Reply to post: Re: PR is the special olympics of electoral systems - you get elected just for turning up.

Re: PR is the special olympics of electoral systems - you get elected just for turning up.

"PR though has severe limitations of its own"

There are about a dozen variations of "PR" and some of them attempt to address the issue you raise by having electorate seats (FPTP) and list seats, Voters cast 2 votes (one for the electorate and one for national voting) with the list seats being used to "top up" numbers of seats to match the overall party vote (ie, if party X wins 20% of the electorate seats but gets 30% of the vote then it will get enough list seats to bring them up to to 30% overall representation in parliament.

See MMP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation ) for an example which usually works fairly well, as does the AMS variant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additional_Member_System) used in Soctland and Wales. Note that they require a 5% threshold to gain a list seat as thresholds below that figure usually result in unstable governments (This is a particular problem in Italy, which has a 2% threshold)

Despite various moaning about non-representavtive govt whenever XYZ group in the UK doesn't get its own way, the EU parliament has tended to work relatively well. If they'd just get rid of the massive inefficiencies caused by having to pack up and move to Strasborg for 1 day per week (which all by itself shows that France has undue influence over the EU) then things might run more smoothly(*).

(*) Some may argue that the disruption caused by having to move to Strasborg and back each week keeps the EU parliament from being able to be too effective. This follows the Heinlein school of thought on govts (that they work best when no group has an absolute majority, because for the most part they don't do anything at all)