Re: Ontario Citizens Assembly comes up with a voting system.
" The main criticism of PR is not that extremists gain influence, but rather that it produces unstable minority governments. It requires the political culture to change somewhat, and perhaps a more consensus-forming approach to developing a budget."
This is a common misconception. In fact, much of the instability of minority governments in our system arises from the FPTP system itself. In a FPTP system every election in some sense a lottery, as even a tremendously small shift in voter preferences can swing an election in one party's favour, if the concentration and allocation of those added votes falls right for that party (something which in the long run likely evens out and thus is "fluke-ish"). The opposition knows that even, say, a 5% shift in voting can propel it from being an opposition in a minority gov't to forming a majority government (swings like this have happened before). The opposition has an incentive in toppling the minority government every time that it gains in the polls, however small a gain it is. This incentive is removed in a proportional system, because a small shift in votes will translate to a small shift in seats, allowing the parties to temporarily forget their electioneering opportunism and focus on consocialization and coalition-forming.
The notion that minority governments are inherently less effective than majorities is also something of a misconception, and there is research that would suggest that minority governments are on the average just as capable of "getting things done" (counterintuitive as the idea may be) as majority governments.
