[AndrewDucker]

I know how the system works.

I don't consider FPTP to be democratic, because it disenfranches large swathes of the population and means that you can rule the country with a massive majority despite only getting 34% of the vote.

[milesrout]

FPP does not disfranchise anyone. If you vote for someone that loses their seat or wins in a landslide your vote still counts.

[defrost]

Modern democracies moved on past creaky old FPTP and its strong tendency to produce two party non representive majorities.

  The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting

[milesrout]

Novelty isn't inherently good. The word "modern" is the most overused word in the English language on this forum. Every new Javascript framework is "modern" and by implication good.

There is nothing non-representative about FPP. It has nothing to do with parties. It is a non-party-based system. There is no a priori reason why it is "more democratic" for the proportions of seats in Parliament when split by parti to correspond to the proportions of votes for candidates from those parties. You can declare that you define "democraticness" to be a measure of the extent to which that is true, but there is no logical reason for them to correspond and no good argument that they should.

It is assumed as axiomatically good and you work backwards from there. Party-proportionality is democracy, therefore list-based proportional representation is more democratic. Well only if you redefine "democratic" first to mean "proportional", which isn't what anyone understood it to mean in the past and isn't the way the term is commonly used in any other context.

[defrost]

Every voting system has flaws, no voting system is perfect.

FPTP has more flaws than other systems and almost inevitably leads to less representation in democracies by promoting two party blocs that barely differ over successive election iterations. It's a political form of Hotelling's Law coupled with discrete dynamics.

As has happened to the USofA despite a strong opposition to party politics by the founders and crafters of the current system who failed a few centuries back to understand the dynamics of a scheme that didn't scale well.

[milesrout]

FPP doesn't cause less representation at the local level, it has more. Party list-based systems have no local representation at all. MMP has it, at least, but has the same kingmaker issue. They assume implicitly that democracy is about competition between unified ideological factions which is not inherent to the concept at all. There is more to life than ideology.

FPP prioritises local representation and majoritarian results: if constituencies are arranged properly, then swings in voter sentiment are amplified. Relatively small changes in voter satisfaction can produce hundred seat majorities at Westminster. That is on purpose. It is part of why governments are accountable.

If you compare it to Germany, where there is enormous dissatisfaction with the government, they held an election, and mostly the same parties will be in government again, because of coalition politics.

The alternative to Germany is the situation here in New Zealand. Culturally still two main parties, but instead of voter sentiment deciding which of them wins, instead it is the choice of a minor kingmaker party that can pick a winner based on who gives it the most concessions. That is arguably better, but still not a good situation compared to a simple majoritarian system. We had one of those. The country was better-run under FPP than under MMP.

Westminster proves quite wrong the common claim that the system encourages two parties, by the way. The main parties have a lesser percentage of votes between them than they have ever had. It is just not true that two parties inevitably dominate.

[HPsquared]

One's vote physically being counted is not the same as having any representation in Parliament, let alone government. It's a system of artificial consensus. Managed democracy, in other words. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's very arbitrary.

[milesrout]

An MP represents everyone in his constituency regardless of whether they all voted for him. That is his job. He represents the constituency. It is quite false to say that someone lacks representation in Parliament because his preferred candidate was unsuccessful. Everyone's preferred candidates obviously can't all be successful! That wouldn't be democracy.

>let alone government

The idea that everyone is entitled to have his preferred local candidate become a minister of the Crown is truly absurd.

>artificial consensus ... Managed democracy ... arbitrary

I don't know what this means.