Normally I point out one or two mistakes I made in the video in this pinned post. This time's there's slightly more of them. You see, ordinarily I write the script, create the imagery, adjust the script if necessary, and then do the voice-over. This time I did the voice-over before creating the imagery, so I couldn't adjust things anymore that I'd have otherwise wanted to. Anyway, here we go with the list of mistakes I made: 00:30 - I exclude a lot of former British colonies in Africa from the Anglosphere here, and I'm still not sure whether that was right or wrong. On the one hand, Uganda (to name one) is very different from Australia or Canada, but on the other hand, I did feel like including India in there, so I'm conflicted as to the exact boundaries of what I consider to be the Anglosphere. 00:36 - Not the whole population, just those eligible to vote. 00:49 - That should be "votes" instead of "vote". I've clearly got a problem with plurals lately... :p 01:42 - I'm not making it clear enough in the voice-over that every single party needs to have the exact same integer multiple for this to work. 02:25 - I waver between abbreviating Mixed-Member Proportional Representation as MMPR and MMP throughout the video; sticking with MMP would have been wiser. 02:56 - Actually, a fair chunk of countries using PR do still have constituencies, but these are so large as to remove the local representative effect anyway. Should have said something different, but ultimately doesn't change the point I was making. 03:23 - I misspelled "pourquoi". 03:47 - They're not actually véry different. I meant to do that at first, but then decided to go for a more realistic, nuanced scenario instead. 03:53 - That's meant to say "it's not hard", rather than "it's more hard". Trust me, I'll learn to annunciate one day... 04:01 - I did a semi-rewrite of the script here, and so I ran into a few issues. Most of them you won't notice, but the one you do notice is rather glaring: I say "hundred-ish" and show twenty, and the 'fix' in subscript is hardly fixing anything at all... What I wrote in subscript is correct by the way; I genuinely couldn't be arsed when I found out just how much typing formulas into Excel it would entail. The revised script had a more graceful solution than bodging the imagery to fit the already recorded voice-over though. 04:33 - I apologise to all those who haven't seen GoT series 7 yet, because that will have been a genuine spoiler. 05:22 - Technically we don't divide the votes by the quotient; rather the number we fill in ís the quotient.
On the other side of the balance sheet, I do think the painter joke between 03:13 and 03:22 is the best bit of comic relief I've put into a video yet. Feel free to disagree, but I actually had a little chuckle when I came up with that one, poor in taste it may be to laugh at your own jokes.
In Australia, we have a single member constituency lower house and a PR upper house. The 2 chambers compositions are totally different and they have disagreements all the time.
@@barnacles1352 I guess one way to justify it is to say that as the majority in the lower house forms the government then having a system that favours a broad appeal 2 party system creates a sense of stability in the executive that you don't get with PR. At the same time, having PR in the upper house allows greater opportunity for effective scrutiny of the executive and forces negotiation and compromise on legislation without threatening the very existance of the executive. PR also effectively denies both of the major parties control of the chamber.
What happens in a proportional system when a seat becomes vacant before the next election? It wouldn't be practical to hold a special election, but appointing a replacement wouldn't work either if the person doing the appointing isn't a member of the same party that held the now-vacant seat.
In Party List PR, the seat is generally considered to belong to the person, so if they want to separate from the party they were elected with to join a different party or become an independent (essentially the only way one can sit as an independent in Party List PR), they can do so. However, if they give up their seat, die while holding it, or get ousted from parliament for some reason, the seat generally reverts back from the person to the party, and so it's the party who decides which person gets the seat. They technically have complete freedom in picking someone for the seat, but in practice it often ends up being the party member who most narrowly missed out on a seat in the last election, so if a party wins 38 seats in an election but one of those 38 representatives loses their seat, it gets given to the person who was #39 on the list. Everything I've said above can (and probably should) be prefixed with _As a general rule,_ because it's just one of the quirks of PR that can be tackled in a few different ways, rather than a foundational principle of the system that everybody agrees on. It's a good question though, thanks for asking it!
Here in Brazil, a lot of people want a "distric system" because our proportional systems generated a lot os political parties, rigth now there are 33 of them serving in congress and most of them don't have clear political views. And also, unpopular cadidates have chances os winning a seat, the parties have a considerable amont of power over theyr members.
Another big problem with proportional representation is that in extreme circumstances it can lead to the government being extremely un effective, in the weimar constitution the amount of radical parties in the reichstag meant that the chancellor and reichstag never agreed, that left Germany with no support from the government in the great depression that resulted in Hitler being appointed chancellor
We really are talking extreme circumstances there, but indeed it can lead to such situations, yes. Because PR almost never returns single-party majorities, parties have to work together, which is generally a good thing, as it leads to consensus policy that doesn't see-saw back and forth between elections as different parties get into power, but if there is no capacity or willingness from parties to work together, then it can indeed cause problems.
RobertExplains yeah I'd agree with you there, it's also decently important for the figure head of a country to be from the same party as the majority in Congress/parlament for pr to work properly
I just want to throw in that if this was my video I would've made it ten seconds longer by saying something like "in rare circumstances there can be a parliament made up of many tiny parties, which makes cooperation very difficult, so a some countries have a minimum number of votes needed to get into the parliament, especially those with a troubled history in that regard."
The thing about flaws that can be found in one form of proportional representation is that there are other forms that might not have those same flaws, and the flaws that do exist in a particular form of proportional representation can be easily tweaked so they aren’t a problem. The flaws of First-Past-The-Post, on the other hand, are inherent to the system and can’t be tweaked to lessen the flaws’ impact.
Oi! I’m from the Rep of Ireland and our voting system is a form of PR (still with constituencies - unlike that CrAzY cool Dutch model), so why is it that our spotty Parliament graph looks like it’s largely two parties... Cause it really does. Well maybe until this coming election.
Something I never understand is the very high volume of independent TDs in Ireland elected, in the UK most of our independents come from people leaving parties in the middle of a parliamentary term. (STV is the best form of PR though)
If you'll allow me to spew some vitriol: at 3:23 it is "pourquoi" not "pourqoui"! Apart from that, I think you explain political systems way better than CGP Grey, continue like this!
Yes, it clearly is. Don't know why I didn't catch that, actually, because that really is quite atrocious. I'm not sure I agree in your comparison to CGP Grey, but thanks for the compliment!
As always, appreciate the video. I love these information dense videos. As you surely know others would have taken fifteen minutes for this video. Now, my main complaint: What's going on at 3:34? Why is there a new Bielefeld if there is no old one? EDIT: I mean, why not make it Bielefeld itself is the joke is that it doesn't exist? EDIT: Shouldn't if(video_liked) work just fine? What language needs if(video_liked = true)? After all, for it to return true it must already be true.
Hehe, thanks for the kind words, and your complaints are all valid, I have to agree. I did want to reference the Bielefeld Conspiracy, but thought that just "Bielefeld" didn't really sound right for a city on an outlying island, hence "New Bielefeld". As for coding, I have to admit I have very little experience with it. I dabbled in Visual Basic.NET a long time ago, but I haven't touched it in years. I think I just took an example of an IF statement in C from Wikipedia, and used that, but I'm not sure; it was a spur of the moment thing that I did months ago for my first video, and just decided to stick with.
Hahaha, fair enough then. To be honest, I would've done the same thing with my code for a long time until someone pointed out to me that it's pretty redundant.
So to begin with. STV is not FPTP lite. It is a proportional system which keeps local representatives. Calling every system which has local representatives "FPTP lite" is at best a disingenuous move.
I see your point, but my reasoning for referring to it like that is that STV came to be as a way to make FPTP more proportional. They undoubtedly succeeded in this, and while STV struggles to match PR for proportionality, it is an awful lot more proportional than FPTP. However, it still builds on the basic principles of FPTP. I certainly wouldn't call all systems that retain local representatives 'FPTP Light', as that would also include MMPR, which sits in an almost perfectly 50/50 grey area between FPTP and 'proper' PR.
@@RobertExplains I mean, so then I'd ask why talk about Europe as mostly PR when the major countries (excluding your "exception") including Hungary and Germany use MMP? Additionally Italty, Bulgaria and Greece who use mixed system. Excluding some rare examples STV countries have at least near the same if not exactly the same level of representation as PLPR countries. Ireland for example, has near perfect breakdowns, excepting 2020 where SF didn't run enough candidates. I am not gonna go into the shortcomings of PR such as the fact rural voters are shafted, the threshold requirement meaning that minority candidates still get fucked (looking at you Israel) and core issue that since no member has an electorate to be beholden to they just have to keep a party happy rather than the voters.
In MMPR, when a member of an elected body dies/resigns/gets expelled, how is a replacement chosen? What if a seat is vacated by someone who has no party affiliation?
Good question, I'd need to look into that. In Party List PR, the party just chooses a replacement, but I'm not entirely sure what happens in MMPR with independents.
@@RobertExplains The U.S. is essentially split 3 ways- Republican, Democrat and 3rd party/no party. If the U.S. had proportional representation, I don't know if people with no party would readily join one.
@@christianpatriot7439 Correct, although in my Addendum video to this one, I do go into how the two-party split in the US is largely just there because it is enforced by the system. If the US adopted proportional representation or another voting method that allowed for a proper multi-party Congress, both current parties would probably split into two or three parties each, and it's more likely that currently independent candidates would join one of those parties. Bernie Sanders famously doesn't represent the Democrats in the US Senate, but if the Social-Democratic wing of the party were to become a party in its own right, I could see Sanders joining that. I know that's not a complete answer to your question, but as I mentioned before, I'm not 100% sure what what the way would be to incorporate independents in MMPR. Might interest you to know that here in the Netherlands, where we have Open Party-List PR, the seats in parliament do belong to the individual, not the party, so when a member of parliament is kicked out of a party (which has happened a few times in the past decade), they effectively become an independent. So in the Netherlands, you cannot be elected as an independent, but you can become one once you're already in parliament.
Haha, I am very happy that I'm a small enough channel that said algorithm does not determine my paychecks. It really is quite changable. :D I just make content I like to make, so I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it too.
I'm a political science major here in the US, and am barely learning about this. From what I just gathered seems like a way more better system than the shitty one we got. 😮💨
Indeed it is, but when used without any qualifiers, "proportional representation" usually refers to party list proportional representation. STV is commonly named under the PR header on lists that qualify nearly any system that isn't FPTP as some form of PR, but I personally think that since STV developed from FPTP, it doesn't really fit under the wider PR umbrella. It is undeniable that STV produces more proportional results than FPTP though, and it is an interesting system to switch to for countries who currently use FPTP, want more proportionality in their elections, but don't want to lose the ability for independents to run, or want politics to still be more people-centric than party-centric.
Normally I point out one or two mistakes I made in the video in this pinned post. This time's there's slightly more of them. You see, ordinarily I write the script, create the imagery, adjust the script if necessary, and then do the voice-over. This time I did the voice-over before creating the imagery, so I couldn't adjust things anymore that I'd have otherwise wanted to. Anyway, here we go with the list of mistakes I made:
00:30 - I exclude a lot of former British colonies in Africa from the Anglosphere here, and I'm still not sure whether that was right or wrong. On the one hand, Uganda (to name one) is very different from Australia or Canada, but on the other hand, I did feel like including India in there, so I'm conflicted as to the exact boundaries of what I consider to be the Anglosphere.
00:36 - Not the whole population, just those eligible to vote.
00:49 - That should be "votes" instead of "vote". I've clearly got a problem with plurals lately... :p
01:42 - I'm not making it clear enough in the voice-over that every single party needs to have the exact same integer multiple for this to work.
02:25 - I waver between abbreviating Mixed-Member Proportional Representation as MMPR and MMP throughout the video; sticking with MMP would have been wiser.
02:56 - Actually, a fair chunk of countries using PR do still have constituencies, but these are so large as to remove the local representative effect anyway. Should have said something different, but ultimately doesn't change the point I was making.
03:23 - I misspelled "pourquoi".
03:47 - They're not actually véry different. I meant to do that at first, but then decided to go for a more realistic, nuanced scenario instead.
03:53 - That's meant to say "it's not hard", rather than "it's more hard". Trust me, I'll learn to annunciate one day...
04:01 - I did a semi-rewrite of the script here, and so I ran into a few issues. Most of them you won't notice, but the one you do notice is rather glaring: I say "hundred-ish" and show twenty, and the 'fix' in subscript is hardly fixing anything at all... What I wrote in subscript is correct by the way; I genuinely couldn't be arsed when I found out just how much typing formulas into Excel it would entail. The revised script had a more graceful solution than bodging the imagery to fit the already recorded voice-over though.
04:33 - I apologise to all those who haven't seen GoT series 7 yet, because that will have been a genuine spoiler.
05:22 - Technically we don't divide the votes by the quotient; rather the number we fill in ís the quotient.
On the other side of the balance sheet, I do think the painter joke between 03:13 and 03:22 is the best bit of comic relief I've put into a video yet. Feel free to disagree, but I actually had a little chuckle when I came up with that one, poor in taste it may be to laugh at your own jokes.
In Australia, we have a single member constituency lower house and a PR upper house. The 2 chambers compositions are totally different and they have disagreements all the time.
The doctor prescribes MMP for this problem.
Thats weird tho. In america and i guess most of the world, the lower house is supposed to be more representative then the upper house
@@barnacles1352 I guess one way to justify it is to say that as the majority in the lower house forms the government then having a system that favours a broad appeal 2 party system creates a sense of stability in the executive that you don't get with PR.
At the same time, having PR in the upper house allows greater opportunity for effective scrutiny of the executive and forces negotiation and compromise on legislation without threatening the very existance of the executive. PR also effectively denies both of the major parties control of the chamber.
Most List PR systems do use constituencies. Having the whole country as a single constituency like Netherlands is unusual.
What happens in a proportional system when a seat becomes vacant before the next election? It wouldn't be practical to hold a special election, but appointing a replacement wouldn't work either if the person doing the appointing isn't a member of the same party that held the now-vacant seat.
In Party List PR, the seat is generally considered to belong to the person, so if they want to separate from the party they were elected with to join a different party or become an independent (essentially the only way one can sit as an independent in Party List PR), they can do so. However, if they give up their seat, die while holding it, or get ousted from parliament for some reason, the seat generally reverts back from the person to the party, and so it's the party who decides which person gets the seat. They technically have complete freedom in picking someone for the seat, but in practice it often ends up being the party member who most narrowly missed out on a seat in the last election, so if a party wins 38 seats in an election but one of those 38 representatives loses their seat, it gets given to the person who was #39 on the list.
Everything I've said above can (and probably should) be prefixed with _As a general rule,_ because it's just one of the quirks of PR that can be tackled in a few different ways, rather than a foundational principle of the system that everybody agrees on.
It's a good question though, thanks for asking it!
Here in Brazil, a lot of people want a "distric system" because our proportional systems generated a lot os political parties, rigth now there are 33 of them serving in congress and most of them don't have clear political views. And also, unpopular cadidates have chances os winning a seat, the parties have a considerable amont of power over theyr members.
Another big problem with proportional representation is that in extreme circumstances it can lead to the government being extremely un effective, in the weimar constitution the amount of radical parties in the reichstag meant that the chancellor and reichstag never agreed, that left Germany with no support from the government in the great depression that resulted in Hitler being appointed chancellor
We really are talking extreme circumstances there, but indeed it can lead to such situations, yes. Because PR almost never returns single-party majorities, parties have to work together, which is generally a good thing, as it leads to consensus policy that doesn't see-saw back and forth between elections as different parties get into power, but if there is no capacity or willingness from parties to work together, then it can indeed cause problems.
RobertExplains yeah I'd agree with you there, it's also decently important for the figure head of a country to be from the same party as the majority in Congress/parlament for pr to work properly
I just want to throw in that if this was my video I would've made it ten seconds longer by saying something like "in rare circumstances there can be a parliament made up of many tiny parties, which makes cooperation very difficult, so a some countries have a minimum number of votes needed to get into the parliament, especially those with a troubled history in that regard."
The thing about flaws that can be found in one form of proportional representation is that there are other forms that might not have those same flaws, and the flaws that do exist in a particular form of proportional representation can be easily tweaked so they aren’t a problem.
The flaws of First-Past-The-Post, on the other hand, are inherent to the system and can’t be tweaked to lessen the flaws’ impact.
Slow down? (Cool, quick video)
Oi! I’m from the Rep of Ireland and our voting system is a form of PR (still with constituencies - unlike that CrAzY cool Dutch model), so why is it that our spotty Parliament graph looks like it’s largely two parties... Cause it really does. Well maybe until this coming election.
Something I never understand is the very high volume of independent TDs in Ireland elected, in the UK most of our independents come from people leaving parties in the middle of a parliamentary term. (STV is the best form of PR though)
@@benfarmer-webb1016 That’s because stv is a proportional system that doesn’t rely on having parties
If you'll allow me to spew some vitriol: at 3:23 it is "pourquoi" not "pourqoui"! Apart from that, I think you explain political systems way better than CGP Grey, continue like this!
Yes, it clearly is. Don't know why I didn't catch that, actually, because that really is quite atrocious. I'm not sure I agree in your comparison to CGP Grey, but thanks for the compliment!
As always, appreciate the video. I love these information dense videos. As you surely know others would have taken fifteen minutes for this video.
Now, my main complaint: What's going on at 3:34? Why is there a new Bielefeld if there is no old one?
EDIT: I mean, why not make it Bielefeld itself is the joke is that it doesn't exist?
EDIT: Shouldn't if(video_liked) work just fine? What language needs if(video_liked = true)? After all, for it to return true it must already be true.
Hehe, thanks for the kind words, and your complaints are all valid, I have to agree. I did want to reference the Bielefeld Conspiracy, but thought that just "Bielefeld" didn't really sound right for a city on an outlying island, hence "New Bielefeld". As for coding, I have to admit I have very little experience with it. I dabbled in Visual Basic.NET a long time ago, but I haven't touched it in years. I think I just took an example of an IF statement in C from Wikipedia, and used that, but I'm not sure; it was a spur of the moment thing that I did months ago for my first video, and just decided to stick with.
Hahaha, fair enough then. To be honest, I would've done the same thing with my code for a long time until someone pointed out to me that it's pretty redundant.
So to begin with. STV is not FPTP lite. It is a proportional system which keeps local representatives. Calling every system which has local representatives "FPTP lite" is at best a disingenuous move.
I see your point, but my reasoning for referring to it like that is that STV came to be as a way to make FPTP more proportional. They undoubtedly succeeded in this, and while STV struggles to match PR for proportionality, it is an awful lot more proportional than FPTP. However, it still builds on the basic principles of FPTP. I certainly wouldn't call all systems that retain local representatives 'FPTP Light', as that would also include MMPR, which sits in an almost perfectly 50/50 grey area between FPTP and 'proper' PR.
@@RobertExplains I mean, so then I'd ask why talk about Europe as mostly PR when the major countries (excluding your "exception") including Hungary and Germany use MMP? Additionally Italty, Bulgaria and Greece who use mixed system. Excluding some rare examples STV countries have at least near the same if not exactly the same level of representation as PLPR countries. Ireland for example, has near perfect breakdowns, excepting 2020 where SF didn't run enough candidates.
I am not gonna go into the shortcomings of PR such as the fact rural voters are shafted, the threshold requirement meaning that minority candidates still get fucked (looking at you Israel) and core issue that since no member has an electorate to be beholden to they just have to keep a party happy rather than the voters.
In MMPR, when a member of an elected body dies/resigns/gets expelled, how is a replacement chosen? What if a seat is vacated by someone who has no party affiliation?
Good question, I'd need to look into that. In Party List PR, the party just chooses a replacement, but I'm not entirely sure what happens in MMPR with independents.
@@RobertExplains The U.S. is essentially split 3 ways- Republican, Democrat and 3rd party/no party. If the U.S. had proportional representation, I don't know if people with no party would readily join one.
@@christianpatriot7439 Correct, although in my Addendum video to this one, I do go into how the two-party split in the US is largely just there because it is enforced by the system. If the US adopted proportional representation or another voting method that allowed for a proper multi-party Congress, both current parties would probably split into two or three parties each, and it's more likely that currently independent candidates would join one of those parties. Bernie Sanders famously doesn't represent the Democrats in the US Senate, but if the Social-Democratic wing of the party were to become a party in its own right, I could see Sanders joining that.
I know that's not a complete answer to your question, but as I mentioned before, I'm not 100% sure what what the way would be to incorporate independents in MMPR.
Might interest you to know that here in the Netherlands, where we have Open Party-List PR, the seats in parliament do belong to the individual, not the party, so when a member of parliament is kicked out of a party (which has happened a few times in the past decade), they effectively become an independent. So in the Netherlands, you cannot be elected as an independent, but you can become one once you're already in parliament.
Very good video, thank you.
Had to watch this for a political science class, very informative for a foreigner like myself!
Really? You had to watch this video specifically? I don't know what effect I had on your teacher, but I feel very flattered. Thank you!
Great video, quick and on point. Thus it will never see the light of day in the YT algo-rythum becuase this info is DANGEROUS in the USA.
Haha, I am very happy that I'm a small enough channel that said algorithm does not determine my paychecks. It really is quite changable. :D
I just make content I like to make, so I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it too.
I'm a political science major here in the US, and am barely learning about this. From what I just gathered seems like a way more better system than the shitty one we got. 😮💨
Fantastic
This is party list. In stv people matter more than party
Indeed it is, but when used without any qualifiers, "proportional representation" usually refers to party list proportional representation. STV is commonly named under the PR header on lists that qualify nearly any system that isn't FPTP as some form of PR, but I personally think that since STV developed from FPTP, it doesn't really fit under the wider PR umbrella.
It is undeniable that STV produces more proportional results than FPTP though, and it is an interesting system to switch to for countries who currently use FPTP, want more proportionality in their elections, but don't want to lose the ability for independents to run, or want politics to still be more people-centric than party-centric.
Please speak a bit more slowly.
Wtf was that the map of India ???
I report spam for this video
I think it was actually a map of the former Raj. Could have done better on that one.