James Gilmour wrote:
Kristofer Munsterhjelm > Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 2:29 PM
I'm not a UK politics expert, but it seems this is a minimal concession,
of the sort one would see in negotiation. AV/IRV doesn't really lead to
multiparty systems, if Australia is to be any judge. Instead, you get
two large parties and one middle sized party (as in Australia's Labor
and LibNats), which is an improvement from Plurality, and definitely so
from the point of view of the Liberal Democrats (who could become the
middle sized party).
The UK already has a multi-party system - all under FPTP.- at least
as measured by votes. Of course, not as measured by seats -
but that's FPTP.
Although I was thinking of measured by seats, that's interesting. What
keeps the Liberal Democrat voters from going lesser-of-two-evils?
US members might be interested to know that more than two-thirds of
the 649 MPs elected in the 2010 UK general election are minority
members - elected with less than half of the votes in their
individual constituencies (electoral districts). See:
http://www.jamesgilmour.f2s.com/UK-MPs-GE-2010-Minority-Members-12Jan11.pdf
AV+ or STV/MMP would have been better, but alas.
STV-PR would certainly have been better than AV (= IRV) from every
perspective. But AV+ would have been a disaster. Remember, AV+
was designed deliberately to distort the seats-to-votes so that one
or other of the two largest parties would nearly always have an
overall majority of seats for only a minority of the votes.
I thought AV+ was just MMP with AV rather than FPTP as the base. MMP
itself, as far as I know, keeps a number of direct election seats, then
counts the wasted preferences and compensates by using list seats so
that one's vote can count even if it doesn't elect the direct seat. If
so, it shouldn't be biased in favor of the two largest parties unless
the calculation itself is.
Full MMP would have been better in terms of party proportionality, but
that is all. MMP, with two very different kinds of elected member,
brings a raft of new problems which would be high price to pay
for party PR. We have MMP in the Scottish Parliament (we call it
AMS), but we want to change to STV-PR.
MMP is somewhat a hack, yes, but it's better than no compensation at
all. From the party list angle, I think it's better than plain old party
list as well, since the voters have at least some ability to elect
within parties, not just between them.
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