Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "TLDR News EU"
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@haidouk872 The problem with democracy is that once you try to govern too many people et once using the system you loose the benefit of most peoples experiences being somewhat represented by the political elite, of the country being governed by people who knows how it is to live the various lives that the citizens live.
I do not believe that a system where a majority makes decisions is a good democratic system et all.
You end up with cities holding all the power.
Yet it's also wrong to have low population areas making decisions that affects city dwellers too much without their say etc, so a senate like system or a veto based system is also flawed.
The only way to maintain a well functioning democracy (and I do not consider the US, UK, France, Australia, Russia, India or any other large "democracy" a "well functioning" democracy.
Indeed Canada is deeply flawed too, and only New Zealand is a anglophone country with a decent electoral system and a low enough population to have a more or less well functioning democracy.
The EU is far to big to ever have a well functioning democracy and should remain a supernational organization only without the power to enforce laws on member states without their consent or ability to modify.
As a result I believe that legally binding EU regulations should be abolished and replaced with directives only, and that if EU regulations is to be kept then member states should have the right to veto, remove or modify them at will.
Power should ultimately come from the bottom up, not the top down.
Because only at the bottom layer is real democracy even possible.
And once the population reaches 5 million people you're already approaching (if not exceeding) the limit of what can be a well functioning democracy.
Expecting someone from the Ruhr valley and voted in by their voters to know anything about the life in a small Norwegian fishing village or a Swiss mountain village unreasonable, and if they're given power over said areas they will make decisions harmful to those communities.
Likewise it's unreasonable for tiny villages of less then 1 000 people to make decisions about a valley with a population larger then the whole country of Norway, where business needs and lifestyles differ greatly from ours.
In both cases the best solution is independent decision making where anything affecting both communities should be mutually agreed upon.
And it should probably be a compromise solution neither side entirely likes but both can live with.
I do think that the EU has had a positive effect on Europe, helping us avoid any major wars since its formation.
But it shouldn't have legeslative powers that member states can't overrule, except possibly when it comes to enforcing a minimum level of democracy and rule of law in member states if democratic backsliding goes to far like in Poland and Hungary.
I might not like the homophobic laws of Poland, but it's not our place to force our laws and values on them.
So unless they start jailing or executing people for who they are (as opposed to their behaviour) we should not interfere.
The same applies to abortion, and anything else.
Especially if we keep the passport union.
As it would allow anyone who can't live with the current living conditions (most likely including me if I had to live in a Poland with such a conservative government) to leave the country with relative ease.
They have to work out the right course of action themselves instead of having it forced upon them externally.
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@fruhlingsrolle7303 I don't think that the problem back then was having too many political parties.
Rather I suspect it was that the big ones where too big and the small ones too small, if it makes sense?
So there wheren't enough possible ways to combine the parties to form a government coalition.
In our system in Norway 150 of the 169 seats have zero electoral threshold.
Only 19 seats are actually subject to a 4% threshold giving smaller parties a incentive to merge, as being in the region of 4% can be a force multiplier for smaller political parties in our country while your vote isn't wasted if you have less then 4%.
Does that make sense?
So in Norway in our last parliamentarian election we had 10 political parties making it into our parliament.
Red had 4,7% of the national votes and got 8 seats, the liberals had 4,6% and also 8 seats.
8 our of the 169 seats is about 4,7% of the seats.
My own preferred party the greens had 3,9% of the votes but got 3 seats, or about 1,7% of the seats, yet our smallest party had 0,2% of the national votes (41,6% of the votes in their home region where they're fighting for a hospital accessible even in bad weather, and 12,7% in their home constituency as a whole) and also got 1 seat, or 1,69% of the seats with 0,2% of the national votes.
So while parties above 4% is pretty damned close to the correct proportionality of seats given their percentage of the votes things gets weird below that since smaller parties rely on concentrated regional support to get seats, meaning that they can potentially get seats with very few voters if said voters are located in certain constituencies.
Or if their voters are very spread out like the greens are you might struggle if you fail to make the 4% threshold.
We'd probably have 6 seats if we had 0,1% more votes.
Or twice as much as we have now.
Something that mobilize our voters.
But falling below 4% hasn't penalized us to the point where we don't have representation, we just didn't end up with enough to be relevant for coalition discussions this time around.
Does that make sense?
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@fruhlingsrolle7303 Our system is one with 150 seats distributed among 19 constituencies based not just on population but also other factors like land area, ensuring representation from rural areas.
Like the first past the post part of your system is intended to do.
And seats are distributed based on the proportion of the votes in each constituency that said party gets.
Then there's one extra seat pr constituency (the last 19 making our parliament 169 seats) that's reserved for parties with more then 4% of the votes and that's distributed based on the proportion of the votes the parties get at the national level, taking i to account what they already have from each of the 19 constituencies already, so if you have way less seats then you should based on your percentage of the votes you'll get some of these seats, if you have slightly more or exactly what you are meant to have you'll get non.
And since there's a 4% threshold those 19 seats are enough to ensure a high degree of proportionality.
Does all of that make sense to you?
In a system with no thresholds at all you end up with votes being spoiled at parties too small to get even a single seat, what happened in the Weimar republic.
If you have a threshold for all the seats you end up with just big parties and any party just below the threshold has their votes essentially spoiled making it really hard to get in for new parties.
Our system makes it easy to get into our parliament and get some representation, and potentially the option of becoming a king maker if your seat is the one splitting the difference between two coalitions.
But parties above the 4% threshold for the last 19 seats has a advantage and are more likely to be relevant in coalition negotiations while the margins have to be narrow indeed for smaller parties to end up in that situation, still it can happen.
So a party with just 1 seat is still relevant, even if that's one seat represents 0,2% of the population.
Indeed that party of 0,2% of the population actually managed to make the difference giving the parliament enough votes for a new tax on salmon farming recently that they wouldn't have without said party.
The party that helped our government to get into power (it's a minority goverment) is more left wing and wanted far higher taxes (45%) on salmon, something that the industry though would be crippling, the other side wanted no taxes, but with just the right combination they managed a moderate tax (25%) that the industry says they can live with even if they're not happy with a new tax.
(We have a tradition of taxing use of any natural resources within our territory, but salmon farmers where previously exempted for some reason, now they're not anymore, but they're also getting a compromise solution instead of a far left high tax similar to what the oil industry had to deal with, a tax that the fish farmers unlike the oil industry couldn't have dealt with as it would have lead to investments moving to other countries)
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@night6724 Anyway, Norway has 19 electoral circles, corresponding to "fylker" (counties) we used to have.
Each gets a number of seats in our parliament, like your states gets seats in your congress, not just based on their population, but actually favouring lower population electoral circles a bit (or in your case states).
As a result the smallest political party in our parliament actually got into our parliament with 0,3% of the votes, or 4 908 votes, taking a seat from the second biggest party in one of our lowest population electoral circles, and a new party formed as a reaction to plans to close a hospital (they're all public).
Since that would leave half the electoral circle in question cut of from any hospital at all when the weather is too bad to cross the mountain between that half and the closest hospital on the other side this party was formed and won a seat on their first try, costing the former second place party their seat.
At the same time my own political party recieved 3 seats with 3,9% of the votes, on of the highest ratios of voters pr representative of any political parties.
Our biggest party had a bit over twentysix percent of the votes and about twenty eight percent of the seats.
There's no lower limit to how many votes you need to get i to our parliament, although 19 of the 169 seats are reserved to political parties with more than 4% of the total votes at a national level.
I can go into more details if you're interested.
But the main point is, we're a democracy.
Yes, we're a constitutional monarchy, but we elect people in a way that ensures that all viewpoints are represented fairly.
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@night6724 As for a prime minister being elected by parliament and not directly by the people, that's actually give the people more representation and power then voting for him directly.
The reason is that you essentially get a similar effect to swing states but with far more tipping points where just a few votes makes a difference.
It's far easier to punish a prime minister doia bad job in a election where you vote for those that elect him then if you vote for him directly.
Because our elections are not binary, you don't 100% win or 100% lose, you get degrees of power for your political party depending on how much voters you have.
In the US if you get 12% of the votes there and all other parties get 11% or less of the votes you'll get 100% of the representatives from that state to the congress or electoral college etc.
So as long as you aren't that one voters that's the tipping point between having more or less votes then another party you have no agency.
In our system we have a tipping point for every single representative for every single political party.
And winning or losing depends on the overall combination of parties that gets a majority of the seats or not.
Every single one of those parties can punish a prime minister that doesn't behave.
Also, prime ministers don't rule alone.
They run cabinets with representatives from multiple political parties in a coalition, each one of them usually voting on what to do rather than the prime minister having power of his own.
And our parliament can cast a vote of no confidence at any time removing the prime minister from power replacing him with someone else in the process.
So instead of situations like in the US where the congress makes it impossible for a president to get a budget through and then punishes him and complains about him as if that's his fault (regardless of party affiliation) we just leave that to the parliament.
Indeed we've had situations where our prime ministers has had to work with the budgets proposed by other parties.
There's no gridlock, no blaming our prime minister.
If we don't like his budget proposal and another party propose another budget with more support in the parliament then that ends up winning and is what the prime minister has to work with.
Done and dusted.
And it's parliaments job to balance those budgets.
(A few years ago the conservatives had the prime minister, labour won their budget proposal, so we ran with a labour budget, then the conservatives and their coalition cabinet members had to work out the details of how to use that.
So a liberal minister of something (say education as a example) would have x amount of money budgeted by the parliament, but would then make a education budget of their own with no interference from the parliament.
That amount of money for education might be more or less then the prime minister planned in her budget.
There's no we don't like your budget come up with another one.
Just okay, that budget is good, but this one is better, use it, done and dusted.
And like I said, our biggest political party had 28 out of 169 seats in the last election, so no one party can get a budget through that no other party likes.
And even a budget proposal from a tiny party like mine (3,9% in the last election) can win if they get more votes then any other proportional.
Parliament can give the prime minister instructions.
Failing to carry them out can lead to being replaced.
Essentially our prime minister and his or her cabinet works on behalf of our parliament to run the country.
Our system leads to everything being compromises between different people with different ideas about the best solutions to a problem.
With different alliances on a case by case basis.
For instance take the Christian peoples party.
They're socially conservative, so not all that keen on gay marriages, abortion, genetic manipulation etc...
But they also believe in helping your neighbour, taking care of Gods creation etc.
So while they'll vote with the conservatives on some matters they'll often vote with labour and the socialists on issues like helping the poor both at home and abroad, taking good care of refugees etc since it's in their view a god given duty to do so.
And they also vote in favour of taking care of the environment, since in their view we're gods stewards of creation.
Unlike labour however they want private schools.
Labour wants the egalitarian equality of public schools, the conservatives believe in privatization being more effective both economically but also in terms of quality.
And the Christian peoples party wants that freedom of private schools to have a separate christian curriculum on top of the enforced government ones to instill Christian values, the liberals also wants private schools.
So the compromise is that private schools are allowed but making a profit on them keeps being banned then mafe legal again then banned etc depending on who's currently holding the upper hand in our parliament.
And yes, the government pays for private education.
All of this ensures that we have educational freedom without being exploited by anyone trying to make a profit on us, and we have equal opportunities for education of equal roughly quality.
About the same amount of money is used on everyone, but private schools have the freedom to use it differently.
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@night6724 Again, a parliamentarian system is far more democratic.
The reason why there's such conflict between different candidates within the US political parties is because you only have two with realistic chances of representation.
By contrast under our system Hilary and Sanders would be in two completely different political parties to begin with.
And people would vote for them *directly*.
Any political party here can propose a prime minister candidate.
It's then their job to get enough voters and coalition partners (and votes for said coalition partners) to get a majority in the parliament for their proposal for a new cabinet.
You don't have to be one of the biggest parties to become prime minister, just have the most support in parliament.
And that support is created by our votes.
We use a party list proportional system where you can rearrange the order of representatives in the party list.
Even adding people from other parties onto your list if you wish, removing people that's there etc.
And seats in each electoral circle is given to each list proportionally to the number of votes they got in that electoral circle.
And remember, we have 19 of them with between 3 and 21 seats.
In every single one of those electoral circles a few votes can make the difference between a seat going to one list or another.
And if enough people change their list then depending on those changes the representative sent in may change, and indeed like I mentioned at least in theory even be from a different political party.
Or a candidate may in some cases be listed on two lists, potentially splitting the votes for them between those two lists, but also giving them two possible avenues to be elected as either list may win seats.
And such alternative lists often win in local and regional elections, although that one party with 0,3% of the votes is the first time in many years that it happened at a national level (a labour party representative was also listed in another list called patient focus, all about that hospital they where about to lose, forming that list essentially created a new political party that won what had been a conservative seat in their electoral circle, the labour party kept the same number of seats as normal there, if that party had been the swing vote in our parliament between two possible cabinets she would have had the ability to fight for her hospital by trading that hospital for cabinet support for instance, being a king maker)
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@night6724 As a example of that agency we have I used to vote for the socialist left party in Norway, they never join into coalitions with the conservatives, only labour or they fight as a opposition party in the parliament.
Last time they where in a cabinet with the labour party the labour party didn't make much concessions to their coalition partners, behaving like bullies.
So I switched to voting for the green party.
A lot of people voted for other parties then the socialist left party in the next election.
The greens where willing to cooperate with the conservatives.
And other voters switched to red, who campaigned on being in opposition and not selling out to the labour party.
In essence we indirectly gave power to the conservatives, without voting in conservative representatives.
Labour actually grew as a party with more representatives in parliament due to getting more voters.
After all, they achieved their politics.
But their coalition partners didn't, so they lost the election.
Green political parties where strong in the parliament and the conservative relied on three other political parties, the liberals and christian peoples party both green parties that wants us to take good care of the environment, and the "process party" that's as gray as they get. so we (the environmental movement) got more work done under the conservatives then under labour despite the conservative party itself being pretty gray.
They're just better at making compromises.
So despite being left leaning politically I'm very much in favour of a conservative prime minister, as long as they do not enter a coalition with the progress party and enter coalitions with plenty of greener parties.
The end result might not always be my preferred one, but the overall direction is likely to be better from my point of view.
Other parties on other political spectrums will have similar trade offs when picking a party to vote for.
But yeah, we very much vote for prime ministers, even if we don't do so directly.
For you guys it would mean that you could vote for someone other than Hilary or Trump.
And someone who genuinely has support in the population would win.
My guess would be a moderate right leaning person back then given the political climate in the US instead of Trump.
Since the person in question would have support from both the left and right, given that Hilary wasn't popular enough.
Trump and John McCain would probably be in different political parties.
And my guess is that McCain would have won that election with some support from the left, assuming that both Hilary and Sanders would probably fail to get enough support for their own candidacies in that election.
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