• @Aceticon
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    26 months ago

    From my experience living in a country with Proportional Vote, one with First Past The Post and one with something in between (multiple representatives per electoral circle) my conclusion is that Democracy works best with variety and frequent change - you don’t want Stability, because that just entrenches some people in control of the State and inevitably leads to frequent abuse of that power for personal upside maximisation, including via outright corruption, as well as the steady takeover of the various mechanisms of the State (most notably the subversion of the supposedly independent Pillar Of Democracy which is the Judicial System, something you see reaching its natural outcome right now in the US).

    Change and many eyes with many conflicting interests and a real likelihood of reaching power are the best way to delay and even undo the natural subversion of the State by the kind of people who seek power - which happens in all systems, not just autocratic ones - whilst the highly stable “Two Party Systems” in supposed Democracies are barely better than dictatorships in their resilience to the rotting of the State from the inside.

    Proportional Vote, which isn’t at all Mathematically rigged for “stability” is the best system I’ve seen so far at keeping the politicians in power from pillaging and subverting the State, mostly because they fear both their coalition partners (Government there is always by coalition) finding it out and using it for political advantage (by loudly bringing down government and triggering new elections in order to capture more votes) and that the next government might very well be a wholly different coalition whose politicians are not “people like them” and would just love to catch and bring to Justice any funny business done by the previous guys.

    In places with two dominant parties that alternate in power, the politicians of both those parties make lots of noise for the audience simulating deep differences but often are mates and frequent the same social circles and even when they’re not there’s generally on subjects like Corruption a “gentleman’s agreement” of “I don’t go after you in my turn and you don’t go after me in your turn”.

    Not even PV systems are immune to crooked politicians but they certainly seem way more resilient to their actions and even much more capable of self-healing before the rot is too far along.

    • MudMan
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      6 months ago

      There are a good couple of decades of Italian politics that would no align with that.

      Honestly, all that is fairly misinformed and superficial. Cross-checks in politics are hard to design and very susceptible to details. I just don’t think we disagree enough on the fundamental (i.e. FPTP with no adjustments is an outright bad system) to be worth getting caught in the weeds. If I’m gonna argue I’d rather spend the time arguing with someone I actually disagree with :)