politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
What system do you think is better, then? Because, reading that post, the main takeaway I got was basically "the people that lost a vote don't have much say in government," which... That's how democracy works? I'm confused.
A community representation system is better. Or as a lot of people like to call it, a "first past the post" system.
Sometimes things are named by those who oppose it. For example the Big Bang Theory was called that by people that thought it was preposterous. But it turned out to be the best theory.
"First past the post" was deliberately called that by people pushing a proportional representation system in an effort to make it sound arbitrary and unfair.
But when power dynamics are considered, proportional representation systems are far more arbitrary and unfair. It looks better on a spreadsheet to see the number of seats being proportional to the number of votes. But when you consider the seats are controlled by the parties and not the individuals sitting in them, there's really no point to having seats at all, other than for optics. An optimal proportional representation system would simply have the each party appoint one representative and that representative would have exactly the number of votes the party got in the last election. The only reason there are legislatures and seats in a proportional representation system is to give people the illusion that there's a legislative assembly.
A bicameral system with House that is community representation body and a Senate that's a proportional representation system might be fine. But having seats in a pop rep is really silly, just have each party appoint someone to put on record why they're voting for or against a bill. And bicameral systems can lead to gridlock, so I'd say that at most a prop rep system should only be able to delay legislation, not block it completely. This would encourage listening to the concerns of minority parties to get legislation passed sooner, but prevents some far right whackadoos from blocking everything because they want the government to fail.