PR and extremists

[ewx]

A few people have expressed the objection to PR that it might lead to BNP MPs (I think twelve is the figure currently being bandied around). Rather than repeat my responses to that each time someone says it:

1. Some of the BNP votes may be protest votes. The BNP vote might very well turn out to be less in a situation where they might actually get seats.
2. FPTP doesn’t actually possess some magical anti-BNP property. It just happens not to give them any MPs because of the way their support is currently spread. That situation isn’t guaranteed to persist.
3. Choosing an electoral system to disadvantage a specific party is fundamentally dishonest. There are lots of better reasons people say they like FPTP, even if they aren’t persuasive to me. (I know this is the Internet and so everyone who disagrees is assumed to be arguing in bad faith, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)
4. A handful of ineffectual extremist MPs publicly making idiots of themselves is a reasonable price for a fair voting system (whatever you think a fair voting system looks like). I think that as well as being predisposed to ineffectiveness, the other parties would tend to cooperate to deny them any real power (because supporting them would be electoral poison).

Arguably we already have some extremists (of various kinds) in Parliament already, you just don’t find out they’re an extremist until they make a politically unwise outburst.

Is this academic, since the most we’ll get is a referendum on AV (which is electoral reform but isn’t PR)? Maybe, but I think that even a lost referendum would keep the electoral reform debate open in the medium term, so (if extremist support remains near current levels) the point will remain relevant.

I need a politics userpic.

Comments

[imc.livejournal.com]

Choosing an electoral system to disadvantage a specific party is fundamentally dishonest.

What about to disadvantage all minority parties? It's been pointed out that some real-world PR systems discount any votes from each region that amount to less than 5% for a party in that region.

Some of the BNP votes may be protest votes.

I'd be interested to know what basis there is for this. I can think of much better ways to protest. :-)

I need a politics userpic.

Me too.

What about to disadvantage all minority parties?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Some form of that effect is surely inevitable, e.g. any party that gets less than T/N votes for turnout T and N total seats is out of luck. So unless someone is arguing for direct democracy, where to put the threshold is ultimately an implementation detail.

Re: What about to disadvantage all minority parties?

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Implementation details are exactly what I'd be interested in hearing before I offered up a vote one way or other -- presuming we get a referendum, of course...

There seems to be a lot of "PR as magical pixie dust" around at the moment, and personally whilst I think it'd be a good idea if suitably implemented I would also like to see a) some link to a 'local' MP retained, since at least some of us have MPs who are actually local and do a good job at it, and b) potentially an overall reduction in the current number of MPs. It looks to be a tough juggling act to combine PR with either, never mind both.

Re: What about to disadvantage all minority parties?

[fanf]

STV can give you both (a) and (b) with no trouble at all, though it gives you multiple MPs for each much-bigger constituency.

Implementation details are exactly what I'd be interested in hearing

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Sure, the point is merely that the threshold is never going to be 0.