Via Make My Vote Count.
I continue to be confused by the (confused) media coverage of Berlusconi’s reform. Some stories imply it is essentially straight PR (occasioned by Berlusconi’s realization that he’s going to lose). Others (including the story quoted at MMVC) imply otherwise, referring to various “bonus” provisions for the largest bloc (which makes no sense if the current government fears falling into second place, as recent polls suggest.
My previous puzzlings over just what Berlusconi is up to make up three previous entries in the Italy block.
[UPDATE: Thanks to Roman Chytilek, in the seedbed below, for his interpretation of the actual Italian provisions.]
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Fruits and Votes » Blog Archive » Italian electoral “reform” grafted [...] Roman Chytilek: After wading through Legge Elettorale, my guess is that Blais and Massicotte would probably label the proposed system as a "mixed... [...]
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It was actually your comment about the confusion that spurred me to post that up in the first place.
As I said in replying then… it’s a bit of both…
“The ‘majority bonus’ bit is in case the winning party doesn’t get quite ‘enough’ seats, in which case they get a few more for having a jolly good stab at it.”
Seed planted by Paul Davies — 15 December 2005 @ 09:57
After wading through
.
Legge Elettorale, my guess is that Blais and Massicotte would probably label the proposed system as a “mixed conditional”
Primarily, it is a PR system (closed lists, large districts). The thresholds of 10% for coalitions and of 4% for single parties are introduced with some protection for minorities and subjects with regional concentration of votes (Lega).
At the same time, the bill provides for 340 seats majority (54% of seats), awarded to the winning coalition and/or party (given the condition the party/coalition is unable to score this -or higher- result in the PR election). Here lies the cause of the “Mussolinian” references (similar to the 2/3 bonus used in the 1923-25 period).
What I was unable to decipher fully is the 2% threshold for the coalition parties. The bill states that parties participating in coalition who finish below 2% shall elect no MPs but there is some ambiguity in the text (at least for me) whether these parties are counted into overall coalition score or not.
If not, the engineering dimension of the bill would make sense as the Berlusconi´s bloc is clearly less fragmented than that of Prodi. Even the close win may turn into a loss for Prodi when subjects receiving less than 2% are deducted for the bonus purposes.
Indeed pretty complicated…
Seed planted by Roman Chytilek — 16 December 2005 @ 17:02
[...] Roman Chytilek: After wading through Legge Elettorale, my guess is that Blais and Massicotte would probably label the proposed system as a “mixed… [...]
Scion grafted by Fruits and Votes » Blog Archive » Italian electoral “reform” — 16 December 2005 @ 17:12