1) don't get the question. To the extent I'm talking about coalitions, I'm speaking about non-US examples, because we don't have "coaltions" in the Parliamentary sense of the term.

2) maybe, but I'm not sure how significant that is, given the tendancy of parties in some form of PR to be more like what would be called factions in a Japanese or Mexican context.

ursus arctos wrote:

I'm not sure how significant that is, given the tendancy of parties in some form of PR to be more like what would be called factions in a Japanese or Mexican context.

Interesting point. That would complicate things. i don't know much about inner-party workings in places like NL or germany - are they really beset by Japanese-like factions?

E10, you're shifting the ground of the discussion. I'm asking whether a LibCon coalition is futrther to the centre than a con only govt, and you're responding that the LibCon govt. is further from the centre than the Blair government at a similar juncture. Which might be true (though as I've argued before, the gap between the Labour and Tory manifestoes as far as cuts go was really not that large), but is a bit beside the point.

And I'm saying that the difference between a Con-only government and a LibCon coalition is, on the evidence so far, negligible. The Tories have outmanouevred the Libs on all the key issues so far and rammed through what they want, because they're arrogant 'born to rule' types like that. But this isn't so much a problem of coalition as of ideology, and the fact that the LibDems broadly subscribe to much of what the Tories want. So we're not really seeing compromise and coalition work swimmingly beneficiently so far. We've had a kind of broad economic 'bipartisanship', or 'tripartisanship' for too long in this country anyhow, so I'm not really feeling the benefits of party leaderships agreeing with each other on stuff.

Gramsci, I don't know enough about Dutch politics to answer for Holland, but there are definite factional tendancies in the German context. The whole CSU/CDU split looks very factional to me, and one could also descirbe the Lafontaine wing of the SPD in those terms. That said, the German example is to me less relevant in this context given the emergence of the FDP, Greens and Linke as national parties (what I was trying to shorthand, was that the combination of PR and long periods of single party rule tends to be accompanied by factionalism).

Toto Gramsciddu wrote:
I find the OTF consensus in favour of PR but against bipartisanship deeply confusing. Both demand compromise: why is one OK and the other not?

(edit: this is a reaction to some of the stuff upthread, not on what Inca just posted)

I can't speak for everybody, but I'm not against bipartisanship in principle. Compromise is an inevitable and sometimes even a good thing in any political system. However, much of what is praised in the mainstream press in the U.S. as "bipartisan" is often little more than Republicans and Democrats agreeing to capitulate to some lobby or another. So it's not so much bipartisanship itself that I dislike, but the way the idea of it is used to justify poor legislation and stifle debate.

Defence and criminal justice seem to be the most centrist parts of the government, though the Lib Dem influence is probably weighing less heavily than the deficit. There are some leftish Lib Dems elsewhere in government- Norman Baker, Sarah Teather, Lynne Featherstone and (maybe) Chris Huhne. They might make a difference but hard to see it yet.

I do have a bit of problem with PR for broadly the reasons Toto suggests, but I think there's a principled difference to be drawn between (a) compromising in order to form a Government and (b) offering the electorate no real choice.

The prime example of bipartisanship in British politics in my lifetime was Northern Ireland. Now, there are arguments to be had about whether or not, in that particular and exceptional case, bipartisanship was necessary. But those are for another thread. All I want to observe here is that bipartisanship on Northern Ireland seems to have been quite corrosive of democracy: political censorship, propaganda, rigged public enquiries, Special Branch collaborating with favoured armed groups and possibly conniving at murder. All this should have been rigorously scrutinised and where necessary opposed.

Labour were bad on NI, but the Tories were usually reliably worse, until quite late on in the story. Yet they were never taken to task by Labour for anything (apart, as I recall, from when they made it illegal to vote "felons" into Parliament, which Labour felt went beyond NI in its implications). When both government and opposition own a policy, both will be tempted to ignore any failings and malign effects it may have. I think this greatly increases the chance that it will have them.