[dkjaudyeqooe]

No, he's complaining that minority parties can join with the opposition to form a majority and consequently bring down the government (this can happen when government forms a minority government or relies on minority parties to form a government).

A shocking example of the perils of democracy.

[Taniwha]

if the minority parties work together with the opposition to form a majority representing a majority of the public surely that's a great example of real democracy in action, it may be a 'peril' to the governing party .... but at that point they represent a minority of the populous - this is not 'shocking' this is how a democratic country should behave

I live in New Zealand we have a proportional representative voting system (MPP), since we changed we've had coalitions and minority governments .... but we haven't had dysfunction or anarchy, largely I think because our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected

[Adverblessly]

The problem is not that the minority parties can cooperate with the opposition to bring down the current government, that's indeed a good thing. The problem is that every coalition in recent years has been so narrow that any individual party in the coalition, no matter how small, is still large enough to bring down the coalition on their own.

And my point in general was not that proportional represntation is bad because it has this specific failure mode, but rather that our political climate has put us in the situation where the failure mode happens consistently, and so the real problem democracies are facing (in my opinion) are the factors that lead to this situation rather than specifically the voting system (which at best is a contributing factor).

> our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected

Ours know that going beyond the pale won't cause them any problems, especially for the smaller parties ;)