09 May 2010

Intelligent ‘mulling’ of floating voters points to PR?

Worth pondering at this time: RSA The intelligent ‘mulling’ of floating voters : Social Brain: "I think it unlikely all floating voters are ‘irrational’. I think rather that many of them are ‘mulling’ over what is a very complicated choice: there are policy trade-offs, tactical-voting trade-offs and personality/character trade-offs. Not to mention trade-offs between these three sets of issues, as well as trade-offs around how long a party has been in power and whether this is healthy from a governance point of view.
In other words, voting is bloody complicated if you are not ideologically aligned. Waiting and mulling is a way of letting your automatic brain whir through all the possibilities and permutations below the surface of consciousness. The ‘hunch’ a floating voter may end up with as a result of this process can be a highly nuanced and intelligent decision. It’s just that the decision wasn’t a consciously controlled one. So what?"
I see this as a potential argument for a more proportional system. What we have in FPTP increasing the trade-offs needing to be considered because it effectively reduces the choice to two candidates. With only two choices (and this is the dynamic of the infamous 'two-party squeeze') then the likelihood is that each candidate is going to be a rich mix of the various concerns a voter may have; rarely will a candidate have a critical mass of a good majority of all the considerations and policies that a voter will want in a representive.

This relates to voting reform in this way: by making the system more effectively pluralist it is easier for a voter to find a candidate who has a critical mass of policy and characteristics whom they would feel more comfortable representing them in parliament AND, crucially, would feel would have some chance of actually representing them.How Should We Vote?: Democracy and Voting Reform in the UK (Democratic Audit Paper)

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