Why winner-take-all voting is bad for democracy

This was initially posted anonymously on slashdot.

No, in 'the last 50 years', voters and politicians have often not fudged up: the most recent five decades have seen massive advances in technology (often driven by policy), the fall of communism and the USSR, the introduction of the Internet and mobile phones to the masses, and the ascension of Eastern European countries into EU and NATO. This was highly rewarding for whichever party was in power at the time, and to voters, too.

The 'fudged up' part comes with the passage of time, when political incumbents become complacent (as parties), and are no longer able to create good policy, which then causes many countries to surf or skid on the inertia of previous achievements.

Consider Estonia, for example: Reform Party, Isamaa / Pro Patria, the former Res Publica party (since merged into Pro Patria), and Social Democrats / SDE were often in coalition, had in place great policies, interesting programmes (Tiigrihüpe computerisation of schools, the brainchild of Toomas Hendrik Ilves), consulted great visionaries (Linnar Viik), introduced the ID card for electronic two-factor authentication, and so on. Estonia and Estonians are still enjoying the fruits of many of these politicians' labor, including the current construction of Rail Baltic (pushed by Juhan Parts).

In 2012, Mart Laar, a superstar politician from Pro Patria had suffered a stroke. The retirement from politics of Mr. Laar caused a change in leadership in Pro Patria, which eventually resulted in rather average people becoming party leaders (ex.: Helir-Valdor Seeder).

In 2016, the coalition of Reform, Pro Patria, and SDE collapsed, IMO, because of a very scathing personal insult of one Estonian politician to another. These events lead to a change in the makeup of coalitions, introducing contrarian parties (Centre and EKRE) to government and power, who introduced bad policies, such releasing the pension money from the second-column pension plan (similar to a 401k), thus increasing inflation, and taking too many loans to burden all the future state budgets.

Time passed by. The EKREIKE coalition finally dissolved after yet another scandal involving Centre and EKRE.

Enter Kaja Kallas (Reform), arguably a very capable superstar politician and Prime Minister, who set out to fix many things, but who couldn't fix everything during her not-long-enough tenure as Prime Minister.

The passage of time during the previous Centre-lead coalitions resulted in the attrition of valuable talent from Reform and SDE parties, which resulted in the emergence of politicians who are less-than: Kristen Michal as PM from Reform, Lauri Läänemets from SDE, and Joakim Helenius from the Eesti 200 party. The current coalition of Reform, SDE, and E200 is satisfactory only because Centre and EKRE are not in power.

Ostensibly to rebalance the state budget, these politicians in the current coalition set out to raise taxes by introducing the car tax, and raising the property tax, which hits people of scant finances more than well-to-do and wealthy people. (2024)

2016 was also symbolic for two other major events: the stupid Brexit referendum (with not-very-surprising results), and the election of Trump that same year.

To summarize, the great coalitions in Estonia, which typically consisted of Reform, SDE, and Pro Patria, were held together not only due to their having superstar politicians in (party) leadership (Ansip, Laar, Marju Lauristin), but also because of these parties' desire to keep out the Centre party, which remains contrarian in many ways, and which leadership in the form of Edgar Savisaar sought to appease Russia.

Such coalitions were possible because of Estonia's electoral system, which favours proportional representation. In a first-past-the-post / winner-take-all system, Centre would have ruled Estonia to the country's detriment for too long.

The mistake of the U.S. and UK winner-take-all / first-past-the-post electoral systems favours only a two-party political system. A two-party political system invites the extremes into either party: the extremes of the U.S. Left into the Democratic Party, and the extreme-right into the Republican Party in America. Such an electoral and political system can easily lead to vacillations between extremes. For many decades, this had not been happening, as Democrats and Republicans were unified with regard to opposing the USSR and the wider socialist and blocs.

Now, even if a good party wins (the Democrats), there is a higher chance of it and the country being lead by well-meaning politicians, who are great bureaucrats, but who are very weak in foreign policy: these would be Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), Trump (appeasement of the Taliban in Afghanistan), and Joe Biden (2021-2025). I'll add Neville Chamberlain (1937-1940), Angela Merkel, and Nicholas Sarkozy, who also sought the politics of appeasement.

With regard to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Obama before Trump, and Biden himself sought appeasement ('de-escalation', stuff like that), though to a lesser extent, only because superstar politician and President of Ukraine Zelenskyy and many Eastern European politicians (Kaja Kallas), did not budge.

Proportional representation in the Western democracies that have adopted it, helps prevent the emergence of bad or weak politicians, and helps heal many of the bad politicians' mistakes. While it does not entirely prevent awful politicians from getting to power (both in Hungary now, and in Estonia in the recent past), a single-winner system almost always makes it worse, if the system of a political party favours and allows terrible politicians to run for office.

That is why it's never surprising, and by design, that the first-past-the-post and winner-take-all systems favour the emergence of only two major political parties. If their policies are not too different from another in domestic or foreign affairs, then this indeed makes it appear, as though there is little difference between the two.

Proportional voting usually prevents nations from stepping on that rake. (But doesn't help too much in countries where all, or too many parties are extreme, and willing to form a far-right coalition.)

To counter the argument of the parent poster, it's really not 'the last fifty years', but 2016 as one of the focal points in the West of things going wrong at the same time.