A proportional system ensures all meaningful views are accommodated
Our PR system can claim as one of its major successes the fact that it ensured that there was, and is, an opposition
Peter Curle is a respected company director. His views about our electoral system, however, are open to question. His article in Business Day reveals his hopelessly rose-tinted opinion of the constituency system — one of the alternatives to our current system. We live and operate in SA, not in the UK. There they have experience of a democratic parliamentary system that developed over a couple of hundred years. Here, we have 23 years’ experience of a constitutional democracy that is still a tiny infant. We have not even passed the acid test of democracy: a change of national government through the ballot box. Prior to 1994 we had a constituency-based parliamentary system that excluded black South Africans. Since then at provincial and parliamentary level we have had a proportional representation (PR) system. If a party polls 50% of the votes it gets 50% of the 400 seats, ie 200 seats. Importantly, at municipal level we have a combined ward-based and PR system, like the German system ...
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