In a comment to my post (Does Social Change Depend on the Electoral System?), Ilya Somin (of George Mason University) pointed that while FPP has clear advantages, such as that it produces clear winners, it also has serious drawbacks:
True, in a PR system you have to pay off small parties to join a coalition. But in an FPP system, you have to pay off interest groups within the major parties. It's not clear to me which [one of the two systems] is more of an obstacle to reform.
The flip side, of course, is that under [FPP] the opposition can more easily return to power and undo your reforms. So just as Thatcher was able to sweep her reforms into place with a relatively narrow coalition, so too did the post-WWII Labor Party when it created the quasi-socialist system Thatcher was trying to get rid of.
It is true that the reforms in New Zealand could have been undermined even in the absence of MMP. When the Labour Party returned to power in 1999, it could probably have won a majority under the old FPP system.
In my post I argued that one should choose between electoral systems based on their ability to foster social change, as opposed to the status quo. The status-quo is however desirable in some circumstances. The conundrum of constitutional law is to create institutions that make change difficult (for instance by having three elections: two legislative and one presidency as in the US) and yet can lead to a turn-around if needed (which you can generally obtain under FPP and a unicameral Parliamentary system).
Thatcher won in 1983 and was able to continue her reforms not only because of FPP but also because the opposition was deeply divided (as Ilya put it: “the Thatcher Revolution happened at least in part because the British left failed to follow Duverger's Law”). This shows that positive social change requires a set of conditions that are rarely met in the real world – which is why we rarely experience it.
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