>>>You can look at Italy and Israel as examples.
>>
>>But they can't do these things frivolously. If they do; especially if they bring down the government, they will likely pay for it in the ensuing election.
>
>Not necessarily. They can always play it to the tune that their voters would like - for instance, that the senior partner was pretending that the agreement didn't include stipulation X, and has filed a bill to put Not X as a law. That may actually be true (the senior partner may have just calculated that the small party wouldn't dare yell), and they may just bring down the government. Rightfully or not - that is not a matter at hand - the end result is that there will be a new government, with or without pre-term elections.

If they do act frivolously, even if they play to their voters, some will see through it and if they bring down the government, they may well lose those voters and become an even more minor player. Certainly they can act against the government (in fact they have that obligation in some cases), and it may work to their favour, but the real key is that they need to do it carefully. People get very cheesed off if they get dragged out to a new election without a very good reason.

>And this may be a good thing sometimes - the minor party may use such a maneuver to expose the dirty tactics of the major, or vice versa, the major party can use this to expose the minor party's dirty tactics and hope to get their votes in the next pre-term elections. One has to be in the game to know it :).

None of that sounds frivolous to me.

>>I still think it's a better system than the one we have now where some people's votes are worth more than others. No system is going to be perfect, but weighting the system is inherently unfair to the voters.
>
>You mean, majority-biased or slightly-majority-biased system? Also, the system with a census or not (i.e. the minimum percentage to be in the parliament). In some countries there is a 2% bar, and goes up to 5% in some places. That's a good way to get rid of not-so-serious parites (yogi fliers, retirees etc) but sometimes these fringe parties get their act together and manage to insert a foot in the door (retirees' party has a couple of ministers in Serbia now).

Not necessarily 'majority' biased. 'Largest vote getter' biased. The largest vote getting party gets a few more seats than they earned at the expense of the lowest vote getting parties who then get either fewer than earned, or no seats at all.

>
>The downside of the census is that it eliminates minority parties, so they either vanish from the scene, go off-parliament or get represented directly (by special legal measures - but then that's not too democratic, is it?), or get into a deal with some of the regular parties on the condition that they get a number of seats in the Parliament and maybe in ministries as well.
>
>Or you mean the system where the ballots cast for the two candidates of the two flavors (blue and red) of The One Party count, while none of the others do? ;).

Any time a voter votes for a politician who loses, his vote goes for nothing. It shouldn't. In our latest election, the Green Party received 6.8% of the vote - almost 1,000,000 votes. In spite of that, they have no seat in parliament. That's 1 million voters for the Green party alone, who's votes counted for nothing. To me that makes no sense (even though mine was not one of those votes). The guy I voted for won in our riding, but the losing votes should not be summarily discounted.

I honestly believe that one of the reasons why we keep seeing (on average) fewer and fewer people coming out to vote in each election is that so many feel disenfranchised because of this.