Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gödel's Loophole

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–134 of 134 posts

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#131

Post by oehtXRwMkIs »

skissane wrote: post #130
oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the joys of first past the post. The largest minority takes all. Also agree with the point about elite support. Not every supporter counts equally in terms of political support. Even in democracies this is the case.

> Ah, the joys of first past the post. Not in this case, Weimar Germany used proportional representation. I personally think that proportional representation is superior to first-past-the-post, but actually you could argue that PR played a role in Hitler coming to power. PR systems encourage multiparty systems as opposed to two-party systems. Multiparty systems can sometimes produce great political instability when n…

Could you say that such a system essentially devolved into FPTP in the case of the Nazi's at that time? Due to a lack of unified opposition?

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#132

Post by skissane »

oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #131
skissane wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah, the joys of first past the post. Not in this case, Weimar Germany used proportional representation. I personally think that proportional representation is superior to first-past-the-post, but actually you could argue that PR played a role in Hitler coming to power. PR systems encourage multiparty systems as opposed to two-party systems. Multiparty systems can sometimes produce great political instability when n…

Could you say that such a system essentially devolved into FPTP in the case of the Nazi's at that time? Due to a lack of unified opposition?

I don't think so. I don't think FPTP really had anything to do with the Nazi's rise to power. FPTP is worthy of criticism but not everything bad in this world is FPTP's fault, and Nazism is an evil of which FPTP is innocent.

You could argue that the specific form of proportional representation being used – the list system – was a factor. Countries which use the list system (such as Belgium, Italy and Israel) tend to be more likely to have unstable multiparty systems than countries using milder forms of proportional representation such as instant run-off or single-transferrable vote.

After WW2, West Germany moved away from the pure list system to the current hybrid system in which voters vote both for an individual candidate and a list. That change was inspired by the lessons of the early 1930s.

The shape of the electoral system was possibly a contributing factor to the Nazi's rise to power, but it was only one factor among many. Many other countries had (and still have) the same system and yet they didn't end up with someone like Hitler in charge.

Post reply on HN