[strongvigilance]

Perhaps this is partly due to the multitude of parties, which in turn is due to the nature of the electoral system?

In a two party system, a lot of people feel like they are voting for the lesser of two evils, so negative campaigning is presumably far more helpful to your cause.

If you have to compete with multiple parties for votes, you need to offer more than simply criticism of the opposition.

[dimitar]

There are a lot of people protesting the current multiparty proportional system in Bulgaria. They don't like the coalitions, the lists of candidates as opposed to individuals, the indirect election of prime minister (biggest coalition appoints one).

However I am very skeptical that changing the political party structure changes much. Aren't in the end the Republicans and Democrats just two big coalitions of movements that tolerate their coalition partners? If you had a multiparty system you'll get a liberal party, a conservative party, a far-right party and maybe a libertarian party. And they'll form long-run coalitions just like they do in multiparty countries.

In a multi-party system you are still probably voting for the lesser of two or more evils. In Bulgaria between 4 and 7 factions in parliament so its definitely a multi-party systems, although parties like to place themselves on a left-right spectrum and ally accordingly.

Did it have attack ads in all the elections? Absolutely! Ads target everyone, including smaller parties, to get votes from them and create guilt-by-association to their actual or potential coalition partners. You obviously don't target you partners, so thats why a right-left divide seems to appear... so you can claim you get a two-party system, you just have the primaries during the actual election.

[Pxtl]

Hey, Bulgaria, want to trade?

Here in Canada, the government goes to the party with the most seats, and each seat is handed out in a small regional FPTP election. What this means is that our elections go through two first-past-the-post filters instead of one. In 2008, the Conservatives faced all the other parties aligning against them to throw them out and, through a trick of procedure, they managed to keep control of the government. They were elected with only 38% percent of the vote - the minority ruled as a majority.

[alanctgardner2]

Lots of people unhappy with the Conservatives seem to have this idea that a minority government means they have no mandate to rule, etc. Personally, doesn't it represent the country better to have multiple parties with non-majority representation? If you keep winnowing down until you give most of the power to one group which the majority of people don't mind, they can push through whatever legislation they want with impunity. I would rather have the population represented proportionally by MPs who share their views, so that legislation lives or dies by what proportion of the general populace supports it.

As an (extreme) example, you could have parties with different opinions on disjoint issues, like abortion (A) and legalizing marijuana (B). You could then have four parties, AB, A'B, AB', A'B', and some of the populace would vote for each of them based on their support of those issues. If you require that some party 'wins' and gets a majority, people have to work to rank the parties by least distate, by preferring some issues over others. With a whole bunch of minority parties (ideally 2^n, with n binary issues), every voter could actually encode their whole stance on a set of issues, and bills on that issue would pass or fail proportional to the support of the populace.

My point being, FPTP might not be the best at the riding level, but there's no reason to mess with which party becomes 'the government'. The country is well served by the existing Parliamentary system. The Senate, on the other hand...

[pyrocat]

Mixed-Member Proportional Representation

[JonSkeptic]

Agreed. I think having more than two parties to choose from would resonate with many Americans.

Currently we have only to choose between a douche and a turd. It would be nice to at least get different shades of douche and turd to pick, and who knows, we may get to pick something that isn't horrible.

[kghose]

Unfortunately there is no good solution. I followed Indian politics for a while, and the danger of multi-party elections is the dreaded 'coalition' where a bigger, more mainstream party, in an effort to come into power, will align with a smaller, more extreme/fringe party. In this manner extremist views start to gain ground, and gain influence beyond what the simple vote gave them.

[pgeorgi]

One of the reasons why in Germany there's a 5% quorum to enter parliament. The only downside is that your vote is lost if you happened to vote for one such party.

That could be fixed by a preferential system similar to what's in Australia (if the first pick is <5%, take the second, ... repeat until all votes are accounted for in a party that's actually present).

The current power dynamics are in favor of large parties (people voting for the a "safe" party that is the closest to them, instead of risking to lose their vote), so it's unlikely to change.

[ronaldx]

Indian politics - at least the Lok Sabha - follows a FPTP system which largely forces politicians to coalesce into a two-party system (in this case, a two-coalition system).

In most of Europe, PR systems tend to avoid permanent coalition.

[Svip]

That being said; most European governments are formed by coalitions. But they are seldom the same. And of course, PR is not perfect, there will be some coalitions where small fringe parties do get a larger say than they should. But is not very common.

In Denmark, often we form minority governments (that is a government formed from fewer mandates than half the parliament), but usually with a 'support party'. This support party is sometimes ignored, because they are likely too fringe to have the actual government, and thus reaching across the aisle is necessary.

[jbooth]

Doesn't the game theory for this sort of always point to the last, smallest member to join the coalition gets to make the most demands relative to it's size?

If it's get my party with it's 4 seats on board or fail and hold new elections, I can make demands way in excess of what those 4 seats should get me, right? And then once the government's installed, why not just hold them hostage again?

I mean, assuming your parliamentarians have no sense of shame. Maybe that's my bias from watching American legislators.

[ronaldx]

In some circumstances, yes, but in general, no: game theory doesn't say that.

If the coalition's large parties have alternative small parties to choose from, the smallest party has to compete for entrance with the other smallest parties.

This 'reverse auction' makes it possible that a small party would end up with net 0 power when the right to govern is taken into account (could be itself negative).

An agreement that excludes a new election from being called should be possible at this point (e.g. Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition agreement).

The fact that we normally observe smallest members having outsized power might be explained by, e.g.: 1) Coalition in a two/three-party Westminster-style system tends to mean the third party is essential and doesn't have competition 2) Regression to the mean: we would observe this anyway if power in coalition was independent of party size.

[Svip]

Some of the support parties have tried that, and have been shut out, so the government reaches across the aisle on certain laws. Our previous government tend to do the budget with the opposition party rather than their support party, for these reasons. And the same with our current government.

The only problem is that if the government cannot find an agreement across the aisle, they have to go to their fringe support party. So the opposition always have to wager this when negotiating. If they don't want to find an agreement with the government, the result might be worse than a compromise. So it is an advantage to the government in negotiating positions sometimes.

[Ras_]

Makes sense. In Finland the only constant between parliaments seems to be the Swedish People's Party. One or two cabinet seats since 1979 (support ranging from 4.2 to 5.5%). They basically exist to maintain the Swedish language's position in Finland. Since their demands are predictable and relatively trivial, they end up in all combinations, even the current mongrel six-party coalition.

[disgruntledphd2]

@jbooth - possibly, it sometimes depends on the smaller party. In Irish politics, typically coalitions are formed with one large party and another smaller one. In some cases (a rightwing party known as the progressive democrats) they have been very effective, while in others (the Greens) they have been completely pointless.

Normally, the smaller parties take the blame for the decisions of the larger one, which is a facet of irish politics which I have never been able to understand.

[kfk]

If we stay in Europe, you can see what you just described in the last 70ish year of Italian history.

[devx]

That seems to happen anyway in US. A lot of extremists, especially in the Republican party.

[brazzy]

But what Germany's parties are offering instead of criticism is generic, meaningless feel-good slogans. Better than smear campaigns, to be sure, but still rather disappointing.

[sentenza]

The true problem is that most parties flat-out refuse to state a vision for the future of the country. This election season it has become so bad that "having a plan for the future" and "fringe party" have become synonymous.

All parties that have a chance of being in a government coalition only talk about the past, the now, or nothing at all. It's a declaration of intellectual and ideological bankrupcy.