Should we drop Proportional Representation

blackwhite wrote: »

Single-seat constituencies - whether with FPTP or with instant-runoff voting (like we have for the presidential election) would result in a Dail where the % of seats wouldn't be near proportionate to the % of the vote.
Smaller parties would be wiped out, and would have little or no chance of growing to challenge the large parties.

Also look at the stability that run-off elections give France!

The French system basically has a first round election and if nobody gets >50% of the vote, it goes to a run-off between the two highest polling candidates for the seat.

You've a huge array of political opinion in France with parties and candidates from across the spectrum. So, you've huge activity in the first round.

Then it's whittled down to two candidates who are in 1st and 2nd place, who'll make it to the second round and you end up with say a centre right candidate like Macron (or Chirac or Sarkozy) up against a far right populist like Le Pen. The majority of the population may have voted for a range of parties from left groups to greens to other centrists, but would be deeply opposed to a far right candidate.

So you end up with a runoff between a centre right vaguely tolerable character (Macron) on 23.75% and a far right candidate with nothing like a majority, (Le Pen) on 21.53%. They end up going head to head in a 2nd round.

So, people vote for Macron because they dislike Le Pen, not because they support Macron. They've effectively voted for their least-worst option.

It's not exclusive to centre right parties either, look what happened with François Hollande.

The result of that is you've a government driven by someone who in reality only ever had 23.75% of the vote. His approval has often hovered around that level and you've mass public anger because they don't feel that they're being represented.

The majority of the French public aren't Macron supporters, and the vast majority absolutely reject the politics of Le Pen, but that's the choice they were given and they voted for the least worst option, which is an unplatable outcome for most.

Back when Chriac won the election, a lot of socialists and left leaning voters literally put on rubber dishwashing gloves when voting to theatrically display their protest and that these were 'borrowed votes' and only cast to avoid Jean Marie Le Pen.

The media image of it is that there's some huge support for Le Pen because is in round two, but that in reality is a ridiculous representation of the French public's view of politics.

That's why France has street protests and continuous strife.

An instantaneous paper run off system here for the executive would result in a similar lack of representation. It's is not proportional representation. It's just modified first past the post.

Is that where we'd want to go with run-off voting systems?! It seems hugely inferior as a system to what we have in terms of the level of representation it gives and the nuances it can express.

A paper / instantaneous run off would come down to people voting say I donno Green on their 1st preference and FF on their second, and only the FF vote would in reality matter. It would reduce your higher preferences to potentially being nothing but a symbolic protest vote for a candidate who'd never have a hope in hell of being elected.

It's less of an issue with the Irish presidency because the position really holds no power. But if you were to move to that type of voting system for Dail seats, you'd effectively remove the nuances entirely and end up with a lot of problems, particularly as people started to feel they were not being represented.

I find some commentators in Ireland seem to think the fact that there's regular street protests in France is a good thing and fail to understand that the reason there's that kind of level of anger is because people feel their voices aren't heard and they then express them 'dans la rue'.

Or, do you seriously want a Tory vs Labour or Republicans Vs Democrats dichotomy here? Both of those countries are a mess!

Ireland has far less of that because you can get an expression of your political point of view heard and there is a much more consensus-building approach to politics.