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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Having lived in a country with Proportional Vote, that's exactly it in my experience: all those other, mathematically-rigged, parliamentarian allocation systems are not broken Democracy, they're subversions of Democracy that twist what is supposedly the will of the voters to achieve some other objective (generally we're told it's "Stability", which curiously always end us as a power duopoly of parties whose politicians have to worry about getting votes far less than they would otherwise, and which are easilly corrupted by those with lots of money).
Democracy isn't broken, it has however been subverted to control it in most of the West, very deeply so in some cases like the US.
The US didn't "subvert it", they're just running a pre-alpha version that never worked and was built for entirely different hardware.
Because ultimately all representative democracy is game design. Democracy isn't majority rule, it's majority rule tempered by a lot of pre-existing agreements and ongoing compromises.
Very representative systems have a lot of advantadges, but they also have different issues. Coalitions can be hard to sustain, manifestos and programs aren't expected to see implementation. People argue, and they do have a point, that an overly fragmented legislative doesn't represent popular will, since the policy implemented by coalitions necessarily will be mismatched to every option people voted for. It's also true that in extreme cases you end up with systems where people run as an audition to get a job in the ruling coalition, rather than to push an agenda.
So yeah, ultimately all electoral systems are constantly being gamed by both politicians and voters. That's just how politics work. But within that we can fine tune all these systems for optimal outcomes, and I do think that a legislative that genuinely needs to trade and deal and compromise is going to be more functional and less prone to extremism than direct majoritarian rule, where there are no checks beyond the other powers. I think even a system like the French would be a big improvement for both the US and UK systems, but it's probably only applicable in the UK, where there is already a multiparty system. The US is so entrenched that at this point you probably need a full reinvention of their entire constitution. The thing was always a first draft at best anyway.
From my experience living in a country with Proportional Vote, one with First Past The Post and one with something in between (multiple representatives per electoral circle) my conclusion is that Democracy works best with variety and frequent change - you don't want Stability, because that just entrenches some people in control of the State and inevitably leads to frequent abuse of that power for personal upside maximisation, including via outright corruption, as well as the steady takeover of the various mechanisms of the State (most notably the subversion of the supposedly independent Pillar Of Democracy which is the Judicial System, something you see reaching its natural outcome right now in the US).
Change and many eyes with many conflicting interests and a real likelihood of reaching power are the best way to delay and even undo the natural subversion of the State by the kind of people who seek power - which happens in all systems, not just autocratic ones - whilst the highly stable "Two Party Systems" in supposed Democracies are barely better than dictatorships in their resilience to the rotting of the State from the inside.
Proportional Vote, which isn't at all Mathematically rigged for "stability" is the best system I've seen so far at keeping the politicians in power from pillaging and subverting the State, mostly because they fear both their coalition partners (Government there is always by coalition) finding it out and using it for political advantage (by loudly bringing down government and triggering new elections in order to capture more votes) and that the next government might very well be a wholly different coalition whose politicians are not "people like them" and would just love to catch and bring to Justice any funny business done by the previous guys.
In places with two dominant parties that alternate in power, the politicians of both those parties make lots of noise for the audience simulating deep differences but often are mates and frequent the same social circles and even when they're not there's generally on subjects like Corruption a "gentleman's agreement" of "I don't go after you in my turn and you don't go after me in your turn".
Not even PV systems are immune to crooked politicians but they certainly seem way more resilient to their actions and even much more capable of self-healing before the rot is too far along.
There are a good couple of decades of Italian politics that would no align with that.
Honestly, all that is fairly misinformed and superficial. Cross-checks in politics are hard to design and very susceptible to details. I just don't think we disagree enough on the fundamental (i.e. FPTP with no adjustments is an outright bad system) to be worth getting caught in the weeds. If I'm gonna argue I'd rather spend the time arguing with someone I actually disagree with :)