[raxxorraxor]

Democratic or undemocratic are always subjective terms. For me personally, the level of indirection is a problem. This problem was known since the inception and the reason why the subsidiarity principle was underlined. Sadly, that doesn't seem to apply for important issues like chat control. Imagine accountability on a communal level. We wouldn't even see this crap.

You cannot just add 100 layers of indirection and call it as democratic as direct representatives of your smallest communal voting unit. Any mandate in more indirect position should become weaker if the only metric is indeed democracy.

[bluecalm]

I agree. Additionally systems where it's really vote for parties and not for people from your region results in elected officials being more loyal to the party than to the people. It would be significantly better if every region voted for their representatives. As it is if you don't belong to a party that gets 5% (or w/e it in your country) you will not be representing your voters even if you win in your area. Who runs in a given region is often decided by a centralized party leadership anyway. The people not only don't get to vote on issues but they can't even elect someone to represent them - just a party official designated to a given region.

[iknowstuff]

If you’re gonna have districts you gotta have MMP voting with a second party vote to preserve proportional representation

[dragonwriter]

Proportionality is always approximate, and you can have proportionality without party votes by having multimember districts with a system like STV, with the degree of proportionality dependent on district size.

Now, with what I think of as probably the ideal manageable district sizes for voters (5-7 members) that is fairly chunky proportionality, so you might still want to do MMP to reduce underrepresentation of geographically diffuse minority positions.

OTOH, there are places which have STV (usually for a whole body elected at large, but you could do the same thing in districts for a larger body) with 20+ seats in a single constituency, and if you go that big per district, MMP is less necessary.

[hopelite]

You got right to it with the “100 layers of indirection”. I like calling it democratic homeopathy, just with slow arsenic poisoning.