Electoral Reform committee  It's a very good question. My sense is that what keeps every country going is different, so it doesn't always help to look at other countries. When I look at Canada in particular, what I see is that parties that have aspired to power have been forced to reconcile themselves to t

Electoral Reform committee  The degree to which you find common ground is a normative question. Parties divide people—they always have—and there is a model in which we say we want a democracy in which a smallish number of parties compete for power on relatively clear platforms and with a leader at the head.

Electoral Reform committee  That's not the relevant metric, or rather, that's not the only metric in this case—

Electoral Reform committee  Sure. My claim is not that there are more elections under PR. I've never said anything of the sort. My claim is that there are more changes in government because there—

Electoral Reform committee  Hold on. Excuse me; sorry. It's because there are more—

Electoral Reform committee  Okay. Isn't that nice?

Electoral Reform committee  It's because there are frequent negotiations. It's not that you're changing governments every six months, but there are more frequent negotiations. The result is the following. You can have a change in government in essentially in three ways. You can have an election that chang

Electoral Reform committee  —that this is the empirical regularity. Now, whether you think that's normatively desirable, again I'm open to it, but it doesn't suggest to me a system of stability; it suggests a system of constant bargaining.

Electoral Reform committee  Not at all. I concur—

Electoral Reform committee  I think the trouble, Mr. Cullen, is that you're conflating two things. You're conflating the composition of Parliament and then the composition of government and the policy that results. It is true that if we have a PR system, we'll have a composition of Parliament that more ac

Electoral Reform committee  I don't want to speak to the normative merits of mandatory voting. I'll only tell you that I think the empirics are relatively clear that it increases voter turnout and that it's not clear that there is a commensurate increase in voter knowledge or engagement in other parts of ci

Electoral Reform committee  The evidence is unclear to me that it increases turnout very much. That's partly because of the way the evidence gets presented. Maybe my own opinion is not worth something, but for what it's worth, I quite like strolling down to my polling place and standing in line with other

Electoral Reform committee  Right. The point I'm making in that second table is that I'm comparing the 15 countries in the world that have the largest foreign-born populations. I want countries that look like Canada. They're countries of immigrants.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, and Mr. Lijphart uses 36 countries.

Electoral Reform committee  You are welcome any time at the School of Public Policy and Governance.