A goverment is never "fair". Govermente must be controlled by the people. PR takes away the power of the people over their MP, gives all the power to party leaders, creates Political Oligarchy. What UK needs is direct election of President to finnally have division of powers
Excellent introduction. We should make a version of this for Canada. It is an international human rights issue so we should reach out and work together on abolishing distorted misrepresentation everywhere.
Living in a safe seat, it doesn't matter whether I vote or not and my vote is essentially worthless. Down the road in a marginal every vote means something, certainly more than mine. You only have to look at the level of canvassing and leaflets in marginal seats versus safe ones to learn all you need to know. FPTP is not fit for purpose in a modern democracy and needs to be scrapped as soon as possible. (As an aside, another way the Tories showed that they are totally out of touch with voters in their manifesto, was a proposal to EXTEND the antiquated FPTP to mayoral and police commissioner elections! You really couldn't make it up!)
PR voting would be the reform that unlocks all reforms. It offers better government, better representation, a more responsive politics, competition and choice for voters and the ability for politicians to create more new parties that accurately represent their views and do not lock themselves into huge, unwieldy and fractions internal party coalitions like Labour and Tories.
isnt a solution to everything. there would still be money in politics pushing prodominate parties, meaning no opportunity for reform thats not in the intrests of donors/members/trade unions. Also, tradition pushes many to vote for tory or labour or liberal, which wouldnt change that much under pr. But .... PR IS AWESOME
Not quite. The UK is notoriously hard to unravel with it's political system. I can't find any statute that specifies what the prime minister even does. It's a convention really. Things could be codified though, like assured autonomy with only special reasons allowed to override devolution or even federalism, specific procedures required to amend the system, and no single place where you can look up all the rights that have been won so far back from the state (although there are many that could be won back in future through more campaigning).
of course PR is just one step among many, and assuming we voted under PR for the next election it would still be a good decade or two before lobbying and media influence was challenged. I disagree about "no opportunity" for reform that's not in the interests of powerful vested interests. They would still call the shots yes, but by the nature of proportionality a greater diversity of issues would be considered valid for serious debate. Over time I think you would see a noticeable increase in serious pushes for reform. Strategically the best time for reform would actually be immediately following brexit, but with the current ruling party ripping itself apart and Labour not currently including it as a manifesto pledge (although there is large and growing support within the party, 80+ of 257 MPs in favour)
Proportional Representation is evil. It means the end of the power of the people over PM. Proportional representations means that there will be 2,3 or 4 parties which will rule on behalf of themselves because they have no control from the voters. You will not have any MP to talk to, you will have no MP. You will be subject to the parties. In Spain we know very well, proportional representation is party oligarchy where 4 party-leader make the law.
@Sirius White Germany was very successfull leading to WWII So was Japan. We are talking about Freedom and controled power balancing system. PR is oligarchy of some parties. You can live well under an political Oligarchy, you can even have "successful" progress under dictatorship. Freedom comes from the people controlling their goverment
>"80% of developed democracies..." >Lists Turkey The rest of the list were developed democracies, I don't think Turkey should be included in that list though. They're not particularly developed and with regards to democracy they are regressing.
Hmm no. Turkey's government is so corrupt that calling it democratic is the same as calling China democratic. Sure they vote, but when the votes don't matter that doesn't mean much.
The German state of Baden-Württemberg uses PR which is smiliar to FPtP which has one ballot, one vote, unlike those which has a regional ballot, but they still have regional representation, by increasing our MPs from 650 to 2,001 the 1 being the speaker, 650 constituencies and 1350 topping up to match the vote share of the party with the remaining 6 being the 6 party leaders according to votes. The largest two party will then face off and party to get 50%+1 of the vote get in No 10, then third and fourth have a vote to see who be the coalition junior partner and so on till there is a coalition of 1,001 MPs.
FPTP is laughable. But democracy is about people power not party power. I would suggest that parties are just as poisonous to good governance as FPTP. If everybody gets to choose their preferred representative (which might be a party rather than an individual) with block votes so that each rep has the power of those who chose them then the parliament thus constituted has 'PR' built-in with no fudges (apart from parties filling seats that they have gained but that's the problem with any party system). After their initial fervour all parties are corrupted by self-interest.
Individual politicians can be corrupted by self interests as well if they were to decide for themselves which way to vote every time on a piece of policy. Parties, provided that they are dependent on a broad base membership, need a large number of people to approve the nomination of a candidate in a constituency. More internally democratic parties like the D66 in the Netherlands allow the party's general membership to put clauses in the party's policy book. The NDP in Canada holds a vote of confidence in the party leader every two years by secret ballot. The SPD in Germany hold a vote among their general membership as to whether or not to approve coalition and confidence and supply agreements. The Liberal Democrats hold a direct ranked ballot for their party leadership without reweighting. Some parties like the NDP in Canada have a standing council to draft policy in between conventions where it is reasonably possible for ordinary people to be elected by their constituency associations to serve. Party caucuses can be internally democratic as well. You can have the MPs, by a secret ballot with a ranked or runoff system if nobody gets a majority, elect members to committees in the parliament, elect their parliamentary leader, the leader of the government or opposition depending on which side they are on, elect the party whip, secretary, chair. They can hold internal votes as to whether or not to impose the party whip on a vote, to decide whether or not to expel a member from the caucus or accept a new member. The parliament as a whole can also do similar things to elect the auditor of the government, elect the prime minister, approve of the cabinet members and approve of the removal of those ministers or the reshuffling of them. Remove the prime minister and elect their successor, elect the speaker, deputy speaker, and the chairs of committees. They could elect members to say the board of directors of companies which the crown owns stock in, elect members to a council to nominate judges for the Supreme Court. They could also elect a president if the UK turned into a republic, although it could also be held by a direct election like Ireland or France.
Exact, PR takes the power from the voters and gives all power to parties. In Spain we know very well, PR leads directly to party oligarchy. With PR you choose no MP, you have no MP.
@The secular humanist - Parties do not have any fundamental role in democracy. Chasing our logical tails so that parties are fairly represented in parliament arises because parties have corrupted virtually every global parliament to suit their own agenda. In Britain the largest party membership is in the hundreds-of-thousands the electorate in the tens-of-millions, why would such a tiny minority have the 'right' to gain governance and impose their will when we can easily devise systems that more closely represent the voters.
@@robertjarman3703 - 'corrupted by self interests as well if they were to decide for themselves which way to vote every time on a piece of policy', their self-interest will be to serve their voters NOT their party. If they vote against the interests of their voters the voters can directly 'deselect' them; in the UK the parties will place their favoured colleagues in 'safe-seats' (another FPTP issue) putting them outside the reach of voter-power. Political Parties have almost universally corrupted democracy for their own interest and we have become acclimatized to their dominance - democracy is not a system for choosing our masters.
@@andyinsuffolk Proportional systems can limit that problem. Single transferable vote and open list proportional representation means that a candidate who has no identity but their party has no seat in parliament, as they won't get the vote in their own right to be elected, and a party with no good people will have no seats of any kind in the constituency as other party's people will be elected instead. It is also possible to nominate candidates in more open races. The Conservative party a couple times has used open primaries, and American states have been using them and semi closed primaries (the latter of which forbids members of other parties from voting in primaries other than those of their own party but everyone else can vote) too, at least some of the better ones such as Colorado. You could use them in proportional systems just as much.
Proportional representation is not the best solution for the U.K. Voters would be forced to have their local MP appointed; further, some systems of PR would restrict you to voting for local rather than national parties. The U.K. may have to have such a system under PR to make it workable. Another point to consider; being that PR lists would be highly susceptible to pruning by the “establishment” media (character assassination), is that PR would likely only select “acceptable” candidates, leaving the public with no direct way to change politics through election of a localised party candidate who can bring a new voice to the table. The ‘established’ parties will say that candidate is just ‘popular’, but does that make it wrong? For a nation said to be already riddled with voter apathy, even by the PR supporters, and that lacks trust in its politicians, PR will for fail people further, especially after any initial apparent success. That the party a voter mostly agrees with is no longer directly connected to them anymore by ‘direct vote’* will be the final nail in the coffin of British democracy for many people. In the U.K. that link to local candidate means a lot, even if they can’t change much, because people generally don’t believe much will change anyway and don’t want others taking what little they have away. The local voice is all important in the U.K. to ensure your resistance is heard to the endless march of globalism. The only people saying PR will change anything are the people who continually benefit from Globalism, or are desperate enough to vote for phoney change. PR is elitist and meritocratic. It will further divide the public, shut the electorate out of politics even more, and allow for more blindly ideological and closed minded politicians to climb within established parties. PR will further drive people away from mainstream politics, embolden smaller and extremist parties, and will force decent people wanting change, to turn to a patchwork army of independent candidates, running as party entities, to get the change PR has failed to deliver them. The result will be weaker and weaker governments elected under PR, and a general decline in sovereign capacity. People may want change, but PR is not the solution. I would suggest a digital revolution with digital social apps that can bring people together who share similar ideas to help form new political movements would be a better way to go; some sort of ‘Find My Politics’ app is badly needed in the U.K. of course we don’t have the transfer vote system to make that successful, but that’s a whole different debate. At the very least people of similar beliefs could find more out about where they might be right and where they might be wrong, and then push for internal change of the main parties instead. * By ‘direct vote’ here I imply that the voter’s individual vote elects a candidate without any other mechanism or equation being applied to its status as one vote for one candidate other than a simple count. PR would apply a percentage calculus to either increase or decrease the impact of that vote on the final arrangement of the party based on the overall votes various parties take throughout the country, opening the way for all the abuses and potential corruptions of democracy I lost above.
Just the late nights ;) Takes a good few high quality brain cells to make an animation like this! Thanks for all your hard work (through the late nights!)
I agree that FPTP needs to go, everywhere. However, proportional representation (PR) is not the way to go. Preference voting (PV) is a much better reform. Here's three reasons: 1) PR incentivizes political polarization. Since more than one seat is awarded per riding, candidates are incentivized only to play to their faction of support within their riding, as long as that faction can give them enough votes to win. PV on the other hand incentivizes candidate to move to the center of the political spectrum because only one seat is awarded per riding. 2) PR makes political parties a permanent part of government. With PV on the other hand political parties are not required. All seats in government could be won by independent candidates. 3) PR has very complicated rules for awarding seats in each riding. With PV on the other hand there is only one seat per riding, the winner takes it - far easier for people to understand. Check out these PV systems: - STAR voting - Score voting - Approval voting - Ranked choice voting. Also, here is an interesting video comparing the efficacy of different PV voting systems: ua-cam.com/video/-4FXLQoLDBA/v-deo.html
STV tends to encourage candidates to appeal to a broader part of their constituency even if it isn't a majority. Also, party list proportional is a misnomer. Any person with some signatures or a deposit or both can submit a list in a list based system, and STV is party agnostic as well. Parties will hold nomination contests or have their nominating committee identify candidates in a given constituency and their membership vote to approve or deny them, but that is only related to official endorsements. Modern open list systems do not have the parties or listmakers creating an order for the list to be in. Also, what is wrong with parties?
STV is an extremely complicated voting system. It would require computerized vote counting. (Ranked-choice also requires computerized vote counting, so actually I would prefer STAR, Score or Approval voting amongst the PV systems I listed.) I don't think it is realistic to expect that a common citizen who submits a list of candidates would have a hope in hell of that list winning. And with that type of system there could be thousands of lists that people submit, which would be chaos. Party lists are restricted to party members, and are therefore fundamentally restrictive, making them less open to all potential candidates, and hence making elections less open. PR systems in general are just too complicated, as I mentioned. Political parties restrict our government representatives from acting freely and I believe the ideal government would be made up entirely of independent candidates. So, I oppose any electoral system that makes this impossible or favors political parties.
@@jonfklein Ireland has been using STV for their elections, and the UK using it for some university constituencies, even many cities in the US and a couple provinces and cities in Canada used STV about 100 years ago, long before computers like we know them were around, even before the Bomba machine used to decode the enigma machine. Australia switched to using STV for their senate elections in 1948 or one of the years around then, not precisely sure. I know India uses STV for their Senate, as does Pakistan, but I'm not sure when they started to use this. I also know they do this in some form for their presidential elections too but I'm not sure when they used STV to do it. Besides, anyone can get a chromebook for a hundred dollars and even that has the power to run a moderately sized STV election. Common citizens wouldn't be able to fill in a list just themselves, they would need a petition, submitted by perhaps 100 registered voters. Ordinary candidates face this same limit. Political parties usually also have to get some signatures who would act as the first members of the party in order to be registered, at least in most countries with legal parties. And in theory, any group could propose a list, like a cooperative or trade union, a non profit, etc. But because parties happen to be in the biggest position to submit lists, they submit most of the lists and most candidates. They have a specific ideology, a relatively broad class of members in most free countries, and a desire to seek electoral results as opposed to say a union's focus on labour strikes and contract negotiation. Also, political parties can be used as a tool for individuals, but an internally democratic party and a coalition based pollical system with many aspects of power sharing can have parties be quite useful. Their members would approve at annual general meetings policy statements and ratify a platform, nominate their candidates or approve the slate of candidates recommended by their nominating committee in each constituency by ballot, elect their party leader and hold regular votes of confidence in them, which is the person nominated by the party to become prime minister, their members would elect their executive board to run the party on a daily basis, and constituency associations have their members elect their constituency board and elect delegates to a party standing committee which holds power of policy and representing the political interests of the party between general meetings (usually held between one and three years apart). Their members can also vote to ratify their coalition or confidence and supply agreements, as the SPD does in Germany. Membership can also be subsidized by electoral authorities and campaign finance rules limiting the ability of specific individuals to influence a party too much, such that it is cheap or even free to join a party. The party caucuses can also hold ballots, like to adopt or not adopt a specific position, to expel members of the caucus or accept new members from other parliamentary caucuses, elect and remove their chair, whips, parliamentary leader, members of committees, committee chairs, the president/speaker of the legislative assembly, elect the cabinet members which the party is assigned, and the parliament as a whole voting to elect the prime minister, hold votes on whether or not to remove an existing one, approve the cabinet, give consent or rejection to the dismissal or transfer of a minister, nominate, elect, or give consent to the appointment or removal of many types of officers like the auditor, the judges of courts, important bureaucratic officials, board directors of state owned companies, and more powers like these. Parties with discipline over members means that an interest group can't just bribe a politician to vote a certain way. Politicians make promises when they get elected, but there is little that can be done in the meantime to hold them to that promise. A party is one of the few ways of keeping them to that promise, and given that it is cheap and easy to join a party with broad based membership and collective power rather than concentrated power in a leader or president, it is also relatively easy to vote on the policies created. Plus, other forms of democracy like initiatives, recalls, referendums, elected constituent assemblies, citizen's assemblies, and constitutions allow for more involvement in the process of big decisions. The mere existence of these forms allows people to bypass parties if they remain to themselves an oligarchical club.
The pros and cons of political parties can be debated ad infinitum. My issue is that the playing field should be levelled at the ballot box such that no candidates, neither party nor independent candidates, have an advantage. This allows voters to decide which they prefer to be running the country. The voters can decide who gets punished or rewarded at the ballot box. If independent candidates do a poor job running the country the voters can choose party candidates at the next election. Vice versa, if voters becomes disgusted with dysfunctional political party rule they can vote them out and put in whoever else is on the ballot. In other words I want a system that forces the political world to be more competitive. Just like in the business world, free markets allow for competition which, as we know, leads to technological progress and better services (in almost all cases). I want a free market system for the choice of governance of our country. The structure of PR systems is based on rule by parties, and therefore is fundamentally biased towards party candidates, and I would argue PR systems are fundamentally undemocratic. This is primarily why I oppose PR. I suppose independent candidates can theoretically be elected to all seats under PR systems. But this has not been the result in reality. You have argued for PR, but you haven’t mentioned any disadvantages of PV systems. Why do you feel PR systems are superior to PV systems? I view PV systems as fundamentally superior to PR systems due to their simplicity and hence lack of bias towards any candidate. About STV. They used a computer in Maine to run the ranked-choice vote counting in the U.S. mid-term elections last year. So, being that STV is more complicated than ranked-choice, I assume STV vote counting would also be computer-based. I suppose vote counting could be done by hand for any system, but with much effort and time, especially if there are a large number of ballots involved. In the Maine election it took a couple days just to scan all the ballots into the computer before the counting program could be run and a winner determined. I imagine it would have taken weeks to count by hand.
@@jonfklein The US does a lot of voting at the exact same time, often a bunch of referendums state and local, municipal councils, school boards, state legislatures for the state senate and state parliament, the governor, between two and 5 other executive positions, several judges at different levels of courts, county commissioners, sheriffs, coroners, national congresspeople, federal senators, and in years divisible by 4, the president, and holding them every two years, plus a primary election for each of these positions held for each party a couple of months before the election. That is a lot of things to vote on, and so computers are quite useful. The UK only elects mayors in some places, MPs, MEPs, and local councillors, and for 3-5 year terms depending on exactly where you are. Party leaders retain their position until they resign or lose a vote of confidence within their party. Parties often provide resources to individuals who wouldn't have the connections of access to finances or volunteers but who are otherwise qualified. And it allows more people to be involved in the decisionmaking. Parties can hold AGMs annually, they can vote on policies at once, and there can be a dozen parties at each level of government in the UK. In places where independents do tend to win, parties are often either restricted by law like in Kuwait, or there are large clientelist systems based on patronage or dominance of the elections by those who are often much more connected to people already in power, or they were kicked out or resigned from a party but decided to run for the seat again anyway. Municipal politics are non partisan in Canada with the exception of Vancouver and Montreal and they are really lame and not very inclusive. It feels like the election of a board of directors for a large corporation where almost no incumbents are ever defeated. And preferential voting hasn't led to independents being strong. Australia shows this, where it is used at basically all levels of government (although many have a second chamber with STV), yet it's been used for about a century. If anything, independents have become weaker over time. PR means that it a group of voters, if they vote the same way, which numbers X% of the population, will get roughly X% of the seats according to their primary choice. I like STV in particular because it does give people the right to elect independents if they want, and this right is commonly used in Ireland and some Scottish localities, but list based systems are acceptable. They fundamentally require more people to agree with a decision for it to be taken, and require even more people to agree with such a decision than PV. They comprise a larger fraction of society. Combine this with many forms of power sharing and the fact that power is also held by local councils, mayors, MEPs, etc, and many more political groups are involved in a decision. There is less risk of being on the outside of the group who is vital to keeping power, and so more people get to enjoy the benefits society produces which public officials decide the distribution of. As for expelling parties people hate, that is perfectly possible under a proportional system. In 2011, the Green party collapsed in Ireland after their poor handling of a coalition with Fianna Fail, and Fianna Fail lost many of their seats, losing to a coalition formed by Labour and Fine Gael. In 2016, people hated Labour for how soft they were on Fine Gael with the labour movement, and so the support for Labour collapsed and received almost no caucus. The Dutch Labour Party saw a similar shift in 2017 and lost many seats and couldn't be part of the new coalition. Also, even though a population might seem like it outright rejects a group, it is more common for shifts in society to take place over many election cycles and years Few people lose their confidence in most groups overnight, and allowing it to be slower allows them a chance to change their ways before everything goes crashing down. There are also many ways for the governance to be based on the entire will of the parliament and less on parties. Having secret ballots to put people on various groups allows the parliament to govern itself more so than the will of any individual leader. Adding some meaningful form of second chamber also tends to promote cross party and ergo less partisan debate and inclusion. You can also add more limits on the cabinet to this end. EG, making the prime minister formally elected in a vote of confidence at the beginning of the term of a parliament and removed only after an election when their successor is installed or when a constructive vote of no confidence is passed. You can make the cabinet itself less so comprised of partisans by prohibiting current party members, people formerly party members in the previous say 5 years, ex MPs and ex Lords and ex-councillors, and the spouses and immediate family of them, and have an open nomination where anyone with the professional requirements necessary can put their resume out. Then randomly select a bunch, say half, of these to put to a parliamentary committee which oversees a ministry to nominate a list of candidates for that ministry, and then the parliament as a whole can say with a ranked ballot which among the list they prefer most, and then only a vote of the parliament can remove the minister. This combined with making actions of the cabinet dependent on a majority vote of it, transferring most of the prime minister's powers to this, makes the office of prime minister less partisan. The UK could also adopt a judicial services commission like South Africa which assures regional representation, professional representation, and opposition representation (and would work a lot better if South Africa had a multi party system and not a dominant party system, but you can't force people to stop liking a party), and this group can nominate judges instead of prime ministers.
So many points in this video I would contest. In this day and age, why do we have representative democracy at all, when the technology for direct democracy is cheaper? With Brexit, is democracy even a popular idea? Ending fptp is not a magic bullet. I know Israel is far from a perfect democracy. As a diaspora Jew I can not vote in Israel elections, even in representative bodies, illustrated by the betrayal of "women of the wall". The reason we still have the fptp system is the influence of money in politics and the media bias. Fix those things first.
I personally feel that direct democracy at the national level is only valid in a situation where a much larger portion of the population has the time and motivation for extensive research. Everyone today is capable of this but as the brexit referendum showed only a small minority actually put the effort in, with most people allowing themselves to be swayed one way or the other by headlines and demagogues. The point about whether democracy is even a good idea is important, if we want to give more power to the average voter are we also expecting them to self-educate to a high level in economics, political history, and social sciences? I currently, begrudgingly, feel that a political class is a necessary element of modern society and in that regard absolutely agree that lobbying and media control must be limited, and ideally banned. Whether we would ever see a government willing to bite the hand that feeds it under FPTP is extremely doubtful, the question has risen to the foreground occasionally but no serious action has ever, or will ever, be taken while power is so easily concentrated and the national debate so easily manipulated. I see PR as a necessary step to challenging these other systemic flaws that extend beyond the governmental architecture itself.
@@OHYS Of course it would depend to some extent on the PR system that was adopted as there are many variations, however no PR system would be likely to produce a workable majority for any sustainable coalition. It's a recipe for chaos.
Problem is with Proportional representation is that too many parties are represented which can lead to weak coalition governments, and it opens the gateways to extremism getting into power. A prime example would be Weimar Germany 1918 - 1933 and Italy (Modern Day). Therefore PR is just impractical in the real world, it solely depends on the environment of which the voting is taking place. The UK also does use PR electoral systems in Scotland, Wales and is also used for the Greater London Assembly. Via the Additional Member System (AMS). Northern Ireland also uses the Single transferable vote (STV). These systems are needed in these regional areas due to the situations in their respected areas (Such as STV is needed in Northern Ireland). FPTP is also easy to understand and produces clear results in each respected constituency compared to PR. It also gives a clear sense of accountability to each individual MP which PR simply does not. We've also had a referendum n 2011 which rejected the proposal for change showing the British people don't want FTPT to be removed, and come on the good old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. As for the argument of income inequality just take a 101 economics class and you'll understand income inequality is not a bad thing, or simpy read Yaron Brooks book "Equal is unfair" which is a masterpiece or watch this video: ua-cam.com/video/HtJwAYJ9B08/v-deo.html
Most developed democracies use PR and have coalition governments - including Germany, Norway and Switzerland - and this has been proven to be a very effective way of governing. Countries with PR have been shown to perform better on average in quality of democracy, in building more equal and egalitarian societies, and in responding to long-term issues like protecting the environment and tackling climate change. FPTP simply isn’t delivering stability. It’s hard to describe recent British, American or Canadian governments - or the last pre-PR regimes in New Zealand - as stable. In terms of elections, studies have actually found that countries with FPTP on average have unplanned elections slightly more often than countries with PR. People often focus on extreme examples like Italy, forgetting that 80% of developed countries use PR - the vast majority of which are very stable. www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/mythbusting
Well a lot of UKIP voters voted for the "progressive" Labour party who would've voted differently had there been PR. So a Right wing coalition could've still taken power under PR. Regardless, the outcome of the election would actually be the will of the people rather than a result of strategic voting.
In FPTP someone can get 49% of the votes and none of the seats, if none of them won a majority in their local area.
Proportional Representation is the only way to get a government which is fair for all.
A goverment is never "fair". Govermente must be controlled by the people. PR takes away the power of the people over their MP, gives all the power to party leaders, creates Political Oligarchy. What UK needs is direct election of President to finnally have division of powers
proprtional representation voting is fairer than having a two party voting system.
Excellent introduction. We should make a version of this for Canada. It is an international human rights issue so we should reach out and work together on abolishing distorted misrepresentation everywhere.
Living in a safe seat, it doesn't matter whether I vote or not and my vote is essentially worthless. Down the road in a marginal every vote means something, certainly more than mine. You only have to look at the level of canvassing and leaflets in marginal seats versus safe ones to learn all you need to know. FPTP is not fit for purpose in a modern democracy and needs to be scrapped as soon as possible.
(As an aside, another way the Tories showed that they are totally out of touch with voters in their manifesto, was a proposal to EXTEND the antiquated FPTP to mayoral and police commissioner elections! You really couldn't make it up!)
PR voting would be the reform that unlocks all reforms. It offers better government, better representation, a more responsive politics, competition and choice for voters and the ability for politicians to create more new parties that accurately represent their views and do not lock themselves into huge, unwieldy and fractions internal party coalitions like Labour and Tories.
isnt a solution to everything. there would still be money in politics pushing prodominate parties, meaning no opportunity for reform thats not in the intrests of donors/members/trade unions. Also, tradition pushes many to vote for tory or labour or liberal, which wouldnt change that much under pr.
But .... PR IS AWESOME
Not quite.
The UK is notoriously hard to unravel with it's political system. I can't find any statute that specifies what the prime minister even does. It's a convention really. Things could be codified though, like assured autonomy with only special reasons allowed to override devolution or even federalism, specific procedures required to amend the system, and no single place where you can look up all the rights that have been won so far back from the state (although there are many that could be won back in future through more campaigning).
of course PR is just one step among many, and assuming we voted under PR for the next election it would still be a good decade or two before lobbying and media influence was challenged. I disagree about "no opportunity" for reform that's not in the interests of powerful vested interests. They would still call the shots yes, but by the nature of proportionality a greater diversity of issues would be considered valid for serious debate. Over time I think you would see a noticeable increase in serious pushes for reform. Strategically the best time for reform would actually be immediately following brexit, but with the current ruling party ripping itself apart and Labour not currently including it as a manifesto pledge (although there is large and growing support within the party, 80+ of 257 MPs in favour)
Proportional Representation is evil. It means the end of the power of the people over PM. Proportional representations means that there will be 2,3 or 4 parties which will rule on behalf of themselves because they have no control from the voters. You will not have any MP to talk to, you will have no MP. You will be subject to the parties. In Spain we know very well, proportional representation is party oligarchy where 4 party-leader make the law.
@Sirius White Germany was very successfull leading to WWII So was Japan. We are talking about Freedom and controled power balancing system. PR is oligarchy of some parties. You can live well under an political Oligarchy, you can even have "successful" progress under dictatorship. Freedom comes from the people controlling their goverment
Anyone here for school
>"80% of developed democracies..."
>Lists Turkey
The rest of the list were developed democracies, I don't think Turkey should be included in that list though. They're not particularly developed and with regards to democracy they are regressing.
I think they were thinking of OCDE countries because they listed México but not Argentina or Uruguay so...
Hmm no. Turkey's government is so corrupt that calling it democratic is the same as calling China democratic. Sure they vote, but when the votes don't matter that doesn't mean much.
Fuh puh teeh puh? That only makes it sound more stupid...
That's the idea
Donkeys also want to come in Parliament.
Well made
great news🌍🌏🌋🏔🌎🏝🏕🗻⛱🐷🐷🐃🐃
You vote for people, not policy
the least worst not best, is who you vote for.
I agree with every word - I wouldn't however have made Frankie Boyle first on a list that includes Noam Chomsky
Frankie Boyle likes this... well he's a disingenuous douchebag... almost puts me off too.
Yep, should switch to an STV system. .
Absolutely not
enjoy your two party state that nobody in europe uses
The German state of Baden-Württemberg uses PR which is smiliar to FPtP which has one ballot, one vote, unlike those which has a regional ballot, but they still have regional representation, by increasing our MPs from 650 to 2,001 the 1 being the speaker, 650 constituencies and 1350 topping up to match the vote share of the party with the remaining 6 being the 6 party leaders according to votes.
The largest two party will then face off and party to get 50%+1 of the vote get in No 10, then third and fourth have a vote to see who be the coalition junior partner and so on till there is a coalition of 1,001 MPs.
Nice, but what does a person's race have to do with PR? And why is that ideal anyway? Fetish?
FPTP is laughable. But democracy is about people power not party power. I would suggest that parties are just as poisonous to good governance as FPTP. If everybody gets to choose their preferred representative (which might be a party rather than an individual) with block votes so that each rep has the power of those who chose them then the parliament thus constituted has 'PR' built-in with no fudges (apart from parties filling seats that they have gained but that's the problem with any party system). After their initial fervour all parties are corrupted by self-interest.
Individual politicians can be corrupted by self interests as well if they were to decide for themselves which way to vote every time on a piece of policy. Parties, provided that they are dependent on a broad base membership, need a large number of people to approve the nomination of a candidate in a constituency. More internally democratic parties like the D66 in the Netherlands allow the party's general membership to put clauses in the party's policy book. The NDP in Canada holds a vote of confidence in the party leader every two years by secret ballot. The SPD in Germany hold a vote among their general membership as to whether or not to approve coalition and confidence and supply agreements. The Liberal Democrats hold a direct ranked ballot for their party leadership without reweighting. Some parties like the NDP in Canada have a standing council to draft policy in between conventions where it is reasonably possible for ordinary people to be elected by their constituency associations to serve.
Party caucuses can be internally democratic as well. You can have the MPs, by a secret ballot with a ranked or runoff system if nobody gets a majority, elect members to committees in the parliament, elect their parliamentary leader, the leader of the government or opposition depending on which side they are on, elect the party whip, secretary, chair. They can hold internal votes as to whether or not to impose the party whip on a vote, to decide whether or not to expel a member from the caucus or accept a new member.
The parliament as a whole can also do similar things to elect the auditor of the government, elect the prime minister, approve of the cabinet members and approve of the removal of those ministers or the reshuffling of them. Remove the prime minister and elect their successor, elect the speaker, deputy speaker, and the chairs of committees. They could elect members to say the board of directors of companies which the crown owns stock in, elect members to a council to nominate judges for the Supreme Court. They could also elect a president if the UK turned into a republic, although it could also be held by a direct election like Ireland or France.
Exact, PR takes the power from the voters and gives all power to parties. In Spain we know very well, PR leads directly to party oligarchy. With PR you choose no MP, you have no MP.
@The secular humanist - Parties do not have any fundamental role in democracy. Chasing our logical tails so that parties are fairly represented in parliament arises because parties have corrupted virtually every global parliament to suit their own agenda. In Britain the largest party membership is in the hundreds-of-thousands the electorate in the tens-of-millions, why would such a tiny minority have the 'right' to gain governance and impose their will when we can easily devise systems that more closely represent the voters.
@@robertjarman3703 - 'corrupted by self interests as well if they were to decide for themselves which way to vote every time on a piece of policy', their self-interest will be to serve their voters NOT their party. If they vote against the interests of their voters the voters can directly 'deselect' them; in the UK the parties will place their favoured colleagues in 'safe-seats' (another FPTP issue) putting them outside the reach of voter-power. Political Parties have almost universally corrupted democracy for their own interest and we have become acclimatized to their dominance - democracy is not a system for choosing our masters.
@@andyinsuffolk Proportional systems can limit that problem. Single transferable vote and open list proportional representation means that a candidate who has no identity but their party has no seat in parliament, as they won't get the vote in their own right to be elected, and a party with no good people will have no seats of any kind in the constituency as other party's people will be elected instead.
It is also possible to nominate candidates in more open races. The Conservative party a couple times has used open primaries, and American states have been using them and semi closed primaries (the latter of which forbids members of other parties from voting in primaries other than those of their own party but everyone else can vote) too, at least some of the better ones such as Colorado. You could use them in proportional systems just as much.
Proportional representation is not the best solution for the U.K. Voters would be forced to have their local MP appointed; further, some systems of PR would restrict you to voting for local rather than national parties. The U.K. may have to have such a system under PR to make it workable.
Another point to consider; being that PR lists would be highly susceptible to pruning by the “establishment” media (character assassination), is that PR would likely only select “acceptable” candidates, leaving the public with no direct way to change politics through election of a localised party candidate who can bring a new voice to the table. The ‘established’ parties will say that candidate is just ‘popular’, but does that make it wrong? For a nation said to be already riddled with voter apathy, even by the PR supporters, and that lacks trust in its politicians, PR will for fail people further, especially after any initial apparent success. That the party a voter mostly agrees with is no longer directly connected to them anymore by ‘direct vote’* will be the final nail in the coffin of British democracy for many people. In the U.K. that link to local candidate means a lot, even if they can’t change much, because people generally don’t believe much will change anyway and don’t want others taking what little they have away. The local voice is all important in the U.K. to ensure your resistance is heard to the endless march of globalism. The only people saying PR will change anything are the people who continually benefit from Globalism, or are desperate enough to vote for phoney change.
PR is elitist and meritocratic. It will further divide the public, shut the electorate out of politics even more, and allow for more blindly ideological and closed minded politicians to climb within established parties. PR will further drive people away from mainstream politics, embolden smaller and extremist parties, and will force decent people wanting change, to turn to a patchwork army of independent candidates, running as party entities, to get the change PR has failed to deliver them. The result will be weaker and weaker governments elected under PR, and a general decline in sovereign capacity.
People may want change, but PR is not the solution. I would suggest a digital revolution with digital social apps that can bring people together who share similar ideas to help form new political movements would be a better way to go; some sort of ‘Find My Politics’ app is badly needed in the U.K. of course we don’t have the transfer vote system to make that successful, but that’s a whole different debate. At the very least people of similar beliefs could find more out about where they might be right and where they might be wrong, and then push for internal change of the main parties instead.
* By ‘direct vote’ here I imply that the voter’s individual vote elects a candidate without any other mechanism or equation being applied to its status as one vote for one candidate other than a simple count. PR would apply a percentage calculus to either increase or decrease the impact of that vote on the final arrangement of the party based on the overall votes various parties take throughout the country, opening the way for all the abuses and potential corruptions of democracy I lost above.
a two round voting system would be a good idea to be tried in Britain because it may give smaller parties a chance to become bigger.
People like you are the reason the UK probably doesn’t deserve PR anyway. I hope your country crumbles you dumb whack
Developed democracies "turky" The fuck xD
1969 election?
I'm curious, there wasn't a UK election in 1969? what do you mean?
MUKOKUSEKI At 0:50, where a list of election dates scrolls.
snap, glad you pointed that out mate, I made this vid and that completely slipped by me.
blame late nights and not enough brain cells.
Just the late nights ;) Takes a good few high quality brain cells to make an animation like this! Thanks for all your hard work (through the late nights!)
I agree that FPTP needs to go, everywhere. However, proportional representation (PR) is not the way to go. Preference voting (PV) is a much better reform. Here's three reasons:
1) PR incentivizes political polarization. Since more than one seat is awarded per riding, candidates are incentivized only to play to their faction of support within their riding, as long as that faction can give them enough votes to win.
PV on the other hand incentivizes candidate to move to the center of the political spectrum because only one seat is awarded per riding.
2) PR makes political parties a permanent part of government. With PV on the other hand political parties are not required. All seats in government could be won by independent candidates.
3) PR has very complicated rules for awarding seats in each riding. With PV on the other hand there is only one seat per riding, the winner takes it - far easier for people to understand.
Check out these PV systems:
- STAR voting
- Score voting
- Approval voting
- Ranked choice voting.
Also, here is an interesting video comparing the efficacy of different PV voting systems:
ua-cam.com/video/-4FXLQoLDBA/v-deo.html
STV tends to encourage candidates to appeal to a broader part of their constituency even if it isn't a majority.
Also, party list proportional is a misnomer. Any person with some signatures or a deposit or both can submit a list in a list based system, and STV is party agnostic as well. Parties will hold nomination contests or have their nominating committee identify candidates in a given constituency and their membership vote to approve or deny them, but that is only related to official endorsements. Modern open list systems do not have the parties or listmakers creating an order for the list to be in.
Also, what is wrong with parties?
STV is an extremely complicated voting system. It would require computerized vote counting. (Ranked-choice also requires computerized vote counting, so actually I would prefer STAR, Score or Approval voting amongst the PV systems I listed.)
I don't think it is realistic to expect that a common citizen who submits a list of candidates would have a hope in hell of that list winning. And with that type of system there could be thousands of lists that people submit, which would be chaos.
Party lists are restricted to party members, and are therefore fundamentally restrictive, making them less open to all potential candidates, and hence making elections less open.
PR systems in general are just too complicated, as I mentioned.
Political parties restrict our government representatives from acting freely and I believe the ideal government would be made up entirely of independent candidates. So, I oppose any electoral system that makes this impossible or favors political parties.
@@jonfklein Ireland has been using STV for their elections, and the UK using it for some university constituencies, even many cities in the US and a couple provinces and cities in Canada used STV about 100 years ago, long before computers like we know them were around, even before the Bomba machine used to decode the enigma machine. Australia switched to using STV for their senate elections in 1948 or one of the years around then, not precisely sure. I know India uses STV for their Senate, as does Pakistan, but I'm not sure when they started to use this. I also know they do this in some form for their presidential elections too but I'm not sure when they used STV to do it. Besides, anyone can get a chromebook for a hundred dollars and even that has the power to run a moderately sized STV election.
Common citizens wouldn't be able to fill in a list just themselves, they would need a petition, submitted by perhaps 100 registered voters. Ordinary candidates face this same limit. Political parties usually also have to get some signatures who would act as the first members of the party in order to be registered, at least in most countries with legal parties. And in theory, any group could propose a list, like a cooperative or trade union, a non profit, etc. But because parties happen to be in the biggest position to submit lists, they submit most of the lists and most candidates. They have a specific ideology, a relatively broad class of members in most free countries, and a desire to seek electoral results as opposed to say a union's focus on labour strikes and contract negotiation.
Also, political parties can be used as a tool for individuals, but an internally democratic party and a coalition based pollical system with many aspects of power sharing can have parties be quite useful. Their members would approve at annual general meetings policy statements and ratify a platform, nominate their candidates or approve the slate of candidates recommended by their nominating committee in each constituency by ballot, elect their party leader and hold regular votes of confidence in them, which is the person nominated by the party to become prime minister, their members would elect their executive board to run the party on a daily basis, and constituency associations have their members elect their constituency board and elect delegates to a party standing committee which holds power of policy and representing the political interests of the party between general meetings (usually held between one and three years apart). Their members can also vote to ratify their coalition or confidence and supply agreements, as the SPD does in Germany. Membership can also be subsidized by electoral authorities and campaign finance rules limiting the ability of specific individuals to influence a party too much, such that it is cheap or even free to join a party.
The party caucuses can also hold ballots, like to adopt or not adopt a specific position, to expel members of the caucus or accept new members from other parliamentary caucuses, elect and remove their chair, whips, parliamentary leader, members of committees, committee chairs, the president/speaker of the legislative assembly, elect the cabinet members which the party is assigned, and the parliament as a whole voting to elect the prime minister, hold votes on whether or not to remove an existing one, approve the cabinet, give consent or rejection to the dismissal or transfer of a minister, nominate, elect, or give consent to the appointment or removal of many types of officers like the auditor, the judges of courts, important bureaucratic officials, board directors of state owned companies, and more powers like these.
Parties with discipline over members means that an interest group can't just bribe a politician to vote a certain way. Politicians make promises when they get elected, but there is little that can be done in the meantime to hold them to that promise. A party is one of the few ways of keeping them to that promise, and given that it is cheap and easy to join a party with broad based membership and collective power rather than concentrated power in a leader or president, it is also relatively easy to vote on the policies created.
Plus, other forms of democracy like initiatives, recalls, referendums, elected constituent assemblies, citizen's assemblies, and constitutions allow for more involvement in the process of big decisions. The mere existence of these forms allows people to bypass parties if they remain to themselves an oligarchical club.
The pros and cons of political parties can be debated ad infinitum. My issue is that the playing field should be levelled at the ballot box such that no candidates, neither party nor independent candidates, have an advantage. This allows voters to decide which they prefer to be running the country. The voters can decide who gets punished or rewarded at the ballot box. If independent candidates do a poor job running the country the voters can choose party candidates at the next election. Vice versa, if voters becomes disgusted with dysfunctional political party rule they can vote them out and put in whoever else is on the ballot.
In other words I want a system that forces the political world to be more competitive. Just like in the business world, free markets allow for competition which, as we know, leads to technological progress and better services (in almost all cases). I want a free market system for the choice of governance of our country.
The structure of PR systems is based on rule by parties, and therefore is fundamentally biased towards party candidates, and I would argue PR systems are fundamentally undemocratic. This is primarily why I oppose PR. I suppose independent candidates can theoretically be elected to all seats under PR systems. But this has not been the result in reality.
You have argued for PR, but you haven’t mentioned any disadvantages of PV systems. Why do you feel PR systems are superior to PV systems?
I view PV systems as fundamentally superior to PR systems due to their simplicity and hence lack of bias towards any candidate.
About STV. They used a computer in Maine to run the ranked-choice vote counting in the U.S. mid-term elections last year. So, being that STV is more complicated than ranked-choice, I assume STV vote counting would also be computer-based.
I suppose vote counting could be done by hand for any system, but with much effort and time, especially if there are a large number of ballots involved. In the Maine election it took a couple days just to scan all the ballots into the computer before the counting program could be run and a winner determined. I imagine it would have taken weeks to count by hand.
@@jonfklein The US does a lot of voting at the exact same time, often a bunch of referendums state and local, municipal councils, school boards, state legislatures for the state senate and state parliament, the governor, between two and 5 other executive positions, several judges at different levels of courts, county commissioners, sheriffs, coroners, national congresspeople, federal senators, and in years divisible by 4, the president, and holding them every two years, plus a primary election for each of these positions held for each party a couple of months before the election. That is a lot of things to vote on, and so computers are quite useful. The UK only elects mayors in some places, MPs, MEPs, and local councillors, and for 3-5 year terms depending on exactly where you are. Party leaders retain their position until they resign or lose a vote of confidence within their party.
Parties often provide resources to individuals who wouldn't have the connections of access to finances or volunteers but who are otherwise qualified. And it allows more people to be involved in the decisionmaking. Parties can hold AGMs annually, they can vote on policies at once, and there can be a dozen parties at each level of government in the UK.
In places where independents do tend to win, parties are often either restricted by law like in Kuwait, or there are large clientelist systems based on patronage or dominance of the elections by those who are often much more connected to people already in power, or they were kicked out or resigned from a party but decided to run for the seat again anyway. Municipal politics are non partisan in Canada with the exception of Vancouver and Montreal and they are really lame and not very inclusive. It feels like the election of a board of directors for a large corporation where almost no incumbents are ever defeated.
And preferential voting hasn't led to independents being strong. Australia shows this, where it is used at basically all levels of government (although many have a second chamber with STV), yet it's been used for about a century. If anything, independents have become weaker over time.
PR means that it a group of voters, if they vote the same way, which numbers X% of the population, will get roughly X% of the seats according to their primary choice. I like STV in particular because it does give people the right to elect independents if they want, and this right is commonly used in Ireland and some Scottish localities, but list based systems are acceptable.
They fundamentally require more people to agree with a decision for it to be taken, and require even more people to agree with such a decision than PV. They comprise a larger fraction of society. Combine this with many forms of power sharing and the fact that power is also held by local councils, mayors, MEPs, etc, and many more political groups are involved in a decision. There is less risk of being on the outside of the group who is vital to keeping power, and so more people get to enjoy the benefits society produces which public officials decide the distribution of.
As for expelling parties people hate, that is perfectly possible under a proportional system. In 2011, the Green party collapsed in Ireland after their poor handling of a coalition with Fianna Fail, and Fianna Fail lost many of their seats, losing to a coalition formed by Labour and Fine Gael. In 2016, people hated Labour for how soft they were on Fine Gael with the labour movement, and so the support for Labour collapsed and received almost no caucus. The Dutch Labour Party saw a similar shift in 2017 and lost many seats and couldn't be part of the new coalition.
Also, even though a population might seem like it outright rejects a group, it is more common for shifts in society to take place over many election cycles and years Few people lose their confidence in most groups overnight, and allowing it to be slower allows them a chance to change their ways before everything goes crashing down.
There are also many ways for the governance to be based on the entire will of the parliament and less on parties. Having secret ballots to put people on various groups allows the parliament to govern itself more so than the will of any individual leader. Adding some meaningful form of second chamber also tends to promote cross party and ergo less partisan debate and inclusion.
You can also add more limits on the cabinet to this end. EG, making the prime minister formally elected in a vote of confidence at the beginning of the term of a parliament and removed only after an election when their successor is installed or when a constructive vote of no confidence is passed. You can make the cabinet itself less so comprised of partisans by prohibiting current party members, people formerly party members in the previous say 5 years, ex MPs and ex Lords and ex-councillors, and the spouses and immediate family of them, and have an open nomination where anyone with the professional requirements necessary can put their resume out. Then randomly select a bunch, say half, of these to put to a parliamentary committee which oversees a ministry to nominate a list of candidates for that ministry, and then the parliament as a whole can say with a ranked ballot which among the list they prefer most, and then only a vote of the parliament can remove the minister.
This combined with making actions of the cabinet dependent on a majority vote of it, transferring most of the prime minister's powers to this, makes the office of prime minister less partisan.
The UK could also adopt a judicial services commission like South Africa which assures regional representation, professional representation, and opposition representation (and would work a lot better if South Africa had a multi party system and not a dominant party system, but you can't force people to stop liking a party), and this group can nominate judges instead of prime ministers.
So many points in this video I would contest. In this day and age, why do we have representative democracy at all, when the technology for direct democracy is cheaper? With Brexit, is democracy even a popular idea? Ending fptp is not a magic bullet. I know Israel is far from a perfect democracy. As a diaspora Jew I can not vote in Israel elections, even in representative bodies, illustrated by the betrayal of "women of the wall". The reason we still have the fptp system is the influence of money in politics and the media bias. Fix those things first.
I personally feel that direct democracy at the national level is only valid in a situation where a much larger portion of the population has the time and motivation for extensive research. Everyone today is capable of this but as the brexit referendum showed only a small minority actually put the effort in, with most people allowing themselves to be swayed one way or the other by headlines and demagogues. The point about whether democracy is even a good idea is important, if we want to give more power to the average voter are we also expecting them to self-educate to a high level in economics, political history, and social sciences?
I currently, begrudgingly, feel that a political class is a necessary element of modern society and in that regard absolutely agree that lobbying and media control must be limited, and ideally banned. Whether we would ever see a government willing to bite the hand that feeds it under FPTP is extremely doubtful, the question has risen to the foreground occasionally but no serious action has ever, or will ever, be taken while power is so easily concentrated and the national debate so easily manipulated. I see PR as a necessary step to challenging these other systemic flaws that extend beyond the governmental architecture itself.
PR would be a disaster in the UK, it just wouldn't work.
What?😂
@@OHYS Of course it would depend to some extent on the PR system that was adopted as there are many variations, however no PR system would be likely to produce a workable majority for any sustainable coalition. It's a recipe for chaos.
Problem is with Proportional representation is that too many parties are represented which can lead to weak coalition governments, and it opens the gateways to extremism getting into power. A prime example would be Weimar Germany 1918 - 1933 and Italy (Modern Day).
Therefore PR is just impractical in the real world, it solely depends on the environment of which the voting is taking place. The UK also does use PR electoral systems in Scotland, Wales and is also used for the Greater London Assembly. Via the Additional Member System (AMS).
Northern Ireland also uses the Single transferable vote (STV). These systems are needed in these regional areas due to the situations in their respected areas (Such as STV is needed in Northern Ireland).
FPTP is also easy to understand and produces clear results in each respected constituency compared to PR. It also gives a clear sense of accountability to each individual MP which PR simply does not. We've also had a referendum n 2011 which rejected the proposal for change showing the British people don't want FTPT to be removed, and come on the good old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
As for the argument of income inequality just take a 101 economics class and you'll understand income inequality is not a bad thing, or simpy read Yaron Brooks book "Equal is unfair" which is a masterpiece or watch this video: ua-cam.com/video/HtJwAYJ9B08/v-deo.html
Most developed democracies use PR and have coalition governments - including Germany, Norway and Switzerland - and this has been proven to be a very effective way of governing. Countries with PR have been shown to perform better on average in quality of democracy, in building more equal and egalitarian societies, and in responding to long-term issues like protecting the environment and tackling climate change.
FPTP simply isn’t delivering stability. It’s hard to describe recent British, American or Canadian governments - or the last pre-PR regimes in New Zealand - as stable.
In terms of elections, studies have actually found that countries with FPTP on average have unplanned elections slightly more often than countries with PR. People often focus on extreme examples like Italy, forgetting that 80% of developed countries use PR - the vast majority of which are very stable.
www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/mythbusting
Well a lot of UKIP voters voted for the "progressive" Labour party who would've voted differently had there been PR. So a Right wing coalition could've still taken power under PR. Regardless, the outcome of the election would actually be the will of the people rather than a result of strategic voting.
You had the chance in 2011, but It came of nothing...
AV is not proportional
AV is preferential
The Conservative party is a left wing progressive party. fptp encourages the two main parties to have similar policies
Are you kidding?