Regular readers of LH will know that I have a particular interest in Russian swearing, or mat (1, 2), and through a comment by tellurian in a thread at AskMetaFilter I was pointed to a long article by S.A. Smith called “The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia” (originally in Past & Present, August 1998). For those who don’t want to work through all 20 pages (some of which are quite short), here’s the conclusion:
Mat was a key element in the shifting discourse of kul’turnost’ through which educated Russians reflected on the state of society. Though its particular connotations changed, as Russia changed its rulers—from moral degradation of the common people, to sedition, to hooliganism, to political backwardness—neither the late imperial nor the Bolshevik authorities looked on mat as politically neutral. Moreover, those who fought to overthrow the tsarist order, including the ‘conscious’ workers, viewed mat in the same negative way as the educated elites in general. Although peasants and workers might utilize mat to insult their social superiors, revolutionaries showed no inclination to vindicate it as a ‘weapon of the weak’. Towards the end of the Soviet regime, mat did acquire a politically subversive function, as obscene chastushki or anekdoty, puncturing the pretensions of the party-state, grew in popularity. One writer has recently described the use of mat in the post-Stalin era as a ‘rebellion against the semantically ruined, mendacious language of official propaganda’ and a ‘little island of freedom in the kingdom of totalitarianism’. Pointing to the explosion of anecdotes about Lenin, Radio Armenia and the Civil War hero, Chapaev, in the 1960s, V. Gershuni has argued that that decade marked the ‘triumphal march of language that had been in disgrace’ (opal’noi slovesnosti) when the (male) intelligentsia for the first time ‘armed itself’ with mat as weapon of social satire. But that is another story.
But half the fun is in the details. From page 18:
While many cogent reasons were adduced to justify Bolshevik objections to swearing—the need for young people to acquire ‘cultured speech’, the need to combat hooliganism, the unacceptability of male chauvinism, and so forth—at the deepest level much of the distaste may have sprung from a revulsion at the intimate association of mat with what Bakhtin called the ‘grotesque body’. Mat celebrated gross corporeality, the lower physical faculties, fecundity and decay, nature and excess, things that sat uneasily with Bolshevik asceticism and horror of being engulfed by nature. Eric Naiman has drawn attention to a dread of the female body that haunted Bolshevik ideology during NEP, which, he suggests, was a projection of wider fears of loss of political and ideological control. If he is correct, it is possible to see in the efforts to discourage mat a defence mechanism against the disorderly excess of popular speech, the libidinal energies of the body and the elemental forces of nature, which threatened to overwhelm the orderly, rational and controlling will of the party-state.
And from page 8, this odd Dostoevsky quote (from a newspaper article of 1873):
My intention was to prove the chastity of the Russian people, to show that even if the people use foul language when they are in a drunken state (for they swear incomparably less when they are sober), they do this not out love of bad language, not out of the pleasure of swearing, but simply out of nasty habit so that even thoughts and feelings that are quite distant from obscenity become expressed in obscene words. I further argued that to find the principal reason for this habit of foul language one must look to drunkenness. When drunk, one’s tongue moves with difficulty yet one has a powerful desire to speak, and I surmised that one resorts to short, conventional, expressive words. You may make what you will of this conjecture. But that our people is chaste, even when it is swearing, is worth pointing out.
Incidentally, anyone interested in the relations between the workers and the intellectuals who have presumed to lead them should read Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic Of The Russian Intelligensia And Socialism (review), by Marshall S. Shatz. Machajski (1866-1926) was a Polish revolutionary who has long been forgotten (except by Leszek Kolakowski) and who never achieved much in his lifetime aside from annoying tsarists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks alike (though he managed to eke out a living as a copyeditor in Moscow for the last eight years of his life), but the theory he developed in Siberian exile in the late 1890s, known as “Makhaevism” after a Russianized form of his name, is the earliest and perhaps still the most thoroughgoing analysis of the inherent gulf between the intelligentsia (which he defined in practice as anyone with a diploma) and the working class. He had no positive goal in view (except a vague idea that workers should educate themselves so the gap could be eliminated), but his stubborn insistence that knowledge is power and that those with such power can never be trusted to wield it in anyone’s interests but their own is still bracing and retains its ability to discomfit the bien-pensant intellectual.
Is Bakhtin’s “gross body” what the translator calls “the material lower body stratum”?
I mean, “the fucking translator”.
John Emerson’s comment for some reason made me think of a character in one of Tom Sharpe’s South African novels who misunderstood the phrase ‘against the fucking law’ as being a reference to the Immorality Act.
Re: mat as a form of resistance, I’m reminded of a short story by Viktor Pelevin, titled “Den’ buldozerista”, where workers use the language of official propaganda for cursing and swearing.
Ah yes, “Mai ego znaet”! Here‘s the story, if anyone needs a link.
I think mat.. and especially tryokh etazhniy mat can sometimes be classified as wit.
You know how sometimes at a cocktail party someone tells a one-line pun type joke that involves a play on words. Mat can serve the same purpose. Either way, I think it’s an intimate language to be used among friends that isn’t really offensive as it is expressive.
I went to a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District a few weeks back – what was interesting was that the English translation of the libretto was even today fairly bowdlerised – to be fair, my Russian has got awfully rusty over the past decade since I left school, but I’m fairly sure that ‘swine’ doesn’t translate ‘svoloch’ quite properly, and Boris Timofeyivich expresses his desire to know Katerina in a rather cruder way than a genteel euphemism.
After some googling, “Ya b yeyó” is translated as ‘I could get her’ – perhaps a Russian speaker could confirm my semi-educated guess that the first means what I think it does…
Thanks for the link, LH — a great article. Note that, unlike mat, Armenian radio, Chapaev and Lenin jokes have always been perfectly acceptable in polite society, provided they contained no non-euphemizable (as it were) mat.
Richard J — svoloch’ literally means trash, or that which has been dragged off (волочь–to drag) to a garbage heap. “Scum” might be an acceptable translation. “Swine,” meant as plural, makes sense too. But unlike in the past (don’t know how distant though), svoloch’ is not a collective noun anymore: it has a valid plural, svolochi so “scumbag” may be a better fit.
“Ya b yeyo…” is an unfinished sentence with no expletives: ya is “I,” b is a particle indicating conditionality, and yeyo is just “her.” The speaker essentially says, “I would do something to her,” but omits “do something.” At most, it’s a euphemism for “I’d like to have fun with her.”
Thanks for the correction – as I said, my Russian is very rusty these days to say the least…
Since I discussed Makhaevism in the post, this thread seems a good place to add a link to Daniel Gaido’s long and comprehensive review of The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919–30 (itself almost a thousand pages long), edited and translated by Barbara C. Allen; a brief snippet, so I can do a site search on Shliapnikov or Shlyapnikov and find this:
thank you for this! i don’t expect i’ll read the book unless a project leads me deep into the details of the internal drama of the bolshevik party, but i’m very glad to have read the review.
it’s striking, reading the selections the reviewer quoted, how hair-thin the material differences between the proposed policies of the different bolshevik factions were, even on the points that are often named as major divergences. the Worker’s Opposition [sic], for instance, enthusiastically participating (alongside trotsky and the future Left Opposition [sic]) in the massacre of the kronstadt uprising (and the suppression of the st. petersburg strikers) at precisely the same moment as they called for their party to ‘listen to the workers’. for these champions of “democracy”, the idea that workers’ assemblies – rather than single leaders in a hierarchical structure, however selected* – might actually make collective decisions about economic and political matters was beyond the pale enough to justify mass murder. with “opposition” like that, who even needs a “monolithic party hewn of one piece”?**
.
* the W.O.’s touching naïve belief that an electoral bureaucracy functions differently from an appointive one could, i suppose, be defended as coming before the experience of social democratic mass-membership unions in germany and france, or u.s. business unionism – but there were abundant well-elaborated analyses of precisely that question before WWI, articulated by syndicalists, anarchists, and horizontalist communists. and, of course, there’s the entire history of the RSDLP, whose internal votes on policies and leadership were so democratic they allowed a minority faction to name itself “bolshevik”.
** the answer is lenin. but you knew that.
I thought it would interest you! And yes, those differences and alignments are sometimes hard to wrap one’s mind around all these decades later.
the answer is lenin. but you knew that.
The answer is always Lenin, comrade!
Who can turn a cub into a cube?
Who can turn a tub into a tube?
Who can turn a man into a mane?
Who can turn a van into a vane?
My immediate response was: “That sounds like a Tom Lehrer song from The Electric Company.” And guess what, it is! (While I might unconsciously have remembered the words from childhood, there’s no way I knew then who wrote it. I didn’t know who Lehrer was until I was in high school.)
I feel relatively confident that my comrades in Wobblyism Today would also reject syndicalism as a slur. That said, a large chunk of the last meeting of the NYC local (not technically the right term) was occupied by a debate over a proposal before the central organization to emphasize the “no political-party alliances” provisions of the current IWW Constitution. I found myself in the strange position of arguing that anarchism is just as much a political party as any other, and that nobody should be made to feel excluded merely because they happened to be an archist.
knowledge is power and that those with such power can never be trusted to wield it in anyone’s interests but their own
Of course. what we now know is that people in power can’t be trusted to wield it in their own interests either, as is shown by the rise of the baboon political class and their hangers-on, the baboon intellectual class.
Baboon libel!
One of Mr. K*A*P*L*A*N’s fellow students once asked which material was used for making chairs, “baboon”, or “bamboon”.
Coming from a place where unions are party sub-organizations and conservative unions are made possible by Catholic social teaching, so that most parties have more or less affiliated unions, I pondered the US situation for a second or two and concluded that any unions there are automatically, nolens volens, Democratic because 1) Republican economic policy is extremely libertarian, so unions and Republicans are automatic enemies, and 2) there’s no escape from the two-party system. What have I overlooked?
One (and this is something I only just realized), the “parties” in the U.S. are party coalitions in European terms. The Republicans are moving towards being a party, but the party still needs its right and ultra-right members; the fascists are not (yet) strong enough to stand alone.
Two, while 71% of the electorate supports unions (a 50-year high) only 6% of workers actually belong to one (a 100-year low).
Three, while unions are aligned Democratic, their members are much more divided, ever since Reagan.
On the one hand, Ronald Reagan was the only American president who had previously been the head of a union. On the other hand, he was the most anti-union president in United States history.
True.
Well, “true” in an ethereal sense that doesn’t require actual boring reality-based truth. Party coalitions are made up of, you know, parties (CDU and FDP, Fine Gael and Labour, Labor and Mapam, Conservatives and Lib Dems, you know the sort of thing); the “parties” in the U.S. are, well, not.
the “parties” in the U.S. are, well, not.
The whole business of politics is no party. Of course politicians would like you to believe otherwise. They sometimes call their groupings “coalitions” to dispel the impression that they are party animals.
Stu Clayton : I can tell you from second-hand experience that building coalitions between parties, in proportional representation countries is hard work.
In any case, the Democrats in the US are not a party but a coalition. The Republicans are a shoggoth that could go in any direction. The only thing uniting them is Trump.
“Learn parlor tricks and join a party.”
I can tell you from second-hand experience that building coalitions between parties, in proportional representation countries is hard work.
And another problem is single-issue parties (often religious), which would happily join any coalition that promises to agree with their main issue – which means that they almost always end up in the ruling coalition (unless there’s too many contradictory options) because every little bit is important to get a majority, and consequently that their main issue is almost always agreed with, even if it’s otherwise not very popular.
There aren’t many countries where single-issue parties make it into parliament. Usually there’s a so-called hurdle* of 3%, 4% or 5%: parties that get less don’t get any seats. Israel and the Netherlands are prominent examples of countries without such a thing.
* So called in German anyway: Hürde.
Why suddenly so literal? Both of the main US parties have been developing in a direction that makes them easier to understand as coalitions, even though that isn’t how they came about. They used to be crisscrossed by internal divisions that often extended into the other party, so that overall they were more like continuous spectra; nowadays there are clear partitions within them and a wide gap between them – and the Democrats seem increasingly aware they’re a coalition (of very roughly “Hillary” and “Bernie”, or “Pelosi” and “AOC”…) and seem to be acting accordingly these days. I’ve read as much from US-based, -born and -bred commentators.
Both of the main US parties have been developing in a direction that makes them easier to understand as coalitions
That’s fine, but don’t call them party coalitions. Words have meanings.
Your “very roughly” is an admission that the designation is just a loose metaphor. Actual parties are not “rough,” they have membership lists.
Israel certainly does have a “hurdle” (akhúz hakhasimá, ‘blocking percentage’), set at 3.25% of the votes. It started at 1% in 1951 and increased over the years, most recently in order to prevent the four small Arab parties from getting in. They got around that by forming a coalition (which later partially splintered again.)
don’t call them party coalitions. Words have meanings.
Seconded. By the same token, British Political parties are awkward compromises of wildly-disagreeing sub-parties. (And the modern Liberals were actually a formal coalition with the SD’s for a time. Although the historic Liberals split apart when Labour rose to power on the back of the Union movement.)
The proto-coalition-ness was particularly visible over the EU referendum: it was the Thatcherite(-ish) wing of the Tories in some sort of ghastly liaison with the left-of-Corbyn(ish) wing of Labour. But that awkwardness was equally visible in the 1975 referendum. (The Neil Kinnock wing of Labour — future leader of the Party, and EU Commissioner pah!)
There aren’t many countries where single-issue parties make it into parliament.
Do the Greens count as single-issue? They are in Parliament in NZ, were part of the formal coalition in the government that kept us safe through the pandemic, and have regularly passed the Hürde over most of the time NZ has had Proportional Representation (based on the Germany model).
I mean, you can’t really push the “coalition” thing very far, because it implies that a pure (non-coalition) party is totally united, with no dissenting views, and this was not even true of the Bolshevik Party after the October Revolution. Humans find it hard to agree among themselves.
The Republican Party is, in some ways, actually moving to be much more like a cohesive parliamentary party. Recent events aside, no American political party has ever had the kind of lock-step voting in the House or Representatives, with everyone the same way on the vast majority of bills, that the G.O.P. caucus now enjoys.
And from “single-issue parties (often religious),” it seemed to me to be pretty clear that January First-of-May was most especially thinking of Israel. There is a parliamentary threshold in Israel’s proportional representation system, by the main religious parties (Shas, United Torah Judaism) get vote numbers well above that. The religious parties’ general willingness to join almost any coalition government then results in the significant skewing of priorities that January First-of-May mentioned.
No; it implies that a pure party can’t be divided along non-arbitrary lines. The main US parties used to be such cases – “big tents” with plenty of internal diversity, but no clear clustering: different members agreed on different issues, and on average there were no clefts running through the parties. In the last 10 years or less, however, clear blocs are apparent within both parties; they get along with each other very much like parties in a coalition, but they’re easily distinguishable.
Depends on the country and the decade. Many Green parties started as single-issue parties in the 80s and then expanded their platforms.
Oh.
Looking it up, I see ten parties made it above the threshold; a 4% threshold would have kept two more parties out (assuming no adaptations like mergers of small parties into a single list), a 5% yet two more, leaving only 6 parties in the Knesset like in Austria’s parliament.
I’m too lazy to look up the scholarly literature right now, but I’d suggest the most relevant way in which U.S. parties function like European coalitions is that they do not control the party ticket.
In the U.S., a faction can attempt (and succeed) at taking over a party by running in (and winning) a bunch of party primaries. There may be some European parties in which primaries are the one and only way the party ticket on every ballot is awarded, but I know none. So if you want to take over based on the support of voters rather than incumbent party bigwigs, you need to start a new party. Needless to say, proportional representation helps with that.
In Italy or Spain it would have been impossible for Ocasio-Cortez to unseat the chair of the House Democratc Caucus. It’s unlikely the main left-wing party (PD or PSOE) would have given her any electable position on a parliamentary ballot, when her only experience had been volunteering for a losing candidate in the party leadership contest. People who break into Parliament the way she did are more likely to do so with smaller and newer parties (M5S or Podemos).
Even more precisely: nobody could have taken over Forza Italia (Berlusconi’s party) like Trump took over the Republican party. What Meloni could do and did was to leave that party, found another, win elections with her new party and thereby take over the right-wing coalition.
So, sure, U.S. political parties are U.S. political parties and there are no U.S. party coalitions. But there are Italian and Spanish party coalitions as well as Italian and Spanish political parties. Neither the ones nor the others are exactly like U.S. political parties. But in significant ways Italian/Spanish party coalitions are a closer analogue to U.S. political parties than Italian/Spanish political parties.
I’m less familiar with politics in other European countries, but I suspect the pattern is more general and this is what John Cowan and David Marjanovič meant when saying that “parties” in the U.S. are “party coalitions” in European terms. It seems a reasonable, realty-based view to me. Though I grant that placing quotation marks around the U.S. term only may be somewhat insular coming from Europe, or somewhat unpatriotic coming from the U.S.
In the U.S., a faction can attempt (and succeed) at taking over a party by running in (and winning) a bunch of party primaries.
Yes this always struck me as weird — and has gotten a lot weirder in the past ~10 years.
In the UK, there’s nothing corresponding to primaries. Candidates must get vetted by a constituency party committee, and seek (informal) approval from a party central committee — at least for the major/established parties.
You’d hope/imagine this would prevent a George Santos getting anywhere near a ballot paper: the committee would want character witnesses, documentation of good standing, etc [**]. And a candidate for high office (local or national) would have to show a track record of party activity.
[**] This still leaves unexplained why Santos’ Democrat opponents didn’t dig into his bona fides. Most U.S. electoral rhetoric seems to feature throwing shit at your opponent. In his case they could have dug it up by the dumptruck-load.
… “parties” in the U.S. are “party coalitions” in European terms.
I think that’s not a helpful analogy either. There’s no primary-like system in Europe whereby any dude off the street can get themselves funded and promoted on the ‘party ticket’ without going through a long approval process. As you say, except by starting their own party. But winning at the ballot box won’t necessarily get them into coalition/anywhere near power, whereas in the U.S. getting the X-party nomination in a X-safe seat automatically gets you the baubles of power. (Isn’t everybody very aware the Nazi’s never had anything like an electoral majority?) It’ll be interesting (depressing) to see what happens with Wilders now.
@AntC:
It’s not one or the other! What passes for primaries in Italy is astonishingly unregulated relative to U.S. primaries, but nobody—least of all the party itself—would claim that being awarded the M5S ticket in its heyday required a long approval process. If anything, they were proudly advertising they were trying to get as close as possible to having random dudes off the street run for Parliament.
Again, naturally I agree that U.S. parties work differently from both European parties and European coalitions. They are bound to given that most European countries have a parliamentary system with largely proportional elections, while the U.S. has a presidential system with purely first-past-the-post elections.
However, I don’t understand what difference you are highlighting here. In the U.S., you mostly get into Congress by winning a primary. In Europe, you mostly get into Parliament by winning the general election instead. That’s exactly why I reckon within-party competition in the U.S. resembles within-coalition competition in Europe.
Maybe what you’re saying is that after individual politicians win a U.S. primary they are unlikely to leave their party (though that has happened), while after parties win seat in a European general election they may more easily change their coalition partners. That’s true, but some pre-electoral coalitions are remarkably stable. The same three-party* right-wing coalition has contested every Italian general election this century,
* Two of those parties merged right before the 2008 election and de-merged again right before the 2013 election.
In 1933 they had a 43.9% plurality of the vote and more seats than the next three largest parliamentary parties combined. Bringing up the Nazi tends to be a conversation-killing move, but if anything their electoral victory was similar to Trump’s (46.1% of the popular vote). I’m no scholar of interwar German history, but I don’t think it would have been imaginable to keep the Nazi out of government through a grand coalition extending from the communist KPD to the conservative DNVP. The parliamentary arithmetic didn’t allow anything else. In both the U.S. and Europe, you can win elections without winning an electoral majority.
electoral victory was similar to Trump’s (46.1% of the popular vote)
Thanks Giacomo, but the popular vote figure in U.S. Presidential elections is almost irrelevant. The Presidential Vote is to an electoral college. Its membership is only rarely proportional to the party vote in the states. You’ve failed to mention that a single candidate (Clinton) — not some straggle of small parties — got a higher proportion of the popular vote (48.2%) than Trump. By the way this was on a ~60% turnout. The constant question I ask with U.S. elections is how would the results go if people were not so utterly pissed off with the system (and/or were not so effectively gerrymandered), and actually turned out to vote?
And, yeah, I take your point about bringing up the unmentionable. You only need read the first paragraph here to see that was not ‘free and fair’. Never mind “keep … out of government”, they’d already seized the government. The more relevant results are those of the elections in the previous year.
Jörg Haider did take over the FPÖ in 1986 in what is widely called a coup, suddenly transforming it from a stolid, lightly libertarian party* that was in a coalition government with the Social Democrats into a xenophobic party that despised both of the big parties alike, pushed them both before itself, flirted with Nazi allusions again and again and again, and increased its share of the vote at every election until 1995 and then again in 1999. There were (and are) no primaries, but I think the candidate at the top of the list (who would usually become chancellor or vice chancellor if the party ended up with enough votes) had to be confirmed by a large number of delegates at a big party conference (Parteitag), where usually there’s only one candidate who’s selected by the party establishment and gets over 90% of the vote, but sometimes surprises happen. I think in this case Haider had somehow placed enough of his cult followers among the delegates that they managed to elect him.
Similar things happened in the up-to-then-conservative party (ÖVP) shortly before the election of 2017; that was Sebastian Kurz exploiting various divisions in the party to the extent that his network of cult followers managed to make him the boss. He even changed the party’s color from black to turquoise, which is a much bigger deal than the US Democrats changing from a rooster to a donkey sometime long ago. However, the ÖVP had a long tradition of questioning the current chief and “sawing his chair”.
* It did have a few old Nazis in the basement. The term Kellernazis was actually used.
The Electoral College is a gerrymander of the whole country: just as it is useless in most congressional districts to vote for representative, it is useless in most states to vote for president. Or governor or senator for that matter. Of course lots of people stay at home, and of course the most common reason for election results to defy the polls is a change in who turns out.
@AntC: I don’t think we disagree on the merits, but I’m afraid I’m not following how the Nazi digression relates to the difference between single parties and ideological coalitions.
I may misunderstand the fractious politics of the Weimar Republic, but I thought the NSDAP tried twice fairly enough and unsuccessfully, and once rather unfairly and successfully, to gain a parliamentary majority at the head of a right-wing coalition including at least the DNVP, and possibly smaller parties that escape me.
Naturally, proportional representation makes it very possible even for coalitions—let alone for single parties—to fail to win a majority. Examples abound without going back to 1930s Germany. It happened in Spain just this year, with informal two-party blocs (the right got 45.5% and the left 43.3%), and in Italy in 2013 with formal pre-electoral coalitions (the left got 29.6% and the right 29.2%). I don’t see how that makes proportional-representation parties closer to U.S. parties than proportional-representation coalitions. If anything the opposite.
But maybe you rather meant to reject the possibility of any analogy between political actors in a first-past-the-post presidential system and in a proportional-representation parliamentary system.
I suspect the pattern is more general and this is what John Cowan and David Marjanovič meant when saying that “parties” in the U.S. are “party coalitions” in European terms. It seems a reasonable, realty-based view to me.
I’m fine with using it as an analogy — analogies can be very helpful. I am not fine with just saying parties in the U.S. are party coalitions. They’re not.
The SDS in Bulgaria experimented in the ’90s with primaries in a proportional system, trying to emulate the US Democrats. They abandoned the experiment.
The (formerly?) conservative party of France, refounded (as is French custom) a while ago as Les Républicains, now has primaries modeled on the US ones.
That could work in the French system, it’s ballotage.
@Giacomo Ponzetti: I guess AntC’s point was not so much about coalitions per se, but against taking the 43.9% in the March 1933 elections as a measure of popularity. The best result of the NSDAP in free and fair elections was the 37.2% they won in 1932, and they had slipped to 33.1% in the November 1932 elections. And in the end, their end-game wasn’t forming a governing coalition with a simple majority (although they formed one); they wanted and managed to find a super-majority for the Enabling Law and then do away with democracy.
anarchism is just as much a political party as any other
Like “atheism is a religion,” some yes and some no, I’d say. People assembled with a mostly shared vision of society that consolidate, differences in that vision notwithstanding, to achieve something, sure. But as an explicit rejection of the spectacle of the system, maybe not.
@Hans: Needless to say you and AntC are right that in fair and free elections the NSDAP consistently failed to get more than 37.3% of the vote, and the whole Nazi-complicit extreme right never got to a majority. The NSDAP+DNVP coalition maxed out in July 1932 at 43.2% of the vote and 43.9% of the seats. I admit I have no idea if any of the irrelevant <1% parties might have been willing Nazi allies, but I'm happy to assume they were better than that and anyway they couldn't have reached a majority
I'm sorry for citing the March 1933 election results without acknowledging they were tainted by violent suppression of Nazi-opposing politicians and voters. I appreciate that Nazism is a conversation-killing subject for good reason, and I apologize for handling it too superficially. I didn't mean to imply that a majority of German voters had freely and fairly voted Hitler into power, but I see I should have been clearer in avoiding that insinuation.
I have an ever-decreasing understanding of how the Nazis' failure ever to win a fair and free election might support AntC's original argument that in Europe "winning at the ballot box won’t necessarily get them into coalition/anywhere near power, whereas in the U.S. getting the X-party nomination in a X-safe seat automatically gets you the baubles of power." But I've learned my lesson to let the first mention of Nazis kill the conversation as it's supposed to.
Whether that’s true depends on what “winning” means. A party that gets 50% or more of the vote will necessarily get into power. A party that gets less than that, but more than any other party, has very good chances of ending up in a governing coalition (or even, in countries where that has a tradition, a minority government), but that’s not guaranteed.
@GP: The issue with using late Weimar to illustrate the relationship between votes and power is that since the Papen government (June 1932), power in the sense of forming the government had nothing to do anymore with seats in parliament – neither Papen nor Schleicher had any formal support in the Reichstag except for the DNVP with ca. 6-8% of the vote; they both relied on the support of president Hindenburg and executive orders. And that was the same way Hitler came to power – at the time, the SPD opposed the Enabling Law using as one of the arguments that Hitler’s government actually had a parliamentary majority (achieved by whatever means) and should rely on that, but that’s not what Hitler wanted.
Thanks Giacomo, my take-away is that not all democracies are equal — even if you exclude the joke ones like Putin’s. You have to ask “what form and arrangement of democracy?” to quite a detailed level. And in this day and age (or was it always the case?) First Pass the Post/winner takes all is looking increasingly sickly.
Of the two democracies I’ve lived under, U.K. has been on a steady decline since the Thatcher era. The Liz Truss debacle was par for the course — indeed even in the ’90’s MPs were using their status to line their and their mates’ nests much more than look after their constituents.
In NZ (which abolished the Second Chamber in 1951, leaving few ‘checks and balances’), by the ’80’s and early ’90’s governments were regularly riding roughshod over anything that might be seen as a consensus — to the extent the electorate demanded a change in the voting system. We’ve had MMP (based on the then-German model) since 1996. Most governments are coalitions — indeed there’s a tendency for the largest party to form a coalition even when it has 50%+1 of the seats — precisely to widen their appeal and their ability to form a consensus — and to be in power for more than one term.
There’s no primary-like system in Europe whereby any dude off the street can get themselves funded and promoted on the ‘party ticket’ without going through a long approval process.
The regulations for getting on the ballot differ state by state. In NYS a state-registered party (currently there are four) can have the state run a primary for them (the Democrats and Republicans almost always do so) or can use some alternative process for choosing their candidate. In order to get on the primary ballot, a candidate must present a sufficient number of signed petitions, roughly 5% of the eligible voters of the constituency (but in the Senate, the threshold is 5% of the eligible voters in a majority of House districts, ensuring that Senate candidates have substantial statewide support). In practice, more petitions are needed because the regulations for the validity of a petition are rather twisty, and a substantial fraction of petitions are not counted.
It is also possible to get on the general-election ballot as an independent candidate, but the ballot requirement is roughly 15%. If a party’s candidate fails to get enough votes in the general election, that party is no longer state-recognized until and unless it goes through a petitioning process similar to what candidates do. Fairly recently the Liberal Party of NY lost its recognition in this way.
In NYS a party may nominate the candidate of another party, so that that person appears on the general-election ballot more than once The Working Families Party usually, but not always, nominates the Democratic candidate, and the Conservative Party of New York State usually, but not always, nominates the Republican candidate. (I generally vote for the WFP candidate, as I am more aligned with the WFP than the Democratic party, but it is not a wasted vote.) This “electoral fusion” is legal in Connecticut as well, and in six other states in some but not all elections; it has been illegal elsewhere for a century or more, though it was common in the 19C. It is fairly rare for anyone to be elected in NYC, where fusion is the most intense, without being recognized by at least two parties. In effect, this creates party coalitions, although they are not formally recognized as such.
whereas in the U.S. getting the X-party nomination in a X-safe seat automatically gets you the baubles of power
Depends what you mean by “baubles”. AOC got the Democratic nomination in a safe Democratic seat, but it turned out not to be safe for the 10-term incumbent she beat in the 2018 primary election. The chief baubles she got for that were the title of “U.S. Representative” and the salary of US$174,000 (probably more than she ever made before). In the 2019-2023 terms (members of Congress are elected in November but take their seats in January) she was not more empowered than any other junior Congresscritter whose party holds the House; she has more powerful positions now, but they are devalued because the House is Republican-controlled.
@AntC:
Duverger’s undoubtedly has its downsides, but the Weimar Republic is commonly considered the poster child of its benefits. Unless I miscount, here’s its eventual parliamentary arithmetic—1933 excluded!
May 1928: KPD 11.0% – SPD 31.2% – BB* 30.1% – R** 10.4% – DNVP 14.9% – NSDAP 2.4%
Sep 1930: KPD 13.3% – SPD 24.8% – BB* 23.7% – R** 12.5% – DNVP 7.1% – NSDAP 18.5%
July 1932: KPD 14.6% – SPD 21.9% – BB* 17.8% – R** 1.8% – DNVP 6.1% – NSDAP 37.8%
Nov 1932: KPD 17.1% – SPD 20.7% – BB* 17.6% – R** 2.2% – DNVP 8.8% – NSDAP 33.6%
* The Bürgerblock: Zentrum, DVP, DDP/DStP, BVP.
** The remainder: agrarian (CNBL, DBP, RLB, SLV), other Interessenparteien (WP, VRP) and smaller conservative parties (CSVD, KVP, DHP); all of which I understand to have been right-wing.
Far be it from me to absolve Hindenburg and his fellow reactionaries from their historical responsibilities for bypassing parliament with presidential cabinets since March 1930. We cannot know whether subsequent election results would have been better without that authoritarian move. Keeping election results constant, however, such five-way parliamentary fragmentation (with generous lumping of all conservatives in one bloc) implies a death spiral of governance failure.
The 1928-30 grand coalition between the SPD and the liberals broke down acrimoniously. The SPD explicitly campaigned in 1930 along the KPD and “against the bourgeois and the Nazi.” As remains typically the case, the grand coalition parties reaped electoral punishment and lost a combined 13 percentage points to their more extreme rivals. Hence, 1930 government formation would likely not have changed much without Hindenburg’s presidential cabinets—though I hasten to add government policy might have been quite different. Liberals and assembled conservatives, falling just short of a majority, could have formed a minority government tolerated by the SPD. Maybe under Brüning; maybe for two years. With either set of 1932 results, nothing but a huge constitutional crisis was possible anymore.
Again, Hindenburg must bear some blame for how badly this death spiral ended. But once you grant it wasn’t an unstoppable consequence of uncontrollable historical forces, you start wondering what else might have helped. Many people over the decades have thought a system promoting fewer parties and more stable government could have. First-past-the-post does that.
And maybe it’s too memorable that the April 1932 German presidential election, which was unavoidably winner-takes-all, went Hindenburg 53%, Hitler 37%, Thälmann 10%. Not that any of the three candidates was great, to say the least; but in comparison to parliamentary election results …
That’s why I’m a proponent of (some form of) D’Hondt representation from few-seat constituencies*. You’ll need significant backing locally for your candidates to be elected anywhere, but it takes national appeal to gain power. Multiple views are represented from all districts and nationally, and the whole country is represented in all major parties, which is important for keeping the nation together.
* I’m agnostic about the ideal number. Maybe as low as seven. But a higher number could be compensated by a high first divisor.
There is a whole tradition of “lessons from Weimar” in Germany; several of them became part of our current Grundgesetz and electoral system. But I doubt that any kind of change to the electoral system could have saved Weimar; the fundamental issue was that it lacked acceptance among the traditional elites (army, bureaucracy, judiciary) who didn’t accept that losing the war and Versailles were due to their own failure and among significant sections of the population; without the economic crisis it might have limped along and gained acceptance, but it never got the chance.
What strikes me about these election results is how weak the conservatives were. Putting all of BB and R together*, they ended up with half as many votes as the extreme right (DNVP stands for Deutschnationale Volkspartei) and not much more than the communists.
* Oversimplified of course. The one detail I know is that the Zentrumspartei wasn’t so much centrist as religious-reactionary.
It seems unhistorical to label the BB parties “conservative.” I don’t doubt they were by present-day standards, but they nonetheless represented the liberal center-right of their time. They were also the republican establishment: Zentrum was in government continuously 1919-1932. They look weak because I’ve focused on the death throes of the Weimar Republic, whose agony you can trace in their almost monotonically declining share of seats in parliament.
Jan 1919: 44.0%
June 1920: 40.0%
May 1924: 32.6%
Dec 1924: 34.7%
May 1928: 30.1%
Sep 1930: 23.7%
July 1932: 17.8%
Nov 1932: 17.6%
Mar 1933: 15.3%
I agree with GP here – in the literature about the Weimar Republic I am familiar with, Konservativ is mostly used for the traditional part of the anti-democratic right, basically the guys who wanted the Kaiser back.
Yeah … history is just one bloody thing after another. A President with power (necessarily ‘winner takes all’) is going to banjax however the multi-member ‘house’ can operate.
In the U.S. constitution, the President is supposed to be only the administrator/servant of Congress. But a) the President has power of veto; b) when Congress is in deadlock, the President is the only one who can act in a hurry. Hence most wars the U.S. has engaged in were Presidential decisions, some later ratified by Congress. And deadlock/not even agreement enough to keep the lights on has been the overwhelming mode for all of this century.
In the UK/NZ, the Monarch/Governor-General has only nominal power; the Prime Minister is really the apex, but can in effect be dismissed by Parliament at any time. (In Australia notoriously in 1975 the Governor-General dismissed the PM/whole government — but that was explicitly to trigger a general election.)
I’m less than convinced that fixed terms are an entirely wise feature in a democracy — since we’re examining “not all democracies are equal”.
Taiwan seems to manage it better: their 1991 constitution is loosely based on the U.S., with a directly-elected President for 4-year fixed term, and simultaneous Parliamentary elections. Then usually the President is of the same party as the Premier (typically sitting atop a coalition in Parliament). OTOH is that comparable? Only 23 million population, in a small island, much more culturally homogenous.
@AntC:
I’m neither a lawyer nor an American, but this perspective seems idiosyncratic.
The U.S. Constitution establishes three separate branches of government, and is commonly understood as placing an emphasis on each checking and balancing the other two. The President has an independent popular mandate and does not answer to Congress, unlike a prime minister. While it is clear that the executive branch has increased its powers since 1789, the notion that the Constitution really meant to set up a system of parliamentary sovereignty along the British model is certainly a minority one.
For most of U.S. history, 1789-1949, foreign wars were decided and declared by Congress: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. The closest a president came to jumping the gun in any of these wars was Polk sending 80 U.S. soldiers to the disputed Texan border in 1846. That’s playing politics with Congress, not starting a war.
Maybe Jefferson should have asked Congress whether to accede to a fresh request for tribute, rather than refusing it and triggering the Barbary Wars? I have no idea of the constitutional way of addressing requests for tribute. What else? I don’t think the “Banana Wars” were considered wars. I don’t think the “Indian Wars” were considered foreign. The Civil War obviously wasn’t.
Since Truman in 1950, presidents have taken a controversial lead in bringing the U.S. into war. This development is a concern for many, myself included. Exactly how far presidents have taken and can take their military powers before asking for congressional authorization is a hotly debated question I’m not qualified to answer.
However, I think 160 years are enough to establish this is not an intrinsic feature of the U.S. presidential system of government, nor a necessity imposed by parliamentary sluggishness. Congress declared war on Japan within 24 hours of Pearl Harbor.
The Federalist, nos. 67 ff, gives a pretty clear picture of what the proponents of the Constitution meant for the role of the presidency to be.
Congress declared war on Japan within 24 hours of Pearl Harbor.
I know this will come as a shock to some, but WWII had been already in full throat for a couple of years before Pearl Harbour. USA — that is, the President behind the backs of Congress — had been providing material support from the beginning. So exactly what I’m talking about. And similar position with WWI before 1915.
Since Truman in 1950, presidents have taken a controversial lead in bringing the U.S. into war.
There then. It’s since WWII that I mostly had in mind: Johnson in Vietnam, tricky Dicky, Iran-Contra, and support for any number of dodgy military operations in S.America.
I’m not saying they were ‘just’ wars or that Congress was dragging its feet/not standing up for its moral duty or failing America’s interests. Entering a war is a policy/Legislative decision, not to be devolved to merely Executive/administrative pragmatics.
I think, Giacomo, you’re taking far too much of a literalist/legalistic approach. Not enough Realpolitik.
what the proponents of the Constitution meant for the role of the presidency to be.
Do I remember one of those early Presidents being of the view it should occupy only a few months of each year, so he could spend plenty of time on his farm?
Schlesinger’s (1973) The Imperial Presidency is a classic, but a preoccupation with Nixon’s (and Johnson’s) personal and world-historical failings never made for a dispassionate reading of U.S. history.
Blaming Wilson for dragging the U.S. into World War I behind the backs of Congress is a tall order. I doubt you can advance in this valiant attempt more than Clements (2004), who doesn’t get far.
While he contends that Wilson and his administration lacked foresight or attentiveness, he acknowledges Congress was acting. As it reconvened on Dec. 7, 1914, Reps. Richard Bartholdt (R, MO) and Henry Vollmer (D, IA) introduced H.J. Res. 377 & 378 “To prohibit the export of arms, ammunition, and munitions of war from the territory or any seaport of the United States.” Its fate is detailed by Child (1938). Though the Wilson administration surely had no fondness for it, it was not crushed by presidential imperium, but in the most thoroughly parliamentarian manner: Henry D. Flood (D, VA), Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, shelved the resolution and its proponents decided against appealing to the floor over his head.
Unlike Wilson, FDR was certainly ahead of Congress and voters in his opposition to Nazi Germany. I grant that my personal fondness and gratitude for this position of his may color my assessment of his wartime leadership. But what exactly are you alleging he did to drag the U.S. into war behind the backs of Congress?
I’m altogether uncomfortable with your implicit premise that Pearl Harbor was a response to U.S. provocation. I wouldn’t let Japan off the hook so easily. But let’s set that aside and focus on material support for Britain against Nazi Germany.
Before World War II had even started, in March 1939, Senator Key Pittman (D, NV) introduced a bill ending the 1935-39 U.S. embargo on arms sales. Congress passed the Pittman Act in November, making arm sales to the Allies on a cash-and-carry basis a fully congressional decision.
In September 1940 FDR probably overstretched his authority by exchanging 50 aging destroyers for leases on British bases. The deal was public, and publicly criticized. Voters could have punished the president for it — he was running for reelection in November. Congress could have rebuked him and tightened rules against such shenanigans. Instead it passed the Lend-Lease Act of 1941.
USA — that is, the President behind the backs of Congress — had been providing material support from the beginning.
So in your mind there’s no distinction between providing material support and being at war? In your mind, the US is now at war with Russia (to take a current example), and a formal declaration of war would be only a formality? Furthermore, the US and the USSR were at war from the late 1940s to the fall of the latter? I think your Realpolitik is blinding you to reality.
Well, it is true that since then cold wars and proxy wars became much more popular (and thus entering a cold war or proxy conflict does not lead to a direct war).
Once again I must insist that words have meanings. You can use the “war” metaphor all you like — there’s a war going on in the comment section! my brother and I are at war! — but if we’re talking seriously about history and politics, cold wars and proxy wars are not actually wars, and the US was not at war before Dec. 7, 1941 (nor is it at war now).
I agree.
I just mean that the likelyhood that an indirect (but unambigous) conflict will lead to a direct war has decreased significantly (also for, say, Saudi Arabia and Iran who are in war in many ways. Also compare, say, Iran vs. Israel – a more official but presently less destructive conflict) so modern examples are not entirely correct.
But I agree that there is a difference.
“Russia is doing a war and insisting on calling it a special military operation. Israel is doing a special military operation and insisting on calling it a war.”
– my bad but sticky joke on the events of October 2023, possibly somewhat unfair to Israel
It is difficult not to compare (not only for me). What I was comparing is the siege of Mariupol (Ukraine wants a corridor to Ukraine, Russia offers a corridor to Russia) and the siege of Gaza (Israel markedly does not want a corridor to Israel, Egypt markedly does not want corridor to Egypt, everyone else is explaining why it is right). But it is not a joke.
@Hat cold wars and proxy wars are not actually wars,
Ok, that’s your chosen usage. A proxy war where U.S. military and civilian assets (if not so far as boots on the ground or military deaths) are deployed _is_ being at war, in the sense I intended.
(I had prepared a long list of instances of U.S.A. — via the President, in defiance of Congress and public opinion — committing U.S. assets. But I see we’re in a semantic dispute over ‘proxy war’.)
In all the examples I had in mind, the material support lead on to actual boots on the ground — when public support, or at least sufficient persuadable heads in Congress, acknowledged the inevitable.
‘Cold wars’ where there’s sabre-rattling but not actual military engagement, was not what I had in mind.
In your mind, the US is now at war with Russia
Yes. In all but formal declaration. I agree U.S. boots on the ground would be a ‘phase shift’; and in the murkiness of diplomatic niceties, a threshold not to be crossed (yet).
the US and the USSR were at war from the late 1940s to the fall of the latter?
No. Although the Afghan war/Mujahedeen support came darn close.
being at war, in the sense I intended.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
this perspective seems idiosyncratic
A six-syllable word for a one-syllable concept (beginning with w).
the notion that the Constitution really meant to set up a system of parliamentary sovereignty along the British model is certainly a minority one
A four-syllable word (beginning with m), in this case, with the same meaning. Of course, parliamentary sovereignty hardly existed in 1787: the presidency was an elective monarchy with re-election (term limits didn’t happen de jure until 1951).
Entering a war is a policy/Legislative decision, not to be devolved to merely Executive/administrative pragmatics.
You’ve got them paired wrong for the U.S.: policy goes with executive.
…Yes. I was thinking in the terms that conservatives want to conserve the status quo, while those who react to recent events by wanting to return to the status quo ante, e.g. the Weimar monarchists, are best called reactionaries… though of course that term 1) has almost never been used as a self-designation and 2) is rather skunked by a century of communists using it to slur everyone to their right.
From my post-WWII point of view I expect to see a CDU/CSU-like party in such a landscape, so I found its absence remarkable.
There is no “yet”. A war between nuclear powers is impossible – unless one of them has an absolute dictator who is either permanently insane or desperate to the point of insanity. And even in that case, half an hour isn’t long enough to put any surviving boots on any ground.
An important point.
@David Marjanović:
As an under-informed outsider I’d suggest the parties’ roots in the Bürgerblock run deep.
Adenauer held elected office as a member of Zentrum 1906-33. All other CDU members of his first postwar cabinet came from Zentrum (Hans Lukaschek, Jakob Kaiser, Anton Storch) except Gustav Heinemann (CSVD) and Robert Lehr (DNVP). Two out of three of the CSU members (Wilhelm Niklas and Fritz Schäffer) came from the BVP.
The Overton window moves gradually!
“A war between nuclear powers is impossible – unless one of them has an absolute dictator who is either permanently insane or desperate to the point of insanity. ”
It has not happened since MacArthur’s proposal to nuke China, that is all I know. Meanwhile many such countries are ruled by people who we find weird. Nuclear war is irrational, but I don’t know if this is a sufficient explanation. Even though “weird dictator” does seem to be a plausible pathway, I’m not sure if there can’t be democratic paths. As for peace theories, despite general humanitarian progress of Europe I suspect that the reason why we don’t have wars in Western Europe is simply business (business networks).
It has not happened since MacArthur’s proposal to nuke China, that is all I know.
I looked it up; AFAICT it had happened once – Kargil 1999. (There was an arguable example in 1969 with much less active border clashes.) I wouldn’t have guessed it was that late…
That one was defused (with US help, ironically enough) before any nukes showed up, though.
I think I chose MacArthur, because that time it was still not obvious that nuclear war is a horrible thing.
That’s the thinking behind the ECCS ~ EEC ~ EC ~ EU: never mind making war unthinkable, make it infeasible.
I suspect that the reason why we don’t have wars in Western Europe is simply business (business networks).
That’s why war was supposed to be impossible in 1914.
I’m pretty sure the economies were much less integrated then than they’re now. The amount of trucks clogging Europe’s highways – and that’s with a dense rail network operating, in the German case, at 120% of its capacity if we ignore all the construction sites – is simply not comparable to anything from back then.
Sure, but so what? The lesson is that if leaders want war, they don’t give a shit about economic disruption. Look at what’s going on in Ukraine right now…
Russia was already under sanctions instead of integrated as well as France and Germany are with each other, and it spent years preparing for further sanctions (despite underestimating the sanctions that were actually enacted in 2022 – 300 gigabucks intended to buffer the economy from sanctions were in fact frozen, and ten commercial planes had to make emergency landings lately and can no longer fly).
Still, the more complexity (sic) in economy and the network, the safer.
@LH, well, European peace does not extend to the ME (and we DO consider a war with, say, Libya normal).
For Russia it is Caucasus. And it is quite obvious that having oil (and people who want to buy it) is already danger in itself, so “business” is not exactly innocent:) We anyway have to take other factors into account or at least quantify this complexity.
Sure. All I’m saying is that it’s silly to claim that business interests prevent people from going to war.
That’s why war was supposed to be impossible in 1914.
Or was that because the Kaiser [eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria] wouldn’t declare war on the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha?
It’s not silly if the business interests are strong enough and widespread enough. Again, 1914 was different by orders of magnitude.
Yes it is silly. But believe what feels better to you. (Note that it is not business interests who declare war.)
It’s transparently false that war is impossible when its economic cost is too great, or that powerful business interests can prevent all wars that are bad for their bottom line. On the other hand, it’s also unlikely there’s a switch in any leader’s brain that goes from “I want peace” to “I want war” with complete disregard for the accompanying economic costs and benefits.
Both economists and (as far as I know) political scientists rather think that leaders have a desire for war, which varies across leaders and over time, and decide to wage war when this desire is stronger than their internalization of economic costs, which may be imperfect but is never nil. Thus, higher costs of war make war less likely. Leaders sometimes have mad cravings for war and will indulge them no matter what, but sometimes they also have a little itch for war that economic considerations may persuade them not to scratch.
The best analysis of how this relates to international trade is provided by Martin, Mayer and Thoenig’s (2008) “Make Trade Not War?” Their point is that the doux commerce hypothesis needs to be qualified. If two countries trade a lot with each other, the trade-disruption cost of war is greater. But if they have lots of other trade partners, the trade-disruption cost of fighting any one partner is smaller — there are potential substitutes.
Empirical evidence is pretty supportive of their theory, though it may not persuade you if you’re convinced a priori that the theory is false — it’s essentially impossible to get clean identification of causal relationships for country-level outcomes like war.
LH, if you want to say that business interests don’t guarrantee peace I don’t disagree with you.
But we need some peace theories if we want peace.
For western Europe it seems plausible that complexity and pervasiveness of business is a factor.
Actually I first thought about all this int eh context of North Korea. As I told many times, boycott/sanctions/etc are counter productive with such regimes. I can imagine that Western politicians (much unlike Koreans) even benefit of existance of some “axis of evil” but even in that case, not from the nukes. The regime is stong and crazy, they have nukes, they have missiles.
It seems obvious that the policy failed completely (or performed no better than no policy).
But I thought that before the nukes in Jong Il’s era: imagine a graph (web, network) of contacts between people (ordinary people, officials, businessmen) and other actors in Korea and elsewhere. When this graph is very complex, it sheer weight will keep pulling the local politics towards normality… or at least everyone else’s madness. It will get into Kim’s head as well:)
(Someone recently wrote a comment on the forum of some Russian novel: there will always be wars. I don’t like this attitude (actually, I responded and pointed at western Europe and he said “Europe is fooling everyone”… I don’t know what he means – but indeed if peace correlates with relative – rather than absolute – prosperity the European example will be of little use to others.))
@Giacomo, this consideration – lots of other trade partners – did occur to me. Sadly it won’t explain why Belguim can’t fight with the Netherlands.
Trond Engen : ” That’s why I’m a proponent of (some form of) D’Hondt representation from few-seat constituencies*. You’ll need significant backing locally for your candidates to be elected anywhere, but it takes national appeal to gain power. Multiple views are represented from all districts and nationally, and the whole country is represented in all major parties, which is important for keeping the nation together.
* I’m agnostic about the ideal number. Maybe as low as seven. But a higher number could be compensated by a high first divisor.”
Bulgaria does something like this — it’s between four and thirteen, and also balanced between the electoral districts to adjust similar to the German system, but diferrent. It used to be D’Hondt, but it was switched to Sainte-Laguë recently (for, IMO, nonsensical reasons). First the method is used nationally between the parties, then locally, with a compensatory mechanism that sometimes results in misrepresentation of the local of at the expense of the national. This often results in imbalances locally, which is a source of tension.
Yeah, that sounds backwards to me.
We do have something similar here, even if coming from the opposite end. The last seat in each constituency is reserved for national distribution. The distribution between parties is straightforward, but the mathematical distribution of the allotted party seats on 19 constituencies can have weird effects. I think the record is well under 50 votes behind a Liberal mandate in Finnmark.
Of course any system breaks down on the edges, and it should rather be evaluated on overall merit. My problem with the current Norwegian system is that the number of nationally distributed seats almost removes the advantage of large parties, and the result is a gradual development towards an increasing number of small and roughly equal parties with a more and more narrow scope, and diminishing cost of using the vote for a single-issue message rather than broad agreement with a coherent policy.
proportional representation makes it very possible even for coalitions—let alone for single parties—to fail to win a majority.
What we need is for
In fact Hong Kongers felt so assured by restricting candidates to “certified as a patriot”, only 27.5% took part, “the lowest turnout since the former British colony was returned to China.”
Heaven forfend that elections should become politicised or swayed by populism!