Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 09:36:53 +0100 From: Eivind Eklund <eivind@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>, Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Guess we've lost the server market too...? Message-ID: <19990305093653.B38288@bitbox.follo.net> In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990304165819.04049340@localhost>; from Brett Glass on Thu, Mar 04, 1999 at 05:00:16PM -0700 References: <Your <19990303131235.A1022@netmonger.net> <41919.920485707@zippy.cdrom.com> <4.1.19990304165819.04049340@localhost>
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On Thu, Mar 04, 1999 at 05:00:16PM -0700, Brett Glass wrote: > Alas, as the American political system shows, the public actually > resists having more than two choices. It's "one, two, too many." Wrong. The US political system is fu^H^Hrigged from the start to create two parties. This is the effect of having a forced choice of one representative from each area; "winner takes all". It also forces the two parties to be very much like each other. I've always believed that this was a deliberate choice by the founding fathers, choosing stability over having the political system match what the people actually believe. If you want an example of how you get a lot of parties, look at Denmark. (At this point I left my computer with the window open and hoped for some dane to jump in and finish off my mail by describing the danish voting system, but it didn't happen). Since nobody present seems able to describe the danish voting system in anything resembling reasonable detail and accuracy, I'll go on to describe the norwegian one, which resembles it and which I'm more familiar with. The country is divided into a number of counties. When there is a national election, the representatives are choosen by county - with each county sending about 12 (?) representatives (the actual number is somewhat related to the number of people in the county) to the equvalent of congress. These representatives are choosen according to the number of votes they got inside the county; they do NOT come after a vote in a smaller area. In addition to this, we have something called 'adjustment mandates'. These are based on "vote overflow" in the counties; they make up a total of about 10% of the mandates, I think. They will (by the laws of mathematics) tend to favour the large parties, but this is a rather small advantage. The result of the above system is a division similar to this (numbers are from memory, so bear with me that they're not accurate): Arbeiderpartiet (~25%) Fremskrittspartiet (~19%) Høyre (~16%) Kristelig Folkeparti (~13%) Kystpartiet (1 representative) Rød Valgallianse (1 or 2 representatives) Senterpartiet (~15%) Sosialistisk Venstreparti (~10%) Venstre (~3%) ... with the governing power held by a coalition of Venstre, Kristelig Folkeparti, and Senterpartiet. The reason that Arbeiderpartiet isn't governing (either in minority or in coalition with somebody else) is that they refused to take the responsibility unless they got some certain minimum number of votes. The reason Fremskrittspartiet (a populistic/liberal party, the one that is most similar to the US parties) isn't in the governing business is that nobody would cooperate with them. Eivind. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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