Yeah I’d love it if we had no prospect of having a government for the next 6 months and Labour were spending all their time arguing with the greens, lib dems and reform in a desperate attempt to form a government.
i am torn, on the one had its more democratic and representitive, on the other hand we have a lot, and I mean a lot, of vile racist scum in the counrty and we just dont need them having more power and influence.
We absolutely do need voting reform. The worries about coalition I think are pretty pointless. The coalition government we had recently was the most stable we have had in a long time, and was negotiated pretty quickly.
It would also give view points actual representation in parliament.
In every other walk of life, we agree competition is a good thing to drive up quality, yet with politics, we adopt a duopolistic approach and are shocked that quality is woeful.
PR isn’t perfect either. It creates a lot of hung governments and the need for complicated power-sharing agreements that often break down. Look at Italy as an example, which has gone through many governments in recent years. Giving greater weight to popular parties can reduce this issue by making the parliament less fragmented and therefore governments less fragile.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of FPTP either because of its lack of fair representation. Maybe a better system would be what the Scottish parliament does, which is a mixture of FPTP and PR?
50 people voted in this poll? Well it must count for everyone in the country!
We already had a democratic referendum not even 15 years ago. Respect the will of the people, it was a generational vote, we don’t need another vote so quickly.
We live in a county(s)/kingdom ( whatever the fuck it is) where you can’t vote for the upper house (House of Lords / Senate) and people get distracted by the FTP issue of the section they vote for. What other countries have half of their parliament unelected FFS. Voting reform starts with being able to vote.
Well actually the yes votes were all spread out among the constituencies and the no votes were concentrated. The actual votes look like this.
500-no
150-yes.
Therefore by the people’s will we won’t be changing.
Party politics is the problem. The idea that a polarised system where all voters agree with everything one camp decides on is the problem. The requirement for a government with one point of view is the problem, because it can only please a few. But why do we need party politics at all? Why do we need whips to tow the party line? Every elected M.P.’s opinion is valid. As long as there is an odd number of M.P.s voting, then a vote will always come out one way or the other. If there is an even number of votes, discard the last-one by-time.
[removed]
I wonder what the results would have looked like if there were more options than those three… would we have seen tactical voting amongst different proponents of proportional systems? Or would they have cannibalised each other to the extent that the simple no vote wins?
Nah, I’m not a Labour fan, but looking at other Western countries, and I am so grateful that we had a peaceful transfer of power, and no bickering over power between rival parties. Labour has a mandate, and the ability to pursue it without non-stop obstacles. Too many psychopaths and narcissists in the political class, they’re too ready to squabble over power. Much better to have a clear winner.
the difficulty i have with PR is how do we choose the reps. Suppose communist party gets 500-1000 votes from each constitudency and say have 10% of the total votes. So they get 10% of parliamentiary seats. Who decides what reps got to parliament. There are currently 650 seats. Assume PR allows for these to be reduce to 300 MPs. Someone has to decide on which 30 individual represent the communist party of Britain. Under PR nobody is directly elected.
One benefit of FPTP is there’s a clear winner from each constituncy and they get the mandate from the constitudency to represent them.
Under PR you just vote for the party and party chooses their MPs
Ah, a classic of poor surveying.
Lump “all other options” into one box and then pretend like it’s a binary choice.
PR meaning… list based total PR? Consistuency based AV? Quadratic Voting? Multiple Elector FPTP (which is actually more a form of PR), multiple round voting, hybrid list and area voting, “top up” voting?
There are as many voting systems as there are politics professors, and almost all of them could, with a thesaurus and a bit of time, be called some form of PR.
If you split this out into 25 different options, you’d get a couple of % across each.
If you actually expected people to understand the options you’d get 4 valid votes and they’d be for multiple elector systems because it’s the people who watched the old CGPGrey video on improving voting outcomes.
And if you then asked those 4 people how they think it would change the voting system and why that’s good, you’d get 1 coherent answer that would boil down to “I like voting systems where my side wins.”
This is not a topic where there is anything like a good level of understanding of the options.
There is an argument for PR, but I think it’s been weakened by the last couple of elections. Voting seems to be more volatile, there are fewer safe seats than there used to be, so even under FPTP your vote counts more.
The main two issues with FPTP are gerrymandering and perceived tactical voting.
If constituency lines were regularly evaluated and shifted to even out the electoral numbers for each, and people voted for the party that best represents their interests, then it would be a lot ‘fairer’.
Fully expect this to get buried, but this is a terrible idea for anyone who understands what ‘institutions of consent’ means under Karl Popper’s political philosophy, epistemology, and what an ‘open society’ entails. People are profoundly confused about the role of democracy: elections are functionally, primarily, a way to remove policies and people from power, not a way to represent what the electorate thinks should be enacted.
As much as I’m for all the criticism the British political system receives, there are reasons it is uniquely stable and successful in comparison to most other systems which have been tried over the last few centuries.
I’ve spent most of my life in Britain, but I was born in Eastern Europe and I currently spend a lot of time in central Europe. Proportional representation is a political travesty and the EU is largely such a joke because of it.
That Poll is bollocks I am afraid.
Source: Am a pollster for one of the big Polling companies. I’ve asked that question a couple of hundred times now and the ratio for keeping/changing is about 95/5.
I know that’s less than the referendum and less than you would expect the three main minority party’s supporters to come up with, but that’s the numbers.
I’m really surprised that more people didn’t answer “I don’t know”.
If there was a preceding question along the lines of “Do you understand the concept and implications of PR?” I imagine you’d see results much closer to 50/50.
People clearly will vote for things they don’t understand. And there is no reason for them *not* to understand
Yes but not necessarily with straightforward PR. I think a system with second and third choices is important to reduce the need for tactical voting and encourage parties to consider the views of their non-core voters.
I also think coalitions can be a problem and can prevent governments from taking tough but important long-term decisions. So I might accept a system which gives extra seats to the winners or to parties which did well in second or third place votes, even if it makes the result not quite proportional.
I’m kinda mixed on PR as a whole, mostly because of LOOOOOOONG negotiations and the rise of the Gar Right, which I argue the current system has done a fairly good job at keeping out for the most part (did start showing cracks this election though)
I’d personally go for 2nd preference voting (formerly used for mayoral elections until 2024), which would give the best of both fairness and representing constituencies
We had a referendum on exactly this in 2010 … The labour and Tory parties managed to put out sufficient propaganda to scare off the voters. Also it was the lowest turnout of any vote ever; I hope they re-do it but I doubt it.
Where were ya’ll last time the issue got raised?????
When it was a certain subsections of voters’ benefit, they had no problem of FPTP.
Remember the right wing screaming how it would mean repeat coalitions, which would be a disaster for the country (despite already being in one at the time)
22 comments
Yeah I’d love it if we had no prospect of having a government for the next 6 months and Labour were spending all their time arguing with the greens, lib dems and reform in a desperate attempt to form a government.
i am torn, on the one had its more democratic and representitive, on the other hand we have a lot, and I mean a lot, of vile racist scum in the counrty and we just dont need them having more power and influence.
We absolutely do need voting reform. The worries about coalition I think are pretty pointless. The coalition government we had recently was the most stable we have had in a long time, and was negotiated pretty quickly.
It would also give view points actual representation in parliament.
In every other walk of life, we agree competition is a good thing to drive up quality, yet with politics, we adopt a duopolistic approach and are shocked that quality is woeful.
PR isn’t perfect either. It creates a lot of hung governments and the need for complicated power-sharing agreements that often break down. Look at Italy as an example, which has gone through many governments in recent years. Giving greater weight to popular parties can reduce this issue by making the parliament less fragmented and therefore governments less fragile.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of FPTP either because of its lack of fair representation. Maybe a better system would be what the Scottish parliament does, which is a mixture of FPTP and PR?
50 people voted in this poll? Well it must count for everyone in the country!
We already had a democratic referendum not even 15 years ago. Respect the will of the people, it was a generational vote, we don’t need another vote so quickly.
We live in a county(s)/kingdom ( whatever the fuck it is) where you can’t vote for the upper house (House of Lords / Senate) and people get distracted by the FTP issue of the section they vote for. What other countries have half of their parliament unelected FFS. Voting reform starts with being able to vote.
Well actually the yes votes were all spread out among the constituencies and the no votes were concentrated. The actual votes look like this.
500-no
150-yes.
Therefore by the people’s will we won’t be changing.
Party politics is the problem. The idea that a polarised system where all voters agree with everything one camp decides on is the problem. The requirement for a government with one point of view is the problem, because it can only please a few. But why do we need party politics at all? Why do we need whips to tow the party line? Every elected M.P.’s opinion is valid. As long as there is an odd number of M.P.s voting, then a vote will always come out one way or the other. If there is an even number of votes, discard the last-one by-time.
[removed]
I wonder what the results would have looked like if there were more options than those three… would we have seen tactical voting amongst different proponents of proportional systems? Or would they have cannibalised each other to the extent that the simple no vote wins?
Nah, I’m not a Labour fan, but looking at other Western countries, and I am so grateful that we had a peaceful transfer of power, and no bickering over power between rival parties. Labour has a mandate, and the ability to pursue it without non-stop obstacles. Too many psychopaths and narcissists in the political class, they’re too ready to squabble over power. Much better to have a clear winner.
the difficulty i have with PR is how do we choose the reps. Suppose communist party gets 500-1000 votes from each constitudency and say have 10% of the total votes. So they get 10% of parliamentiary seats. Who decides what reps got to parliament. There are currently 650 seats. Assume PR allows for these to be reduce to 300 MPs. Someone has to decide on which 30 individual represent the communist party of Britain. Under PR nobody is directly elected.
One benefit of FPTP is there’s a clear winner from each constituncy and they get the mandate from the constitudency to represent them.
Under PR you just vote for the party and party chooses their MPs
Ah, a classic of poor surveying.
Lump “all other options” into one box and then pretend like it’s a binary choice.
PR meaning… list based total PR? Consistuency based AV? Quadratic Voting? Multiple Elector FPTP (which is actually more a form of PR), multiple round voting, hybrid list and area voting, “top up” voting?
There are as many voting systems as there are politics professors, and almost all of them could, with a thesaurus and a bit of time, be called some form of PR.
If you split this out into 25 different options, you’d get a couple of % across each.
If you actually expected people to understand the options you’d get 4 valid votes and they’d be for multiple elector systems because it’s the people who watched the old CGPGrey video on improving voting outcomes.
And if you then asked those 4 people how they think it would change the voting system and why that’s good, you’d get 1 coherent answer that would boil down to “I like voting systems where my side wins.”
This is not a topic where there is anything like a good level of understanding of the options.
There is an argument for PR, but I think it’s been weakened by the last couple of elections. Voting seems to be more volatile, there are fewer safe seats than there used to be, so even under FPTP your vote counts more.
The main two issues with FPTP are gerrymandering and perceived tactical voting.
If constituency lines were regularly evaluated and shifted to even out the electoral numbers for each, and people voted for the party that best represents their interests, then it would be a lot ‘fairer’.
Fully expect this to get buried, but this is a terrible idea for anyone who understands what ‘institutions of consent’ means under Karl Popper’s political philosophy, epistemology, and what an ‘open society’ entails. People are profoundly confused about the role of democracy: elections are functionally, primarily, a way to remove policies and people from power, not a way to represent what the electorate thinks should be enacted.
As much as I’m for all the criticism the British political system receives, there are reasons it is uniquely stable and successful in comparison to most other systems which have been tried over the last few centuries.
I’ve spent most of my life in Britain, but I was born in Eastern Europe and I currently spend a lot of time in central Europe. Proportional representation is a political travesty and the EU is largely such a joke because of it.
That Poll is bollocks I am afraid.
Source: Am a pollster for one of the big Polling companies. I’ve asked that question a couple of hundred times now and the ratio for keeping/changing is about 95/5.
I know that’s less than the referendum and less than you would expect the three main minority party’s supporters to come up with, but that’s the numbers.
I’m really surprised that more people didn’t answer “I don’t know”.
If there was a preceding question along the lines of “Do you understand the concept and implications of PR?” I imagine you’d see results much closer to 50/50.
People clearly will vote for things they don’t understand. And there is no reason for them *not* to understand
Yes but not necessarily with straightforward PR. I think a system with second and third choices is important to reduce the need for tactical voting and encourage parties to consider the views of their non-core voters.
I also think coalitions can be a problem and can prevent governments from taking tough but important long-term decisions. So I might accept a system which gives extra seats to the winners or to parties which did well in second or third place votes, even if it makes the result not quite proportional.
I’m kinda mixed on PR as a whole, mostly because of LOOOOOOONG negotiations and the rise of the Gar Right, which I argue the current system has done a fairly good job at keeping out for the most part (did start showing cracks this election though)
I’d personally go for 2nd preference voting (formerly used for mayoral elections until 2024), which would give the best of both fairness and representing constituencies
We had a referendum on exactly this in 2010 … The labour and Tory parties managed to put out sufficient propaganda to scare off the voters. Also it was the lowest turnout of any vote ever; I hope they re-do it but I doubt it.
Where were ya’ll last time the issue got raised?????
When it was a certain subsections of voters’ benefit, they had no problem of FPTP.
Remember the right wing screaming how it would mean repeat coalitions, which would be a disaster for the country (despite already being in one at the time)