At this point I suggest asking “what’s it for?” Then ask “what could it be useful for?”
One answer that occurs to me for the second question is merely to change the system to unclog it a bit. One argument for “Yes” is that it will shake up currently safe seats. But I’m from Australia, which has an AV-like system, and the safe seat problem there is every bit as bad as it is in the UK.
As such, I suggest it may be explicitly beneficial just to change the system slightly every now and then, to dislodge complacency.
(Obvious danger: breaking it.)
I must admit I’m not sure how to make this a more robust hypothesis, let alone a quantifiable one …
One big advantage would be solving the whole “X can’t win here! Only Y can keep Z out!” problem, and allowing people to express their actual preference rather than one based on a best guess as to what other people would do. Even if that leaves us with safe seats, they will be safe because a majority of the people in the constituency genuinely want them to be. At the moment, there are some safe seats (e.g. Hazel Blears’ seat in Salford) where a majority of the voters want their MP out, and the MP is genuinely horribly unpopular, but there’s no way for those voters to co-ordinate between themselves and settle on the most likely alternative to kick them out.
I’m speaking in more meta terms than the particular advantages of this as a proposed system for the indefinite future. Would kicking the system every few decades actually be a very good idea?
It could be—except that at some point you have to move from a ‘better’ system to a ‘worse’ one. At which point, people complain—rightly—that they are getting a worse democracy because of some meta-rule.
Possibly one option, if we’re talking about that kind of radical change, would be for every election to also have a referendum on how the next election would be held—with four or five options each time (say FPTP, STV, AV, AMS, AV+ or something). Each time, the least popular option from last time will be removed from the ballot and replaced with a different system.
(Of course then you get into a meta-meta argument about how to count the referendum votes...)
How does the system work in practice in Australia? Do candidates have safe seats because they represent popular views, or are there other factors that stop them from being challenged?
One of the differences between the Australian system and the proposed UK system is they have compulsory voting and compulsory ranking of all candidates, neither of which would be in play in the UK.
This has lead to ‘above the line’ voting, where parties register what they want their supporters to put as their preferences, and then you can just mark a box for that party and you get assigned that party’s registered preferences. This gets rid of many of the advantages of AV (though not all, as people are free to express whatever preferences they want—it’s just that 95% of them don’t) in favour of backroom deals between parties for preference swaps.
At this point I suggest asking “what’s it for?” Then ask “what could it be useful for?”
One answer that occurs to me for the second question is merely to change the system to unclog it a bit. One argument for “Yes” is that it will shake up currently safe seats. But I’m from Australia, which has an AV-like system, and the safe seat problem there is every bit as bad as it is in the UK.
As such, I suggest it may be explicitly beneficial just to change the system slightly every now and then, to dislodge complacency.
(Obvious danger: breaking it.)
I must admit I’m not sure how to make this a more robust hypothesis, let alone a quantifiable one …
One big advantage would be solving the whole “X can’t win here! Only Y can keep Z out!” problem, and allowing people to express their actual preference rather than one based on a best guess as to what other people would do. Even if that leaves us with safe seats, they will be safe because a majority of the people in the constituency genuinely want them to be. At the moment, there are some safe seats (e.g. Hazel Blears’ seat in Salford) where a majority of the voters want their MP out, and the MP is genuinely horribly unpopular, but there’s no way for those voters to co-ordinate between themselves and settle on the most likely alternative to kick them out.
I’m speaking in more meta terms than the particular advantages of this as a proposed system for the indefinite future. Would kicking the system every few decades actually be a very good idea?
It could be—except that at some point you have to move from a ‘better’ system to a ‘worse’ one. At which point, people complain—rightly—that they are getting a worse democracy because of some meta-rule. Possibly one option, if we’re talking about that kind of radical change, would be for every election to also have a referendum on how the next election would be held—with four or five options each time (say FPTP, STV, AV, AMS, AV+ or something). Each time, the least popular option from last time will be removed from the ballot and replaced with a different system. (Of course then you get into a meta-meta argument about how to count the referendum votes...)
It’s meta-arguments all the way down, yes :-)
How does the system work in practice in Australia? Do candidates have safe seats because they represent popular views, or are there other factors that stop them from being challenged?
What Andrew said. But basically, safe seats happen when a system is (IMO) too stable, such that the election is decided by marginal seats.
But this is getting towards my own political opinions, which somehow are boring even me to type on LW ;-)
One of the differences between the Australian system and the proposed UK system is they have compulsory voting and compulsory ranking of all candidates, neither of which would be in play in the UK. This has lead to ‘above the line’ voting, where parties register what they want their supporters to put as their preferences, and then you can just mark a box for that party and you get assigned that party’s registered preferences. This gets rid of many of the advantages of AV (though not all, as people are free to express whatever preferences they want—it’s just that 95% of them don’t) in favour of backroom deals between parties for preference swaps.