One serious flaw of the proportional system, like Italy and Israel both have, is that a small party can be the deciding vote, and have a much larger weight than it merits.
For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote. To form a majority, the large party must strike a deal with the small party, which can dictate conditions... This happens regularly in Italian politics, and I believe in Israel as well.
Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament. This gives a lot of power to the political party itself, and whoever controls it.
> For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote. To form a majority, the large party must strike a deal with the small party, which can dictate conditions...
Or they simply look for someone on the other side. E.g. in Germany, SPD (social democrats) routinely ignore Left (socialists and communists) and instead deals with the conservative CDU. It's not like they have only one alternative, nor like they need a majority to form a government in most countries with PR.
I don't see this as a downside. If you only get 48%, you don't even have a mandate from a majority of voters. It is only fair that you will need to negotiate with other parties to adjust how you govern to the benefit of a larger part of the population. For that matter, this shouldn't just change at 50% either - having parties representing 50% + 1 dictate policy still leaves half the population subject to the whims of a narrow majority.
> Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament. This gives a lot of power to the political party itself, and whoever controls it.
Why is this a flaw? If voters are not happy with the candidates that are nominated, they can a) join the party and vote for other candidates during nomination, or b) vote for a different party (or form one...). With proportional representation the barrier to starting a new party with a chance of taking a seat is much lowered, and it is fairly common in European politics for candidates that does not get the support of their party to get a list together as an independent and win a seat. Sometimes that even ends up forming the basis of a new party.
However, the latter to me is just plain insanity. It is a serious flaw in that it is the opposite of WYSIWYG but applied to the most critical of institutions that forms the foundation of your society.
In addition, there is likely a high level lack of transparency and consistency because parties can internally organise themselves however they like and change it whenever and how often they like. Information and transparency changes are always slow to propagate in social systems, especially in time for the next elections. To argue voters should be better informed and act accordingly is ... systemically optimistic, to say the least. There is also the huge opportunity cost of going independent or forming another party.
So, this is, like the OP said, effectively handing over a huge amount of democratic power into a few controlling hands.
For example, even if someone left the political party or were never part of it but simply a powerful patron, they could still retain enormous control over a political party. Do you really want a George Bush, Tony Blair, Berlusconi or some economic magnate or ideologue controlling representation and policy from "political retirement", for example? :)
Note that Germany (as well as New Zealand and Scotland) actually has a mixed system for the Bundestag (lower, more important chamber of parliament) where roughly half the seats are determined by a district-based first past the post system and the others by a proportional system, with each voter having two votes.
The downside is that you need really complex rules to reconcile cases where the two results don't match up. This is done by adding extra seats, but can lead to edge cases where a party would actually have gotten more seats if it had recieved fewer votes.
> Or they simply look for someone on the other side. E.g. in Germany, SPD (social democrats) routinely ignore Left (socialists and communists) and instead deals with the conservative CDU.
When they have the opportunity. In Italy, in recent years, the choice may have been between the communists and Berlusconi, which in my book is not a pleasant choice to have to make.
My point was that proportional systems can go wrong in certain ways, not that they necessarily will do so all the time.
It sounds nice, but in places like Israel you end up with governments headed by a party that took just about a 15% mandate, coalescing with two partners that took a 13% mandate and a shit-ton of small single-issue parties that got something like 3% each. One Member of the Knesset deciding to swing can topple the government or force a coalition realignment.
In practice, they use the 5% threshold in Germany to keep the number of parties down to a reasonable limit. Israel doesn't have this limit. I don't know whether they have a limit at all, or whether it's just rather low.
I don't like the arbitrariness of the 5% threshold. But it seems to work.
>For that matter, this shouldn't just change at 50% either - having parties representing 50% + 1 dictate policy still leaves half the population subject to the whims of a narrow majority.
One should also note that even if one party in Germany were to have more than 50%, they still don't have a very stable power:
Each member of the parlament could vote against his party. So for a stable gonverment, they would need to have a bit more than 50%
This isn't really a problem of the proportional system - given a large party narrowly over 50%, relatively small interest groups within the party will start gaining extraordinary weight as well. Just think of the tea party.
In my opinion, the upside of splitting the parties up is that it makes these particular power struggle more visible, and allows parties more flexibility in ignoring interest groups when a majority can be found elsewhere.
An even more extreme example is Japan: the LDP was in power from 1955 to 2009 (except for two years in 1993-1994), with the result that actual policy decisions (as well as who go the highest political offices) were negotiated between factions within that party.
This also happens in the Britsh system with regional parties. For example the Bloc Quebecois have often had way larger political power than their voter base.
Edit: Nothing against the Bloc (I am from Sweden), they are just an example.
On feature of (Nordic party list) PR that irks me: With near perfect proportionality, you loose (geographic) ties to a specific block of voters. Because a large proportion of MPs are elected on the coat tails of "vote magnets" and the general performance of the party, the party becomes more important than the candidate. Owing your mandate to an artefact of the D'Hondt method and not the fact that you got more votes than the other guy does no favours to your attachment to voters.
I'm fairly new to the UK, but it seems beneficial to me that MPs have exactly one well defined constituency and all voters have exactly one MP (even if it's one they didn't vote for) that represents them in parliament.
No such thing. There are lots of proportional systems, each of which have different proporties.
> like Italy and Israel both have
what you say is explicitly not true in Italy, where the biggest party/coalition is automatically given enough top-up seats to give them a majority.
> is that a small party can be the deciding vote, and have a much larger weight than it merits. For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote.
If the seats were split 48-48-4, then the party wih four seats would have as much power as the other two, since any two parties form a majority. But under PR, legislatures typically aren't split between two big parties and a small one. In Israel, for example, the largest party got 28 of 120 seats.
> Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament.
This is the same as with FPTP: the party decides on the candidate, and if it's asafe seat, that candidate is virtually certain to be elected. There are several systems of PR where voters not parties decide which of a party's candidates are elected: STV and open lists, for example.
Italy has fiddled with its election laws a lot in recent years, and is probably going to do so again, so what may be true right now may not have been true in year WXYZ.
What I say certainly has happened in the past: witness the downfall of the previous Prodi governments, where support from minority coalition partners tanked the government.
Coalition governments built on many small parties are often weak.
> the party decides on the candidate
Often through relatively open primaries though. Witness the Republican race on right now. "The Party" likely wants Romney, because he's probably more electable than the others. A lot of people do not want him though, evidently.
Not to say any system is perfect, I agree with the poster who says that they all have problems. To think that one system is "the best" is a bit silly in my opinion.
> Coalition governments built on many small parties are often weak.
If by weak you mean "cannot rule without support of representatives who collectively were voted for by most voters" then IMO that's a feature not a bug.
> Often through relatively open primaries though. Witness the Republican race on right now.
That's true. There's no reason why a party couldn't choose list candidates through an open process, however.
I don't think that's such a huge problem, and I think it may even be preferable than the small party only having proportional power. The reason for that is that if they only had proportional power, small parties wouldn't be able to accomplish anything, ever.
And the alternative winner take all the small party has 0 say. Or I should say, the people have no say. No matter which party we vote for, they are all just different sides of the same coin.
For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote. To form a majority, the large party must strike a deal with the small party, which can dictate conditions... This happens regularly in Italian politics, and I believe in Israel as well.
Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament. This gives a lot of power to the political party itself, and whoever controls it.