Representation versus democracy: the impossibility of perfect democracy

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I've recently been thinking about the nature of democracy and how perfection within it is more or less impossible. Some aspects of it largely come down to personal choice: popular or liberal democracy? Presidential or parliamentary? Obviously you can't please everyone even if the answer is clearly liberal parliamentary democracy!

But there is, in fact, a simple problem of arithmetic that means that with most sets of real voters it's impossible to have an absolutely perfect democratic result. I also think that you usually can't have perfectly functioning representation. And also that ideal representation and democracy, to some extent, work against each other.

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Devolved and local elections 2016: make what you will

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Early May saw an array of different elections across the UK, and although I initially had no intention to write about them the results were actually quite interesting. There's not a clear pattern across the UK of success or failure for any of the political parties, so a lot of fine detail to examine. This isn't to say that these elections haven't been good or bad news for any of the players involved, some parties clearly had better nights than others, but depending on what elections you focus on and how you judge success you can always find a silver lining to cheer you, or see a dark cloud hiding behind glittering political achievements. Hence the title: make what you will.

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Thoughts on a surprising election or "They're all losers!"

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I think it's safe to say that no-one quite expected the outcome of this election. All the signs pointed to a particularly messy hung parliament and any reasonable reading of the polling would suggest the Conservative majority we ended up with was very unlikely indeed. In fact, it was the only outcome of the election I'd ruled out entirely.

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