, because the leader got into a scandal that year, he lost his electorate. So his party didn't get into parliament.
- Four other parties each got less of the party vote. But they got in through electorate seats.
Sorry, I might be a bit confused here. Do you feel that a one-seat requirement is sufficient? Or are you against having limitations like a one-seat requirement and % cut-off?
There are 338 seats in the Canadian House of Commons atm. Say we go to MMP and split that in half - 50% local ridings, 50% proportionate. That would mean there would be 169 seats available for the proportionate vote. With no restrictions that would mean a party could gain a seat with just ~0.59% of the vote. IMO there needs to be cutoff otherwise that would result in major fracturing.
jwl wrote:
In the UK in 2015 UKIP got 12.7℅ of the vote and one seat.
I'm not a supporter of PR though, but I might support a system that "tops up" seats so they equal the largest parliamentary party with less votes than them.
Which proves my point that it's unlikely that a party with a significant amount of support like that will fail to win a single seat somewhere, but bilateralrope has shown it can happen.
Note that despite their lack of seats UKIP supporters were successfully able to hijack the Conservatives into holding the referendum, then have them stick to a "hard Brexit". FPTP is no better when it comes to extremist groups being able to have large influence in government policy.
Statistics: Posted by Tribble — 2017-02-21 10:23pm