Electoral Reform

[borusa]

There's been quite a lot of talk about electoral reform of late, and there's the possibility of it actually happening in some way or another, with the indecisive result in the General Election.

Comments

[djonma]

I was talking with Rob about this the other day. Would it just be better now to have us elect our local officials for who they are and the work they do, and elect the PM for the same thing, and their party.
Two seperate things.
There are a lot of issues with the US system, a main one being that if the PM were Tory and most of the officials Labour, the PM would have HELL trying to get things done, but the PM has such an influence on our individual life now that we aren't necessarily voting for the people we want in power locally, which is rather a shame.

Point of the US System

[bellabrigida]

the PM would have HELL trying to get things done

And that's exactly the point. The US system was created upon a philosophy that government should be adversarial. The government that does least is generally considered to be the best and if something must be done, it should be so important across the board that it can be done and it can overcome the legislative differences.

Government is slower, yes. There are fewer changes, yes. But I think that was mostly the point upon the creation of the system.

Re: Point of the US System

[djonma]

Yes, but it doesn't exactly work all the time. If the majority of MPs were Labour and the PM Tory, or vice versa, they'd stop him doing things for the sake of it, as well as because their policies are so different. There'd just be complete stagnation for four years, which is just terrible.

Re: Point of the US System

[bellabrigida]

Eh. Stagnation in general is not all that bad (depending of course on your philosophy, what you'd like to see done, etc).

Do you really think that if it were really important they'd stop him doing things just because? I think they'd probably do a few things. Just not a whole lot.

[spikydavid]

Historically, this makes sense, and is in many ways quite natural. Each community votes for someone to send to parliament, and off they trot, to do the best job they can (or not - Isaac Newton I am looking at you). When communities are fairly disparate, and relatively homogenous, this works quite well.

It's not really suited to the modern world, though. People are less tied to their geographic community. Populations are less homogenous in any sense. The role of the leader has taken on increasing importance, because of his or her ability to contact and be seen by the whole population. Maybe, but I think you've jumped a couple of steps in the logic here that I don't necessarily agree with

[spikydavid]

PS - Conflagrated rather than conflated? Or was that just to check if we were reading it all carefully :)