Yeah, I'm from America. But Britain is highly unitary, am I right?

No. You are not right.

You are, in fact, wrong

How am I wrong? I know that Wales, Scotland, and sometimes Northern Ireland have their own governments, but they are limited in power and can be disbanded at any time by a vote from Westminster.

It's unitary in some areas, and two or even three-tier in others. There's little uniformity. Some areas did change from two-tier to Unitary in the last few years, such as County Durham, where I live.

You are wrong because you think that the way things work is how things are written down. Britain is not a new country, it's a very old one, and it works on an enormous variety of tacit understandings and historical precedents and very little on written statute. We vote for an MP to represent our local interests as much as (possibly more than) someone to run the country and local loyalties (and rivalries) run very deep.

Oh sorry you're talking about 'unitary' on the national parliamentary level.

I thought unitary means that the central government has absolute authority. The central government in Britain could change the powers or even existence of the lower-level governments at any time. But in the US, the central government cannot ever demote the states from their rights. Unitary means power of the central government, not necessarily more levels.

@P&J: Do you think Clegg will get his referenda?

@Parallel
Perhaps I was overly vague. I meant that in a unitary system, the local constituencies are less salient than in federal systems. PR in the US would not stand a snowball's chance in hell of ever coming about, but in Britain there is not small amounts of talk about it.

I think Clegg's referendum will depend on how desperate the Conservatives are for a deal.

Got to be honest, I don't know what you just said Raven, but the main reason PR is being talked about is that currently simple due to the location of their voters the Lib Dems would need something like 10% more of the electorate to get the same number of seats as Labour. It hasn't been brought up by the two main parties. why? Because it would cost them seats.

It seems that some voters in Britain support the move too. The BBC last night had a good number of people talking about PR. In the US, that's crazy talk. Not even fringe parties consider bringing up PR.

RavenKing, 'fringe' parties do bring up PR in the US - it's in the national Green Party's platform. While it's not in the platform, the concept has support among many Libertarians (like me).

(Sorry I wanted to say the BNP aren't not even the third party.)

Damn I cannot speak englaish =( : I wanted to say... whatever

@Raven - Yes, but I think a main part of that is because it was a subject that should be talked about. If we were PR they would be talking about FPTP.

In the US, voting systems are more interesting than they are seriously considered. As Tolstoy showed, even among the smaller, more radical parties, there is not much mention of leaving FPTP. I didn't even realize other systems existed until this previous fall, when I had a comparative politics class, and I'm fairly active in terms of politics and political science. Other parts of the world have changed their systems multiple times, or are very proud of certain systems. It's quite different than in the US.

No one has yet brought up instant runoff voting (IRV) as another electoral reform. Discuss.

IRV - can I have a potted explanation?

Instant Runoff Voting (IRV): basically, voters rank all the candidates based on their preference. The ballots are tallied and the voters' first choices are all counted. If no candidate has a majority, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated. The ballots that had the eliminated candidate as the first choice are then counted for the voters' second choice in an instant recount. This goes on until one candidate has 50%+1 of the vote.

This can be cumbersome if the ballots are counted by hand, but when counted by computer is quite quick - the only catch is you have to wait until all the ballots are in before you can start tabulating the results.

This system is often touted by third party activists as a solution to the "wasted vote" argument which leads people to vote for a candidate they may not be happy with instead of 'wasting' their vote on a candidate who the voter is happy with, but has a very small chance of winning.

IRV is also called preference voting or ranked choice voting.