That's where the analogy breaks down; parties don't negotiate and merge terribly often. The only case of this happening in the UK in my living memory was the Liberal/SDP merger circa 1992.
What actually happens under FPTP is that information about secondary preferences is lost, so if we have (say) four centre-to-left parties and one right-wing party, most people may prefer some flavour of centre-to-left, but the single right-wing party picks up most votes and wins. (Or vice versa, if you have multiple right-wing parties.)
We've just seen this in Canada under FPTP, where the centre-to-left vote fragmented among three parties (BC, Liberals, and NDP) and the Conservatives got a majority of seats on around 40% of the vote.
We had this throughout the 1980s and early 1990s in the UK, when the centre-to-left ballots of around 55-60% of the electorate who bothered voting fragmented between Labour, Liberals and SDP (and then between Labour and Liberal Democrats), while the Tories created "majority" governments on around 40% of the votes.
If you were right, Labour and the LibDems would have merged some time in the early 90s. Alas, FPTP doesn't work that way -- there are external differentiating effects imposed by the different tiers of government. For example, the LibDems were (until relatively recently) way behind in numbers of MPs, but in local councils in England they punched well above their parliamentary weight, often being the #2 party in local government rather than a distant #3.
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]]>The Tories would be interested in promoting such a system because that would effectively eliminate all those pesky little parties that they have to suck up to during coalitions. And they could get their wish of turning into America.
]]>Technocracy, like the other great Futurist ideologies -- Fascism and Communism -- is the future of the 1930s, and always will be. It ain't gonna fly (at least not this century) because it has the besetting problem of the other absolutist doctrines: it requires its believers to approximate human beings to perfectly spherical entities of uniform density, and encourages them to chop off the irritating lumps and projections which invalidate its over-simplistic model. (Eventually human beings react negatively to having bits chopped off them, and rebel.)
]]>Technocracy, like the other great Futurist ideologies -- Fascism and Communism -- is the future of the 1930s, and always will be. It ain't gonna fly (at least not this century) because it has the besetting problem of the other absolutist doctrines: it requires its believers to approximate human beings to perfectly spherical entities of uniform density, and encourages them to chop off the irritating lumps and projections which invalidate its over-simplistic model.
I obviously don't know my history of political ideologies as well as I should; could you explain that last bit? At rock-bottom, I've always been a capitalist because I believe all that stuff they teach about price-signalling (and why when people call - accuse is more like it - me of being a "liberal" it's just so much silliness). That is, Capitalism as it is theoretically practiced does a better job of optimizing for individual preferences and takes the economy as a whole closer to the production frontier than does any other sort of economic organization.
But I had thought that technocrats didn't believe this and that some sort of central planning was necessary. Which is also what I believe; I contain multitudes :-) So what am I missing? Was it some sort of weird stuck-on bit, say eugenics or some other fallacious fad?
]]>Just the same old authoritarian shit: the idea that there's an ideology that delivers all the answers if only those pesky humans will live their lives in accordance with its demands. Humans who don't see this for the self-evident fact that it is are therefore malfunctioning and need to be whipped into compliance.
See also: communism, nazism, etcetera. Technocracy was just another top-down managerialist doctrine, this time with rule by engineers rather than by the vanguard party or the brownshirts.
]]>I voted No because, while I support PR, I don't believe AV is proportional. I'm far from alone in this - googling news stories on the referendum, I was really surprised by the number of comments saying "I might vote for PR but this isn't even that". Most people may not know a d'Hondt quota from a Borda count, but they do know that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland use PR, the Greens and the Lib Dems have always supported PR, and even the Labour Party is (reluctantly) committed to do something about PR some time. AV is not PR and (ironically) it's nobody's first choice.
AV for a lot of people seems to be a kind of placeholder, a token of well-intentioned progressive electoral-reform-iness rather than a system in its own right. One of my main reasons for supporting PR is that I frequently vote for the fourth or fifth most popular party and would occasionally like to elect somebody. AV is absolutely useless for this - the barriers for entry for small parties are even higher than with simple plurality voting. To get elected in Brighton, for example, Caroline Lucas would have had to get just as big a first-preference vote as she did, plus second preferences from Lib Dems and Tories - second preferences from the second most popular party (Labour) wouldn't be counted. What AV does really well is to cement a national duopoly (Australia) or a series of local duopolies ("Labour can't win here!"). (More on all this here.)
Also, I think the pressure to close the book on electoral reform would actually have been much stronger if we'd just implemented a partial reform - everyone would be saying we needed to let it bed in for another election or two. Now, AV's been shot down and we've still got a broken system for Westminster elections - unlike the Welsh assembly, Holyrood and even Stormont. When the Northern Ireland assembly makes yours look dysfunctional, that's really embarrassing.
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