Is it efficient for you to contest every single-member election or to strive to become one of the top two parties in your country? Wouldn’t it be better if you could get enough people to see things differently so that one of the two major parties would more or less take on your positions?

I make a distinction between influence and power. You can have influence without having a lot of power, while one can get a lot of power only by submitting to the “right” influences….

I am in favor of the use of both winner-takes-all and winner-doesn’t-take-all elections. I think if done right with proper intra-party discipline that we’d have two major parties that would be ideologically flexible, positioned around the center and a whole bunch of t-parties that would contest local winnable elections and otherwise vote strategically.

For this to work, you need intraparty discipline within the major parties, and a viable non-vote or support the other side threat, as well as other measures of potential retaliation by the t-parties.

I think though that winner-takes-all elections are here to stay and, as a result, there’ll always be two major parties. So the best we can hope for is a contested duopoly with a large no. of t-parties wielding disproportionate levels of influence. Of course, there may still be national contenders, trying to knock out one of the major two parties, but it could be too costly to sustain such an effort over time. I’d rather see outsiders, like myself, focus on keeping things dynamic and holding the big two accountable in their local communities.

dlw

One could improve upon a multimember election by finding ways to limit the no. of candidates so that the costs of shopping around are limited.

I’d say maybe even consider the use of an open primary to fill the final ballot of say 7 candidates. Let the incumbents be on the ballot automatically and let the open primary give parties the right to endorse as many candidates as possible, with multiple endorsements possible from parties that have sufficient voter-support.

Such systems are generally called “parallel voting” (as at Wikipedia) or “mixed member majoritarian (MMM)”. They are not MMP. Other examples include Japan and South Korea. In MMP systems, including Germany and New Zealand, the at large seats are awarded to make the legislature as a whole mirror the popular vote as a whole.

For more on Mexico, see Fruits and Votes.

–confused