[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