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Transnational Thursday for March 28, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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It's basically a product of the system. When you have governments consisting of coalitions between parties and when elected representatives are reliant on the party for support (particularly in PR systems where the MPs are not really dependent on having the support of some precise geographical one-MP constituency but larger and more inchoate electoral districts), the only way you can get the business of government done is those parties agreeing on a governmental program and then making sure no-one defects, since if defection is allowed, there's too much of a risk that parties start trying to maneuver to get things on the program they don't like busted (ie. even if they don't formally vote against some law they "allow" a sufficient number of MPs required to get it scuppered to vote against it or so on).

Whether such a system is better than, for instance, the American system, is of course a question on opinion. There are probably more important things to consider than the precise methods of representative democracy whichever country chooses.