« Mr Hain and evidence... the encore | Main | Wake me up in 2009 »
January 24, 2006
Short quiz
In which country:
Do they use an electoral system that is so hopelessly unreliable that it has failed to produce a stable majority government in half of the last 16 elections?
Have there been two elections in the last two years, neither of which produced a decisive result?
Has a party just taken office with only 40 per cent of the seats and 36 per cent of the vote, and no likely parliamentary allies?
Is there likely to be a year or two of desperate political manoeuvring before the weary electorate are summoned to the polls again?
If you said GERMANY you would be wrong. In Germany they use a proportional system, 15 of the last 16 elections have produced a clear result, and politicians from the two main parties are sensible enough to have come to an agreement after the indecisive 2005 election.
If you said CANADA, where they use FPTP, you would be right.
Can you hear the British and American press and commentariat bemoaning the Canadian electoral system now?
Posted by lewisbaston on January 24, 2006
Comments
Maybe the voters were weary, but turnout went up 4% to 64.9% according to CBC.
Posted by: Innocent Abroad at January 24, 2006 04:48 PM
You make it sound like Canada's government is incredibly unstable when it's not. Three minority governments in the past 25 years isn't a lot.
Of course, FPTP needs to get the boot, especially given the Bloc Quebecois received 10.5% of the national popular vote and 51 seats and the Green Party received 4.5% and 0 seats...
Posted by: Brad at January 24, 2006 08:26 PM
In this election, the FPTP system did not even work the way FPTP is supposed to. It worked like a moderately proportional system (a la Spain or Norway) with respect to the two largest parties.
Yet with respect to the next two parties, it showed the two worst faces of FPTP: Over-representing a small party that is regionalist, and under-representing a middle-sized party that's national.
More in "Canada 2006: a dysfunctional FPTP system" (http://fruitsandvotes.com/?p=506).
Posted by: Matthew Shugart at January 29, 2006 10:45 PM
We're democrats and believe in free speech, but we're also committed to civil and rational debate. We reserve the right to delete material posted to our site, but we hope and expect to exercise this right rarely if at all.
