#i do not have any big historical surveys of electoral systems in my pocket either

[tanadrin]

I could, but it'd be kind of dumb to do so, wouldn't it?

...no? if we care about outcomes we have to actually look at outcomes to make sure our intuitions about these systems are correct. there are lots of systems where our intuitions turn out to be wrong--I remember argumate once positing that you couldn't build enough housing to reduce rent in big cities because of induced demand, and that has recently been shown to be outright false, because rapidly building housing in some U.S. cities has resulted in a significant decline in real rents.

That happened upthread with someone else and you quibbled with it on a fairly arbitrary ground, which you'll certainly be able to do with any example, as indeed one do with any example you might to cite to support your position.

I ask out of genuine curiosity, not because I want to knock down examples! Would also be happy for a citation for, I dunno, a political science paper surveying the question.

The Knesset is only one example, and it might be typical of dysfunction in PR systems, but it might not be--I think there are other weird things going on in the Knesset system, like the lack of electoral districts, that are uncommon in PR systems generally, and so might be contributing to the dysfunction there. But because government is complicated, more examples of the phenomenon would be helpful to establish the pattern.

And I think that is reason to be skeptical, sure, but you're setting up a mug's game here where you defend your preferred system on abstract theoretical grounds but insist critics defend theirs with illustrative case studies.

No? Of the handful of PR systems I am familiar with--Ireland (ish, they're multi-member districts with STV, but they still facilitate smaller parties; Wikipedia cites them as an example of a PR system, but IIRC you consider that system not PR?), Germany, and (to a much lesser degree) other European political systems, the thing you and others cite as a big problem with PR doesn't seem to come up all that often. The worst political deadlock caused by spoiler effects in politics that I am familiar with--the US and the UK--are both explicitly FPTP systems.

Now, I am not claiming to be familiar with a representative sample of electoral systems (as I think I said already), so my sample might be terribly biased, but if that's the case, I think it's on you, the advocate of the purported spoiler effect being a problem, to be able to corroborate your assertion!

there's no empiricism to speak of anywhere in voting-systems discourse

It's hard to run controlled experiments with complex real-world systems, but I think sanity checks based on multiple specific real-world examples are still important. If (sorry, not trying to pick on argumate here, it's just the example that came to mind) you make the blanket assertion "building housing can never result in a decline in real rents because of induced demand," and real rents decline in a city at the same time a lot of housing is being built or immediately after, that's an important counterargument.

Given that upthread you were all about the idea that this was an unreasonable concern even if it were true

Are you referring to this paragraph?

And I still think it’s an overreach to even call it a flaw. Close elections produce unstable majorities. It is known. Small parties typically can’t demand outsized concessions from big parties, but it’s reasonable to demand some concessions if you are propping up someone else’s majority. This is how representative government should work! Small parties participating in government means your vote is more likely to count even if your guys don’t win!

My point there is that "small parties getting nonzero contribution to the legislative program in exchange for the majority" is a democratic outcome that we shouldn't worry about. If small parties contribute to bad policy outcomes/unstable governments/other issues in these circumstances to a greater degree than kingmaker/spoiler effects in other electoral systems, that would be a reasonable concern.

And I want to move the conversation to the realm of specific real world examples precisely so we don't get lost in the weeds of debating abstractions/intuitions/models of how these systems work. A couple of strong counterexamples would be really clarifying, and help us avoid just fencing with our respective intuitions/implicit mathematical models. I asked for counterexamples because I genuinely assume that, if one opposes PR for outcome-based reasons, one has particular examples in mind that are the basis of that opinion.

If you like we can say the Knesset is one strong counterexample, but as I said, personally, I find it to be a weird one. So I would find it helpful to have another counterexample that was at least weird in a different way. Because it might be that "no electoral districts" or "easy ways of circumventing the minimum vote threshold rules" or some particular local feature of Israeli politics makes Israeli government uniquely unstable, and Israeli politics seems dramatically different to me than the politics in other countries with even remotely comparable electoral systems.

And given that I can point to one PR system without strong small-party/marginal representative spoiler effects (Germany) and one PR with them (Israel), and two non-PR systems with small-party/marginal-representative spoiler effects (the UK and the US, both of which happen to be FPTP; not counting Ireland in either category because of the categorical issue alluded to above) and none without them (which, to be clear, is not because I think FPTP or other non-PR systems are particularly unstable, but because I simply don't know much about politics in other countries that might use that system), if we are going to establish a pattern of PR systems as being especially prone to this effect then clearly more examples would be helpful.

Honestly, I *don't* want to mix things with proportional representation. I see proportional representation as an excellent way of increasing the importance of dealings between politicians and reducing the incentive effects of the voters. But in my ideal world I'll need to negotiate with people who do like proportional representation, and this system is a compromise I could get behind. Plus you can plug and play any three different electoral systems for different compromises.

First past the post is a bad, undemocratic electoral system. First past the post privileges large parties by making small ones unviable, and distorts the composition of parliaments by wasting votes. It can be gerrymandered in a way proportional representation cannot be. It produces highly unrepresentative outcomes. It is a bad electoral system! All good voting systems are to some degree inclined to more proportional results.

I've never heard the accusation that PR "increases the importance of dealings between politicians," but look. I don't know how else to put this. That is a stupid objection. Just absolutely boneheaded. You haven't thought about this at all, I reckon.

People hate on "politicians" as a generic class, but it's like hating on lawyers as a generic class. You need politicians. You want politicians. You want people whose specialized job it is to read legislation, fight about what should go in it, represent your interests, and come to balanced compromises about those interests. People percieve politics as messy, venal, and corrupt, and it can be all those things, but guess what? The alternative to career politicians is part-time citizens who don't know what the fuck they're doing, have no expertise in the legislative process, and therefore are at the mercy of lobbyists who can walk them like a dog because they're naive and inexperienced.

There's this especially (but not exclusively) American pathology that is a suspicion of government that works too well. This peculiar notion that if only we sabotage government a little bit it will keep tyranny in check and make politicians more honest... somehow. But filling government with random yahoos doesn't get you a noble collegium of Tocquevillian citizen-lawmakers, it gets you a pack of Marjorie Taylor Greens and Lauren Boberts. You know--morons. Americans will support all these ballot initiatives that fuck up government on purpose, like term-limiting legislators and keeping their salaries low so only rich people can afford to go into politics (and even then are only willing to do it as a stepping stone to other gigs), and vote for people who promise to make government work even worse by cutting the budget and lowering taxes, and then have the absolute gall to whine about how badly the government works. My fellow Americans, you did that on purpose.

(And there's this weird paradox where Americans all loathe Congress. Who keeps voting these creeps in? Well. You do. Congresscritters are generally pretty highly approved of by their own constituents. The stereotype of lazy, stupid, venal politicians always seems to apply to the other guys.)

And you will also note that since the abolition of things that used to facilitate deals between politicians in the U.S. congress--since the abolition of earmarks and chummy socials between congressmen and the post--generally, since the post-Gingrich upheaval in the House--it has gotten harder to pass even necessary, basic legislation, because it is harder to make the basic compromises necessary to keep government functioning. Having three separate legislatures that each can claim a different sort of democratic mandate isn't a recipe for good legislation, it's a recipe for paralysis and constitutional crisis.