For the political hackers: note that these victories are made possible by Germany's proportional representation system, which guarantees seats in parliaments to any party which gets more than 5% of the popular vote across the state/city/whatever. Thus parties with broad but shallow support do get represented in government.
The electoral systems in the UK-derived nations (geographic districts only, first past the post) expressly prohibit such broad-but-shallow movements from ever being represented in government. If the Pirate Party in a U.S. state got the same percent of the vote, they would end up with precisely zero seats in the legislature. Even if they got double that percent of the vote, they would end up with precisely zero seats in the legislature. Triple? Still zero. The U.S. electoral system is an extremely conservative one, which prevents new political movements from ever being heard in government. There are better ones, such as Germany's.
> The electoral systems in the UK-derived nations (geographic districts only, first past the post) expressly prohibit such broad-but-shallow movements from ever being represented in government.
This is true for the Westminster parliament. It is not true for other elected bodies in the UK, which use the following electoral systems, and with the approximate share of the vote you need to get elected:
London Assembly, MMP (as Germany), 5%
Scottish Parliament, MMP, c. 6%
Welsh Assembly, MMP, c. 8%
Northern Ireland assembly, 6 member STV, c. 10%
NI local government, 6 member STV, c. 10%
Scottish local government, 3-4 member STV, c. 13%
European parliament,
1 STV constituency and 11 closed lists,
varies between c. 8% and 17%
> The electoral systems in the UK-derived nations (geographic districts only, first past the post)
Not sure 'UK-derived nations' is a very accurate description. New Zealand for one, has a mixed-member proportional system similar to Germany. Australia has preferential voting (not first past the post) and an upper house with proportional representation. I'm sure other commonwealth states must have diversity in voting systems also, despite being otherwise 'UK-derived'.
> It wouldn't surprise me if we have Pirate Party MSPs in a few years
The Scottish parliament is one of the legislatures we're targetting -- it is good for us brecause it has a combination of (a) low threshold to get elected, and (b) low amount of money necessary to run an effective campaign.
One serious flaw of the proportional system, like Italy and Israel both have, is that a small party can be the deciding vote, and have a much larger weight than it merits.
For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote. To form a majority, the large party must strike a deal with the small party, which can dictate conditions... This happens regularly in Italian politics, and I believe in Israel as well.
Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament. This gives a lot of power to the political party itself, and whoever controls it.
> For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote. To form a majority, the large party must strike a deal with the small party, which can dictate conditions...
Or they simply look for someone on the other side. E.g. in Germany, SPD (social democrats) routinely ignore Left (socialists and communists) and instead deals with the conservative CDU. It's not like they have only one alternative, nor like they need a majority to form a government in most countries with PR.
I don't see this as a downside. If you only get 48%, you don't even have a mandate from a majority of voters. It is only fair that you will need to negotiate with other parties to adjust how you govern to the benefit of a larger part of the population. For that matter, this shouldn't just change at 50% either - having parties representing 50% + 1 dictate policy still leaves half the population subject to the whims of a narrow majority.
> Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament. This gives a lot of power to the political party itself, and whoever controls it.
Why is this a flaw? If voters are not happy with the candidates that are nominated, they can a) join the party and vote for other candidates during nomination, or b) vote for a different party (or form one...). With proportional representation the barrier to starting a new party with a chance of taking a seat is much lowered, and it is fairly common in European politics for candidates that does not get the support of their party to get a list together as an independent and win a seat. Sometimes that even ends up forming the basis of a new party.
However, the latter to me is just plain insanity. It is a serious flaw in that it is the opposite of WYSIWYG but applied to the most critical of institutions that forms the foundation of your society.
In addition, there is likely a high level lack of transparency and consistency because parties can internally organise themselves however they like and change it whenever and how often they like. Information and transparency changes are always slow to propagate in social systems, especially in time for the next elections. To argue voters should be better informed and act accordingly is ... systemically optimistic, to say the least. There is also the huge opportunity cost of going independent or forming another party.
So, this is, like the OP said, effectively handing over a huge amount of democratic power into a few controlling hands.
For example, even if someone left the political party or were never part of it but simply a powerful patron, they could still retain enormous control over a political party. Do you really want a George Bush, Tony Blair, Berlusconi or some economic magnate or ideologue controlling representation and policy from "political retirement", for example? :)
Note that Germany (as well as New Zealand and Scotland) actually has a mixed system for the Bundestag (lower, more important chamber of parliament) where roughly half the seats are determined by a district-based first past the post system and the others by a proportional system, with each voter having two votes.
The downside is that you need really complex rules to reconcile cases where the two results don't match up. This is done by adding extra seats, but can lead to edge cases where a party would actually have gotten more seats if it had recieved fewer votes.
> Or they simply look for someone on the other side. E.g. in Germany, SPD (social democrats) routinely ignore Left (socialists and communists) and instead deals with the conservative CDU.
When they have the opportunity. In Italy, in recent years, the choice may have been between the communists and Berlusconi, which in my book is not a pleasant choice to have to make.
My point was that proportional systems can go wrong in certain ways, not that they necessarily will do so all the time.
It sounds nice, but in places like Israel you end up with governments headed by a party that took just about a 15% mandate, coalescing with two partners that took a 13% mandate and a shit-ton of small single-issue parties that got something like 3% each. One Member of the Knesset deciding to swing can topple the government or force a coalition realignment.
In practice, they use the 5% threshold in Germany to keep the number of parties down to a reasonable limit. Israel doesn't have this limit. I don't know whether they have a limit at all, or whether it's just rather low.
I don't like the arbitrariness of the 5% threshold. But it seems to work.
>For that matter, this shouldn't just change at 50% either - having parties representing 50% + 1 dictate policy still leaves half the population subject to the whims of a narrow majority.
One should also note that even if one party in Germany were to have more than 50%, they still don't have a very stable power:
Each member of the parlament could vote against his party. So for a stable gonverment, they would need to have a bit more than 50%
This isn't really a problem of the proportional system - given a large party narrowly over 50%, relatively small interest groups within the party will start gaining extraordinary weight as well. Just think of the tea party.
In my opinion, the upside of splitting the parties up is that it makes these particular power struggle more visible, and allows parties more flexibility in ignoring interest groups when a majority can be found elsewhere.
An even more extreme example is Japan: the LDP was in power from 1955 to 2009 (except for two years in 1993-1994), with the result that actual policy decisions (as well as who go the highest political offices) were negotiated between factions within that party.
This also happens in the Britsh system with regional parties. For example the Bloc Quebecois have often had way larger political power than their voter base.
Edit: Nothing against the Bloc (I am from Sweden), they are just an example.
On feature of (Nordic party list) PR that irks me: With near perfect proportionality, you loose (geographic) ties to a specific block of voters. Because a large proportion of MPs are elected on the coat tails of "vote magnets" and the general performance of the party, the party becomes more important than the candidate. Owing your mandate to an artefact of the D'Hondt method and not the fact that you got more votes than the other guy does no favours to your attachment to voters.
I'm fairly new to the UK, but it seems beneficial to me that MPs have exactly one well defined constituency and all voters have exactly one MP (even if it's one they didn't vote for) that represents them in parliament.
No such thing. There are lots of proportional systems, each of which have different proporties.
> like Italy and Israel both have
what you say is explicitly not true in Italy, where the biggest party/coalition is automatically given enough top-up seats to give them a majority.
> is that a small party can be the deciding vote, and have a much larger weight than it merits. For instance: center-left party gets 48% of the vote, communists (they still exist here) get 4% of the vote.
If the seats were split 48-48-4, then the party wih four seats would have as much power as the other two, since any two parties form a majority. But under PR, legislatures typically aren't split between two big parties and a small one. In Israel, for example, the largest party got 28 of 120 seats.
> Another flaw is that, in Italy at least, since it is not the voters of a given district who decide on one of several candidates, it is the political party who decides who actually gets to be on the list of people sent to parliament.
This is the same as with FPTP: the party decides on the candidate, and if it's asafe seat, that candidate is virtually certain to be elected. There are several systems of PR where voters not parties decide which of a party's candidates are elected: STV and open lists, for example.
Italy has fiddled with its election laws a lot in recent years, and is probably going to do so again, so what may be true right now may not have been true in year WXYZ.
What I say certainly has happened in the past: witness the downfall of the previous Prodi governments, where support from minority coalition partners tanked the government.
Coalition governments built on many small parties are often weak.
> the party decides on the candidate
Often through relatively open primaries though. Witness the Republican race on right now. "The Party" likely wants Romney, because he's probably more electable than the others. A lot of people do not want him though, evidently.
Not to say any system is perfect, I agree with the poster who says that they all have problems. To think that one system is "the best" is a bit silly in my opinion.
> Coalition governments built on many small parties are often weak.
If by weak you mean "cannot rule without support of representatives who collectively were voted for by most voters" then IMO that's a feature not a bug.
> Often through relatively open primaries though. Witness the Republican race on right now.
That's true. There's no reason why a party couldn't choose list candidates through an open process, however.
I don't think that's such a huge problem, and I think it may even be preferable than the small party only having proportional power. The reason for that is that if they only had proportional power, small parties wouldn't be able to accomplish anything, ever.
And the alternative winner take all the small party has 0 say. Or I should say, the people have no say. No matter which party we vote for, they are all just different sides of the same coin.
Just to be clear, the pirate party (with 7.4%) is in the parliament, not in the government.
The government will most likely consist of a coalition of the parties CDU and SPD, so that the Pirates will be in the opposition.
I am sure you meant that, but it wasn't clear to me.
You should also keep in mind, that the german pirate party isn't only about copyright stuff.
They're also "the only" party in germany that represents the interests of web-centric citizens. While the conservative parties try to regulate the internet in germany more an more (you know, germany has A LOT of regulations, everywhere) the pirate party is a good alternative.
I'm really happy about this movement, even if they don't land a huge hit after a few years, you can see more younger people getting more interest in politics etc.
In addition to the things you mentioned, I'm also quite happy about the existence of a party containing many young, inexperienced members in the government. They seem to be reinventing the wheel at least partly out of ignorance of the way things have always been done in German politics, and while that does lead to some chaos within the party, in some cases they're reinventing it for the better.
Even if they don't manage to push through any meaningful changes at all by themselves, their mere presence seems to be enough to shake up the traditional parties, and show them that they need to be more open and inclusive towards the general public, and particularly younger voters.
I'm from Saarland (the state where the vote was last night), and i voted for the pirate party last night.
They are not an anti copyright group. It's true that they want to see modifications made to overly strict copyright laws and oppose treaties like ACTA, data retention laws, web censorship laws (all of which have been proposed in germany in the last years).
Their core demands are:
* Improve overly strict copyright laws
* Improve transparency of government (open data, foia , etc)
* Improve the educational system to take advantage of the internet and other "new media" in class.
* Improve citizen participation in government by having public votes on more issues
They are also about the only party that has some competence when it comes to computers, the internet, etc
So, as a web-centric citizen, it was easy for me to vote for them.
Anti-copyright group... That and the "everything for free party" are the most common discriptions media and the established parties are trying to pose on the Pirates right now. That and the misinterpretation that an opposition to an attemt to simply block child pornographic sites when you try to access them from germany equals a support of said sites.
They are anew party with some, IMHO interessting fresh approaches. And if we have a party in the parliaments of one of the biggest economies in Europe oppossing the most wierd initiatives from the content industry, well that can only be great!
What could probably work out well for them is the opposite of a "fresh approach". In an interview today, one of the new members of parliament said that he sees the PP as representing classical liberalism, as opposed to the FDP's neo-liberalism. That would be something to unite behind, beyond straight-forward internet themes. But we'll have to see whether it's something the whole party can agree on.
In its ideal form, that's something good about the German electoral system. Due to the fact that traditionally most parts need a coalition to form a government, you can have some kind of "mixin" system, i.e. vote for a party because it adds something valuable to the whole effort, not because you could see them govern totally on their own. Especially if the party isn't tied to one particular big sibling, which more and more seems to be the case now.
Funny thing is that neo-liberalism actually used to have a different meaning in Germany. That meaning also had a synonym called Ordoliberalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism), that didn't change so much in meaning.
Anyway, the Pirateparty also has a substantial social democratic background, so calling their stance social liberalism is probably more sensible. (Using the European meaning of liberalism.)
I was basically quoting the terms from the interview. You're right, social liberalism is probably the more appropriate term.
We do seem to like the word "social" here in Germany, even the "right-wing" parties like to use it, albeit not in the strictly socialist sense, of course. No prosperity gospel here. Probably because all the Calvinists ended up somewhere else…
That's what I meant. Apparently, the old is the new fresh, or something like that. :-)
What I expect from them is representation of civil rights and personal freedom in society. And you don't even have to be part of the government to do that in Germany.
Just one question, you are from Germany, aren't you?
Yup (well, Bavaria, which technically does count). But while I do hope that the Pirates emerge as a new center for social liberalism, which was pretty much dismantled in the early '80s when the FDP turned towards a new wind, I'm a bit worried whether that's achievable. I would love to be wrong, but I can't see a coherent picture emerging from that much grassroots democracy.
Me too, the Bavaria part, and yes, we only technically count ;-). The only hope i have in the long run for the pirates, or whatever name the movement adopts one day, is that they are not going the way of any new party and turn the new greens eventually.
Considering that the biggest problem the Greens have right now is that basically every other party is pretty keen on environmental issues, too, and so they've become somewhat superfluous, I wouldn't mind the same happening to the pirates ;)
If you see it like that, you're right! I rather meant the fact that the green turned into yet another mainstream party with the same political infighting.
Copyright discussions played little role in the Pirate's successful campaign, however. The party instead focused on issues of social and political reform.
Has anyone with real political influence (so, not them for now ;) addresses this issue? I suppose this was relevant before, but with more targeted parties like the Pirates, I think the faults in our election system seem more pronounced.
The reality is that a party like this is doomed to either lose votes for not having a position on anything else besides copyright, privacy and such, or lose votes by alienating the people who disagree with them on other issues.
The Green Party (can't remember if it was the German or E.U. party) added some of the Pirate Party's planks to their platform, since they didn't have an official stance on copyright before and were losing voters out of their core demographics to the Pirate Party.
I think their attraction has by now moved far beyond the copyright thing. People feel that politics has become completely detached from their daily lives, and the pirate party promises to change that, for example with direct democracy.
For example, anybody can get elected at the Pirate Party atm. Try that in the established parties: I think you have to join in kindergarden and toil for decades before you can make it big in an established party. If you feel strongly about some issue, could you join an established party and hope to get heard? It seems unlikely.
Copyright et al. is just the most well-known program point they. AFAIK the movement started in scandinavia (sweden?) as response to some Pirate Bay issues I forgot about after all the SOPA, ACTA Megaupload stories. Already sorry for being to lacy to look it up right now.
The point is not to just write a press release, it is to get your platform noticed. They missed this opportunity with ACTA and also when our president resigned. Fefe ranted about this in several posts on his blog.
My hunch is they simply lack the political shrewdness required in these matters at the moment, but that also makes them more appealing to me, they are not just playing the same old game (yet).
I do not expect a party to rant like Fefe does. You can't neglect the fact that the position of the pirate party about ACTA is crystal clear: They don't want it to become reality. They wrote press releases, they organized demonstrations and there are ongoing discussions party-wide.
If you think ACTA is a bad idea I see no reason not to vote for the pirate party - they have done more for the anti-ACTA-movement than any other party. It could have been more but this does not make them unelectable...
What you will find if you actually try to become an activist on these issues is that "getting your platform noticed" is very much non-trivial. There is a wide and deep gulf between "having a position on an issue" and "having a mainstream newspaper write that you have a position on an issue". A particular advocacy group may be spending a ton of effort and money to get noticed about an issue, and still have a complete press blackout on the issue, and it is not necessarily their fault. In the end newspapers write about what their owners want them to write about, not what would be best for society.
Is there any particular reason this is happening first in Germany? Just chance?
Is it because Germany has an electoral system that allows it? [but other nations also allow it]
Or, that Germany is technically advanced, and so one of the first nations to have a sufficiently large constituent of web-centric citizens? (echoes of Martin Luther, opposing the establishment with new communications technology) [but other nations are advanced]
The electoral systems in the UK-derived nations (geographic districts only, first past the post) expressly prohibit such broad-but-shallow movements from ever being represented in government. If the Pirate Party in a U.S. state got the same percent of the vote, they would end up with precisely zero seats in the legislature. Even if they got double that percent of the vote, they would end up with precisely zero seats in the legislature. Triple? Still zero. The U.S. electoral system is an extremely conservative one, which prevents new political movements from ever being heard in government. There are better ones, such as Germany's.