Hi Steve, Good points, all. But I'm afraid it's a pick your poison situation-each set up has trade-offs, and one is not necessarily better than the other. For a real world example, please take a look at Israel. The Knesset has 120 seats; proportional representation means that there are a zillion little parties that can only capture a seat or two. In our system that would make them powerless; in Israel, it makes them king makers. Because one party rarely captures 61 seats on its own, these little parties can demand -- and get -- pretty much anything in return for putting a major party into power.
>From Wikipedia: Golda Meir, a former Israeli Prime Minister, joked that "in Israel, there are 3 million prime ministers". Because of the proportional representation system, there is a large number of political parties, many with very specialized platforms, often advocating the tenets of particular interest groups. The prevalent balance between the largest parties means that the smaller parties can have disproportionately strong influence to their size. Due to their ability to act as tie breakers, they often use this status to block legislation or promote their own agenda, even contrary to the manifesto of the larger party in office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Israel cjf Christopher J. Feola Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjfeola -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Monday, May 17, 2010 4:46 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] WARNING: Political Argument in Progress Chris - > This is why libertarians believe in divided government. The donkeys and > elephants both steal and abuse power, but they have somewhat different > constituencies. Keeping the government at least partly divided between them > guarantees the honesty of thieves. > That's why I'm hoping our president will > soon be blessed with a worthy opponent, the way Clinton had Gingrich and > Reagan had Tip O'Neil. And I think Bush -- and all of us -- would have been > much better off if Pelosi had taken the Speaker's gavel in 02. > And I would like more division, not simple (bi)polarity. I want Libertarian and Green and ??? candidates on the ballot and in the offices. I want the Dems to spin off a Progressive branch and the Pubs to spin off a Hard-Core Conservative branch. And I want our election rules to support this, not suppress it. I want run-off elections so we can vote for OUR favorite candidate first, then vote for OUR lesser evil candidate second, making it obvious when there is no "mandate", when there is strong opposition to the lesser of evils when finally installed, etc. I'm not that up on other forms of election rules in the world and how well they work, but I have to believe there is a better mode than ours which seems to guarantee wild oscillations between polar opposites (or worse yet, the illusion of this while the opposites are merely brightly-differently colored variants of the same damn thing). - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
