You are so wise! 
(See this thread: End gerrymandering! Take redistricting away from the state legislatures! - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board)
It isn’t the hard right or the hard left that holds the balance of power in those situations: it’s the middle of the road. So, with three main parties in the UK, the LibDems would have to work out wheither Labour or the Tories were closer to their line of politics.
Well for (what seemed like) a long time the Major government was propped up by the Ulster Unionists, which meant very little movement in a fledgling peace process. If you make the small parties larger this can only become more problematic.
From the pro-Euro Britain in Europe:
http://www.britainineurope.org.uk/theissues/enews/enews-18-06-04
That’s a sizeable chunk. I’d hate to think what sort of politics we’d have if UKIP or the BNP had any place in government.
But don’t you think they would be balanced out by the Greens, socialists, etc.?
Extremists of either bent are all dangerous in their own ways in my opinion.
It’s worth pointing out the difference between ‘true’ PR and systems more typically used in elections. True PR would, in that example, give those parties 21% of seats. But most systems (single transferrable vote, for example) have a proportional element, while keeping the influence of fringe and extremist parties under better control.
True. Which does not mean it’s dangerous to let a few of them into Parliament. To the contrary, that could be a safety valve for frustrations that might otherwise find their outlet in revolutionary movements or acts of terrorism. But my point is that moving to PR would not, by itself, shift the UK’s political center-of-gravity left or right or up or down.
You ask those who survived a mauling from Denis Skinner, AKA The Beast of Bolsover.
Who?
The election results from 2001, if pure proportional representation (1% of the vote, 1% of the seats) had been used (real seats won in parenthesis):
Labour: 277 (412)
Conservative: 209 (166)
LibDem: 120 (52)
SNP: 12 (5)
UKIP: 10 (0)
UU: 5 (6)
PC: 5 (4)
DUP: 5 (5)
SF: 4 (4)
SDLP: 4 (3)
Green: 4 (0)
SSP: 2 (0)
SA: 1 (0)
S Lab P: 1 (0)
BNP: 1 (0)
APNI: 1 (0)
(This equals 661, and I’m not sure which two would be the ones not to be seated)
Although you would have to take into account that the first past the post system may often mean that people don’t cast their vote for the party that best reflects their views as they have no chance of actually winning. So those numbers may not reflect what would actually happen under PR.
The list given by Governor Quinn makes it clear that some minor parties do well out of the present system. These are the parties which have their support concentrated geographically, e.g., the Ulster Unionists (who get one more seat than they’d get in a PR system). On the other hand, the Toties and the LibDems have their supporters spreadf too thinly, and get significantly less support than they would under PR. So the present system encourages extremism provided it has a narrow geographical base, but discourages moderation that is a significant minorioty throughout the country.
Of course, some people would change their vote given a PR system: you would no longer be told, “You are wasting your vote” when you vote LibDem, Green, or even UKIP. So some people voting Labour now who vote LibDem or Green, and some voting Tory now would vote UKIP, and the results would be a bit different from those in the 2001 election.
Of course. The above was just a demonstration, using statistics I had on-hand.
Other Australian examples of the use of PR include elections for the upper house of the Commonwealth Parliament (the Senate); the upper houses of the New South Wales and South Australian Parliaments (the Legislative Council); and the Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory.
Thanks for the link.
No, of course preferential voting it is not the same thing as PR, and I never even implied, let alone stated, that it was. In fact the two aren’t even necessarily related, though I think both are good ideas. What I wanted to offer was an improvement to the current situation which would be, in my opinion, much easier to implement and much more palatable to the electorate. I disagree with you that preferential voting is first-past-the-post - to me FPPT means that the leader at the end of the first count is elected. With preferential voting that is clearly not always the case. However I don’t think it’s worth quibbling over nomenclature.
I also believe that it would help the Lib-Dems. Certainly, as you say, they would be unlikely to win any more seats at the first election under that system, but they would very likely have a much better showing than would otherwise be the case. They could then be seen as a credible alternative, and this is likely to result in more seats at the next election.
Back to the issue of PR, it is important to know the how many representatives are envisaged for each multi-member electorate. Too few and a hung parliament is almost guaranteed; too many and the quota for election is too low, leading to loony fringe members. The first election for the Australian Capital Territory (after self-government was bestowed) had the latter problem, and the ballot paper was literally more than one metre wide. The former problem also occurs in the ACT, but in Federal elections - we elect two senators by PR, which inevitably leads to one Labor and one Liberal.
I was asked for an example of what PR would do, using election results showing the effect of PR.
In that regard, I have taken the results of the 2004 Greater London Authority top-up seat races, and used them to calculate for the 74 (at least by my count) Greater London seats.
Here’s what the results would have been:
Conservative- 21
Labour- 19
LibDems- 13
Green- 6
UKIP- 6
BNP- 4
RESPECT- 3
CPA- 2
They have a statutory obligation to carry out a review every 8-12 years. (There has to be some flexibility in the timing given that the timing of general elections is not fixed.) So, unless it is abnormally short, there’ll be a review in England during the course of the forthcoming Parliament. Note also that there are separate commissions for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
And one can equally well imagine it splitting the Labour Party as well. What this illustrates is one fact often overlooked about first-past-the-post - it’s not that it makes coalitions less likely, only that those coalitions tend to exist within parties.
Meh.
If that’s the most dangerous “extremist” you’ve got in Parliament now, you need PR to save the country from death by boredom!
Update: In yesterday’s General Election, Labour won 355 seats, the Conservatives 197, the Liberal Democrats 62. Labour’s majority in the Commons was cut from 167 seats in 2001 to 66; the Tories gained 31 seats from 2001 and the LibDems gained 10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4521627.stm
Does that make a PR referendum between now and the next election more or less likely?