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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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What I would like to see in this type of analysis is how much each measure could improve either fairness or security. Otherwise, it's a grab bag of ideas, some of which may do nothing, while a few could potentially even be harmful.

That said, I'll argue against a specific one because I often see it presented as an unalloyed good while, in reality it's a trade off between two sets of negative consequences:

• seats in legislative bodies should be allocated on the basis of proportional representation as is done in some countries (e.g. a party whose candidates receive 5% of the votes gets 5% of the seats)

This actually works in the opposite way than how it's intended to work, ie. it gives an disproportional amount of power to some parties. Consider an election between three parties: A, B, and C. Both A and B obtain 48% of votes. C obtains 4%. Now, in order to form a government, either A or B needs to find a way to persuade C to join them, which means that party C holds, in this moment an incredible amount of power. Actually, it will continue to hold, despite accounting for only 4% of voters, an incredible amount of power because it can, at any moment, decide to break up with either A or B, leading to the break up of the government.

There's also another problem, in that assembling coalitions out of smaller parties necessarily entails going against what each party's voters voted for.

Re-using the A, B, and C example, imagine that party A is pro-X while B is anti-X, while those who voted for party C don't care about X. If party C were to assemble a government with one of the other parties, it will add its weight to the pro- or anti-X side, thereby betraying its voters' "don't care about X" stance.

(Note that I'm basically summarizing Karl Popper's thinking on this problem).

Personally, I think the two-party system works better in the US because of its dynamic, diverse culture. I would be curious if it would introduce some dynamism into other countries.