[Election-Methods] RE : Re: RE : Best electoral system under real circumstances

[Juho Laatu]

One more comparison to the Finnish system.

On Nov 20, 2007, at 11:21 , Kevin Venzke wrote:
> --- Diego Santos <diego.renato at gmail.com> a écrit :
>> According Brazilian law, parties of same coalition are counted as a
>> single
>> party. After elections, is not rare these parties to separate to  
>> opposite
>> political sides.
>
> Well, if the parties find it advantageous to stand together on the  
> same
> party list, I guess they will just form bigger (and more meaningless)
> "parties" if you make a law that says multiple parties can't run on  
> the
> same party list.

Also in Finland the parties may form "unholy alliances" between  
parties that have quite different ideological standpoints just for  
tactical reasons to grab the last seats to this coalition. The  
candidates are clearly listed as candidates of the parties of the  
coalition (no confusion here to the voters), just the calculation  
formula now counts these parties as if they were one.

Forming any kind of parties is not easy. Parties can take part in the  
elections (roughly) if they have managed to get their candidates  
elected in the last or the previous election. Otherwise they need to  
collect a long list of names of supporters to get the permission to  
take part. The party structure is quite stable. The method sets in  
various ways limits to how small a party can be and still survive in  
the process (no artificial limits though on the number of votes a  
party must get, just the problems that I already mentioned on small  
parties having much harder time in the small districts than in the  
big ones, and thereby being forced to try the coalitions which then  
give a bit random results for the last seats).

It is possible for parties to split, form new groupings and  
individual candidates to change affiliation of to form single member  
groupings during the term of the parliament in Finland. This is not  
very common and typically leads to problems in the next elections,  
although some candidates (typically quite visible) have managed to  
establish "new life" in a new party.

I didn't yet understand what exactly the problems in Brazil were and  
how they are perceived. Small differences in the rules and practices  
may sometimes have a big impact. I think voters often are also quite  
different in different countries and at different times - they may  
e.g. be very quick in moving from one party to another or they may be  
loyal to one party no matter what the party does (Finland is on this  
side, sometimes maybe even too much).

Juho