Increasingly sympathetic to @hamandcheese ‘s frequent argument that elections actually have a dual mandate to 1) represent popular will and 2) produce a clearly-defined set of leaders, and there’s a trade of between these, and thus that FPTP is maybe way better than people think.
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Like one common problem in parliamentary/proportional systems is incoherent coalitions, failures to form governments, etc. can happen in FPTP as wel but it’s bias towards fewer parties and lopsided win margins makes it way less frequent, and that’s probably good.
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Of course at some extreme margin you can just cancel elections and apoint a dictator and that also generates clear leadership. But it sacrifices democratic legitimacy. So proportional/districted represented diff points along a line of roughly constant trade offs.
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The critiques of districting can also be made against proportionality vs. direct democracy, but direct democracy doesn’t produce leaders and would be chaotic: people recognize this!
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So we are all engaged in trying to balance the *competing*, rather than complimentary, demands of “acquiring democratic legitimacy” and “producing an internally coherent government.”
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Replying to @lymanstoneky
I think different sorts of proportional systems have different problems, though. Set the threshold too low, and it's too easy for small parties to get in the legislature, which makes it hard to form coalitions (e.g., Israel uses 3.25%, compared to 5% in Germany & NZ).

Dec 15, 2019 · 4:52 AM UTC

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Replying to @davidbaron @lymanstoneky
So I think 5% thresholds work reasonably well and 3.25% ones don't. Given that you could argue that lower thresholds produce a more representative/democratic result, I guess you could frame those as two points along your continuum, though. I'm a fan of the ~5% one...