Thoughts on how to improve the current system

[eppie]

You cannot mandate a party to exist. My country's experience with additional parties suggests that even when they do, they cannot make much change because of the structure of our voting system.

Indeed the voting system is the problem.
People often vote against the other party or vote for a party to make sure the one they are against will not be biggest.

First, a problem with many parties, in a system like the netherlands (there are 150 seats in the hosue of representatives so 0.7 % of votes will get you 1 seat) is that it can often take a long time to form a government (I am speaking with the Netherlands in the back of my mind). And that while doing so parties need to exchange opinions a bit. What happens often is that things like 'the environment' always get traded away in favour of things like economy, welfare etc.

A good thing is that small parties which aim on certain issues, like the PvdD (party for animal rights) can be represented and get a lot of things done. EXample: if you ask dutch people if they are for or againts wearing fur, or bioindustry most people (more than 50%) would be against these things. However with only the big parties in the HoR noone will usually ask for a vote on these things because 1; they don't find it important amd 2: if noone mentions these things they at least don't risk losing votes of people that are not against fur or bio-industry.

So now this PvdD with their 2 seats in the HoR has of course the opportunity to propose new laws and what you see then is that many parties don't want to vote against such a new proposol because they know that this will be very bad for their image and so something like this could pass.

To me this is superdemocratic. A quasi-two party system (because of voting laws) will suffer from the representatives who will consider the amount of seats in parliament more important than the topics they actually work on.