Why PR makes sense

I'm interested in American politics. It works very differently from politics here in Britain, or so I thought. Americans seem to split every issue into 'conservative' or 'liberal'. Every newspaper or news channel is either 'conservative' or 'liberal'; every person is either a 'conservative' or a 'liberal'; and every policy is either a 'conservative' policy or 'liberal' policy.

Strangely enough, in Britain we do have a Conservative and a Liberal Party! But, to me, those words don't mean the same things they do in America. My impression in America was that a person's entire political mindset could be extrapolated from any one issue. If you admitted to being anti-abortion, this automatically means that you are also anti-gay rights, anti-taxation, pro-Iraq war and countless other things I know nothing about. But here in Britain, I thought, that doesn't happen. I could quite happily have a discussion with a stranger about abortion while giving him no clues about my political leanings.

Last night, I tested this theory on a French and an English friend. To my surprise, the English friend disagreed. She said that moral, social and economic issues were just as polarised here as in America; that being anti-abortion was inextricably linked to adherence to the Conservative Party, pro-abortion with the Liberals or Labour, and so on. Perhaps she is right; perhaps I have just wilfully ignored the political landscape. Or perhaps British politics is polarised, but just not to such a great degree as American politics. However, the real surprise for me was hearing about politics in France.

The political situation in America and Britain is caused by the electoral "first past-the-post" system, in which only the top candidate in each region is represented in congress/parliament. This stops minority parties getting any power and forces a two-party system (Britain is unusual in that a third party, the Liberals, consistently attracts a sizeable portion of votes, but on the whole it is still a two-party nation).

In France, on the other hand, there is proportional representation. The number of votes equals the number of representatives. This has one significant consequence: minority parties are worth voting for. There are about ten parties in France that get over 5% of the vote: the biggest party only gets about 20%! The problem is that they have to form coalitions before they can govern the country, but think of the advantages! In France, if you care about the environment you don't have to vote Democrats, you can vote Greens. If you are patriotic, you don't have to vote Republican, you can vote Rally for the Republic. If you are socialist, you can vote Socialist or even Communist, and so on. And your vote will count.

Bipolar politics is bad politics. It averages out countless viewpoints into two groups. No-one can vote for the issues they care about without supporting numerous others they don't. Some people say at least it keeps extremism out of politics. On the contrary, the best thing you can do with extremism is keep it in the open. In France, the National Front polls about 12% of votes, but at least everyone knows they'll never actually get in power and they'll never contaminate the moderate parties. In Britain and America, extremism seethes under the surface. Conservatives and Republicans are forced to court right-wing nationalists. It makes me reluctant to vote for the parties I really like. That's not good enough. When will our governments realise the best democracy is genuine, proportional representation?