PR - more evidence it's a bad idea

In today's National Post Gerald Owen rebuts Andrew Coyne in an excellent column discussing PR in relation to the German experience:

Though West Germany adopted PR, like the weak Weimar regime, it started with few parties and before long passed a law that parties with less than 5% of the vote would get no seats in parliament. (Our Canadian Greens got less than that in 2006, I note.)

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The unification of West and East Germany in 1990 made a more complex nation-state. Federal German politics is now a constellation of five parties, and the FDP has struggled to meet the 5% threshold.

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It is hard for ... [Angela Merkel's coalition] government to make strong decisions. Even the mildest measures to make labour markets more flexible, and thus reduce East German unemployment, are a struggle.

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Andrew Coyne did not read Tuesday's Post editorial attentively. With inexact reasoning, he claims there is a contradiction between two consequences of PR alleged by the Post: party fragmentation and excessive consensus. If he followed the politics of Continental Europe with active interest, he would see the drift that results when those two factors collaborate.

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PR is not good for countries as complex as unified Germany and Canada. It would mean endless and incoherent coalition governments.

Amen!