> But if you are electing parties (like the US House)

I'm not sure why you are phrasing it this way. Voters don't pick a party for their House representative, they pick a candidate. Each House district election is independent of all the others.

Yes but if each house district is FPP 3rd parties generally don't get a look in, people who vote for them get no representation at all, and can produce governments where the party with the most seats got fewer votes than the others.

MMP provides local representation, and proportional representation (at the expense of having larger local seats, or more representatives).

Voters pick a candidate knowing that the candidate will have to play within a two party legislature.

Third party legislators are shunned. Their bills get no traction, and they get no committee assignments. If they are seriously divergent, the House could easily have them removed.

Further evidence for this exists in the demise of ticket splitting: if you vote R at the top of the ticket, you're very likely to vote R the rest of the way down the ticket, regardless of who the downballot R's are. It wasn't always this way, but has been for some time.

Some States even have a single box you can check to vote entirely for that party’s candidates, “straight ticket voting”.

Texas removed it a few years back and it’s removal was challenged (and lost) by Democrats: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/30/texas-2020-election-...

Ranked ballots in single member districts are really a hack on electoral reform movements. It creates the appearance of improving the system while only solving one of many problems.

The hack worked in Canada and GB, where it was used to divide, confuse and ultimately scuttle the electoral reform process.

I'm Australian so I might be biased, but I don't like MMP. It seems to be optimising for democratic outcome (well at least a parliament that looks like the distribution of first party votes) while ignoring all other factors. Many countries that use it seem to have weak governments that can't get much done. There is parties that won't work together because one is secessionists (Catalans), right wing (national rally in France, AfD in Germany), different ethnic group (Arabs in Israel, Flemish vs French speakers in Belgium). Some parties seem to get more popular if they refuse to compromise. This can end up in endless elections (e.g. Israel), inability to form government for years (e.g. Belgium) or parties that aren't acceptable for mainstream parties to form coalitions with becoming the only opposition (e.g. National Rally). Even well run countries like the Netherlands and Sweden can seem to take forever to form a government. RCV mostly allows one party to form a majority government and get things done. There is clear accountability. While at the same time there is still the incentive to appeal to a broad base. And over time new parties can break into the system if they are appealing enough.

You seem to be assuming that doing something is usually better than doing nothing. I believe the opposite is true in politics. It's difficult to make things better with political decisions, but it's much easier to break things or make them worse. If you can't convince a clear majority that something is a good idea, doing nothing is probably a better choice.

Presidents, prime ministers, and governors are always enemies of liberal democracy (the republic for those more familiar with American terminology). Nobody should be given that kind of power, but unless we can figure out how to run a country without such leaders, we have to tolerate them as a necessary evil.

It works well here in NZ - I think that part of it is that we've built a political culture around MMP that understands that to be successful at MMP parties need to build coalitions and compromise (very transparent public compromises) - the current government is the first we've had in 3-4 decades where one party could form a government by themselves, and they still formed a coalition of sorts

Just to be clear - most of the countries you give as your examples aren't MMP systems, they are other proportional representation systems, and the problems you have with it are common to proportional representation systems broadly rather than MMP.

It's interesting you gave France as an example, because they have a nice workflow/system to avoid this.

There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he can work with if they're OK with him. Macron won with 20 something % in the first round ( second round was against the aforementioned National Rally, so his victory was guaranteed), but his party got 50%+ in the legislative elections because people decided to give him a chance to enact his program, even if he wasn't their first choice. That isn't always the case, and if the far right wins the presidential elections next year i'm certain they won't have a parliamentary majority.

To avoid a popular wave sweeping everything, the legislature id bicameral, the aforementioned legislative elections only for the lower chamber, the National Assembly. The higher chamber, the Senate, which is more limited in powers but can still exert influence over the lower chamber's law making, is indirectly elected by mayors, local/departmental/regional councilors with staggered 6 year terms ( every 3 years half the seats are up for election).

IMHO it's overall a good system that allows for everyone to be represented, enables governments to be stable ( but doesn't force it). The main thing i'd improve is ranked choice voting for single seat elections ( presidential, local).

And besides all that specific to France, i disagree about "classic" MMP. It forces cooperation and compromise, much better than a party forcing through with whatever they want because there's nobody that can opose them.

That’s not correct, Chirac won the parliament in 2002, the first time the presidential election was for 5 years. The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity and that’s how he got to work with a left prime minister, 10 years after having been himself the prime minister of a left president.

Hm, i remembered my history wrongly, i've now removed that stuff, thanks!

> The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity

Yeah, but 7 years is a lot and it's a remnant of when France wad supposed to be a monarchy, so i completely understand why they changed it.

I see RCV and STV used interchangeably. And the way I’ve seen RCV described in the US it is just STV with a better name for easier marketing. But I may be missing some subtlety. I also prefer MMP for parliamentary systems but changing the US to use MMP is several orders of magnitude harder than implementing RCV, which can be done state by state. It can even be implanted using multimember districts without changing anything. So it gives the US the best path to a better electoral system I think.