MMP is way better than FPP, however the NZ version with list MPs is undesirable in my opinion, because the party gets to choose candidates who get zero votes and then get into parliament. To remove someone you have to vote out the party.
To explain: in NZ MMP, the party creates a list of candidates, and if the party is voted for, people from the list become members of parliament. NZ also has 60 out of 120 seats allocated by voting in an electorate, but even someone that doesn’t win their electorate can still become an MP if they are sufficiently high on the party list. https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy...
I’m from NZ which changed from FPP to MMP in 1993.
Two big problems:
1. Half of the politicians that make it into parliament are from the party list (which is chosen by the party) and are not voted for individually. I believe much of the power of democracy is the ability to vote people out, and the party list mostly prevents that.
2. There is a lot of talk of strategic voting. I guess all systems can be gamed, but MMP seems to encourage it.
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy... “Every candidate who wins an electorate gets a seat in Parliament. They are called electorate MPs. The remaining seats are filled from party lists. Every party has a party list, which is a list of candidates ranked in the order the party wants those candidates to be elected to Parliament. Candidates elected from a party list are called list MPs.”
Living in an MMP country, I can say I think the party list system truly sucks, because you get career politicians that you can’t vote out, whom are essentially elected by themselves into the party.
I think one of the most important strengths of democracy is voting out people we don’t like, and MMP badly breaks that ability.
The argument for the list is when 5% of the population would vote for NZ First, and Winston Peters would get a seat because he put himself first on his party list. He would get over-representative power when a coalition government was required: in that specific situation he had a constituency. However in the larger parties (National, Labour) there are situations where people on their list get in on their party vote, even though the person is wildly disliked in the electorates, and would never get a constituency. During a past landslide Labour win, a bunch of nobodies wayyyy down the list (not expected to ever win) got in as members of parliament with zero constituency.
New Zealand has a similar system - the MMP (mixed member proportional) system we use is better than FPTP but I suspect vote-ranking systems are better than MMP.
In NZ, citizens vote for a candidate in each of the 60 electoral districts and so they get the representative that they vote for. Similar to Germany? Also our citizens vote for a party, and the other 60 seats of parliament are filled from lists of candidates (one list created by each party). The 60 seats are allocated to candidates from the lists, selected so that that we have the same percentage of members in parliament to match up the percentages of party votes by citizens.
New Zealand gets members of parliament that were chosen by the party. That is a problem because those members have no constituency: citizens can't really vote out someone (because a party selects some of its members).
I personally think that a critical feature of democracy is being able to vote out someone we dislike. I'm sure we can think of undemocratic countries where they would love to vote out a disliked politician. MMP fails here: citizens can't vote out some of our members of parliament.
the party list gives disproportionate (force multiplied) political power to a few key players in each party.
The second problem is also a feature: we often get small parties that get outsized influence. To get 50% control of parliament multiple parties join together in a coalition. Coalitions are an emergent property of MMP: and coalitions create some terrible incentives for parties to do misrepresentative things.
Outsized power is misused particularly by one celebrity politician with 5% of the population voting for him. The guy is a tool.
In theory a small party should be able to focus on a single cause. In practice, The Green Party gets 10% of the seats but it then refuses to form a coalition with our "conservative" party. The Green Party gives up its minority power, because the thei politicians are too strongly greenie and they won't compromise. The idiots fail to make green tradeoffs against economic policies. They are idiots because the planet is strictly worse because of their political failings.
New Zealand avoids the worst excesses of a two party system. However MMP is no panacea: politicians do the same political things.
In theory a left wing and a right wing party should form a coalition together to run the country. In practice such a coalition can't form.
New Zealand has Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) where you vote for a local representative and also a party.
There are a fixed number of local representatives and the rest of the 120 available seats are made up by the total party vote. So if you won 10 seats but 25% of the party vote you would have 10 representatives and 20 list/party MP's.
It has also worked very well to give third parties more power and help keep the two main parties closer to the political center.
Yes. NZer here. The list-based implementation is hideously undemocratic.
The party chooses the list candidates. The problem is that the two major parties get to choose some of our members of parliament, because they are at the top of the party list. We get members of parliament that have zero franchise and that you effectively cannot vote out.
Personally I think it's a really fucked system. Although even with all its suckiness, it is way way better than a two-party system like in the USA. We get some kooky third parties, but somehow the third parties seem to keep everything honest.
We use the MMP system in NZ and it seems to work quite well, though needs a bit of fine tuning as currently you need 5% to get into a coalition and that is slightly too high.
MMP is a fantastic system, but it can face resistance if it relies on Closed Party Lists[0], which allow a party to put a potentially controversial candidate at the top of the list, almost guaranteeing them a seat and forcing party supporters to accept that as the cost of choosing the party.
Open lists are better, but I believe they still have the problem that they make it unclear where representatives' mandates come from, especially if a representative can resign and be automatically replaced by someone lower on the list without a by-election.
Other problems exist with list-based systems, such as treating independent candidates differently to candidates with established parties, and the possible use of "decoy lists"[1].
The best implementation I've seen of MMP, though, is that used in Baden-Württemberg, which avoids party lists by filling the proportional seats with the candidates who came closest to winning the elections in their local districts.[2]
When NZ adopted MMP (proportional system similar to Germany's) both the major parties (National & Labour) campaigned against it on the "better the devil you know" basis, which the electorate see through. The first MMP election was mildly rubbish, with a populist kingmaker gaining disproportionate leverage, but since then the electorate has been shrewder and in a subsequent referendum MMP remained the preferred system.
The NZ voting system looks very much like the German system to me. And while that system certainly has its flaws (e.g. when a party has more directly voted members than seats from the overall proportion of votes), it does respect a higher number of cast votes than FPTP. Any vote in FPTP that wasn't cast for the winning local candidate is lost. In MMP, every vote for a party influences the result in every case.
I live in New Zealand. We have an MMP parliament, which means that you get lots of different voices in government. IMO, the problem with the US is the FPP system - it lends itself to being monopolised by two large parties. When NZ had FPP, that is what happened here, also.
I don't think you can have a working democracy without real choice in who to vote for. I would argue that FPP means that you don't have that choice in the US. Witness that people voting for Nader (left of the Dems) split the Dems vote and gave you a right wing government. The system works against anyone having ideas outside the mainstream.
My strong opinion is that if you want a better democracy you must get rid of FPP. STV or MMP are both better alternatives.
Germany (and NZ) use MMP - everyone gets 2 votes one to select someone for their local voting district - that provides half the seats in parliament, the other vote is for a party, these votes are used to choose the other half of the seats which, taking into consideration the parties of the local representatives who have already been elected, are used to pad out the party representatives to match the country wide party vote.
In both countries there is a threshold (5% party votes) that a party must get to get party seats ... looking online in 2013 AFD (spit) got less than 5%, below the threshold, and got no seats, in the recent election they got above the threshold and were awarded 92 seats (14%) - seems to me that the system is working as designed.
But just because they got seats it doesn't mean that the other parties are required to stoop to form a government with them.
MMP is a far better system than the FPP system used in many other places, most people end up with someone they voted for representing them, unless they are in an extreme minority (<5%), and it's pretty immune to gerrymandering. Personally I'd argue for reducing the 5% threshold to the size of one seat so even more people are represented.
NZ switched from FPP to MMP for partially this reason. It also neutered the outsized voting power of marginal electorates - entire elections were decided at times by the votes of 5K - 10K people.
I guess our marginal seats were the equivalent of US "swing states"?
Yes, NZ had 2 parties trading off power for decades until we got rid of the FPP system (like the US/UK), we now use MMP (the same as Germany) and we haven't had a government that wasn't a coalition since (even this time when one party did get more than 50% of the votes).
What it means is that to form a government parties have to form a coalition and that means compromise, done in public - compromise is a good thing, a mediating thing, if you're a party that can't compromise you'll never be part of a government - and voters understand this, they understand that it takes time to compromise, we might not have a government for 3 months and all of a party's promises might not be able to be kept as part of a compromise.
It's not perfect, but I do think it's far better and far fairer that the governments we elected under FPP (when sometimes the party with the most votes didn't get the most seats, and smaller parties could never realistically get a look in)
I would have suggested Israel or Tasmania as a better example of the stability problem than New Zealand.
New Zealand is vulnerable to it though: MMP makes it harder to form majorities, and encourages the election of "hacks" - abrasive party people who the system motivates to carve out a brand rather than inclusive electorate-centric members. This pattern also plays out in Gerrymandered electorate systems like California.
> The advantage is that parties like the Greens have a
> much fairer slice of the influence.
I understand your point, but disagree with a premise. The way you've stated that thinks in terms of party brand, rather than representatives.
The Westminster system is fundamentally about responsible representatives for the purpose of governing. Members with electorates have an incentive to be mild and inclusive, to keep their electorate happy. Whereas parties have incentive to be abrasive to carve out brand. Electorate systems that favour parties have a jobs-for-the-boys culture.
Look at the US or Australian senate vs the lower houses. Or the UK upper house which is one of the most effective in the world for the purpose of performing quality review despite being not elected. It's also the only upper house I can think of that's not packed with teachers, lawyers and party hacks.
If anything, what we should be seeking is to reduce the reach of parties. For example, the Hare-Clarke system used in Tasmania doesn't have party names on the ballot papers and you're not allowed to hand out how-to-votes outside polling booths. (Tasmania multi-member electorates have a counter-effect to this though, and encourage party strength)
The continual pursuit of democracy for its own sake is not necessarily a positive force. Before the 1948 Australian senate reforms, the Australian senate was elected with each state being an electorate. This meant a high turnover of senators, giving more people a shorter role in public life, and it clearly defined them as reviewers. The role of the senate is murkier now: it entrenches the role of party in political life (through election and balance of power contests), senators have long political lives and it has become a place that otherwise unelectable powerbrokers go to sort out their superannuation (e.g. Graham Richardson, Noel Crichton-Browne).
It's better, but it's still rubbish. The FPTP system virtually guarantees a two party system, which means that whatever one party thinks is a good idea, the other is effectively forced into taking the opposing view, and the lake of anti-competition laws (or enforcement of?) around media effectively means that Murdoch media and the Liberal/National coalition are basically wings of the same party.
Having seen MMP play out on the other side of the Tasman, it's pretty clear that MMP produces saner outcomes.
My personal opinion is that is MMP forces coalitions more often. The upshot of which is that everyone is forced to be more willing to communicate and compromise and take on saner positions, because the opposition one term may turn out to be the maker of the governing party the next.
To explain: in NZ MMP, the party creates a list of candidates, and if the party is voted for, people from the list become members of parliament. NZ also has 60 out of 120 seats allocated by voting in an electorate, but even someone that doesn’t win their electorate can still become an MP if they are sufficiently high on the party list. https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy...
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