G'afternoon David,

 DW> Elections, especially provincial ones, never produce a very high
 DW> turnout here. 60% would be regarded as good. Yesterday's election got
 DW> 53%, and nobody is complaining.

I guess 47% are prepared to let the others decide...

 DW> I'm not so sure. Maybe the political climate is different here. Parties
 DW> have always (at least in recent decades) been the driving forces in
 DW> politics. Almost all votes in Parliament are ones in which each member
 DW> has to toe his party's line. When one party gets an absolute majority
 DW> of seats, as happened yesterday, it can do pretty much what it likes,
 DW> even though only a minority of the population voted for it (42%
 DW> yesterday). Only when another election is approaching does the
 DW> government have to take much notice of public opinion.

...and one group and its persuasion drive the nation.

 DW> Occasionally, we get "minority government" situations,
where no party
 DW> has an overall majority. Actually, that situation exists in the Federal
 DW> Parliament right now. So, to get anything done, the parties have to
 DW> co-operate, making compromises that take differing viewpoints into
 DW> consideration. Usually, that turns out to be a good thing. Minority
 DW> governments tend to be a bit unstable, but they govern better than
 DW> majority ones.

Coalitions tend to avoid extremes - if that is 'governing better'. 
In my view, thorny issues go further back with coalitions than 
with majority governments...


 DW> But the "first past the post" system has the effect of
giving parties
 DW> numbers of seats that greatly exaggerate the numbers of votes. The four
 DW> parties here got 42, 32, 17, and 8 percent of the votes yesterday.
 DW> (Independents and tiny parties picked up a percent or two.) But the
 DW> leading party (the Liberals) got about two-thirds of all the seats.


 DW> There's an empirical rule called the Cube Rule that predicts pretty
 DW> well how many seats the parties get. The numbers of seats are
 DW> proportional to the *cubes* of the numbers of votes. If you calculate
 DW> the numbers of seats this rule predicts with the voting numbers above,
 DW> they are pretty accurate.

It works very well over NZ's voting history, too - but I've never 
ever managed to get any of our political scientists to give it 
credence.

 DW> But is this good democracy? Wouldn't it be better to have something
 DW> that makes the numbers of seats directly proportional to the numbers of
 DW> votes. Here, this would almost always produce a minority government,
 DW> but that's okay with me and most other people.

The key to this view is the presence of political parties. I'd put 
it that pp's are hazardous to the concept of democracy and should 
be banned - as are cartels in any other activity.

And if you wanted to have the `popular vote' relate to seat 
precentages,  then any process that ends when a candidate gets 50% 
or more of the electorate vote will do it.

There's no need to give parties the mandate to install their hacks 
and favourites to equate the two percentages as MMP does.

And that `popular vote' is a real nonsense,  anyway;  it's 
obtained by the simple addition of all electorate outcomes,  
regardless of how many candidates and/or parties stand in each 
individual electorate, sizes, geography, soci-economics and the 
like. 

 DW> Oh well... The point is academic now, and probably for the foreseeable
 DW> future.

You're probably safe up there;  it seems that the furtherest bits 
of civilisation like NZ attract or generate fervent nutters who 
get into such ridiculous arrangements....  this MMP government 
won't like a Fijian goalkeeper into NZ to play an international 
soccer, so FIFA has cancelled the match - and probably NZ as a 
future venue for any other international....

Suddenly, we're out of both soccer and rugby worlds and looking 
succeed at lacrosse (sorry, Lacrossians) or tiddleywinks or 
summat...   :-(

Miles.

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