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Most european countries use 2 round elections or proportional representation.
In Britain, they use First-Past-The-Post.
The most idiotic part is that UK actually had a vote to end this shitshow, and they chose not to!!!
How moronic can a population get? Why the fuck did they vote against democracy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum
Of course the anti democratic British idiots failed to suggest the only sensible option which is proportional representation!
I remember David Cameron being interviewed by John Humphries on Today (the Radio 4 morning news show). Cameron basically lied about what was in the proposal to make it sound like it was some crackpot idea, Humphries did nothing to call him out on it.
Same went for most media coverage really.
It's almost like it's a hobby for Conservatives to lie.
We're way past hobby territory and into full blown professionals.
Indeed.
Its their job actually
It's almost like it's a hobby for ~~Conservatives~~ politicians to lie.
FTFY.
TBF the people that wanted reform had been pushing for PR. AV was a compromise nobody really liked.
I currently live in the UK (moved a few years ago), and one of the single most infuriating thing in the culture here is how "we've always done it this way" is THE answer when it comes to justifying anything moronic or broken.
I know that resistance to change and attachment to traditions is not a uniquely British thing but it's markedly worse here than anywhere else I've lived.
I was told in history lessons, that it was also why UK didn't modernize after WW2.
While the rest of Europe modernized, especially Germany that had to rebuild a lot.
But when UK rebuild, they made the same mistakes as the first time all over again, because of tradition as you say.
As a counterpoint to that, after WW2 the UK created the National Health Service, comprehensive education and the rest of the welfare state, while nationalising many huge industries. For the UK that was pretty radical stuff, and it lasted until the 1980s when Thatcher and her mob started tearing it all apart.
Whether you'd call that modern I'm not sure, but it wasn't traditional either.
Being radical is not a sign of being progressive in thinking and definitely not a sign of doing what is best.
Being radical left (or right) is not to be more "modern" either.
UK at the time was way more radical on both the left and the right side than most European countries, exactly because of FPTP. And it lead to politically unsustainable solutions. Again a sign of stupid policies, and a sub par form of governance.
Nationalizing is radical, but it's a double edged sword that can easily become a burden. It was already at that time an old fashioned socialist way of thinking.
The more modern Social democracies of Scandinavia avoided nationalizing but used regulation instead. A model that has been proven on average to work way better.
So again I'd say the UK politicians weren't neither modern or clever in nationalizing industries, as I wrote in a previous post, and nationalizing an industry has nothing to do with modernizing it, on the contrary nationalized industries tend to become monopolies, and monopolies tend to stifle innovation.
Also the improvements in the Social Democratic countries on health education and infra structure quickly surpassed the UK.
The UK voter seems to be roughly as well informed as the US voter.
There are striking similarities.
The press widely covered AV as if it was incredibly expensive and didn't solve any problems, so presented it as if we'd be throwing away beds at children's hospitals, support for pensioners and equipment for soldiers just to introduce pointless bureaucracy. If the choice was the one most voters thought they were making, then voting against it would have been the sensible option.
The Conservative government response to a 2016–17 parliamentary petition demanding proportional representation said that "A referendum on changing the voting system was held in 2011 and the public voted overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the FPTP system."[209] Tim Ivorson of the electoral reform campaign group Make Votes Matter responded by quoting the petition's text that "The UK has never had a say on PR. As David Cameron himself said, the AV referendum was on a system that is often less proportional than FPTP, so the rejection of AV could not possibly be a rejection of PR."[210]
Ranked Choice ftw.
Ranked choice is the best for single seat elections: let everyone choose their first choices, and do an instant runoff where people not in the top X at that stage are disqualified and their votes transfered to the voters' next choice, until there actually is a candidate with majority support among remaining candidates that made it that far.
Parliamentary systems, though, have room for other representative formulas where each voter isn't necessarily just voting for a single seat to be filled. If you have a system with strong parties, you can vote for a party, each party wins a certain number of seats, and then the party fills those seats with their members according to their internal procedures. This system, however, requires strong parties where members can be controlled by the party.
Single seat elections aren't necessary in every situation, and it's worth thinking through which types of representative structures may be better than single-seat districts and when to use proportional representation through multi-seat elections, and how to formally recognize the role of political parties in those systems.
Ranked-Choice voting can be used for multi-seat elections as well, essentially voter ranks the top x candidates from the full pool. After the first seat is selected the tally continues by removing the first seat name from the pool to appoint the second seat.
I am from the US in a city where we have rank choice local elections, so "strong party" style elections where you vote for a party not a candidate seem frankly wildly unaccountable. I see no advantage to this system for the voters over individual candidates.
It would be possible to get a majority and take all with only 23% of the votes. The David Cameron Tories won with 27%. We need a PR system.
PR will only work if safeguards can be put in place beforehand to prevent one or more parties (political or individual) in an alliance causing a complete government shutdown every time they don't get their way.
What are the odds, do you think, that such safeguards would be put in place when the larger political parties prefer FPTP?
It’s good enough for all the parties internally.
Same shit in Canada or Quebec, take a look at Quebec 2022, 3 parties got ~15% of the vote, check the number of seats:
It would be helpful if this included an explanation, rather than just an assertion. Can you explain how FPTP allows this, and how proportional representation fixes it?
CGP Gray has a good explanation how FPTP works and how it breaks down and ends up typically collapsing down into a 2 party system or is wildly unrepresentative in multi party systems.
Basically fptp is a winner take all system, whoever gets the most votes wins and beats everyone else in the race. It doesn't matter if you won by 1 vote or by 1 million votes the result is the same, you won. So if one party can maintain just a slim plurality across numerous districts, they win those districts despite not getting the majority of votes and everyone else's votes essentially do not count in the greater whole.
You decide to create your own party. The Chocolate Party.
Under FPTP, after intense campaigning, you get 21% of the votes nationally. It's a huge achievement. 1 out 5 people trusted you. Millions of people voted for you. Sadly, you only won 1 race. You were defeated in the other races. So you get 1 representative in parliament. The millions of people who voted for you ? Their voice is underrepresented.
Under proportional representation, if you win 15% of the total votes, you automatically get 15% of the seats in Parliament. Every single vote matters.
Another negative consequence of FPTP is that it discourages people from creating new political parties when your society is divided.
Many Canadians voted for the liberal party of Mark Carney. Why? Because they didn't want Pierre Poilievre to be Prime Minister. They don't like the Liberal Party. But they were afraid that voting Green or NDP would split the votes.
Many americans vote for a Democrat because they fear that if they don't, the Republican candidate will win. Many americans vote Republican because if they don't, they fear the Democratic candidate will win. Everyone is afraid that splitting the vote means the people they really don't want in power will win.
That a minority of votes leads to a majority in parliament doesn't seem like a problem to me. That's just how it works, nothing wrong with that in itself. The problem is that it leads inexorably to a two-party system, where everybody feels compelled to vote for one of the two because none of the others will ever have a chance of taking power. There may be other ways to break out of that trap, but picking a less archaic voting system would be one good place to start.
I agree with this, and yet British politics currently feels a lot more fragmented now than it used to.
The Tories are likely looking at being reduced to a rump at the next GE, and Labour will probably get a kicking too, unless they smarten up their act toot sweet. Meanwhile Reform will likely gain a lot of seats (vomit) and the Greens may start to get towards double digits. And the Lib Dems will likely just keep on Lib Demming along.
I think there's a very real chance of a proper hung parliament next time with no obvious stable majority coalition possible:
And possibly neither side able to put together a working coalition that would last for very long.
In which case, FPTP would have done the opposite of the two party system and led to even more divisions! Fun! 🤪
Sounds like a shitty system!
What other European country uses two round elections apart from France?
