[greenicon]

These are all valid issues.

Germany addresses them by doing a FPTP pass and then filling the remainder of the parliament such that the overall parliament has PR according to a second, independent vote given at the same time. This creates some other issues again, but works surprisingly well for the most part.

[earthnail]

Worth mentioning that the Germans didn’t come up with this system - it was the allied forces: US, UK and France, drawing on their experience on the deficiencies of their own systems.

It was successful enough that it also served as a blueprint for the Eastern European countries once the Soviet Union fell.

Always puzzles me why these three countries never took the opportunity to learn from their very own experiment.

[paj]

> Always puzzles me why these three countries never took the opportunity to learn from their very own experiment.

It's very difficult to change the existing system because the people currently in power are there because of the way the system is built, so any change will almost by definition be disadvantageous for the people who have the power to change it.

[psunavy03]

Because they had a unique opportunity to design a government off a clean slate, whereas to change their own governments would mean working through the requirements of each individual government.

Which in the US is actually 51 separate governments consisting of the Federal government which only has enumerated powers, and also the 50 sovereign states.

[grotorea]

I heard it was a bit of a compromise since the Germans were used to PR, but felt it had shown weaknesses in the Weimar period, but the US and UK preferred the familiar to them single winner district system.

[robocat]

New Zealand has a similar system - the MMP (mixed member proportional) system we use is better than FPTP but I suspect vote-ranking systems are better than MMP.

In NZ, citizens vote for a candidate in each of the 60 electoral districts and so they get the representative that they vote for. Similar to Germany? Also our citizens vote for a party, and the other 60 seats of parliament are filled from lists of candidates (one list created by each party). The 60 seats are allocated to candidates from the lists, selected so that that we have the same percentage of members in parliament to match up the percentages of party votes by citizens.

New Zealand gets members of parliament that were chosen by the party. That is a problem because those members have no constituency: citizens can't really vote out someone (because a party selects some of its members).

I personally think that a critical feature of democracy is being able to vote out someone we dislike. I'm sure we can think of undemocratic countries where they would love to vote out a disliked politician. MMP fails here: citizens can't vote out some of our members of parliament.

the party list gives disproportionate (force multiplied) political power to a few key players in each party.

The second problem is also a feature: we often get small parties that get outsized influence. To get 50% control of parliament multiple parties join together in a coalition. Coalitions are an emergent property of MMP: and coalitions create some terrible incentives for parties to do misrepresentative things.

Outsized power is misused particularly by one celebrity politician with 5% of the population voting for him. The guy is a tool.

In theory a small party should be able to focus on a single cause. In practice, The Green Party gets 10% of the seats but it then refuses to form a coalition with our "conservative" party. The Green Party gives up its minority power, because the thei politicians are too strongly greenie and they won't compromise. The idiots fail to make green tradeoffs against economic policies. They are idiots because the planet is strictly worse because of their political failings.

New Zealand avoids the worst excesses of a two party system. However MMP is no panacea: politicians do the same political things.

In theory a left wing and a right wing party should form a coalition together to run the country. In practice such a coalition can't form.

Humans are shit at making good compromises.

[slyall]

I'll just note that the above has a lot of opinion with respects to NZ politics that a lot of other NZers would disagree with.

Also with respect to "can't vote out a list MP" I think this is exaggerated. "Bad" MPs are very common in constituencies in many countries. They are often hard to get rid of since they have local support and control their local party organisation. Whereas a list MP can be pushed down or off the list placing even if they cannot be made to resign their seat.

You can't vote out a constituency MP if 2/3s your neighbors like him. Or will always vote for his party no matter who they put up as a candidate.