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Jan 16, 2012

Revisiting single member districts

Much to my surprise, there seems to be some rather thorough dissatisfaction in the legislature with the current single member district system. Not only has Speaker Wang Jin-pyng restated his long held belief the single member district is "not good for democracy," but the DPP is likely to introduce a constitutional amendment next legislative session, and also will ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the current system.

One of the issues the media has raised is that the single member districts have turned "blue" areas bluer and green areas greener, further polarizing the country along north-south lines.

Since larger parties benefit from a single member district system, it's interesting to see them regretting a policy that has increased their own clout. We'll see what changes are actually proposed. Right now, the legislature seems just to be in the complaining phase. 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bah, the KMT knows it profits from the system, hence no change on the horizon. On the other hand, it's quite natural that the DPP regrets its monumental stupidity in supporting the constitutional amendment, idiots.

阿牛 said...

This is only partly true. Wang Jin-pyng has opposed the changes since they were just proposals, and felt the legislature was being shrunk too much. While the districts per se, or the advantage they give to the KMT might not bother him, at least he personally thinks there needs to be a more distributed committee work load.

NJ said...

if DPP won the presidency, they would likely get a majority in legislative.
i like the current parallel voting system which combines both FPTP and PR together.
for less drastic changes, the LY might consider increasing the nationwide seats to 50 ( reduce the disproportionality created by single-MP constituencies ) and lowering the party votes threshold to 3% or even 2% to give small parties a chance.