'Should we switch to proportional representation?' poll discussion

competitionscafe

PR Myths: The facts and the fiction on proportional representation:

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/PRMyths.pdf

Gareth_Lazelle

teddyco wrote: »

"And the tail is wagging the dog. Last Thursday, the two parties that were formally opposed to PR, the Tories and Labour, between them polled 19 million votes. The party that supports PR polled fewer than seven million votes. Is this what Mr Clegg means when he talks about the “new politics”?

To be honest, if the other two parties are so opposed to it then they simply shouldn't negotiate it away. Unless they are desperate for power walking away should not be a problem.

Or perhaps Labour and the Conservatives should negotiate with each other if it truly is common ground... But then perhaps they're not so grown-up after all (like kids in the playground unwilling to back down from some bit of rhetoric "just because"),

Nevertheless, you can't say that 19 million voters are against PR because they may have had other reasons for voting the way they did (and frankly, the Labour party put STV on the table before the election, so you really can't say that Labour are totally against any form of PR - you could even say that 15.5 million are for PR while 10.7 million are against it, though I would consider those figures to be suspect too),

(The anti-PR slant is also not a view supported by the poll results here, although they are hardly a representative sample)

And this:

teddyco wrote: »

"Since last Friday we have lived with the fiction that Mr Brown was simply doing his constitutional duty by staying at the helm until a new government could be formed, acting in the national interest. Now we see that all the time he has been acting in his and his party’s interest, defying the verdict of the electorate by trying to create a coalition of the election losers. This is a bleak day for our democracy."

Pretty much sums up why the Torygraph isn't worth reading... The opening sentence is plainly wrong (quite why we accept the papers castigating him for following the rules is beyond me (it's not like he's been passing new laws since the sixth)... And frankly he still got a substantial number of votes, so he isn't that much of a failure at the election unless you have some political bias), and the rest is simply opinion.

Dave_Gould

tripled wrote: »

I can't stand the idea of PR, I like to vote for my local representative rather than a 'party list'. While I acknowledge parties parachute candidates into some seats, the local people have the power not to elect them.

Having said that, the lefties might get more than they bargained for as UKIP and BNP members get in. Proportional represtentation may do the Lib Dems more harm then good as people don't think they're the only alternative to the 'big two'.

I've had a dig and I don't think AV+ looks two bad, as long as the regional candidates weren't just from party lists but independants could stand regionally as well.

STV is almost proportional, provides local candidates, actually provides you with a choice of candidates from the same party (bye bye Blears), encourages independents yet has a tendency to exclude extremists.

AV+ uses party lists sadly.

I created a version of STV that guarantees a small, working majority proportional to the winning party's mandate. As a new user, I can't post a link but the basic principle is to give seats to candidates from the winning party who lost by the smallest proportion of votes.

Gareth_Lazelle

Dave_Gould wrote: »

I created a version of STV that guarantees a small, working majority proportional to the winning party's mandate. As a new user, I can't post a link but the basic principle is to give seats to candidates from the winning party who lost by the smallest proportion of votes.

This could work with full PR too (you would vote for your constituent, but the top up MPs would come from the best of the losing MPs). Part of the problem with doing it on STV is that the vote-share is skewed with each iteration of the STV-process, though I guess you could use the initial results as the datum.

That said, with the "safe-seats" where anything with the right colour rosette can get in I'm not sure that the connection between electorate and MP exists even under the current system (and if you voted for a "loser" in your constituency how are you represented by the MP that does get in? A problem that PR can address by assigning multiple MPs to each constituency (but having much fewer constituencies)),

jojose

Several problems with FPTP:

1. It gives parties 100% of the power on a minority of the vote (potentially as low as 35%, as we saw in the 2005 election).
2. It creates arrogant, idiotic government, unwilling to take into account other viewpoints or accept constructive criticism. As a consequence, it passes reams of unnecessary and unworkable legislation (which goes some way to explaining why 3,500 new criminal offences have been introduced since 1997).
3. Representation is decided by where imaginary boundary lines are drawn. Constituencies do not even represent homogenous communities, and in most cases the majority of constituents do not get representation.
4. Voters are psychologically forced to vote for one of the two leading parties in their constituency, even if they don't agree with either. This creates unrepresentative policy-making.
5. FPTP causes two-party politics, which promotes negative campaigning - because one party's loss is usually the other party's gain.

Advantages of AMS (the form of PR already used in Scotland and Wales)

1. It maintains the direct constituency link - independents are also able to stand.
2. It means parties only gain representation in proportion to their seat share.
3. It is far less likely votes will be wasted.
4. It creates multi-party politics, which makes negative campaigning rather pointless. Parties are instead forced to make positive pledges.
5. It often results in coalition government, which means more chance of a governmental programme the public supports. Take the current negotiations between the Lib Dems and the Tories. The Tories are keeping their popular pledges about defence, immigration and Europe, and the Lib Dems are keeping their popular pledges about tax and electoral reform. Surely this is a good thing.
6. Because AMS involves constituency MPs and party list MPs, there are MPs available to deal primarily with local matters, representing their constituents, but also list MPs to focus all their attention on matters of national importance.
7. Even though post-election negotiations are usually done in private, the governmental programme is published immediately at their conclusion, and it is obvious from the parties' manifestos who contributed which policies, so they can easily be held to account.
8. AMS tends to force politicians to talk to each other rather than shout at each other, something the public has long expressed a desire for.

cottel7

I believe that perhaps there would be an increase in the chances of having a hung parliament, but in the long run, the parties would have to work harder at being different so that people actually vote for a party that would be willing to change, no just hang around the middle and say the same as all the others.

adouglasmhor

I thought the Liberals wanted a REFERENDUM on PR? Not to force it on us?

jojose

teddyco wrote: »

I think I speak for a lot of people who feel cheated today that Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are using their position to selfishly barter for Proportional Representation as the most important factor in agreeing to form a government.

Do we need electoral reform? Maybe and maybe not. However, it's certainly a subject that's going to reshape the face of Britain forever and certainly not something that we want negotiated on the back of a cocktail napkin by greedy politicians who are horse trading for points they can score with their own party.

People are saying that the current electoral system is 'dilapidated' and 'old' and 'everyone in Europe has PR, so we should too'. Well, as my mother used to say, 'If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too'?

Just because 'everyone else is doing it', doesn't mean that it's good for Britain?

The news is talking about politicians giving the British people a 'referendum' on PR, but I would guess that a lot of people don't yet grasp the full understanding of PR other than what they have Googled or read on Wikipedia. That being said, should we be so foolish to want to change to a new system without first allowing folks to understand what they are getting themselves into?

Maybe this poll should have included additional categories for all those who are voting for PR to ask "If you're in favor of PR, do you know what it is and how it works"?

I personally didn't know much about it myself until it became an issue in the news, and I was forced to do some research on the subject. Do people also know that there are versions of PR? AV and STV for example are two versions that I have discovered from research.

If I could speak to Nick Clegg and give him some advice, I would tell him to form a government with the Conservatives who won the most votes and have a moral obligation to form a government, and to put down his petty squabbling over PR and live up to his promises to tackle the issues that are the most important for the British people which are: taxes, economy, crime, and the staggering national debt.

As Bill Clinton reminded us, IT'S ABOUT THE ECONOMY STUPID!

For God's sake, all Clegg is asking for is a REFERENDUM! Blame the Tories for the fact they haven't reached agreement yet - they're the ones saying 'no, we're not interested in what the public wants, we'll make the decision ourselves.'

If everyone else is doing it, the chances are PR works better. The fact is, virtually every country with PR started off with FPTP - they all changed, and they never changed back. What does that suggest?

Finally, this Tory press propaganda that because their party had the single largest number of votes individually means they have a 'moral right' to form a government is flagrant !!!!!!!!. If the Labour Party and the Lib Dems are more closely aligned, 53% chose their closely aligned policies over 37% who chose the Tories. It is a nonsense to suggest that whoever got the single largest number of votes has an automatic right to form a government.

The system we operate is called First Past the Post. The Post is 326. The Tories didn't get past it. So their friends in the press are trying to persuade gullible members of the public that they should be allowed to form a government on their own anyway. Tell the press to sod off.

spendalot_sanj

Dear All,

A issue with PR is the opportunity for well funded extreme/fringe parties to acquire representation in parliament. What I mean to say is, a party would need approximately 45,000 votes to gain a MP in parliament (turnout divided by number of MPs). If PR was in place for this election then the British National Party (BNP) would have gained approx 12 seats, which scares me. As a coloured man in this country, it would concern me (approx) 2% of the parliment were openly racist.

Of course you could argue that as a democracy is a "government by the people" and as such if 2% of the population vote for the BNP then they should get them.

I would advocate that a well funded party would be able to promote their views, if they could persuade just 75 voters in each constituency to vote for them they would gain a seat in parliament (75 * 600 = 45000). So parties who are able to promote an argument (e.g. all coloured people OUT) and obtain a small number of votes per constituency might get representation.
The table below (sorry about the format) illustrates the net difference in seats in PR was impliemented (raw voting stats from the BBC website).



Party Votes Seats PR Seats Net
Conservative 10706647 306 237 -69
Labour 8604358 258 191 -67
Liberal Democrat 6827938 57 151 94
Democratic Unionist 168216 8 3 -5
Scottish National 491386 6 10 4
Sinn Fein 171942 5 3 -2
Plaid Cymru 165394 3 3 0
Social Democratic 110970 3 2 -1
Green 285616 1 6 5
Alliance Party 42762 1 0 -1
UKIP 917832 0 20 20
British National Party 563743 0 12 12
Ulster Conservatives 102361 0 2 2
English Democrats 64826 0 1 1
Respect-Unity Coalition 33251 0 0 0
Traditional Unionist Voice 26300 0 0 0
Christian Party 18623 0 0 0
Independent Community 16150 0 0 0
Trade Unionist and 12275 0 0 0
Scottish Socialist Party 3157 0 0 0
Others 319891 1 7 6

jojose

'A issue with PR is the opportunity for well funded extreme/fringe parties to acquire representation in parliament. What I mean to say is, a party would need approximately 45,000 votes to gain a MP in parliament (turnout divided by number of MPs). If PR was in place for this election then the British National Party (BNP) would have gained approx 12 seats, which scares me. As a coloured man in this country, it would concern me (approx) 2% of the parliment were openly racist.'

Under sane versions of PR, with a threshold of 4 or 5%, the BNP would not have gained any seats.