The Franchise Should Be Limited

[Kralizec]

The multi-party system is not the cause of the (few) stalemates you have seen in Europe.

First, we have Belqium. The issue in Belgium isn't due to multiple parties, but rather the countey being split in two, with the two sides unwilling to work with each other. Not because of politics, mind you, but because of the flanders/wallon-thingy. The other source of complications arises when it is a requirement for a new government to have a majority in parliament. In more refined democracies, like Norway, a new government doesn't need to have support, it just needs to not have opposition. Ie. it doesn't need 51% of the representatives to vote in its favour, it just needs to avoid having 51% voting against it.

Is it like Germany's sytem? Meaning, a vote of non-confidence can only succeed if it also appoints a successor at the same time?

Otherwise I don't think it's really different at all, and you're describing a "minority government". Which is perfectly workable until a majority in parliament is fed up and accepts a motion of no-confidence. In many countries (mine included) there's some sort of compulsive taboo against the idea of a minority government though, despite that there are plenty of precedents.

Well, before or after the Black Death?

Even so, the fact that serfs could be tempted away from their lords' estates doesn't make their lives "crap" it just means they were at the bottom of the tree and there was room to move up.

I'm not saying it was a wonderful life in rural idyll, but I would think medieval serfs were better off than people during the industrial revolution. For one thing, they appear to have lived longer - Church records for most of the Middle Ages show people marrying in their early to late twenties, 26-28 being the most common irrc. That tells us that people weren't in a desperate hurry to breed and get their children to adulthood before they died.

Probably so, because the industrial revolution was in some ways a revival of serfdom in its most awful sense.

Serfdom is usually understood as being a form of slavery or semi-slavery without the formal label. If we go back to Rome, the legal details of both institutions were different (most importantly, serfs were not "propery") but de facto they were quite similar. The word servi was used to refer to both slaves and serfs with no distinction. In the middle ages the legal specifics differed from place to place and time to time, but the similarity is that the peasants are not inherently unfree like slaves but still have no realistic opportunity to escape from their current social standing, or even their place of residence.

In the industrial revolution it was common practice for a factory owner to monopolise all the goods and services that the common man from the region would need. The laborers were dependent on him for income and were obliged to buy goods and services from him as well. These people, despite being under no restrictions under the law, did not have the means to just pack up and leave try to make a better life elsewhere. This pretty much continued until the late 19th century until laws were passed against this business.

Granted, that just proves that during the height of the industrial revolution life was really really bad. I admit that I don't know a lot about the daily life of commoners in the middle ages. Allthough my impression is that they suffered far, far worse under wars because the slaughter was more local and more indiscriminate.