What do you think of proportional representation?

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In my opinion proportional representation is suck beause in fact that we are voting on, worth s**t political parties and not to a specific person, to have the electoral threshold of 5%. The only solution for my country is the first-past-the-post voting and Single-member district.

We in Poland have proportional representation, but I think that the first-past-the-post voting and single-member district are so much better, so i voted for Kukiz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawe%C5%82_Kukiz

"First past the post" (the one candidate with the most votes wins the whole thing) is how we do it in the U.S.A.. Its hard for me to imagine another way of doing it. Its works okay for us.


So thats the way I would recommend.

This is the type of system we have in Canada, and having this type of system hasn't prevented us from having party politics and a limited number of political parties with a realistic chance of winning seats in the legislature.

People here don't usually vote for a candidate running for office in their electoral disctrict based on the candidate's merits as an individual, they vote for a candidate based on what party that candidate belongs to. Very few independent candidates are elected -- sometimes none at all.

I personally think that, if you have party politics, some kind of proportional representation is better than first past the post. With proportional representation, at least the number of seats a party gets in the legislature better reflects their share of the popular vote.

In Canada's first past the post system, parties with less than 40% of the popular vote have won more than 50% of the seats in the legislature. It's also possible for a party to win the election and form the government in power without actually winning a majority of seats, let alone a majority of the popular vote -- they just have to win more seats than all the other parties (we call this a "minority government").

After more than a century of first past the post, New Zealand changed to proportional representation in the 1990s (the public voted for this out of four choices including the then status quo). No system is perfect, though after all these years there is no support at all for a return to first past the post.

The main argument against first past the post is electoral boundaries which can unduly favour a particular party.
To win an election under the old system, you didn't have to get the most votes numerically; all you had to do was to get the most electorates, to become the government. So there were a lot of elections where the total number of votes for the losing party exceeded those for the winning party (which was fundamentally undemocratic). Now, under proportional representation, the number of votes any party gets determines the number of representatives it will get in parliament, and there are far more checks and balances to unbridled power and domination by one party.

Before we changed, few people here really understood proportional representation in practice, and the status quo of the time misrepresented it (of course) and I suspect this happens in other countries too whenever the issue comes up, there is a lot of black and white thinking about it I think!

Proportional representation seems to work well in South Africa as it allows smaller parties to be represented, which would otherwise have no voice at all. It doesn't mean I support them, but in my view all views should have fair publicity and not have to pay deposits which are lost if that party fails to get a single seat. The playing field should be level.

Previously there was often a situation where with the first past the post system, in the apartheid area, didn't accurately reflect the will of the people (who had the vote at that time) and it favoured the ruling party.

In the UK, the will of the people isn't accurately reflected by the results of this year's election. The Greens and UKIP won only one seat each, far less than they would have with PR based on percentages of the popular vote. Many seats have either a Tory or Labour winner ever since anyone can remember, and haven't changed hands in eighty years or so.

I think a mixed system is probably best.

I support small PR, not large PR.

All PR has to have a cut off point. I don't see benefit in making a national parliament too large.

I support pluralism, I think it is important. However pluralism with parties with hardly any votes is pointless that is diluting balance with homogenisation.

Westminster is a decent size. So I wouldn't make it bigger.

I would also support a lottery system for the Lords, replacing all the other types of Lords. This would be to provide something different from party politics. it would have non-concurrent terms, with basic statute history as an an entry requirement.

I'll take First Past the Post over Proportional Representation.

However, you may find these videos very interesting. Please watch them in the order I've posted them.




And these manage to deliver proportional representation without stopping regions being represented by their preferred local representative, though I don't entirely agree with it. I think it should be possible for one person to keep racking up votes, and if they hit 66% or even 100%, then they have the power of 2 or 3 people.




There are other videos on that channel. And envirozentinel, since you brought up the UK election, there's a video on that too:



But my feelings are very mixed on that. I don't think a jump should be made to Proportional Representation. Use the system in the first two videos and see what happens. Or maybe then combine constituencies to produce a set number of MPs like in the second set of videos. But I think that would be too much too soon. Just implement the Alternative vote first, that has no downside at all. Just whatever you do, don't just go for PR and letting politicians decide their MPs after they know the number they're allowed. What if they choose someone who most people think is a piece of trash and would never vote for and someone else who would be among the people's favourites doesn't make the list? That's the system here and I don't like it:

I don't like the idea of Proportional Representation, but First Past the Post is worse in my opinion. I think having regional representatives is important, but they don't do all that much for their region necessarily. At least in Canada (where I live), our First Past the Post system ends up with a party in a majority government with the vote of a minority of the population.

My personal preference is for STV. It makes the most sense to me. Some people shy away from it because it is more complicated to count the ballots, but it results in a fairer distribution in Parliament, in my opinion.