Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "TLDR News EU"
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@no_rubbernecking Okey, so the problem with the rest of the system you have in mind is this.
By having a automatic system for how the cabinet is put together you end up with parties that don't have a incentive to work together in said cabinet.
It's better to have a system where parties don't vote for who should be a member of a coalition.
Instead you simply do what we do here in Europe, start with whoever has the biggeset party, ask them to come up with a proposal for a coalition, present that to the parliament, if they get a majority supporting that proposal or at least no majority against it (depending on the exact system) then great, that proposal ends up ruling, if that proposal fails then the second biggest party gets an attempt, then the third biggest etc all through the whole list of parties.
Since each party of course wants to lead they'll negotiate with other parties for them to either take part in the cabinet so party 1 might bring party 3, 4 and 5 with them along in the cabinete to try to form a majority, and then they might offer concessions to party 6 7 and 8 in order for those parties not to vote against the coalition proposal.
And in that way they manage to get a majority for the cabinet to be formed, but they don't have enough power with the parties actually in the cabinet to force through new laws, so you'll get ad hoc majorities for various different legislative proposals making democracy work way better.
Since you don't just have 2 big parties a single party using the whip to block members from voting in support of a bill doesn't really matter much as other combinations of parties will form that will support it in many cases.
The voters will ensure it.
The big parties will simply split up since there's no real incentives to keep them merged into big parties anymore.
So the christian democrats can have their own party all about conservative and/or religious values.
The nationalists will get their own party.
The liberitarian right will get their party.
The pro-business conservatives will get their party etc.
The same of course applies to the left wing.
With the different factions within the Republican and Democratic party forming their own parties that will be free to enter into coalitions with eachother or not as they please.
But also be free to ally on single issues when they're not a coalition member but perhaps supporting a coalition in return for concessions.
So perhaps the biggest left wing party will seek a centrist coalition with the former far left factions of the democratic party not being included in the coalition but giving support in return for certan concessions, but then the far left might ally with certain right wing parties to get a certain law through the legislative body since they as a non-coalition member will be free to do their own thing in parliament.
Get what I mean?
I consider that a good thing.
Also, the parties that's actually in the coalition has already agreed on how they want to rule the country together working out the worst issues ahead of time and negotiating what camels each party has to swallow in order to get eachothers support for the cabinet.
What positions should be held by what party, what to do in certain situations etc, etc, etc.
With your suggestion there's no reason why the biggest party actually have to do what the smaller parties wants, after all if those smaller parties don't get their policies through then another small party can just take over their spot and the big party will still be just fine.
Since the logic of your system is still that the cabinet is won based on how much voters each party has itself more then anything else...
Our system instead is all built around the concept of consensus.
In 2001 a party with 12,4% of the voters won the election in Norway because they where the only ones able to get enough support for their proposal.
Despite there being 4 parties bigger then them.
The way I see it that a victory for our system.
Because it means that the parties willing to cooperate ends up being rewarded with power, and the ones that don't end up without power, so you end up with a functioning goverment.
And the voters knew what cabinet proposals that would be likely to win depending on what parties they voted on.
So they did win the election fair and square.
But they didn't win the prime minister job based on their own voters alone.
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@rupplopp My own preferred party (MDG) is the party that struggles the most with the system we have.
The party I mentioned got 1 representative into our parliament with a total of 4908 votes in total behind that representative.
My own party increased its number of seats from 1 to 3 representatives.
Being below 4% we ended up with non of the 19 leveling seats.
As a result our 110.973 votes only gave us 3 representatives or 36.991 votes pr representative.
On average you need about 17 200 votes to get a representative in Norway.
My party is among the ones that suffers the most from our system since they tend to attract urban voters.
And my vote is among the ones that counts less because of our system, since I live in the third/fourth biggest city in Norway, Trondheim (the position depends on how you define what is or isn't included in the city).
However thing of it this way.
A city or urban area has a lot more people who have similar living experiences.
In 2014 we had a population of 182 035 here in Trondheim.
That's means that it's very likely that at least someone who knows how it is to live in Trondheim is represented in our parliament in any given year.
But if every vote is of equal value you end up with a very, very long time between each time any given location in rural area is represented in parliament.
Between every time someone who knows how it is to live there, what problems they face etc is represented.
By giving rural voters more weight in our system we ensure that someone from those areas are represented anyway.
But the overal composition of our parliament is still adjusted for the overall popularity of a party by our leveling seats.
With 110 973 votes my party would have had about 6 seats if we had one seat for every 17 200 votes (the average number of votes pr seat in our parliament)
So once we get past 4% of the total votes we're going to get a lot of leveling seats.
We had 3.9%
It sucks.
But it also means that our voters have more influence.
Since each and every one of our votes matters more when we're in the area of that 4% treshold.
It's a bit like how voters in the US matters more in swing states then in red or blue states.
Except for us it's on a pr party level and it's the 4% threshold that matters.
Having that 4% threshold for our leveling seats means that parties that does make it above 4% are ensured to have a real say in our political climate since they get enough seats to be relevant in our politics.
But since you can get seats even below 4% we also have the possibility to be relevant due to the possibility of ending up with the balance of power between two parties vying prime minister position even with a single seat if the parliamentary math between the rest of the political parties adds up just right.
And even when it doesn' you might end up with balance of power in individual law proposals or even make law proposals of your own with a single representative.
So if you have a issue that matters you can push it with our system if you can mobilize enough voters.
And it's proportional at every level.
The 3 seats we did get where the 3 seats we had earned through our proportional voter share in the electoral circles where we did manage to get enough votes compared to other parties to get at least one seat.
All our 19 electoral circles are multi-member districts and proportional, with the two smallest electoral circles (in terms of seats) still having 4 seats each.
And we have 5 electoral circles that has a two digit number of seats each.
So it's not really unfair towards smaller parties in that sense.
And big parties with a broad appeal among multiple electoral circles will be well represented anyway in the various electoral circles.
So the 19 leveling seats mainly benefits smaller parties that has a broad appeal.
Small parties that's mainly popular in certain areas will get direct representation from their respective electoral circle.
Big parties will get a lot of seats *everywhere*.
And parties with less then 4% of the votes will get represented if they are popular enough in a electoral circle to make it, regardless of how small their total number of votes is.
And with the 4% threshold the parties that makes it past that point gets extra "omph" compared to other smaller parties meaning that you can get something done.
So there's a motivation to try to work issues out instead of just split up parties the moment there is a issue due to the 4% rule, and there is a motivation for people to go out and vote for parties near that limit, people who might otherwise stay at home, or vote for a bigger party, since every single vote might count a lot when you're close to that point, increasing participation.
It does lead to a little bit of tactical voting, since members of bigger parties might win more representation for their coalition pr vote by voting for a small party near that limit then for their preferred option, but since the outcome is always proportional I don't really see that as a problem, they're not forced to do this, it's a option that they have and can make a informed decision to do, and there's no real penalty for not doing so.
Most voters don't do this after all.
Yes, it does mean less power when we're below the 4% limit.
In this case my party.
But we'll get more power when we get above while we're still represented, getting our politics heard, our proposals voted on, and our votes counted.
And all the other parties know that it's just a matter of time before we will end up above the 4% limit and some other parties ends up below, so just ignoring us or pissing us off isn't a good play either.
Our system encourages a consensus, and addressing the issues of everyone.
The bigger parties doesn't have to do exactly what the smaller parties wants, but in order to push us under the 4% limit where we're relatively speaking harmless they have to adopt at least some of the policies of the factions within their own parties that's aligned with us.
So in the case of MDG, the green movement within the bigger parties like the labour party or even the conservatives (movements also represented in other parties like the liberals on the political right and the socialist left party on the left, while we are in the center.)
So yeah, I'm pretty happy with our system.
It's not perfect.
But it's pretty good.
And I think well suited for Sweden.
Perhaps it could allow the center party in Sweden to split up and focus more on farmers making them more compatible with the political left, while the capitalists in the party could merge with another right wing party or form their own themselves since they'd have a real shot for power without a lower limit for representation.
Or any number of other possible changes.
Basically I think it would make Swedish poliltics more balanced.
As for the Sweden Democrats, perhaps the extremists would leave the party and form their own smaller party where they don't have to deal with the moderating forces.
While the leadership could afford to alinate some far right voters in order to actually become a real coalition option.
And so one and so forth...
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@lobaxx Hum, factions within that party could probably get more done by splitting off from the Swedish center party and merging with factions within other parties splitting off from theirs.
Agrarianism, subsidies, protectionism, pragmatism, this is all things that works well enough with the left.
As for the whole immigration thing.
Our center is anti-immigration in general, but that doesn't mean that they're opposed to seasonal work immigration.
It's more about nationalism and protecting our culture etc.
Their immigration policy is fairly pragmatic, they don't want a full stop in immigration because Norway needs to replace people due to our birth rate.
And farms etc does need workers.
But they want limited immigration rates, and immigrants that benefits us if you get my meaning.
And of course working with parties that wants more immigration they're of course willing to conceede accepting people on humanitarian grounds, as long as this is kept within "reasonable" levels.
In essence, on paper they're a "left wing" party, palatable enough to left wing voters to be acceptable coalition partners for the real left wing parties.
But they tend to be the party that holds back a lot of left wing values in the coalition negotiations in favour of their own interests.
Hence why our socialist left party actually decided to pull out of the coalition negotiations after our latest election, since the center party just drove too hard a bargain and wasn't willing to give in enough on enviromental issues...
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@jesseberg3271 That's kind of the point though.
A lot of people (potentially most people) in Europe want a close relationship with each other without being a federation.
In a confederation power comes from below, the participating components give power up but still have the final say, while in a federal entity power comes from above.
A federal approach helps reduce the risk of war as the members are in a close coalition that benefit from working together and the members while still feeling like they belong to their own component entity first still feel like they belong to the same bigger entity.
They can use that bigger entity when dealing with others around the world being close allies in trade negotiations and other forms of diplomacy and quite frankly also in war.
People living in different climates, terrains etc have different living conditions.
Germany and the Netherlands have a lot of urban areas well suited for privatized services like private trains and postal services for instance as the population density makes it easy to make those services profitable directly.
While countries like Norway is rural with lower economic potential for these services, as an example, meaning that these are things that we've traditionally handled as a society at large rather than individuals or corporations.
Our agriculture is less competitive with all our mountains, forests and just in general lack of suitable agricultural land, as well as our reduced growing season.
Meaning that we can't compete in volume with traditional farming, yet most of our "nature" is actually a cultural landscape shaped by agriculture, it has been a vital part of shaping our society where every fjord has its own culture and heritage.
Our farming has always been small scale and for the most part supplementary in nature with many farmers being both farmers and a secondary job like a fisherman.
Historically we have never truly been self sufficient with carbohydrates importing grain from other countries to supplement our own production in exchange for our own products of fish, wood, and various types of meat (both domesticated animals like goat, sheep, cow, reindeer etc) and wild animals.
And of course in later years other products like petroleum based ones.
So for instance when Denmark-Norway was attacked by the UK during the Napoleonic wars while we where still neutral and we ended up with our fleet captured or sunk in the great fleet robbery of Copenhagen (the Brits stole half our fleet) we ended up starving during the blockade of our coast, surviving on food smuggled in or taken by privateers attacking trade between the UK and countries around the Baltic sea.
Obviously we don't want to find ourselves starving again.
But if for whatever reason we can't import food anymore it helps to have some production ourselves.
So tariffs on those products helps in that regard, since we're still importing those products anyway.
That of course doesn't jam well with people living on the fertile plains of Europe.
All the lands between the Netherlands and some distance into Russia are well suited for agriculture, of course it's in their best interest to have good market conditions where they can compete on equal terms with others as they can be competitive, especially the Netherlands and Ukraine (I think?) produce quite a bit of food and are competitive exporting their food all over the world.
We of course welcome their food, but we'd like to keep some farmers ourselves, ideally without resorting to the factory farms found in more intensely farmed places.
Likewise we'd like to keep our fisheries going, and avoid the overfishing that the EU is doing and dealing with certain... Flaws... In the EU fishery policies.
This is of course important topics.
Still being a part of a larger entity can cancel out a lot of the drawbacks of being a small country.
And we benefit greatly from being a part of many of the multilateral agreements that are a part of the EU framework even as we remain outside the actual union itself.
All while also benefitting from advantages of being a small nation like a higher quality democracy (it's harder to make that work large scale), and greater agility in dealing with changes in external conditions.
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@gokulpayyanur1839 Ah, right...
You're Indian, right?
You guys have first past the post, just with so many electoral circles and so much ethnic diversity that you still end up with with some coalitions just like the UK...
What Europe does is having proportionality instead in the election, so instead of having a single representative pr electoral circle with whoever gets 1 vote more then anyone else ending up as the representative from that electoral seat and going to parliament we instead have electoral circles with multiple representativese and those being distributed proportionally, so instead of having 100 electoral circles with 1 representative each and the biggest party in each of those getting 100% of the representation we might have 10 electoral circles with 10 seats each, and a party that has 40% of the votes in one of those seats will get 40% of the seats (4 seats in that electoral circle)
And a party with 20% of the votes gets 20% of the seats.
So if you imagine that one of those 10 seats would have been 8 seats with victory for party 1 and 2 seats with victory for party 2 despite party 1 having 40% of the votes and party 2 having 20% of the votes overall in that area instead in the proportional system party 1 gets 4 seats, party 2 gets 2 seats, and party 3, 4, 5 etc gets the seats they deserve.
And that happens everywhere.
Leading to coalitions where people actually hold power based on how popular they are instead of how hated the opposition is.
It leads to less conflict since elections isn't a binary result anymore with you either winning or losing a electoral circle but instead it's about you increasing or decreasing your relative power in that electoral circle.
And having many other parties to deal with who all may both be an enemy and an ally depending on the situation.
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