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

[fanf]

The reference to the Acerbo law was in reply to the first part of your comment, about making special laws for or against particular political parties. Nothing to do with PR.

Ireland has political problems but these are due to corrupt government and weak parliamentary oversight, not PR. The reason for PR in Ireland (originally) and in Northern Ireland (now) is to avoid unfair representation for nationalists versus unionists (etc.) and it has succeeded magnificently at that.

[gerald_duck]

So maybe the question is: are we in the UK more scared of political paralysis and indecision or of getting taken over by a malevolent dictator? It seems PR protects against the latter, and majority-promoting electoral systems (whether FPTP, some kind of thresholded PR-STV, or a "gamma-corrected" system) protect against the former.

Or maybe it's possible to protect against both. Or neither.

[fanf]

Where is the evidence of PR causing paralysis and indecision?