Why does proportional representation in Parliament fail?

Some feel that proportional representation of multiple parties ensures that all opinions are represented, but the parties are still too coarse-grained and oligarchic to offer voters what they want.

This example from France. A large majority of the French public are supportive of an expansive government and an expansive social welfare system, yet the Left parties have often been torn apart by factionalism, and have consistently under-performed since the establishment of the Fifth Republic.

Honestly, the prospects are bleak. There is still a significant left constituency, but the political left is fragmented, with no force able to take the leadership — neither La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon nor the Greens nor the Socialist Party, which has lost much of its credibility — although many forces still believe that they are entitled to claim a leading role. It’s quite an inextricable situation, in an institutional system that is still governed by the presidential election, with no proportional representation, which doesn’t help us.

However, I must say that when French people are interviewed about their values and expectations, not just on economic matters but also on cultural or ecological issues, there appears to be some fertile ground for left-wing and even radical ideas. The main problem lies with the current parties and their leaders: perhaps it is a little unfair to put it like that, but there is also a lot of truth in it. We have a real problem of political supply, rather than political demand, with the French left. Even five years after Hollande’s disastrous term, the period of reconstruction that is necessary may be long.

The same point is often made about Hungary: everyone hates Fidesz, but Fidesz has never faced well-organized, well-lead competition. The other parties are deeply flawed and fail to inspire the Hungarian public.

In Italy, the government was controlled by the Christian Democrats for more than 40 years. The left-leaning political parties could not organize themselves into a winning coalition, nor could they adjust their policies to become more popular. For the Italians looking for a left-of-center coalition to win power, there was nothing but disappointment for decades. There was nothing the people of Italy could do to fix the problem that the main Left parties had leadership that was either corrupt or incompetent.

Greece, Spain, and Italy have in recent years seen turmoil in their party systems, as the old parties have lost ground and newer, more populist, more angry parties gained ground. But the total number of parties remains small, so the options available to voters remains limited.

Nor do any of these systems aim to merely reflect the will of the voter, since most political participants understand that protecting the “liberal” in “liberal democracy” means putting some “checks and balances” in place which can protect against extremists. In particular, most such political systems try to weed out fringe parties by enforcing minimum cutoffs that a party must get, otherwise it is not offered any representation in Parliament:

In Poland's Sejm, Lithuania's Seimas, Germany's Bundestag and New Zealand's House of Representatives, the threshold is 5 percent (in Poland, additionally 8 percent for a coalition of two or more parties submitting a joint electoral list and in Lithuania, additionally 7 percent for coalition). However, in New Zealand, if a party wins a directly elected seat, the threshold does not apply.

The small number of parties that gain representation leaves the representation of voter’s opinions coarse-grained, a problem that is made worse by the rule that every legislator must vote in lockstep with their party:

In R. Kent Weaver's book Are Parliamentary Systems Better?, he writes that an advantage of presidential systems is their ability to allow and accommodate more diverse viewpoints. He states that because "legislators are not compelled to vote against their constituents on matters of local concern, parties can serve as organizational and roll-call cuing vehicles without forcing out dissidents."

Furthermore, in most of these systems it is rare for one party to win an outright majority, and so the leaders of the parties need to sit down and negotiate a coalition of parties who will govern. The public has no voice in the construction of these coalitions. Which ministries will be given to which party is something that the party leaders work out behind closed doors.

The Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte lead the VVD party (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, a center-right party) through a long era in power, winning the election in 2010 and forming the first government ever lead by the VVD (and the first liberal party in 92 years). Rutte won 3 more elections, only finally losing at the end of 2023. That’s 13 years in power, and yet the peak of support for the VVD was just 26% in 2012. The Dutch public has only an indirect say on which parties will form the coalition that will lead the nation.

Some of these nations have quirks that combine the quirks of the national character with the quirks of the political system. In Finland, no matter how popular a party is, it nearly always loses after one term. Sanna Marin was the leader of the Social Democrats and she served as Prime Minister from 2019 to 2023. According to most polls, her term was one of the most popular in Finnish history. She still lost the next election in 2023.

I won’t even waste your time talking about the two party system in the USA, and the way this limits people’s choices.

The problem has come up over and over again in nations that have proportional representation of parties in Parliament: the voters don't necessarily have an option that matches their preferences. Voters have to settle for a party that offers a few popular ideas while also dragging along a bunch of garbage that the voters don’t want. The problem seems to be worse for the Left than the Right. The Right is often able to put together a coalition built around the dominant religion, the dominant racial group, and the concerns of property holders. The Left has to cobble together hundreds of small factions, and often fails to do so.

Political Scientists generally insist that modern democracy is a creation of political parties. Strong parties lead to a strong democracy, whereas weak parties lead to a weak democracy. An outstanding example of this is The Panama Exception — a nation that has multiple risk factors for dictatorship and yet it has been a healthy democracy for 33 years thanks to its strong political parties that funnel political competition into constructive channels. Therefore, we should not seek to undermine the strength of political parties. But we should ask if there are safe systems that allow a greater diversity of viewpoints. Just as in a market, where more competition leads to a better fit between consumer needs and what products are available, presumably, more political competition could be a good thing for society, so long as that competition can be structured in a way that it does not bring dangerous extremists to power. Some alternative ideas for voting systems we already explored in “Should a system of voting aim to let one individual voter express their preferences?”

What seems certain is this: we should keep an open mind. Proportional representation in Parliament has often failed to give voters the choices that the voters want. We should be looking for systems that might offer more choices, more flexibility, more new ideas so as to allow political competition to be truly constructive, truly healthy, truly creative, such that our societies can better face the challenges that we know are coming our way.

How independent is the Executive branch?

A final point: in some systems, the executive is part of Parliament. In such cases, it can become difficult to enforce the law against coalition partners. In 2023, in Poland, Donald Tusk was able to win a victory against the PiS, which had been in power from 2015. Tusk then cobbled together a coalition of 3 parties, including the right-wing Confederation Liberty and Independence (Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość). For now, Tusk needs them so he can keep the coalition together. And they knew he needs them. So they feel they can get away with outrageous protests that Tusk will not be able to stop. For instance, the truck drivers who make up a large part of Konfederacja have been blocking aid to Ukraine, and have been sabotaging shipments of grain from Ukraine to Europe.

Again, we should consider that there are ways to organize a liberal democracy that avoid some of the failures associated with the most common forms of Parliamentary government.