Proportional Voting Glitch?

Zardnaar

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NZ uses proportional voting system. Anyway in the late 90's we had a party split where the MPs defected from the party and went Rogue essentially.

Some were list MPs. They had no electorate to represent the got elected via the party list. That party went from 13% to less than 5% all the defectors got voted out. They got to keep their ministerial paychecks etc from a bit longer and they propped up a right wing government for an extra year or so.

Otherwise that government would have collapsed new election. Labour smashed them in 1999

They eventually passed a Waka jumping bill. Basically if a list MP leaves their party they're out of parliament as it throws the whole proportional part of the system out of whack.

In the dying days of FPtP both major parties had defectors but they were electorate MPs. Several retained thie seats in elections 1993/1996. All those parties are now gone although the Greens splintered off one of them (the Alliance).

Recently we have had the occasional electorate MP go rogue none have retained their seats. Often via a meltdown with their party.they

Anyway what do you think about list MPs elected to parliament via their party list defecting from the party they were elected on? Or if they actively vote against their former party.

The numbers.

65 electorate seats
7 Maori seats
48 list seats

Maori seats are determined by the amount of Maori on their electoral roll. Maori xan pick which roll they want and stand in whatever seats they like (I think the reverse is also true eg Pakeha/whoever can stand in Maori seat).
 
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We still have FPTP here, though Trudeau campaigned on 2015 being the last election to use that system. He promised to bring in a new system, if elected.

That was enough to lure some voters from the NDP.

The problem is that Trudeau wanted the ranked ballot system, which would ensure that the Liberals were never lower than 2nd place - that the worst they could do would be Official Opposition. They never wanted another situation where the NDP became the Official Opposition (which isn't likely, as Jack Layton was the leader at that time and he's dead now).

So Trudeau tried to stack the committee with Liberals, the other parties called foul on that, and then when the committee came back with a recommendation for proportional representation, Trudeau fired the cabinet minister in charge, and appointed a new one whose assignment was to act regretful while announcing that the committee was unable to come to a consensus, so no changes would be made.

Therefore, the election of 2025 (or sooner if the government falls or Trudeau has another notion to call an early one) will be FPTP.


Now, about MPs crossing the floor (our term for defecting from one party to another): It's usually done for opportunistic reasons, whether a weak leader wants to shore up numbers for a critical vote or an upcoming election and wants bragging rights that so-and-so rejected the "enemy" and came over to the "winning" side, or some agenda that includes the floor-crosser gaining a cabinet position.

My view is that floor-crossing should not come without penalty. It sometimes happens that an MP crosses because they sincerely abhor something their leader has said or done... but they do have the option of sitting as an independent instead of joining another party. Even so, that MP was elected with the expectation of their serving as a member of a specific party, and it's not right to essentially lie to the electorate.
 
We still have FPTP here, though Trudeau campaigned on 2015 being the last election to use that system. He promised to bring in a new system, if elected.

That was enough to lure some voters from the NDP.

The problem is that Trudeau wanted the ranked ballot system, which would ensure that the Liberals were never lower than 2nd place - that the worst they could do would be Official Opposition. They never wanted another situation where the NDP became the Official Opposition (which isn't likely, as Jack Layton was the leader at that time and he's dead now).

So Trudeau tried to stack the committee with Liberals, the other parties called foul on that, and then when the committee came back with a recommendation for proportional representation, Trudeau fired the cabinet minister in charge, and appointed a new one whose assignment was to act regretful while announcing that the committee was unable to come to a consensus, so no changes would be made.

Therefore, the election of 2025 (or sooner if the government falls or Trudeau has another notion to call an early one) will be FPTP.


Now, about MPs crossing the floor (our term for defecting from one party to another): It's usually done for opportunistic reasons, whether a weak leader wants to shore up numbers for a critical vote or an upcoming election and wants bragging rights that so-and-so rejected the "enemy" and came over to the "winning" side, or some agenda that includes the floor-crosser gaining a cabinet position.

My view is that floor-crossing should not come without penalty. It sometimes happens that an MP crosses because they sincerely abhor something their leader has said or done... but they do have the option of sitting as an independent instead of joining another party. Even so, that MP was elected with the expectation of their serving as a member of a specific party, and it's not right to essentially lie to the electorate.

Well electorate MPs can go to their electorate and face the voters. Multiple MPs did that here in 90s and won. Or lost.

The ones that one were generally the ones who did it for ethical reasons (Labour went right theory left wing left, National went hard right list some centrist MPs).

One point we had 10 parties in parliament now we have 5. Most of them were "big men" type parties defectors who kept their seats which matters with 5% threshold or electorate seat.

I don't mind those defectors even if I don't like their politics.
 
Happens fairly often here, MPs are considered to be elected in their own right, even if they happen to be win their seat with distributed party votes .

They then sit as independent (unless they join another faction), and can vote on each issue as they please, although they lose the advantages of belonging to a faction in regard to speaking time and party financing.

The same thing happens if you are expelled from a party, for some reason.
 
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Anyway what do you think about list MPs elected to parliament via their party list defecting from the party they were elected on? Or if they actively vote against their former party.
this isn't much of a problem in denmark; usually happens rare enough that it's not a structural problem. however, in recent years there's been a lot of party creation/reshuffling/etc, so far resulting in a centre government election, which is unprecedented here in denmark. in the road up to that, there's quite a few party members that switched parties or became non-affiliated. not anything to break anything, but was potentially spooky.

as always, needing checks for this depends on human behavior, and the solution has to be reasonable and cheap enough for a check to make sense. i think it can be fine, but it's a potentially awful problem particularly in party-based democracies, such as denmark, where voting is mostly not for the individual, but for the party.
 
The party should not be able to strip them of their seats. The voters have voted for a list and the party should not be able to arbitrarily alter the list afterwards. The party has the power to fill their list, so they should use that power to choose people who represents their platform. If they misjudge, their fault. If the party makes a political shift which the member cannot identify with, also their fault.

In most cases it does not matter much and in cases it does matter, it usually triggers a new election. Most of the time it is political suicide for the member anyway.
 
If you're going to have a list based system, it's really pretty pre-conditioned on recognising the primacy of parties in parliamentary elections, since you've made the party the unit of election. It makes sense that such seats would be linked to the party in question rather than the individual MP. I don't really have strong views or experience on this since our PR systems aren't list systems in Australia, they're candidate-based STV systems (I'm pretty sure there's constitutional barriers to federal list systems, maybe some of the states can do it but none have).

It's obviously one big benefit to single transferrable vote proportional systems like the Hare-Clark system in the ACT and Tasmania and the Irish STV lower house's system. Individuals are the unit of election even though they're organised formally into parties, so when there's a resignation, you can just do a countback and elect the next person like ACT and Tasmania, or run a by-election like the Irish Dáil. When there's a defection, well, they were elected as an individual and the party vetted and selected them so it's their fault if they lose the member. Then both party and defecting individual can fight it out at the next general election.

This is one reason I'm not a fan of MMP since it combines FPTP elections (which are obviously wrong bad and stupid) with party lists (which don't allow for discernment within a single party).
 
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