Informed Opinion

First of all, I must apologize for the language slip; I was not fully conscious though... I'm not sure I am now either, but in any case I am more alive than dead wich is more than I can say about last time. I'm reading about governments and politics, and I am coming to realize the problems of different legislatures and party-systems. At the risk of being pretentious I will try to give a short summary of them: First of all, there are (more or less) two different forms of voting a) majority and b) proportionality.

When it comes to the specifics I refer to the all-knowing Wikipedia, what I can say is that basically the majority-system tends to give a single-party government with a clear majority in the parliament. Obviously this system gives a strong government that is free to do whatever reforms it sees fit. Generally there will be a two-party system where the two parties are equally strong and takes turns governing the country. The democratic problem is that it is possible for very strange outcomes in elections, for example; in one election in Canada the conservatives got 16% ov the votes but only 2% of the seats in the parliament. Similarly, in Spain a party got about 50% of the votes, but 75% of the seats in the parliament.

The propotional voting system usually generates a multiple-party organization, such as in Sweden, where parties negotiate coalitions in order to form government. A party that gets 10% of the votes will get roughly 10% of the seats. In order to prevent fragmented parliaments there is most often a requirement that a party will have to get around 5% of the votes in order to take seats in the parliament. In this system the minorities will have more power and the coalitions means that the decisions made are compromises that are acceptable to most people. On the other hand the fact that all decisions have to be negotiated means that radical reforms are usually impossible, even if they might be absolutely neccessary.

The tendencies in western countries, and very much in Sweden, is that the support for tha major parties is dropping and new single-interest parties such as Piratpartiet is gaining support. When it comes to pointing out single issues where the legislature is lacking or out-dated or whatever these parties are very important. They force the leaders to focus on issues that they might want to ignore and so on. But the problem is that if too many of these small parties take seats in parliament, governing might become inefficient. The members of single-interest parties will vote on all issues regarding the country even if their interest is in a completely different area. The politicians in the parliament are usually specialized in a specific area, so in one way there would be little difference. Decisions would still be made on a basis of expertese and the majority will always win. But today these politicians are members of larger parties, with a laid-out plan that involves all aspects of how to rule the country. The politicians will vote along the lines of that plan on issues that they are not as informed in. This means that all decisions, more or less, will be coherent. If there is a lot of small parties without an all-inclusive plan the turnout will be more random as the politicians negotiate their votes on one issue in exchange for votes on their own issues with little focus. In that case the decisions are likely to contradict each other and there will be no clear direction in wich the country is going. In worst case the parliament might end up discussing the angle a banana should have instead of what to do about the declining economy.

In addition it would be even harder to form a government, and the coalitions could end up represent the overall opinion of the citizens even less. These are just some of the issues I have come across lately, I hope you all realize that there are no definite answers and that I am definently not the one who possess them :)