Why do winner takes all systems hurt left-wing parties in elections? In the US the left has been opposing the electoral college for fifty years or more. In commonwealth countries they have been trying to replace first-past-the-post with proportional representation for the past century. In germany socialists carried out a coup in 1919 to implement proportional representation. New zealand implemented it in the 90s because the primary left wing party lost an election. Has it ever been studied why the left loves proportional representation and why exactly it helps them win more then the right?
>>18545425Because proportional representation (in theory) better supports nuanced and varied political discourse.
Because winner takes all means that all the other views are left in the dust. Proportional systems give leftists more power because most people are dirt poor plebs.
>>18545425Because rightists have what leftists lack: a killer instinct. They can fight and get what they want while leftists are all homosexual cry babies who scream about fairness. You can't believe that would compete against someone who fights and wins, so the right gets to keep the system that helps them.
>>18545425FPTP works if there are only two candidates or options, but the more candidates step up, the higher the percentage of votes that end up getting binned.So it works as long as you're a single party or Uniparty state, where both candidates represent the same politics and are only rated on how effective they are at getting them pushed through parliament.
The UK has FPTP and labour is a perennial big party.>Not real left wingWhich one of the parties that don't like fptp would you consider real l-w by the same standards?
Because leftist policy preferences tend to create wealth for the capital at the expense of everywhere else. Every single government program, the money hits Washington DC first. This tends to create demographic distributions of one mega-capital full of state dependents acting as a tumor draining the rest of the county. See: any Latin American country.
>>18545777Labour has been pushing for proportional representation since forever. Before them there was the liberal party and they were doing it in the 19th centuryThis is in 2026https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgpzp87p11o
>>18545813And yet they've never introduced one.I'll also give you another example - France. Although recently socialists kind of collapsed(so did the republicans) they're also fptp country with long tradition of leftist parties.The issue isn't left vs. right but rather that every establishment party has an entire machine and organsiation geared to succeed in fptp. With proportional representation they have to reshuffle the machine and sometimes a lot(for instance if a state in the US oscillates 30% republican or democratic nobody even thinks about campaigning there, but suddenly they would because the difference between 25% and 35% can change a lot down the line), which is why they don't bother.
>>18545821>I'll also give you another example - France. Although recently socialists kind of collapsed(so did the republicans) they're also fptp country with long tradition of leftist parties.France is also an extremely centralized country where all wealth flows into the capital.
>>18545425Probably just because they tend to break into a smaller groups a lot because of small issues
>>18545425>In the US the left has been opposing the electoral college for fifty years or more.The reason for this is very obvious which most people know already, the electoral college tilts the scales a bit away from urban areas towards rural areas, which benefits the Republicans (now). The Democrats can win the popular vote by running up a lot of votes in California but lose a presidential election because the vote is relatively "inefficient."NYC switched to ranked-choice voting for local elections which benefits the left. Mamdani beat Cuomo outright in the first round of the primary but if he didn't he would've likely won anyways as the ranking sorted out.>>18545787>Because leftist policy preferences tend to create wealth for the capital at the expense of everywhere else. FPTP is bad for parties that have their vote concentrated in one area. It's like (I dunno) the German Greens get 15% across the country, in a winner-take-all system they don't get much (if any) but they get 15% of the seats in a proportional system. Germany uses a partially proportional system. Also the AfD might be weaker too if it weren't for their system, or they'd have to focus on changing the CDP from within.
>>18545425Most people are poor
>>18545895>FPTP is bad for parties that have their vote concentrated in one areaIt depends.If it's party of regional importance(representing regional minority etc) then it often guarantees them seat at the table, the problem starts with large scale national parties that want more than a seat at the table, then especially newcomers without a political machine can't really do much.I think the most instructive example of that was Sargon's of Akkad parliamentary run. Across Great Britain he would probably be able to get enough votes for him in particular, but he had to get votes in Swindon and that's a bigger problem. The establishment parties have these kinds of old timey locally recognised elites(teachers and doctors are a good target if you're looking to recruit them) that can be put to run in contested areas and run while more modern newcomers who usually have more dispersed support and lack the machinery can't hope to do anything at all.
