ยป A Reason to be Against STV…
… and all other proportional representation (PR) systems.
Bill Clinton once said that democracy is about balancing majority rule with minority opinion.
The best way to protect minority ideas (for example, legalizing marijuana) is to make them a majority issue, not to splinter governmental power into several single-issue parties.
What’s happened time and again in polities that implement PR (particularly in Italy, see also Germany, and perhaps Ireland), is that a small, one-issue party ends up holding the balance of power and foisting its views on the majority.
This is a recipe for political backlash and paralysis. If you can’t convince the majority of people that your issue is worth supporting then perhaps it’s not.
In short here’s my argument: Proportional representation means we’ll have fewer Sun Kings and more Spider Kings. There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.
The issue with STV is the large ridings with multiple candidates. This gives the population a feeling that their elected candidate may not come from their community, and thus are less responsible to them. The public are already apathetic about choosing one candidate out of a small number. This is only going to get worse with the addition of more candidates and having to choose more candidates.
The only system that I feel we should change it to is instant run-off system, which still have only one candidate per riding, but transfers votes until the chosen person has more than 50% of the vote. This eliminates basically all the issues with STV. But alas, we are voting for the same system again.
Fred
6 May 09 at 1:08 pm