Why I'm in favour of Proportional Representation

[andrewducker]

According to the BBC, the current polls show Lib Dems on 33%, Conservatives on 32%, Labour on 26%.
Which would give a seat allocation of Conservatives: 246, Labour 241, Lib Dems: 134.
Or, in a more easily digestible table format:

Party	Percentage	Seats
Lib Dems	33%	134
Conservatives	32%	246
Labour	26%	241

It should be pretty fucking obvious that this is an electoral system that is fucked in the head.

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

You've got different info in your little table than you give in your post.

[andrewducker]

There was a 3% error margin.

(Fixed, thanks)

[usmu.livejournal.com]

Yes. Not forgetting the hereditary peers in the hous of lords of course. Yours is a system that sucketh.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm slightly in favour of hereditary peers.

People who are trained from an early age in logic, rhetoric etc. and aren't at the whim of "bread and circuses" mob rule.

It's not ideal, and the current system allows elected government to override the House of Lords (as they have done recently) so it's not "undemocratic", but it puts a sensible brake on knee-jerk legislation. Or does when it works properly.

And the nice thing about it is, most of the "hereditary peers" never showed up anyway, so they had no effect, but the ones that cared about people and law *did* along with the life peers, and other Lords that covered the legal and religious sides of things.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

You'd prefer our system where you only get two choices and the congressional elections are spaced out so as to almost guarantee that a president elected to a four year term will only have 18 months of a friendly party running congress to get anything done, followed by two and half years not being able to get anything done because the opposing party controls congress?

[andrewducker]

No, really not.

[matgb]

Dude; Congress is elected using pretty much the same system we use for the Commons. Just because you have 2-year terms and the insanity of a directly elected executive doesn't actually change the basic voting system.

for the slow american in the room

[autodidactic.livejournal.com]

Are your conservatives like our conservatives? Is your Labour party like our Democratic Farmer/Labor? Are the Lib Dems like Greens?

Re: for the slow american in the room

[andrewducker]

Kinda, probably not, and almost certainly not :->

Your conservatives are so right wing that there's no real equivalent over here. Your democrats are more like our conservatives, our Labour party _used_ to be actively socialist, bot nowadays are fiscally central, and quite authoritarian. The lib-dems are actively liberal.

Re: for the slow american in the room

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Our Conservative Party are what you would call liberal Democrats.

Our Labour Party is a mixture of people from liberal Democrats to what you would term Godless Communists (fewer of the latter these days).

The actual Liberal Democrat Party is composed of people who would definitely be classed as Godless Communists in the US.

Put it this way: all major parties, including the major right-wing one, make comprehensive free-at-delivery socialised medicine a central plank of their policies. To suggest doing anything else in the UK is electoral suicide.

Re: for the slow american in the room

[matgb]

Democrats are a broad church party. Dean openly, and OBama covertly, support the Lib Dems (Obama's main campaign speechwrite was a Lib Dem activist from north London). But The Clinton/New Democrat faction is equivalent to New Labour, and the Old Labour have links with old unionised Democrats.

The confusing bit is the sane members of the Tories also support the Democrats. But the Dems are the right wing of the Lib Dems and Labour, and the left wing of the Tories...

US Greens aren't always as batshit crazy as our Greens though.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

If you're going to force a background colour for the table, please also force the font colour. My layout makes it impossible to read – as will anyone whose font is set to a lighter colour.

[andrewducker]

Sorry! I used an HTML generator to knock the table up and didn't think about that. Fixed it now.

[andrewducker]

Oh - and did you notice the Apple thing I linked to today? Really interesting interview with one of their early engineers.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

This is so frustrating. It is no wonder someone tried to blow up Parliament...

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

That was only because of the St. Mary's scandal.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

The trouble is (as the Americans found out) that when you enclose most areas, you get a mix of people in that area that's not the national average. So in the US they have states with urban areas that are racially mixed, and predominantly Democratic, and rural areas that are far more white and Republican, and the relative proportions of each that can be called out in the vote (or disenfranchised, as in Florida) can serious distort the vote of that area ... then the Electoral College system says that if 55% of a state votes one way, then 100% of the Electoral College votes go that way.

In the UK you do get similar things, and the boundary changes coming in for this election are making some "safe seats" into marginals by trimming out some of the incumbent's votes and bringing in areas that are predominantly for the other parties.

And that's probably right ... in a constituency that is predominantly urban, then the MP they want and the party they want will likely be very different to an area that's predominantly farmland. It takes a mighty swing to move Hackney and Hounslow/Feltham from Labour, so a country wide vote of 30% for LibDems would likely not be enough to change either of those two areas.

A truely representative parliament would have more BNP MPs in it, because with 500 MPs, you only need to get 1/5 of 1% of the vote to get an MP. The current system requires an MP to gain over 1/3rd of the votes in a consituency, not the party getting 1% in every constituency to elect 5 MPs.

[andrewducker]

Yes, there would probably be BNP MPs. I believe that this is the right thing to do. To deliberately disenfranchise people because I find their views despicable would make me as bad as them.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

then the Electoral College system says that if 55% of a state votes one way, then 100% of the Electoral College votes go that way.

Usually but not necessarily. There's no overriding Constitutional principle involved; all the Constitution says is that each state shall appoint electors, and keeps mum about how those electors are chosen. Why so many states have gone with the winner-take-all method is a mystery to me, but they can change the system if they wish; both Maine and Nebraska use different systems, and the other states have the option to set up any laws they like.

Our system is strange, fascinating, and overly complex.

[simont]

Devil's advocate: this argument is surely only convincing to people who already believe that percentage of the popular vote ought to match percentage of Parliament? In other words, this table shows that PR would be an obviously good thing if you already believe that the goal of PR is what you want.

So it might convince somebody who previously considered the goal of PR to be desirable but also thought the current system was producing results close enough to right that it didn't need mucking about with (though the latter would seem a particularly bizarre belief to me). But it would precisely not convince somebody who opposed PR on grounds of disagreeing with its goal, for instance if they thought some minority actually deserved to have a disproportionate influence.

(For example, it wouldn't surprise me to find there were people who believe that city dwellers shouldn't be able to outvote farmers merely on the basis of outnumbering them, on the grounds that they'd vote in policies that completely screwed farmers and then act all surprised when there didn't seem to be any food left. Such people would doubtless consider your table to be a misleading oversimplification.)

[andrewducker]

Of course it does rely on people thinking that the government ought to be representative.

I can see arguments that it shouldn't be entirely representative - that the wacky 1% on the fringe ought to be ignored. But a system where the party with the highest percentage of the vote gets the lowest number of seats? If people can't see that that's utterly wrong, then they aren't democratic at all.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

Quite. On a personal level, it drives me absolutely crazy (particularly the more tax I pay) that I seem to not be of interest to any political party & am sitting in a fairly safe seat so my vote has little value.

I'm perhaps being somewhat basic, but I had thought one of the ideas behind universal suffrage was that all adults should have an equal say in the election of the government of the day. Clearly the current system doesn't deliver that.

Playing devil's advocate I can see (when things like you tax bill & public services are at stake) why it's quite easy to get behind PR when you think the current lot are a shower; rather more difficult when you're quite happy thankyouverymuch. That said, at the moment one does get the impression that the percentage holding the former view exceeds that holding the latter...but I do wonder how many of them are politically engaged.

[andrewducker]

I was in favour of PR when Labour got in. Because it was fairer. I was really annoyed that they reneged on their commitment.

[matgb]

Important.

Do not use the BBC swing calulator

Just don't do it. It doesn't work, and hasn't worked since 1983. IT can't take into effect tactical squeeze, nor can it deal with leading party surge or the crystalisation effect.

Use http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/ and put in 5% for to LD tactical voting from both main parties, with none against.

That'd accurately reflect previous voting patterns and current polling behaviour.

I repeat. Do not use the BBC generator, nor anything else that uses unmodified UNS.

Yes, there might be a post on this needed, again, but I need to not swamp the journal with polling geekery. Even though it's kinda what I do best.

[andrewducker]

That one also shows a massive distortion...