The two big parties are basically getting threatened by the internet and are obviously ready to go nuclear by threatening to simply team up, get supermajority required for a constitutional change, and "optimize" the political diversity down to 2 or 3, US style, maybe even 1, by simply throwing the annoying emerging competition out of the parliaments.

That's why the 5% threshold was established.

But there are a lot or people who say that it wasn't the number of parties, it was the lack of democrats.

(Democrats, not the US party. People who support democracy.)

In fact the constituion back then was very progressive and ambitious, even by todays standards, but with the lack of support even in official positions (e.g. Justice, Army sticking with the former structure and personnel) it didn't last very long.

Add to that the people's wide spread opinion of being burdened with unfairly tough first world war reparations and the regular abuse of emergency law ("Notverordnungen", not sure if the translation is correct) and there are a lot of ears listening to the ideas of the NSDAP.

This may be true for most things in life, but if there's one subject that can't be explained with only one aspect or reason, it's the republic of Weimar. It's decline is the sum of several unfortunate developments and circumstances.

edit: I say it not to reflect on Israeli society or politics per se, but to agree that fragmented parliaments cause such problems.

The military overspend during WWI and draconian terms that the winners impose over Germany destroyed the economy of the country, creating a spiral of hyperinflation[1], both led to an inevitable second conflict, as Keynes pointed in "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" that was written many years before the WWII

[1] A great book about Weimar hyperinflation cycle is "When money dies: The nightmare of the Weimar collapse"

Similarly, the German public understands hyperinflation as leading to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. There was a genuine and severe hyperinflation crisis in the years after World War I, but the main economic reason for the Nazi ascendance to power in the early 1930s was actually a period of _deflation_ and mass unemployment. The Nazi rise to power coincided with an inflationary policy (Germany exited the gold standard in 1931), in part supported by the Nazis, that decreased unemployment and increased economic growth.

This is why it’s kind of funny when the current inflation aversion of German policymakers is attributed to a national trauma about hyperinflation. It’s true that the hyperinflationary period 1919-1923 was deeply painful for Germans and you can understand that they don’t want to repeat that, but surely the consequences of the deflationary period leading to the rise of National Socialism were worse.

(That doesn’t mean that Keynes was wrong, but a story that sees hyperinflation leading to WWII is probably too simplistic. It’s more like hyperinflation → gold standard → Great Depression → deflation → Nazis gain more seats → leave gold standard → Nazis gain absolute power.)

See http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/06/30/197736/austerit...

Thats what he said. How do you know that he honestly sees this as a problem for the country and not just a problem for his party? He is literally advocating getting rid of political competition and decreaasing the overall possible choice for the electorate, so you have to be really really sure that he is honest and has no horse in this race, but as a member of a party which wouldnt be affected by the change but immensely profit off it, he has one.

It would be nice to see a total abolition of parties, in fact in most democratic constitutions the word 'party' is never mentioned.

People should vote for other people, not for parties.

Abolishing the formal definition of parties wouldnt help, because like-minded people would still team up and form de facto parties, so nothing substantial would change.

> People should vote for other people, not for parties.

In Germany, you have both. There are two votes, the first one is for people, the "direct candidates". The second is for the whole party, which again is represented by a list of candidates determined by in-party elections.

I would like to take this concept even one step further. People should not vote for other people. They should vote for ideas and concepts.

Isn't that why parties were invented in the first place? I mean, at least in theory.

More parties can mean more extremes in parliament, and more coalitions that depends on making concessions to extremists.

It may be more democratic in theory, but in practice it does not push politics toward the center, but instead enables the extremist fringe.

We're ultimately going to converge against a leaderless system, without parties, politicians and all that other nonsense. Technology will eventually enable functioning anarchy, and we're just seeing the start of it.

Problem there is that there is no such thing as a person who holds every single one of your views. By voting for the guy who, say, believes the internet should be hands off, you could also be voting for a guy who believes something like abortion is eeeeeevil, or that fiat money is bad, or that minorities should be marginalized, what have you.

Hence the voting for people, since you have to choose which of the pluses and minuses are more important to you.

[1]: Best current example: The copyright industry and their increasingly desperate death throes.

It's the worst example of party politics.

That doesn't keep people from de-facto running as party representatives, though. They can't put their party affiliation on the ballot, but they can say in their speeches which of the national parties they prefer, and parties can issue press releases explaining which of the candidates they support. So it tends towards a two-party, first-past-the-post situation.

If you have a proportional system, where you can more truly state your preferences yet have your vote count even if your first preference doesn't succeed, you end up with more diversity. Downsides include greater tendency for coalition governments and potentially less clear mandates for decisive governments.

This is a self fulfilling prophecy.

People should vote for third parties more often! The mainstream ones suck!

No way, and "waste" my vote? I'd rather hold my nose and pick someone who has a chance!

(6 months later, when the guy voted in is officially hated)

Man, people should vote for third parties more often, this guy is horrible..

And it's this conversation and line of thinking that ensures that (in the USA), it's the same old crap, day in and day out.

There's a saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results..

Especially if you include parties with just a chance of passing the threshold, you theoretically more likely to find a party that represents your position. In practice though it encourages parties that represent certain ethnic/interest groups. It creates instability. It also means governments are alway coalitions where small parties are constantly threatening to bring down the government, especially the ethnic/interest parties with a narrower set priorities.

Right now, both the established political parties and the voters are fascinated by the Pirates. From nowhere to 8 % - that's quite a feat in our slow-moving political landscape. It also means that both the party and those rooting for them are a mix of young people, disappointed voters from both ends of the political spectrum, libertarians and many other factions.

Many Germans are fed up by what is often called a One Party system in disguise, where labeling decisions as "without any alternative" has become Chancellor Merkel's favorite move. There were several large-scale attempts at Internet censorship / filtering (it used to be child pornography yesterday, it's terrorism and copyright violations today, and it'll be something else tomorrow), and more and more people see through the whole theatre.

However, I'm afraid that everyone and their grandmother will project their hopes on a very young and very heterogenous party. There will inevitably be some disappointment.

But then, to quote Groundhog Day: "Something is... different. Anything different is good."

I actually feel that the slow-moving days are over. The recent rise and fall of the FDP was spectacularly fast too, without anything happening, or the FDP even changing their opinion at all. (The FDP is a libertarian/neocon party with some interest in civil liberties.)

Liquid Feedback is a server software (implementing LD for an organization) that allows proxy representation. If I think person X can vote for me on topic Y, I can say so by using LF. And I can change my mind from one minute to another not only every 4 years. Here is a longer explanation:

http://communitywiki.org/LiquidDemocracy

Pirate pads are not chat rooms but Etherpads to work collaboratively on documents (that happen to have also a chat function).

http://www.public-software-group.org/liquid_feedback_core

http://www.public-software-group.org/liquid_feedback_fronten...

But my point is this. At a psychological level people are driven by emotion rather than logic. Most of the general public do not understand or are interested in politics. They do not have the indepth knowledge required to make a good decision. Rather they rely on the media to tell them who to vote for. Depending on the economic circumstances at the time, the ordinary person will vote for the person who promises to overcome their short-term pain, while ignoring the consequences for the long term. The most recent example is Greece, where the people have voted for a government that is threatening to wreck all progress to date on solving their financials issues for the sake of easing austerity.

Thoughts?

You need knowledge to decide whether something is good or not, when the policy is fact-based. You dont need knowledge to decide whether you _want_ something or not, when the policy is purely opinion and preference based, for example filesharing. You dont need domain knowledge to decide that for you freedom to share information trumps the freedom to profit off information creation by enforcing artificial scarcity.

> the ordinary person will vote for the person who promises

> Thoughts?

If people are not allowed to make bad decisions, you dont have democracy, but a kind of dictatorship disguising itself as democracy. "You can vote on whatever you want as long as I and the few other stakeholders approve of the results" is a fake democracy, designed solely to sedate people's natural desire for co-participation and to prevent uprising.

Whatever your justification, you're trying to ban people from contributing their small share to the overall policy because you dont like their likely policy. One of the primary goals of the pirate parties is to fight opinions like yours and people like you by enabling maximum participation for everybody. Direct democracy baby. Bring on the regular swiss-style referendums.

In Greece, voters punished the two main parties who colluded to fuck them over so badly, by voting for other parties. In fact, almost 20% of the parliament is now composed of members of brand new parties - brand new because many voters don't feel their interests are being represented by the older parties. Isn't this result exactly what we would want and hope for in a system of governance?

> is threatening to wreck all progress to date on solving their financials issues for the sake of easing austerity.

Oh my.

Greece (and a whole bunch of other European countries) has a system of governance and a corruption level that is very different from other EU countries, and as such probably should not have been part of the EU to begin with.

Now that they're in Greece is in a position to reap the benefits of that fact but the countries that have for many years (Germany foremost) kept the weaker countries afloat are now themselves getting into trouble. This upset a lot of apple-carts and now we are at a very difficult moment for the union and for Greece.

As it is there are no real good solutions. Greece leaving the euro zone or being forced out will have big consequences for all parties involved and likely the end result of that route would be much worse for the general Greek population than any level of austerity that is currently in effect.

Greece staying in the eurozone will require a lot of very unpopular sacrifices in many places, the end result of which will be a much weaker euro.

There are no winners in any of these scenarios, only losers and it will take a long time (decades?) to fix this problem properly.

What you are seeing here is the result of the EU growing too fast in order to win the pissing match about which economic block is the largest on the world stage. If the forging of the monetary union would have been done in a more restrained fashion a lot of this misery could have been avoided.

Cowboy politics a decade ago are what caused this, emotional reactions to the problem at hand certainly won't repair it overnight. It will get worse before it can begin to get better.

Germany is the winner in this scenario. Having the Euro as a currency is a great boon to their national economy. They were at a trade deficit when they used the DM, but ever since the inception of the Euro, they have been cleaning-up export wise.

Germany benefits from the Eurozone as consumers from EU nation-members can buy German products with no trade impediments. Germany benefits even more from a weak Euro as it makes their products very attractive for purchase from non-Euro countries.

Not in the last ... 30 years. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/balance-of-trade

It's all too little too late - after most of Greece's public assets have already been plundered by the the ECB and the IMF. We wanted that result 3 years ago - not now. A country can be ruined in 4 years.

Should we really need to wait until a country has become so fucked beyond repair that we can protest it by "punishing the main parties"? It doesn't matter who you vote for in the end, the government still gets in!

While 'democracy' isn't inherently the problem, our current interpretation of it is. It goes as follows: Some men in suits make up lots of lies to gain your votes. After they get power, they ignore all their promises and usually do the opposite. If you don't like it, tough - come back in 4-5 years.

We don't really have any democracies (rule of the mob), we have rule of the representatives. The flaw is that they don't represent the mob, they represent their own parties. The concept of a political party is undemocratic. If you vote for a representative in your constituency, he should be voting as his constituents want, not how his party tells him to. (And moreover, if this doesn't happen, you shouldn't need to wait 4 years to give him the boot)

Examples include the austrian government with far right participation, the felt 100 votes about eu membership and maastricht contracts (sometimes three times until they finally got slim pro vote). And thats one of the reasons the pirates and others are growing that fast: people are pissed by that, espacially the younger ones. just my 5 cents.

People behave very differently when comparing communities to even just the town or city they live in. They behave to their neighbor much differently than someone a 15 minute drive from, and absolutely differently from someone they never see.

Given that (in the US at least) approximately 1.5~ in 10 people are public sector workers (I forgot where I got that statistic, but anything > 1 in 50 would suffice), you can easily go full republic and have small communities of 1,000 people (psychological analysis studies seem to lean towards something in the 700 - 1300 range being the maximum number of people any one individual can actively relate to at a human level) who elect a singular representative amongst themselves every year (with no re-elections, and at such a small scale, the politics of campaign finance break down completely - everyone should know each other.)

You simply select, emotionally, the person amongst yourselves you feel best represents you individually, and those that want to take the local seat can debate one another in forum with whoever is interested. The rest can be expected to take sides, but the beauty of this idea is that as long as people remain mobile, you can expect common political interests to attract one another, and as long as you can preserve individual mobility (which is much easier in the modern world) you can expect people to move where the politics suit them.

The idea is that you start legislation bottom up rather than top down. The most fundemental flaw in western politics, such as the controvesry surrounding the Euro, is that hundreds of millions of people can be legislated upon with no suffering or injustice.

In terms of scale, have a "locality" be 1,000 people, have a "district" be 13,000 people (13 representatives), have a "region" be 273,000 people (21 representatives), have a "state" be 9,009,000 people (33 representatives), and have a national body be the sum of all member states in a nation. Those numbers are completely arbitrary - the idea is that each level up represents an approximate order of magnitude more people and has more representatives in chorus to represent more diverse viewpoints and require more debate and process.

CPGrey has an excellent video series on the means to partition a nation into equally sized parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A

If you do the traditional every 10 year national census and split line partition, you MUST be able to get every district in a margin of 950 - 1050 people, and you can shift the per district number to make sure every region and state has the proper number of component members to match.

The real "shift" here is you are actively breaking the boundries of artifical borders. Regions are liquid and determined by how large an area it takes to contain some number of people - naturally, cities will have highly concentrated people in little area and most of the US midwest would be massive regions.

It gets rid of the great flaw of the American representational system that gives biased voting power to small states - an arbitrary hold over from when states were independent nations.

One important facet is that each member body would elect amongst themselves someone to represent them at higher levels of governance. That means the national level has representatives beholden to four levels of government equally (civil service is real service, but realistically being a politician should only start being a full time job in these circumstances at the region level).

Then, you have a constitutional requisite that for legisilation to be considered by a higher tier of representation (IE, for state law to be considered) a law must be drafted that has been passed in a majority of districts, and that law would require a a majority vote with less than 1/4 disapproval (ie, if 1/4 vote against higher legislation, it does not pass state-wide, or region-wide, or nationwide - it remains applied at the lower tiers).

If localities attract mobile people who are like minded, the most successful jurisdictions would attract people, who grow the power base of the region and get entire swathes of the nation under like minded ideologies. As these areas naturally grow over time, and over decades of change, we can see diverse and disparate political ideologies put their ideas into practice in "test labs" of local governments, and then if policy is successful, you will see either other jurisdictions adopt it, or people will migrate to where good governance is practised.

The result is that naturally good policy attracts adoption and migration to it, and ideas that fail to benefit a localities citizenry gets rejected - and in the case of majority opinions that harm minorities, a minority can concentrate regionally and prevent adoption of hostile legislation).

Given a no tarrif system, and a tax code that requires that national tax be at most as large as the smallest state tax, the smallest state tax be as large as the smallest regional tax, and regional tax being as large as the smallest local tax, then you can keep tax from rapidly inflating out of control (local districts can heavily tax if need be, but national tax policy is forced to the minimum, preventing the current policy in the US of focusing all spending at the national level and making 50% of paid taxes be national tax).

The weaknesses in this system are that because disparate ideologies converge, it creates tension between them. Historically, that leads to war, but we seem to have entered a period where hopefully first world countries won't be declaring war on one another over ideological differences. We hope. It is definitely a weakness of this design.

Another one is that it requires mobility fundamentally - if you don't agree with your regional politics, you are at the mercy of your peers to implement legislation that can only be overturned with super-majority indifference in majority approved legislation to overturn it. Hopefully, that would mean that legislation without victims never passes through the system, but I feel it is vulnerable to holes.

One important tenant would be that we maintain the ability for higher courts to declare legislation unconstitutional. A simple bill of global rights, that people are equal, you can not differentiate between people in government based on physical characteristics, fundamental rights to private propery and the resulting privacy, right to freedom of expression, press, religion, etc, right to bear arms - those would all be similarly constitutionally bound concepts and amending that document would require super majority (75%) support of all levels of government (and it would have to be proposed nationally to prevent localities from throwing amendment clutter at everyone in the country).

So if you maintain mobility and human rights, have a forced free trade no war inter-state region, and let politics be local and thus emotionally bonded between small groups of people electing single representatives amongst themselves, with no re-elections, and thus no campaigns, and having each layer of government choose a singular representative to maintain their beliefs at each tier above that (who would most likely be moderate) you get "perfect republic". I feel like having digital remote communication allows politicians at each tier to be "in multiple places at once" much more effectively, enabling a tiered system like this.

... And I just wrote an essay on alternative republics. Go me?

So what? To paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we are all dead.

I really dislike such dismissal without some sort of context such as whether a short term gain might or might not have any effect and why. But then again the journalist only wanted a contrary quote for 'balance'.

The members of the German Pirate Party would happily go back to the things they were doing before. The party was founded as self-defense.

Some members see it as a goal to make the Piratenpartei unnecessary. Not within the next 5 years, but maybe later.

Roughly a generation after the Second Worldwar the Green Party was founded and there to stay. After another generation the Pirate Party movement comes to live. Seems to me that each generation is - at some point - fed up enough with their elders to band together against them.

I salute Germany and the Pirate Party for taking a such aggressive stance towards true democracy.

The election after that one the pirate party main points will be part and parcel of the established parties' programmes.

I doubt that. One of the main points of the pirate party is to take power away from the politicians and give it back to the people (via direct democracy and member votes). The existing politicians would need to change things massively to their own disadvantage.