AIUI, the Lib/Lab pact was like this; it involved a minority Labour government rather than a coalition government.

I’ve also been told that the Labour party constitution forbids it from forming a coalition government anyway.

For the Senate, you have a choice between ranking by hand as many of the roughly 100 candidates as you like, or picking one of about a dozen pre-assigned party lists to vote for. Most people choose the latter.

If I remember correctly (I’m too lazy to look it up now), Australia has some sort of god-awful system where you have to rank each and every candidate (or party?) for the Senate, when there are tens of candidates. Parties then offer “lists” – sets of ordinal rankings – and rather than making one’s own choices among all 60 candidates or so, one can choose from among 150 pre-registered lists instead. Having 100+ candidates for Governor here in California wasn’t that bad, but only because I only had to understand what about 5 of them stood for. If we’d had an STV vote, I’d have researched perhaps another 5 or 10, and ranked about 10. I wouldn’t want to have to rank all 100+.

As a sidelight, I suspect the LD leadership will be rather dismayed to find just how much of their vote goes to the Conservatives under STV.

I agree Soru that STV won’t help the really small parties, and may exaggerate their problems. The main difference it would make would be to the LDP.

Andrew, the Australian system of having STV for the House of Commons (or its equivalent) and PR for the house of review (in this case the Lords) has been (at least for the last 30 years) reasonably effective in balancing the need for stable government with the ideal of minority representation. It would probably work as well as anything in the UK, at least as a foundation.

Instead of the Greens saying ‘we have 1% of the vote and no MPs’, it would be ‘we have 10% of the first preference votes and no MPs’.

STV avoids many of the perceived problems of true PR, but also doesn’t have many of it’s merits.

soru

A lot of people I spoke to about the election weren’t happy about either party – they want more of a plurality of choices. Labour state that they have a mandate – yet their election missives warned people that if they voted for any minority party then the Tories would get in – this is negative campaigning at the end of the day.

I think that people have to decide what they want – STV makes more sense if you consider the MP the important person – in which case I would favour a reduction in the strength of parties as they’re far too powerful now. PR makes more sense if you want a purely party based system. Perhaps a mix with multiple houses would be the best approach – although I know some people feel this would lead to less effective government.

I don’t want to be forced to appear as if I support a party if they are my second choice – if some party gets in I want them to know that they were just considered the lesser of two evils and to govern based upon this rather than claiming some sort of mandate.

I think you are underestimating the boost STV would give minor parties (we’re talking AV here right?). It does this by reducing the cost of voting for them. Now you can vote Respect because you want a party further left than Labour, but still have your vote count for Labour when Respect are eliminated. Thus you don’t split the vote by going more extreme. This makes voting for minority parties more attractive, and would have an effect in some areas. Obviously, if voters were tactical, they could prevent extreme groups being elected by having their vote end-up with some less extreme group they still disagree with (i.e. Tory votes ending up with Labour), but I don’t think voters are that sophisticated.

Of course the real question is where do second preference Tory and Lib Dem votes go when they’re eliminated? If Tories and Labour go Lib Dem then I presume the number of Lib Dem seats skyrockets, but who knows where Lib Dems voters will go?

Can you point to any constituency in England where STV would have changed the result from one of the three big parties to a smaller party, even allowing for some change in voting behaviour? (I’ll restrict this to England, because I wouldn’t be surprised if STV helped the SNP and PC in some parts. Obviously the effect on Northern Ireland would be irrelevant for these debates.) As far as I can tell, STV would make it somewhat harder for UKIP to win a seat, and effectively impossible for the BNP or Respect or Veritas to win one, assuming the major parties did the right thing and didn’t send any preferences their way. There are dozens of seats the LDP could expect to pick up from both Lab and Con, but it’s hard to find seats where any other change could be expected.

In Israel’s case, the problem is that there are 15 to 20 (or more?) parties in the Knesset, that the Big Two consistently get about 1/3 each of the seats, and that there are several mid-sized parties, none of which alone is usually enough to make a government in coalition with one of the major parties.

In the UK, under STV the Conservatives and Labour would likely be receiving between about 30% to 35% of the vote. If due to second-choice votes and the vagaries of the electoral system, one or the other were usually able to form a government alone or in coalition with similarly-minded parties or occasionally the LDP, things wouldn’t change much. However, if the share of the vote, or more importantly, the seats, which the big parties received under STV eroded, the parties filling the gap wouldn’t be just the LDP, despite Kennedy’s fantasies. There would be a plethora of parties with mutually incompatible platforms, making it rather difficult to form a coalition, and rather easy to break one.

Personally, I would have the Lords elected on a PR list basis for the same terms as the commons, and keep the MPs representing individual local constituencies.

No a system where a party gaining only a minority of votes is given total legislative power sounds much more democratic to me. Seriously, if that’s your objection, that you don’t like the idea of representatives being forced to reach compromises without monolithic blocs holding power, then surely a Presidential system is better. Otherwise you’re just arguing against democracy – if the coalition partners allow the policies of an extreme group in return for their support then that is politics, and, I’m afraid, democracy.

More at http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/public

If Britain moved to full PR all sorts of things could happen, but it’s hard to see how moving to STV would make any of these other parties (from Respect to the BNP) more powerful than say the SNP already is.

Any ungovernability problems are already there in the current system. Imagine a scenario (not too implausible as a 2009/10 result I’d think) where Labour drops, say, 60 seats to the Tories, and Kennedy holds firm on him promise to not enter a coalition. What happens then? I imagine we muddle through with minority Labour government. But that will be just as unstable as anything STV might bring about.