Comment by AndrewDucker

12 days ago

I know how the system works.

I don't consider FPTP to be democratic, because it disenfranches large swathes of the population and means that you can rule the country with a massive majority despite only getting 34% of the vote.

7 comments

AndrewDucker

milesrout 12 days ago

FPP does not disfranchise anyone. If you vote for someone that loses their seat or wins in a landslide your vote still counts.

defrost 12 days ago
Modern democracies moved on past creaky old FPTP and its strong tendency to produce two party non representive majorities.
The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
- milesrout 11 days ago
  
  Novelty isn't inherently good. The word "modern" is the most overused word in the English language on this forum. Every new Javascript framework is "modern" and by implication good.
  There is nothing non-representative about FPP. It has nothing to do with parties. It is a non-party-based system. There is no a priori reason why it is "more democratic" for the proportions of seats in Parliament when split by parti to correspond to the proportions of votes for candidates from those parties. You can declare that you define "democraticness" to be a measure of the extent to which that is true, but there is no logical reason for them to correspond and no good argument that they should.
  It is assumed as axiomatically good and you work backwards from there. Party-proportionality is democracy, therefore list-based proportional representation is more democratic. Well only if you redefine "democratic" first to mean "proportional", which isn't what anyone understood it to mean in the past and isn't the way the term is commonly used in any other context.
  
  2 replies →
HPsquared 12 days ago
One's vote physically being counted is not the same as having any representation in Parliament, let alone government. It's a system of artificial consensus. Managed democracy, in other words. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's very arbitrary.
- milesrout 11 days ago
  
  An MP represents everyone in his constituency regardless of whether they all voted for him. That is his job. He represents the constituency. It is quite false to say that someone lacks representation in Parliament because his preferred candidate was unsuccessful. Everyone's preferred candidates obviously can't all be successful! That wouldn't be democracy.
  >let alone government
  The idea that everyone is entitled to have his preferred local candidate become a minister of the Crown is truly absurd.
  >artificial consensus ... Managed democracy ... arbitrary
  I don't know what this means.