I commented in another mail that any system where people can change
the system itself can be said to be a democracy. Even a two party
system that bans third parties may still fall within this definition.
Also multi-party systems have the same problem although in a milder
form. The representatives of the voters may well make decisions that
the voters do not approve, and they may not make decisions that the
voters want. That is possible as long as the representatives do not
get so arrogant in doing this that the voters would use their power to
focus on this particular question in the (few) coming elections an
force the system to change. Direct democracy is more direct than the
two above mentioned forms of indirect representative democracy.
(I'll once more advocate tree voting a bit. One key idea behind it is
that it would be possible that members and voters of all leading
parties would form a pro-x interest group within their own party. Once
all these subgroups within each party would grow and together reach
>50% of all the seats then that change (x) would happen. This change
would take place in a very peaceful way, allowing the voters to stay
within their "own" parties without the need to abandon them or vote
against them or disagree with them, just slowly changing the opinion
balance within these parties.)
Juho
On Nov 3, 2009, at 7:45 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
Kristofer Munsterhjelm > Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 4:34 PM
James Gilmour wrote:
Why in any country that would merit the description "democracy"
would
you want to impose a "two-party system" when the votes of the voters
showed that was not what they wanted?
That is my question, too.
Maybe what the "two-party" advocates really want is guaranteed
single-party majority government. If that IS what they want, there
is a VERY simple and effective electoral solution. If no party wins
an absolute majority of the votes and seats, give 55% of the
seats to the party that wins the largest number of votes and divide
the remaining seats among the other parties in proportion to the
their shares of the votes.
It has been done and it works. Importantly, it's honest. It sets
out clearly what is considered to be the over-riding electoral
criterion and it fulfils it. In the UK we suffer from a lot of
nonsense about the desirability of single-party majority government
and even worse nonsense about the importance of FPTP in securing
that. In fact, in two of the most critical elections since 1945,
when the government of the day (one Labour, one Conservative) was
seeking a renewed mandate for the continuation of its policies,
FPTP elected the wrong government. In both cases the outgoing
government won the referendum on its policies (votes) and lost the
election (seats).
James Gilmour
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