The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Monday, December 29, 2014

Better? Or worse?

Parliamentary systems differ from our own in at least two interesting respects.

They generally allow both for proportional representation of parties and for unscheduled elections prompted by votes of no confidence or other political crisis trip-wires.

Our own system of fixed terms and districts represented by a single member chosen by plurality-voting allows neither.

Proportional representation makes it practical for many parties significantly differentiated by agenda to compete, with all getting seats in the legislature proportional to their shares of the vote.

Both left and right then tend to spread out over multiple parties, voters choosing their personal "best fit" from among sometimes four or more.

On the left one might have separate Progressive, Socialist, Communist, and Trotskyist parties while on the right one might have separate parties of fiscal conservatives, libertarians, Christian Democrats, and (once upon a time) fascists.

Given the possibility of unscheduled elections and the common lack of a single majority party, governments survive only by making coalitions and they can do that only by making significant concessions to fringe parties on agenda items that otherwise could not pass into law.

Too, when parties across the spectrum refuse the voters some agenda item they strongly desire a fringe party with an agenda very few actually favor as whole can nevertheless pick up far more than its share of votes based solely on its willingness to give the increasingly exasperated public its way on that one item.

Anti-immigration sentiment, for example, has made fringe parties of the right winners in much of Europe.

Note the Greek "Golden Dawn" neo-Nazis.

And anti-austerity sentiment right now threatens to hand a legislative majority and with it power to a radical left party in Greece, come the unscheduled elections on the way for January.

Greek political crisis: Huge amount at stake for Greece and EU

The Greek crisis

Syriza and economic thought

The thing about radicals is that they often think of sheer destruction as a good thing, clearing the way forward to their own idea of a brighter future.

Provoking a global depression, for instance.

First past the post

Proportional representation

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