Raveen wrote:QUOTE (Raveen @ Apr 8 2011, 08:47 AM) In terms of reflecting the wishes of the electorate, yes. At the moment you have to shoehorn your views into one of 2.5 camps
Which is the same least-worst choice you get to make with AV. At any rate, the point is specious; lets say every microgroup with a shared view achieved parliamentary representation, what then? Well, sooner or later you have to come down to making decisions, enacting legislation, etc. And seeing as none of these microgroups can marshall a majority, they have to compromise. And in compromising, they defeat entirely the reason for which they were separately represented in the first place.
QUOTE (something I suspect that you, for one, can't do SharpFish).[/quote]
All political parties are inherently comprised of people with minimal, not maximal, levels of agreement and consensus. But the people you are talking about aren't even members of political parties - they're voters. In which case, they have opted out of engaging in the process by which a political party formulates the positions it will adopt. So, whose fault is that?
If you want politics to reflect your views, you have to get involved with politics. As Socrates observed, the penalty of the wise, who refuse to participate in government, is to be governed by worse men.
I am am member of a political party, but not a parliamentary one.
QUOTE There will also no doubt be a bunch of other minority groups and single issue parties that could get meaningful votes too. All this is better for the democratic process in that it gives people meaningful choices and forces parties to actually listen to voters and deliver when given the opportunity.[/quote]
But as I've already pointed out, it does nothing of the sort. It doesn't give "the people" meaningful choices, because once again all the choices were formulated by others, and will be washed out by compromise before anything gets presented as a bill anyway. And it certainly doesn't force parties to actually listen to them, because the populace are now totally divorced from the process by which parties establish their manifestoes, and even joining a party will be a largely useless exercise, as candidates will be centrally selected.
PR will be an excellent means for moving power away from the people and into the hands of a technocratic, managerial elite. And in doing so, it will only lead to more alienation from politics, more resentment, less democracy. As for delivering, how will that be MORE feasible when everything comes down to negotiation? Contrast, for example, the Obama administration's cack-handed attempts to get a universal health bill through by compromising with Republicans, and the Tories $#@!-you austerity budget. We can dicker over whether these are Good Things or not, but which of themis more EFFECTIVE?
Now I want a government that can get @#(! done, and which lives or dies by the success or failures of its policies. But what we'll get with PR is a soup of permanent compromise, rotating personell, half-measures and indefinite committees, where blame and triumph are equally diluted, where the public just leaves them to get on with it but nothing changes and nothing makes any difference any way.
