However, (and in the spirit in which I planted my seed), by the time of the April 2006 election, had these changes reshaped the political landscape fundamentally and produced better governance in Italy? The evidence suggests otherwise. The reductive effect on the number of parties was limited and parties had coalesced into multiparty cartels for strategic reasons: through mutual endorsements and withdrawals which were not always transparent to voters. Today, the two broad coalitions remain fractious and not ideologically coherent since each has to carry awkward passengers at the extremes. More importantly (and sadly for Italian voters), the benefits of stable government have been wasted. Berlusconi, the first post-war Italian prime minister to serve out an entire 5-year term, has delivered bad government and a deterioration in the quality of democracy in Italy.

I agree that the electoral system of ‘reinforced majority’ which Berlusconi rammed through parliament last year is more majoritarian than the previous one. I would be the last person to support it and the manner in which the electoral system can be changed by government fiat in Italy. Moreover, Italy has a history of autocratic prime ministers/party leaders manipulating the electoral system to award their own party and their own faction large bonuses (eg. Fanfani in the 1950s). Fortunately, voters and inter-party and intra-party rivals tend to be wiser. So, good luck to Prodi in forming a government and in changing the electoral system once again!

I agree, the UK party system is now a dominant party system, no doubt about it! [And about time, electoral reform was taken seriously over here.] But that wasn’t apparent when people such as Mario Segni started mobilising support for electoral reform in Italy in the late 1980s and succeeded in eliminating the multi-preference voting system for the 1992 general election.

Not sure where all this offshoot leaves the radical middle in US democracy. Nowhere – like the Liberals in Italy? However, I am a reluctant gardener when it comes to snipping suckers off my rose bushes!

However, the Italian 2006 result is hardly relevant because that electoral system was not proportional! Under PR, one surely would not have seen nearly all the parties aggregate into one of two large blocs (as indeed they did not in the (in)famous days of actual PR in Italy before 1994).

All Italian elections since 1994 have been held under a partially majoritarian format. The 2006 election is actually more so than the previous ones, with the largest pre-election bloc guaranteed 55% of the seats in the chamber and in any given regional senate district.

It is beyond me how one could fail to see the aggregation of parties into pre-election blocs, producing periodic voter-driven alternation, as less than a “fundamental” change from the previous governance pattern of one dominant (but factionalized) party with shifting coalition partners.

“The party system has not bi-polarized in the Anglo-American fashion as was expected.” True, Italy since 1994 is much more bipolarized than the UK, and has had alternation in government far more frequently!

Sure, in Italy, each side is made up of complex multiparty coalitions. But in Italy, different proportional electoral systems (pre-1994 and April 2006) and mixed-member electoral system (with strong SMP component) in between, have not really changed party politics fundamentally. The party system has not bi-polarized in the Anglo-American fashion as was expected. Sure, there are moderate and reformist parties for centrist & radical voters to express their preferences but does that change anything?

In the old days in Italy, the dominant Christian Democrats (DC) were the main recipient of centrist votes and (initially at least) ideological factions inside the DC offered a variety of choices for such voters. Problem is: factions became institutionalised, embedded and self-serving, mainly because party rules and procedures allowed this to happen.

However, this is not inevitable. Intra-party factions (and even bi-partisan factions) can play a positive role in articulating and expressing reformist sentiment from the non-partisan segment of the electorate especially in political systems such as the US (and UK) which lack proportional representation and multiparty systems. But rather than two candidates from the same party running for the same place under the Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as suggested by J. Thomas, the radical voter in the middle ground could vote for the party containing the faction (however small) which is closest to her preferences. Hence, the presence of factions which articulate reformist policies and express reformist sentiment offer potential solutions to this problem . Of course, this assumes that voters identify with and vote for parties (as in Europe) rather than for candidates (as in the US). Ultimately, the trick is first, to change voters perceptions when casting their votes and second, to overcome negative public perceptions of factionalism (a big hurdle in the UK!). Third, parties need to design suitable incentives to align factions with overall party interests. But such conditions prevailing, non-institutionalised factionalism has the potential to enable parties to retain their core electorate while broadening their appeal to catch reformist-oriented voters. Factions can also offer a way of creating ‘open-source’ political parties. But that’s another story!

I find that I agree with you entirely bout the problem. The current US two-party system is inadequate for our current needs.

I’m not clear though that PR is the only possible solution. I think it would be good to find multiple solutions. After all, it would be very hard to make a change that both parties oppose. Ideally a proposal ought to look to a majority party as if it would improve their competitive standing. Not just hurt them less than it hurts the competitor, but help them. What would get them to encourage third parties and PR? It would obviously weaken them.

I have the idea that Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) might be a workable alternative. It would let people vote for their preferred candidate without thinking they’re throwing their vote away. They could vote for their major-party candidate as a backup. That wouldn’t look as threatening — a third-party candidate would still have to come in first to win — but it would *allow* third parties a meaningful chance, which the present system does not do.

It could weaken parties generally. What if two candidates from the same party run for the same place? You can vote for both of them, in your preferred order. When a single wedge issue is important, a party can straddle by running two candidates who disagree. One of them might win.

There’s the problem that the Congress can have rules that tend to freeze out independents and members of third parties, even when third parties are possible. I don’t see a good short-term solution to that, just as I don’t see one for PR.