Aussies?

[Husar]

If 30% of the population do not feel represented for similar reasons, maybe they should start their own party, after all it should get around 30% of the votes.
Of course this does not work in the USA with FPTP since it would get hardly any votes there because the election system is horrible and encourages the two-party system. It seems Australia even switched away from FPTP, still ended up with a de-facto two-party system but that is okay as long as small parties get more representation than none. Plus, if the people vote for only two parties out of habit and not because the system promotes it, they get what they deserve even if it's bad (I'm not saying that it is).

Compulsory voting may increase the power of the two largest parties since people who only vote to avoid the fee will most likely vote for either of them. Be it because they're the most prominent and their programs well-known or because keeping the status quo may appeal to apathetic voters. You could say it props up an unrepresentative system, but only if and because largew parts of the population do not care. And if they do not really care then either they are okay with the existing structures or it's their own fault that they end up with a bad government and have no reason to complain.

[Montmorency]

If 30% of the population do not feel represented for similar reasons, maybe they should start their own party, after all it should get around 30% of the votes.

Unrepresented hive-mind? Make that 30.000001% - I, for one, welcome our centrist overlords...

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

If 30% of the population do not feel represented for similar reasons, maybe they should start their own party, after all it should get around 30% of the votes.
Of course this does not work in the USA with FPTP since it would get hardly any votes there because the election system is horrible and encourages the two-party system. It seems Australia even switched away from FPTP, still ended up with a de-facto two-party system but that is okay as long as small parties get more representation than none. Plus, if the people vote for only two parties out of habit and not because the system promotes it, they get what they deserve even if it's bad (I'm not saying that it is).

Compulsory voting may increase the power of the two largest parties since people who only vote to avoid the fee will most likely vote for either of them. Be it because they're the most prominent and their programs well-known or because keeping the status quo may appeal to apathetic voters. You could say it props up an unrepresentative system, but only if and because largew parts of the population do not care. And if they do not really care then either they are okay with the existing structures or it's their own fault that they end up with a bad government and have no reason to complain.

It's a common complaint that FPTP is an unfair system because it "props up" large parties, but the reality is that "Proportional Representation" is just as bad in its own way. It is possible, through hard work, for an individual to stand and be elected as an independent in the UK - it is considerably harder in a PR system when you don't have a party, and even if you do get elected under one of the deferred preference systems, your constituancy will ALSO elect someone from the largest party.

The problem isn't the voting system - it's the party system - that's worst in the US where Congressmen actually have "D" or "R" before their names, but it's a problem everywhere.

My suggestion?

Make formal parliamentary parties illegal - make campaign contributions and election funding illegal. If you can't get someone to give you office space for 4 weeks and a phone line for free, so you can campaign, you don't deserve to be elected.

[rvg]

My suggestion?

Make formal parliamentary parties illegal - make campaign contributions and election funding illegal. If you can't get someone to give you office space for 4 weeks and a phone line for free, so you can campaign, you don't deserve to be elected.

Might as well just ban elections outright and implement a lottery for the purposes of filling up the legislative seats.

[Tellos Athenaios]

It's a common complaint that FPTP is an unfair system because it "props up" large parties, but the reality is that "Proportional Representation" is just as bad in its own way. It is possible, through hard work, for an individual to stand and be elected as an independent in the UK - it is considerably harder in a PR system when you don't have a party, and even if you do get elected under one of the deferred preference systems, your constituancy will ALSO elect someone from the largest party.

No. Here's why: in order to get a seat in parliament in a FPTP system you need to gain a seat in a specific district. Winner takes all, which means you must have more votes than your nearest competitor in that single district. However in a PR system with a simple minimum threshold you only need to gain the threshold vote over the entire electorate. Fringe parties stand an actual chance because you only need to win that threshold in order to start building a proper political movement that will last (e.g. a party), but more importantly large blocks of electoral dissent (which are bound to crop up in any sizeable population) can be given proper representation in the seat counts. Which means that if you represent an electoral block of, say, 20% you can actually get a seat in parliament (approx 20% of them, in fact) as opposed to a FPTP system in which you'll get approximately 0 because you are the perennial runner up and hence 20% of the vote is simply discarded as irrelevant. Hence why in USA political dissent in big states such as California or Texas don't really matter in presidential races; even though we're talking a couple of smaller states worth of votes that is routinely binned as irrelevant.

FPTP is a system which is barely adequate for deciding on the next company staff outing, let alone something that has to scale to an actual nation-wide mandate simply because it is built to discard dissenting votes.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

FPTP has its real strength in continuity, as it tends to create 2 or 3 parties that share power, slowly absorbing ideas and change based on factions within those parties rather than trying to represent 1400 opinions in one legislative assembly. FPTP is, however, almost remorseless in screening out smaller/emergent political efforts. This keeps the whackoid fringers out, but makes change efforts much more difficult. The USA exemplifies both of these characteristics.

PR has its strength in inclusivity, with all voices actively represented in the discussion within the legislative body. This is also its weakness, however, in that too many disparate voices may have great difficulty in establishing a governing coalition of some form as the legislative body may be too balkanized, with the inability of a party to develop a workable coalition granting too much de fact voice to some of the more extreme or minority "parties" in the legislative body. An example of this would be the Knesset.

Neither approach is without value, but neither is without flaws.

Perhaps a bicameral legislative body with one body elected using each approach?

[Tellos Athenaios]

FPTP has its real strength in continuity, as it tends to create 2 or 3 parties that share power, slowly absorbing ideas and change based on factions within those parties rather than trying to represent 1400 opinions in one legislative assembly. FPTP is, however, almost remorseless in screening out smaller/emergent political efforts. This keeps the whackoid fringers out, but makes change efforts much more difficult. The USA exemplifies both of these characteristics.

PR has its strength in inclusivity, with all voices actively represented in the discussion within the legislative body. This is also its weakness, however, in that too many disparate voices may have great difficulty in establishing a governing coalition of some form as the legislative body may be too balkanized, with the inability of a party to develop a workable coalition granting too much de fact voice to some of the more extreme or minority "parties" in the legislative body. An example of this would be the Knesset.

Neither approach is without value, but neither is without flaws.

Sure, though I would argue that FPTP always exhibits its worst flaws in any setting in which it is implemented whereas the flaws of the PR system only tend to matter in a political worst case scenario (there's a reason we call it Balkanisation, after all). Interestingly that is exactly the same case in which FPTP is most blatantly "discarding" votes and artificially propping up the winner, since in this scenario every candidate or party receives very limited real public support (e.g. gaining the majority of seats by achieving 30% of the votes or less, simply because everybody else does even worse). In FPTP you are pretty much guaranteed to see its worst side even in "fair weather" (since you routinely reject approximately 50% of the vote by design[*]), with a PR system this is much less the case.

Perhaps a bicameral legislative body with one body elected using each approach?

Why? No, really: what advantage does artificially increasing the political power of a few most powerful factions give you? Presumably there is legislative veto power involved, so now you are adding artificial incentives for obstructionism to combat a politically disfunctional situation. How is this going to help matters?

* Yes I am making some assumptions here, mainly that "shortfalls" and "excess" votes are relatively evenly spread and tend to cancel each other out. (E.g. for every seat gained by ~25% of the vote there would be a seat gained by ~75%.)

[Kralizec]

Perhaps a bicameral legislative body with one body elected using each approach?

Why? No, really: what advantage does artificially increasing the political power of a few most powerful factions give you? Presumably there is legislative veto power involved, so now you are adding artificial incentives for obstructionism to combat a politically disfunctional situation. How is this going to help matters?

Obstructionism is usually the point of bicameral legislatures. Checks and balances, and all that.

One justification for district representatives is that the parties will have to take into account the specific interests of a given district in order to win. In addition, the number of people in a district can vary; so that sparsely populated regions are not always ignored in favour of more densely populated ones. States like Alaska would be completely irrelevant if it didn't have two senators like everyone else and the bare minimum of 3 votes in the electoral college.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Obstructionism is usually the point of bicameral legislatures. Checks and balances, and all that.

One justification for district representatives is that the parties will have to take into account the specific interests of a given district in order to win. In addition, the number of people in a district can vary; so that sparsely populated regions are not always ignored in favour of more densely populated ones. States like Alaska would be completely irrelevant if it didn't have two senators like everyone else and the bare minimum of 3 votes in the electoral college.

PR is predicated on a limited role for local government with the national government being the primary focus of government power. As far as I know, no other nation-state accords quite so much legislative and executive power to their "states" which tend to function more as administrative districts than as independent polities.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Obstructionism is usually the point of bicameral legislatures. Checks and balances, and all that.

No, checks and balances is not and should not be about obstructionism but proper vetting and validation instead. Effectively handing out control to the top X largest parties by design is not going to help that.

One justification for district representatives is that the parties will have to take into account the specific interests of a given district in order to win. In addition, the number of people in a district can vary; so that sparsely populated regions are not always ignored in favour of more densely populated ones. States like Alaska would be completely irrelevant if it didn't have two senators like everyone else and the bare minimum of 3 votes in the electoral college.

Yep, though that doesn't seem to work that well in practice. Alaska is still pretty much irrelevant compared to Ohio or Florida and, uh, apart from the big business types the various Alaskan interests (mainly environmental concerns) are still routinely ignored swept aside anyways.

[Husar]

It's a common complaint that FPTP is an unfair system because it "props up" large parties, but the reality is that "Proportional Representation" is just as bad in its own way. It is possible, through hard work, for an individual to stand and be elected as an independent in the UK - it is considerably harder in a PR system when you don't have a party, and even if you do get elected under one of the deferred preference systems, your constituancy will ALSO elect someone from the largest party.

The problem isn't the voting system - it's the party system - that's worst in the US where Congressmen actually have "D" or "R" before their names, but it's a problem everywhere.

What Tellos said and in addition to this I would say that having a system that encourages the two-party system by design is far worse than having one where the people decide that having two major parties is what they want and the smaller parties still get a representation and a voice.

Make formal parliamentary parties illegal - make campaign contributions and election funding illegal. If you can't get someone to give you office space for 4 weeks and a phone line for free, so you can campaign, you don't deserve to be elected.

Different can of worms, there is a reason that politicians get salaries and support from the government in the first place. And the reason is that without this, you end up with only rich people being politicians as a hobby of sorts that also gives them incredible influence while the poor have no representatives. I do however agree that pressure on representatives to vote according to the party line even if they disagree on a certain issue is not really a good thing because it serves to undermine the proportional representation in the worst case.

FPTP has its real strength in continuity, as it tends to create 2 or 3 parties that share power, slowly absorbing ideas and change based on factions within those parties rather than trying to represent 1400 opinions in one legislative assembly. FPTP is, however, almost remorseless in screening out smaller/emergent political efforts. This keeps the whackoid fringers out, but makes change efforts much more difficult. The USA exemplifies both of these characteristics.

PR has its strength in inclusivity, with all voices actively represented in the discussion within the legislative body. This is also its weakness, however, in that too many disparate voices may have great difficulty in establishing a governing coalition of some form as the legislative body may be too balkanized, with the inability of a party to develop a workable coalition granting too much de fact voice to some of the more extreme or minority "parties" in the legislative body. An example of this would be the Knesset.

Neither approach is without value, but neither is without flaws.

Perhaps a bicameral legislative body with one body elected using each approach?

If you get too many parties that can't work together, maybe the problem isn't your political system but the borders of your nation?
If you get only two parties despite having more varied views within the population, it's a problem of under-representation where, as Tellos says, a lot of views are just outright discarded. Whereas having to find compromises and common ground may be problematic but just speaks of a nation that is very diverse and possibly needs more political discourse to find commonalities between the parties and common goals. Either way you ensure a much better representation and do not discard a lot of ideas.

[HoreTore]

What would be the practical, real-life consequences of banning formal parties, while allowing informal parties, PVC?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Also it's worth pointing out that any PR system, even the most crude PR system is less forgiving of abuse since it is less inclined to support "safe seats" and it does not allow the gerrymandering to create them. A vote is a vote is a vote, regardless of where the vote comes from. Similarly seats are nice and evenly distributed over the entire population in PR, whereas in FPTP you can have the strange situation that one X% of people is "worth" more seats than the same X% in a different district. The USA is a particular egregious "offender" on both counts.

Similarly, PR systems are IMO better if you have low voter turnout because % of the seats corresponds directly to % of the vote, allowing you to support a strong statement of mandate based on it. 60% of the seats maps to a real 60% chunk of the vote, which is a clear majority however you slice and dice it. This matters with low voter turnout (say 60% of the eligible voters) because if you are already discarding ~50% of the votes by design, your actual 60% of the seats may correspond to as little as 50% of 60% of 60% of the eligible voters which is only 18% approval in FPTP, compared to the PR system in which those same 60% seats means 60% of a turnout of 60% eligible voters or 36% approval. Unless you have a scenario in which there is a clear winner for an overwhelming majority of seats in either system your FPTP mandate is not nearly as well founded as the PR one because the way you measure support (through discarding dissent) is inherently flawed (it turns out that it doesn't really measure support, after all).

As you can see rejecting votes is not merely a price worth paying for some perceived sense of stability (which depends rather more on how legislation is passed than who passes it, but I digress) it actually supports the concept a government that nobody voted for and nearly everyone strongly opposes (on principle or otherwise), by design. I'd ask our friends from Virginia how that is working out for them with their gubernatorial choices, but I'd like to keep the contents of my stomach where they are right now.