I moved from a proportional-representation country to a FPTP one (Canada) and it's so much better to have a specific individual who is my MP.
Back where I was born, there's a grey and anonymous party list of people selected by extremely dubious internal party political means. I never felt the slightest bit represented; and the political process was completely opaque.
Now I have a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office.
The Anonymous Party list, and opaque process are not inherent factors on any of the replacements for FPTP, in fact the only one WITH the list was supposed to be an open list, and that was the system with the least political support.
Ranked/alternate voting, STV and other options directly address the issues with FPTP without introducing the drawbacks of MMP/unelected leaders being selected for seats.
Ranked voting is a majoritarian variant of FPTP that doesn't fix many of the flaws of FPTP. There is still the flaw of "favourite betrayal" that induces a need to vote "strategically".
Single Transferable Vote involves ranking candidates but is a Proportional System.
STV does a much better job of it and is why I was strongly in support of STV over AR/MMP or other options.
Countries with multiple small parties frequently seem to collapse into political torpor where nothing ever changes.
2 parties means power tends to jump back and forth due to the recent ruling party doing badly vs the opposition actually providing an alternative and compelling change. This means parties tend to "lose" more than actually "win" elections.
2 dominant parties when one side of the spectrum is split among 2-3 parties tends to allow a smaller minority to achieve stronger governments which is not representative. I.E the split on the right in the 90's allowed the Liberals to have many successive majority governments despite less than 50% of support for many of those elections. In the aughts the alliance and PC merger turned that around and now the NDP and Liberals tend to split the left to a degree and the right can win a strong majority with 35-38% of the actual vote. This doesn't benefit any side long term.
"getting things done" isn't always the best metric for a political party, especially when they don't have the public support for their changes.
STV or various other methods that allow proportional results while maintaining current representation and government size were the best outcome, but didn't benefit the liberals so they dropped it.
You are all in the same boat in a sense that’s more local and less abstract than with proportional rep.
Which is why voting needs to be effective, and FPTP is exactly why there are so many "safe" ridings for the various parties.
Comparing FPTP to a worse system and decided FTPT is awesome while ignoring its known and widely discussed flaws surprises me. Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.
Whenever I see something is not open for debate, I view it with a lot more skepticism. Almost always, this type of framing, to make an idea untouchable, leads to abuse. We saw this in a lot of the “trust authorities” type messaging in the pandemic.
Do you realize how alienating this shit is to a centrist?
You're mixing things up. FPTP isn't what gives you "a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office" and prop-representation doesn't prohibit having one either.
