PR, Spain and bipartizanship

One of the things that British opponents of PR allege is that PR inevitably means weak government. Well, I think that looking at Spain might be something of a refutation to that. Spain has, since Franco's time, used a PR system and yet has not inevitably ended up with the horror-story conjured by anti-PRists. It is only now that ...

Spain is entering into a new time and a new political culture with minority and coalition governments, far from the bipartisanship that for 40 years has favored a predictable alternation between conservatives and social democrats since Franco's death. Letter from Spain: The Times Are A-Changin'�|�Montserrat Dom�nguez: 

I note that while we Brits are seeing a similar shift in political culture, Spain has a better system already in place to cope with it. Our FPP system is really a system for a bipartisan political landscape which seems to me to be generating increasingly manifest injustices when there are more than two parties nationally. Spain's system has 'delivered' in bipartisan times and at least in polypartisan times reflects the votes cast rather than giving a party with less that forty percent of votes an absolute majority.



I think it should be said that few countries, becoming democracies, have gone for a FPP system unless they are former British colonies and take on the UK system in some modified form. Most otherwise go for some kind of PR system -because it is obvious that it's fairer. We wouldn't go for it if we started now, as proved by the fact that regional and national assemblies in the UK have all got PR systems in place and Trade Unions and even the CofE General Synod all have PR systems.