No, we dont' have the time.

Sounds like a rather efficient system.*

*yes, that was sarcasm

*From RTE.

Ok, so it all over now. Looks like there will be a bit of horse trading before we see a government as the majority is 83. However if you notice how the percentages breakdown between numbers that voted and seats for each party you will see that they are very close. Good chance we will see the Greens in power with the major party, Fianna Fail, our version of the Republicans. Try and imagine that

The parliamentary system is the type government, Proportional representation is just the electoral system. Ireland and Britain both have the parliamentary system but very different electoral systems. Infact their is a push towards PR in Britain to replace the plurality voting system that, for example, the US employs as well.

I'll try and explain a little better using US parties. Lets use the four largest parties. The Republicans, the Democrats, the Libertarians and the Greens. Now when you come to vote you have 4 boxes, 1 for each party. In a plurality voting system you just tick one box. In proportional representation you list your preference 1 to 4. As candidates get eliminated from each count, their votes get passed onto other candidates. So if you had PR in the US you could vote Libertarians 1 and Republican 2 and stop there or continue on if you wish. This way every vote counts and smaller parties/independents have a fighting chance and your vote is never wasted. Teachta Dála ( or TDs for short, our members of the lower house which is called the Dáil ) very often get there seats with only a handful of votes to spare.

Can't remember the exact number but something like 28% of Britain need to vote Labour for it to get an overall majority. To my mind that ain't democratic.

This would never happen in America. I wish it would, but the fact remains that the two parties in play certainly don't mind their bedfellow party all that much, especially when they look across the pond and see how cutthroat politics and winning an election really are in Europe. Reps and Dems are institutions as cemented in American culture as much as Apple pie and Baseball. They may be rotten, they may not be the best of choices, they may even be boring, but damnit, they're our identity!

Its too easy to promote the ideologies that corroborate with the two parties to ever shove them into a multi-party system. For God's sake, we chose between Bush and Kerry! Jon Stewart remarked that if that was the best we could come up with, then we're definitely in trouble.

Easy. I expect many things. Do they come to fruition? No. But the minute we cease to expect or demand this from our leaders is the minute we've all collectively given in to this type of thinking. Is it a losing battle? Sure, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be fought.

What did you expect from a country built on the foundations of Capitalism?

Something I might add here, for proportional representation to work you have to have quite a number or seats that equal a set number of voters. Off the top of my head I think it 23,000 per seat in Ireland. The areas and seats are constantly in flux and there are multiple seats in each area. Basically the Republican and Democrats need not give up there "power". Given how PR goes in most countries the big parties hog all the first preferences and it inst until after the second seat that small parties or independents start to claim scalps. I'll give you an example of an area in the last election

* RTE again

You may have to click on the image to get a clearer view but it shall suffice. 4 seat and 11 candidates and parties can run as many in each area as they like. FF and FG are the major parties and they top the poll (Count 1) but fail to meet the quota. 6 candidates get eliminated at the first count and lose their deposit of 3k (Basically to stop time wasters) and you are left with the major parties. However all those votes are now transferred to the other candidates and counted (Count 2). SF candidates is in last place now and gets eliminated and his votes are transfered and so on and so on. You keep going until you get 4 candidates that have got the quota.

If you happen to notice that the GP ( Greens ) beat the PD candidate by 304 votes, well you get a cookie. What makes that result very interesting is that PD is the outgoing Minister for Justice and Leader of the Progressive Democrats ( PDs for short ), the last governments partner with FF ( Fianna Fail ). The great thing is you get to see it unfold after each count. 5 in all it took. Nail biting stuff really.

Curious about something though, is European politics viewed as "cut-throat"? The attack adds you see from American politics are well beyond anything I've seen over here. For one the Libel and Slander laws are very different over here and something like the "swift boat" adds would have made Kerry a very rich man or indeed those fake letters about Bush service would have be double and triple checked. That and PR kind of forces politicians to be very wary of saying anything that would burn bridges due to the fact that under PR most parties fail to get a majority and must have a partner to form a government. Our outgoing one a prime example.

Can I pose a little question? No need to answer but if there was PR in the US for the last Senate and Congress election would you have vote your 1st preference as a major party? I'm guessing quite a few Americans would not have.

This may just be semantics, but Independents can vote in all 'elections' just not certain closed 'primaries' and 'caucuses'. Those are a kind of election, and independents are excluded, but they still get to vote on the candidate before they take office, they just have to choose between the candidates each party offers or hope that an independent is running in that particular election. Since primaries center around a smaller number of votes, each vote has more weight, and is often considered where your 'real' power lies as a voter. Therefore independents are seen as having 'less' of a vote because they don't get to vote in most primaries.

It depends on one's state. In some states one claims an affiliation while in others they never even ask.

Fair point. I see where your coming from and stand corrected. Mind you I think everything you describe can be applied to both.

I've witnessed both bi-patrisan elections and PR-type elections first hand in a number of countries.

I'll admit the Irish system with its single transferrable vote system is probably one of the most confusing but also one of the most interesting systems around. Most other PR systems tend to work by just pooling constituencies. Rather than a single seat, you vote for a larger number of seats in your constituency, and these get allocated roughly proportionally to the number of votes cast (often with treshhold minimum percentages). This dilutes votes so single parties will only very rarely muster enough votes to have an absolute majority in a parliamentary session.

Typically, in European democracies, you will have two or three major parties, at least one of which will always be the majority partner in a coalition government. They tend to roughly fall into three categories - conservative/christian democrats (republican), social democrats (left wing democrats) and liberal democrats (right wing democrats).

You then have a number of smaller parties, either marginal ideologies (various flavors of communists, nationalists and other assorted odds and ends), or single issue parties (greens).

In a bipartisan system, the best way to catch votes is to polarise your electorate. You play the media, and try to differentiate yourself as clearly as possible from your political opponents, be it by rational argument, or mudslinging and slander.

Large parties PR systems however tend to drift to the middle. The extreme right and left votes are cast (and usually lost) anyway, but they're too small to matter. The way to catch voters is not to polarise your electorate, but to woo the people in the middle ground who don't really care about who's in power, as long as what they perceive as their quality of life is maintained. They decide the election.

As a result of this, the manifestoes of major parties in a PR election tend to be fairly bland. Yes, there are differences in style and on the finer points of implementation, but, unless the electorate itelf is heavily divided on an issue, it comes very much down to the charisma and personality of individual politicians, either individually or as a group, and their ability to pander to Middle Class Average Joe.

And given that any of them might end up in bed (in a coalition) with any of the others, the mudslinging tends to be fairly restrained or at least more subtle.

Large parties will attempt to woo their electorate by denying ground to the smaller parties. Agenda items from the single issue lobbies will suddenly find their way to all party manifestoes. As an example, over the past 15 years, virtually every major party in European politics has started to include environmental and green concerns in their agenda.

The good aspect of PR is that it's a consensus government, with a large degree of continuity between different parliamentary sessions due to all the major players being so similar. The bad part is that it's very hard and slow to effect real change when it's needed (cf France and Germany). Due to coalition horsetrading, you often end up with very diluted agendas, and in the end nobody really gets what they voted for.