3 reasons why New Zealand has the best-designed government in the world - Vox - Jan 16, 2015
Noting
The Perils of Presidentialism
Linz, Juan J. (Juan José), 1926-
Journal of Democracy, Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1990, pp. 51-69 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1990.0011
Back to Vox.
We in the US tend to assume that — however awful we might think our politicians are — our political system is excellent. The Constitution is held in high esteem across the political spectrum, and Democrats and Republicans alike pay lip service to the "genius" of the Founders. But our system, combining two powerful legislative bodies with a strong executive, is pretty rare internationally. Indeed, it appears to be a weaker model than most; the US is the just about the only country to sustain a presidential system for a long period without descending into dictatorship.
We can learn a lot from other countries' models, which are often more streamlined and democratically representative than our own. The best of the bunch, in my judgment: New Zealand.
The article then discussed a downside of single-member districts: inadequate representation. A Democrat in rural Texas and a Republican in Manhattan are never likely to get well-represented. That is especially bad for when a candidate wins by a narrow margin - there is a big unrepresented population.
Author Dylan Matthews then discussed proportional representation, settling on mixed-member PR (MMP) as the best system. That is what's used in Germany, New Zealand, Lesotho, Bolivia, Scotland, and Wales.
Pure party list?
Party-list systems make it hard for a single party to get a majority, which means that if, say, a party has 45 seats out of 100, it still needs to win over a party with 6 seats to govern. The 6 seat party then has significant power to demand stuff, out of proportion to its actual level of support. So ironically, this form of proportional representation can have patently undemocratic consequences. Stuff like this has happened frequently in Israel, with fairly deleterious results.
DM says that nations with MMP avoid that kind of problem, but then again, there aren't many nations that use it.
Unlike party list representation, people still have representatives with at least some ties to their area, for whatever that's worth.
But more importantly, it means parties have to be organized enough to compete in a decent number of districts in order to have a shot. That discourages the kind of excessive party formation that happens under pure party-list representation, while still ensuring that smaller parties get some say.