It's interesting that when we did have a coalition government, one of the parties, the Liberal Democrats paid a heavy electoral price for being part of it.Originally Posted by DrPatrickBarry
As we all know they'd campaigned to abolish tuition fees at the 2010 election only to go along with the Conservatives and triple them when they got into power. I actually had some sympathy with the LibDems over that. What did their supporters expect? They were the junior partner with less votes and seats than the Tories. They weren't going to get everything they wanted and would have to compromise.
The above episode illustrates that no electoral system is perfect. Proportional Representation leads to coalition every time so you could vote for a party that said it was going to do X only for it to do Y when in coalition with another party. So how do you hold them to account? FPTP used to lead to stable majorities for one party so if a Government didn't do what it promised they couldn't blame anybody else.
But the weakness of FPTP in distorting the relationship between votes and seats is profound where votes are widely spread over a number of parties.
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