I’d be interested to hear you explain the former. How does “compulsory” voting work. What happens if you don’t vote? Can you spoil your ballot?
My instinct is to say that being obliged to vote for one of several competing idiots seems somewhat oxymoronic.
You get fined in Australia if you don’t turn up at the polling booth and get your name marked off the roll (assuming you are on the roll).
You can vote informally in any number of ways and no-one will know that you did so - your vote simply won’t be counted.
I’m a bit horrified by the number of people I know who aren’t on the electoral roll - also punishable by a fine - who nonetheless comlain about whichever government is in power.
I do agree that the preferential voting system causes a lot of frustration here.
Balmain Boy and myself should have pointed out that while it’s possible to allocate preferences yourself, ballot papers here have become unwieldy. It’s not unusual to have a ballot paper with over a hundred candidates listed on (I think, the largest on I filled in was almost 3 feet in length) and to allocate preferences yourself you have to number every box. Therefore, many people choose to vote “above the line”, which involves numbering only one box and your preferences being distributed according to your candidate or party’s choice.
There are advantages of compulsory voting, however. The vote will represent the wishes of the entire population (except children and prisoners) rather than just those who bothered to vote. When voting is optional, it tends to be those who feel strongly that vote, and proportionally, people with extreme views have a larger say than say, ordinary people who don’t care much. You can still exercise your right not to vote by voting informally (filling the ballot out wrong or not at all), but it becomes a choice to do so rather than default. It also provides ownership of the results of the election, since everyone had a say.
The peanalty for not voting is a $50 fine - not much more than a slap on the wrist really.
There are arguments against compulsory voting too, which I won’t go into at this juncture.
For clarification, I belive reprise refers to the ballot paper for senatorial elections. The ballot paper to elect Members to the Lower House seldom has more than five or six candidates, but the Senate paper - which is to elect all 12 Senators in your State - is huge.
On compulsory voting: although it seems most foreigners view this it as pretty weird, it’s accepted without complaint in Australia. An advantage of this system not alluded to yet is that in the election campagin, political parties do not have to depoloy resoures to ‘getting out the vote’. Witness the incredible amount of money spent by US parties simply to get people into the polling booths. Here, the parties have - to use the words of B Boy - a captive audience.
Narrad , I meant my two points in combination have produced the effect of the 35% mandate.
You have to turn up and have your name marked off on the roll. Once, my wife took the ballot papers and walked out, without marking them or putting them in the box. A few dirty looks from the staff, but officially she had “voted”.
And Patten was cursed for 1000 generations, not years. The Sydney Morning Herald had him gleefully correcting a Chinese journalist who said ‘years’. “Generations. It’s a bit longer.”
Here’s the situation in Norway:
Head of State is King Harald V. The best way to describe his situation is that although he can at times wield considerable political influence, he has no real political power. Norway is incidentally one of the few countries to have voted to become a monarchy, after declaring the union with Sweden dissolved in 1905.
The real politicial power sits with Parliament (Stortinget). Members of parliament are elected every four years. Each of Norway’s 18 counties, plus the capital of Oslo as its own voting district, is assigned a number of representatives which is supposed to be in proportion to its population, though in practice the low-population counties are overrepresented. The representatives for each county are divided according to the percentage of votes cast for each political party. There are also a number of equalization mandates which are distributed at-large according to a hideous set of mathematical equations, so that parties who got a small but significant number of votes don’t get entirely squeezed out.
Voters choose the ballots for the parties they wish to vote for from boxes inside the voting booths. They are allowed to make certain changes to the ballots - for instance, by crossing off names of candidates they don’t want to vote for - or to submit empty envelopes or spoiled ballots which are counted as “blanks”.
Once the mandates are distributed, the usual parliamentary stuff begins - the leaders of the parties try to figure out who can get the most support for their agenda. In theory the King can invite anyone to form a government; in practice it’s understood that he will invite whichever party or coalition of parties has the best chance of forming stable leadership. A government can resign, or be forced out by a no-confidence vote, between elections, but a new government must then be formed based on the current Parliament. Elections are held on fixed dates and Parliament cannot be dissolved.
It’s been a good long while now since any party had an outright majority in Parliament. This means we’ve had coalitions and minority governments. At the moment we have a Conservative (H)-led coalition that includes the Christian Democrats (KrF). Because the leader of KrF, Kjell Magne Bondevik, is much more popular both among his fellow politicians and among the public in general, he was given the post of Prime Minister even though his party is much smaller.
The thing about minority governments and coalitions that are either minority or hold the slimmest of majorities, is that they lead to rather cautious “caretaker governments”. On the bright side, bone-headed political ideas tend to die in committee. Unfortunately, this also means that thorny issues are either ignored or “solved” by watered-down compromises that only serve to delay the inevitable. For instance, at present Norway has become a net importer of electricity, in spite of all the hydroelectric power the country has. Since much of this extra electricity is generated at old, polluting coal plants in Denmark, it is widely seen as a Bad Thing. Several alternatives have been proposed, including a large new natural gas power plant in Norway, wind power, building new dams on smaller rivers, etc. All of these alternatives have their advantages and their drawbacks. Because no political party is strong enough to want to risk making an unpopular decision, the debate goes on, as it has been going on for years, and meanwhile those plants in Denmark keep burning coal for the Norwegian market.
As far as effects on people’s daily lives, it’s really the township and to a lesser extent the county governments that do that. Elections for these governments are held every four years, two years apart from the national elections. These governments get tax money from the state, and a list of duties from Parliament. How they spend that money determines the quality of schools, public transportation, old people’s homes, local roads, etc. etc. The problem is that the money is not always sufficient, and some of the township governments have a real problem with money management. (Trondheim, for instance, has several times funded expensive vanity projects instead of, say, buying new textbooks for the schools.)
Bumping this in the hopes of attracting some Japanese Dopers.
I don’t know how some of you keep your governments straight, after reading this stuff. I thought the US government was bad, but geez.
Gawd!! Try South Africa with 11 official languages!!!
Actually, the problem reduces to just publishing the official version in English, and the translations refer to that in matters of dubiosity ( 
)
The South African Government is an interesting mix of federal and centralised ruling - Parliment (the National Assembly) is elected by proportional representation, which means that the ANC (African National Congress) has a large (266 out of 400) majority but also that there is a large presence of smaller parties - 8 of them with less than 10 seats!! The leader of the largest party is the President who is the Executive Branch of Government (along with his cabinet) and the Head of State. The National Assembly is elected for five years.
In addition, there is the National Council of Provinces (since SA is divided into 9 provinces - each with 10 representitives) whose role is to represent the interests of the provinces at a national level - they act as a “House of Lords”, approving or rejecting bills passed by the National Assembly. It can also introduce bills that affect the provinced directly.
There is also a National House of Traditional Leaders for representation from the traditional (tribal) leadership of the South African peoples (chiefs, kings, etc). This has limited (mostly advisory) powers.
Each Province has it’s own government and Legislature which deals with issues affecting that province - agriculture, cultural affairs, education, police, etc. The line can get quite confused, for example, although Local Govt. controls education, the syllabus, salaries and class sizes are mandated by national government - similarly for policing. This leads to a “blame game” when things don’t work out, and it is not always easy to see who is right. Seven provinces are controlled by the ANC and one each by the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) and a DP(Democratic Party)-NNP(New National Party) coalition called the DA (Democratic Alliance), although when I last looked, that was cracking at the seams, and the NNP was looking to get into bed with the ANC (of all people!!)
Below that are the usual Municipal/Metropolitan Councils…
And that is it in a nutshell - a big nutshell, but there you have it. For more info, check out thier website - http://www.gov.za/index.html
Gp
Oops - forgot to mention that our esteemed head of State has FINALLY acknowledged the links between HIV and AIDS - Thank God!!!
Now if we can just produce the same kind of U-turn on Mugabe, South Africa can begin to recove some of its lost international esteem…
Gp
Oh, I dunno, I think it’s more a case of just growing up with the system you’ve got.
Every four years, when you guys have your presidential elections, I seem to be on call with friends and co-workers to explain the U.S. system.* Their comments almost invariably end with “but that’s so complicated!”
Modern government is complicated.
I was working overtime in November, 2000 :eek: