> Unfortunately it's possible to do both at the same time. The fact that the party can kick people out for not sticking to the party line doesn't mean there won't be friction when two members of the same party are campaigning against each other for a seat.

Parties' candidates already work with each other under STV, so party disunity isn't an unacceptable problem.

Expelling politicians should only affect candidates' chances of getting elected if voters want it to. There is no vote-splitting under STV. STV doesn't discriminate against independents. Expelled politicians might take their votes with them if voters choose to follow them.

I don't mean to suggest that the problem of party disunity isn't real, only that it's outweighed by STV's advantages. However, I don't consider excessive party control under STV at all significant; the voters can decide whether to back rebellious candidates.

> "Majority rule" is the problem representative democracy exists to solve. With direct democracy (or anything that sufficiently approximates it) you get bad choices because if you put something on the ballot that will give +1 to 51% of people and -10 to 49% of people then it passes.

I don't consider government democratic if it isn't proportional, but I agree about the advantage of representative democracy over direct democracy. We need representative government to deliberate on our behalf and we need proportional representation to make it democratic. The voting system can do little more than choose between majority and minority; it can't protect against tyranny of the majority, but it can replace it with tyranny of the minority.

We need many civil society protections against the tyranny of the majority. One is subsidiarity.

>> What you want can be achieved with proportional representation. Effective local government (itself elected proportionally) with appropriate powers should address local issues.

> The only way that could work is if each level of government was only in charge of things that affect each of its constituents uniformly, which is not possible.

There's a difference between optimal and perfect. Unfortunately the best we can do is still imperfect.

> And it goes all the way down the stack. Zoning regulations affect the whole city but affect different neighborhoods differently, so each neighborhood should have its own representative on the city council.

Part of the problem is geographically dispersed interest groups. It's not only political parties; under any single winner system, ethnic groups, professions, LGBT people, the disabled, the poor, etc. are vulnerable to under-representation (or a clean-sweep, if they are numerous enough and distributed in a particular way).

> I don't think anybody is arguing that FPTP is not terrible. Approval voting or range voting fixes it without having to combine districts.

I agree that single-winner cardinal voting systems such as approval voting and range voting would be an enormous improvement over FPTP. I think Reweighted Range Voting (the proportional variant of range voting) would be an enormous improvement even over single-winner range voting. The reason I'm not calling for RRV is that I don't know a single example of its use to elect a government. Without that I don't see how RRV can be implemented in countries such as the US, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.