or, Labour and Tories make a coalition for massive majority... oh wait, that would destroy the illusion that there is any difference between them whatsoever... who ever heard of a half'n'half of coke and pepsi, that's just crazy talk. There must be choice!

So there were two twats then there were 3 twats and then this twat, what a fucking twat SHUT UP TWAT!!!!!. downvote

There's an element of this that I keep finding interesting. The supposed problem with a minority government is that the out-of-power parties get an effective veto on policies the plurality party tries to present.

Most people present this as a situation that wouldn't last long, and that the new PM would just call for another election, rather than try to muddle through.

Well, since we seem to have decided in our country that any party with fewer than 60 seats in the Senate (or doesn't hold the White House) is effectively a "minority government" due to it being vetoed by the opposition party, this seems like a permanent condition here in the US.

Simple question -- if this is considered untenable in the UK, why do we act like it's a good thing in the US?

Or am I missing some fundamental difference between our systems?

*british

Adding video to channels (British) - requested by NetRunner.

.

@NetRunner The systems are very different. The US at the federal level elections have more of a winner takes all and the elections are set every four years. When a US president is voted in they have more executive powers. Whereas in within a multi-party parliamentary system they need the confidence of the house (the majority of those voted in from different areas around the country to pass legislation) to continue their term as leader. So in a parliamentary system in a minority government situation what happens more times than not is they will hold a non-confidence motion (meaning minority parties don't have confidence in the ruling party) and their will be a new election. It's a different system of checks and balances. I know that was the way the senate in the US was set up but it doesn't serve much of it's original purpose anymore. The president is more like an elected king for four years. Being from Canada unfortunately we've been moving in that same direction of the US.

Sometimes it's a good thing to have a minority parliament.

@geo321, ahh, I remember hearing about that. Aren't confidence votes automatically triggered by some motion failing? I guess I'm not sure how the parliamentary system isn't elected kingship itself. If you can't stay leader without an uncontested majority in the legislature, and there's no further effective check on your power then doesn't a majority government pretty much get to do as they please?

I feel the US is actually the complete opposite of an elected king. Yes, the president can do some things unilaterally, but everything major needs to be passed through Congress. Majorities of 3/5ths generally don't happen, and there's no "confidence vote" to just trigger a new election when it becomes obvious that the minority party won't let the majority do anything.

Obama can barely get anything to happen as it is, and he has one of the largest majorities in decades behind him.

That's a crazy-strong status quo bias that I just don't see happening in the parliamentary system.

Hung? Shouldn't it be Hanged?

It should be hanged.

Hung makes me think of a parliament full of huge dicks; wait a minute.

That parliament is certainly well hung...

>> ^NordlichReiter:

Hung? Shouldn't it be Hanged?
It should be hanged.
Hung makes me think of a parliament full of huge dicks; wait a minute.


No,

Proportional representation FTW!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_Representation

We have this in the Netherlands and we haven't had a single party majority in decades. There are always coalitions. It can make it harder to govern, but at least people have a real choice when voting, unlike in America for example, where there is not that much difference between the parties on many important topics.

@cybrbeast, we have proportional representation here too, and it doesn't help 3rd parties in the least.

I'm of two minds about the "not much difference between the parties" thing. On the one hand, I find there to be horrendously extreme differences between the parties. One wants to try to deal with health care costs and the environment, the other doesn't want to change anything. One wants to try to get our budget balanced, one wants to just cut taxes without doing anything to spending. One wants to make sure everyone -- including people on the terror watch list -- can buy untraceable guns, the other thinks maybe we should make sure that there's a good way to trace guns to their owners.

On the other hand, there's a lot of bipartisan submission to corporate influence, and an abject refusal to ever say things as left wing as you'd hear coming from the mouths of right-wing European parties on topics like jobs, health care, environment, etc. It's still newsworthy when a politician just says "government can do good things for people".

Mostly though, I don't think there's some simple electoral fix that would break the sway corporations hold in this country. We've essentially set up some deep legal precedent that what in normal circumstances would be called bribery, is instead classified as protected political speech (i.e. campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving door job offers).

I think some tweaks could be done to help 3rd parties get into the mix, namely lowering the barriers that have been erected around getting on the ballot, plus mandatory instant runoff voting. That could pretty quickly turn us to a multi-party system. I just doubt it'd make any difference since you still need 3/5ths majority to overcome minority obstruction in the Senate, and it does nothing to keep the new parties from being subverted by corporate influence, which is really what's driving the similarity between the parties here.

@NetRunner

No you don't have proportional representation. Read the wiki again:

"PR is often contrasted to plurality voting systems, such as those commonly used in the United States"

@cybrbeast ahh, I did look at it too quickly. We generally call our system for electing members of the House "proportional representation", not "plurality voting". I stopped at that sentence in particular because I misread it to confirm my assumption that it was what we had in the US.

I do like that way of doing things better, but we're still at least partially under the illusion that we're an alliance of 50 smaller semi-independent states, and not a single country under a single government. There's still a lot of desire here for geographic regions being able to choose their representation at a national level, though I do think that's of questionable value.

That said, I'm not sure how that would change things, other than to make us even more hamstrung by that 3/5ths majority requirement. Obama only got 53% of the popular vote, but ended up with a much larger majority in the House and Senate, and still he's stymied by opposition.

I think that 3/5ths majority thing has got to go, or we're never going to get any kind of change happening here.