“Proportional representation correlates with more welfare, reduced corruption, less crime, and a host of other social benefits. The need for consensus among a number of groups with drastically different agendas forces government to be more representative of the entire electorate. Creative and progressive solutions to problems tend to be the order of the day, with smaller political parties gaining seats in government and diverse viewpoints collaborating to find solutions.”
The author of the post draws then links through to an article by the BBC’s Mark Easton in which he details a more progressive and effective approach to youth crime that is in place in Finland – a state with a much more proportionately-elected system of government.
Three questions:
- What are the downsides of PR?
- How would a governing class that owed it’s position to a ‘First Past the Post’ voting system be persuaded to introduce a system of PR?
- Local government is often dominated by a different political party from the one that runs central government. Surely it would be advantageous for central government to impose a PR system on local government?
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
Three answers:
1. Compromise/coalition (though you could play this as an upside just as easily.)
2. Only when so few people turn out at the polling station in the current system that it crashes and burns, or when first past the post doesn’t serve the needs of the party in power will you seen any impetus to change the system…. politics as usual will always take precedent as issues of voters’ concern will always be prioritised in order to maintain the voting majorities and the status quo. The urgency isnt there.
3. It might do – but to have PR at local level without having it at national level would further weaken the credibility of the elected systems as a whole, weakening local opposition through more coalitions, whilst allowing First Past The Post to continue creating overly strong bias towards whoever is in power at national level.
One more point:
1. Electoral system reform is the pretty dry and unglamorous end of a fairly dry and unglamorous constitutional reform conversation. Those of us who like to talk about it have probably in some way been motivated to engage with the issue through understanding just how bankrupt our current system is and the extent to which we need to reform it. Until more people can be inspired to engage on this as a matter of some urgency, beyond existing circles, then we’re not going to see real change any time soon. There are simply more urgent matters to attend to. The problems across the system at national and local levels are well known, and PR is only one possibility in a myriad of options. To introduce it without a serious redesign of current systems would be putting a sticking plaster on a broken arm.
you can end up with elections where fringe parties can play king maker a lot more than fptp
more pork barrel politics where bigger parties pay off junior partners
Well – Scotland should be a good place to test the theory out!
The first local government elections were held under PR (STV) in 2007 – the result was to leave Labour with majority control over only 2 councils, and all the others with minority/coalition administrations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_local_elections,_2007
No fringe parties in play so far, unless you count the LibDems, and the sky hasn’t fallen in yet.