FPTP vs MMP

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 07:46:10PM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> And I might point out that Canada's model of government is based upon 
> the Westminster parliamentary system, which has been around much longer 
> than just about any other democratic form of government. The 
> ineffectiveness and the seeming propensity of otherwise intelligent men 
> and women turning into blathering idiots once they are in office has 
> more to do with an uninformed citizenry with short attention spans than 
> some feature of our electoral system. In other words, as long as 
> political contests are nothing more than beauty contests and with adept 
> spin doctoring, a party can convince the electorate that their otherwise 
> indefensible positions on certain issues are the right positions, we get 
> exactly the governments we deserve. I do not believe MMP will change any 
> of that and will have some unintended consequences.

Now for how long has the Wesminster system allowed your average public
to vote?  I suspect (although I am not sure) that it used to be only the
lords in britain that got to vote and run for parliment in the past.
Perhaps they thought that way only well informed people would get to
vote. :)

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists