I think there are plenty of good points to the parliamentary system but I also feel like you should have to win more than 34% of the vote to get a supermajority
Yeah. That's not parliamentary per se, it's first past the post which is the same thing we have. But it gets worse on the disproportionality when you have four parties breaking double digits and first place is in the mid-30s.
Unfortunately FPTP is like The One Ring of UK politics: whoever wins does a Boromir/Isildur and thinks "Maybe we shouldn't destroy it, maybe we should use its terrible power for good?"
Lib Dems got played hard when they had their once-in-a-generation chance in coalition with electoral reform as one of their top demands, and then let the referendum be on AV (RCV) instead of PR.
I always wonder what would have happened if Clegg hadn't gone full Lawful Neutral and decided he must go into coalition with Cameron because they'd won the most seats. If he'd entertained the idea of letting Brown pitch a Lib Lab coalition to him.
The wiki article seems to suggest that both are kind of true. Clegg said that Cameron should have the first attempt at forming a government, but they did also meet with Labour. Paddy Ashdown seemed to think that Brown was not interested in sensibly negotiating?
the press united behind the lie that the biggest party gets first shot, there's nothing in the constitution saying that but it would have made things very difficult for a Lab/Lib to make it through a year (I don't think any 20thC hung parl. did)
I always thought Shirley Williams was correct. They should have agreed to support the government when necessary (remembering that the financial crisis was ongoing) and allowed it to take its natural course, which would probably have meant another GE after about six months.
In fairness, the all-party committee made a complete hash of things, recommending a change in electoral system...and completely ducking the question of what thar system should look like. Which left the Liberals with two bad choices: impose a system, or just do nothing. And they chose nothing.
It didn't help that the Liberals were set on IRV. The NDP wanted a proportional system: IRV would have wiped them out.
Had the Liberals on the committee proposed any flavour of proportional representation, they would almost certainly have had the NDP backing them up.
Straight prop-rep was a non-starter for Quebec, though, because the Bloc would have been permanently crippled. Some sort of mixed-member system was probably the only potentially viable route, but exactly how or what was something no one agreed upon.
But I think that would be something the Libs, NDP, Bloc, and Greens could have negotiated... if the Liberals were willing to come to the table on a proportional system.
Instead, the commission had to go to the Cons, who have no interest in anything except FPTP, except to put egg on Trudeau's face.
Single-winner IRV / RCV is not actually good for third parties, because it's still a winner-take-all system. I haven't dug into the Canadian results, but I'd guess they win a lot of seats on pluralities they might not win on instant run-offs.
Across most of the country, we only have three competitive parties. If there's no majority on the first ballot, IRV is mostly going to elect candidates who are voters' second choice.
That doesn't much describe the NDP.
I’m from NZ and still lived there when we shifted to proportional representation. Genunine game changer. We ‘tried’ (very badly) here in the UK but there was no commitment to it. FPTP remains so dumb though
