That's true. But I would like to know which compromises they are willing to accept before I vote.

There is, of course, a tradeoff between the variety of positions that candidates can take before the election and the ability of candidates to stick to those positions after the election.

And while I can in principle sympathise with the notion that a few big parties will mean that the deals that are brokered before the election will have a better chance of being implemented, this can be both an asset and a liability in terms of representation. It's cool when you happen to largely agree with the compromises that are made. It's a lot less cool when you are effectively presented with a fait accompli that you don't much care for.

More importantly, unless you are prepared to invest a not inconsiderable time in semi-professional politics, you really have only two ways to influence a political party: You can join a party you support (and leave it if they sell out on an issue you find to be of overriding importance), or you can stop voting for them.

The problem with having only a few big parties thus becomes that it effectively prevents voters from punishing their party for making compromises they don't like. After all, if you can only choose between CDU and SPD, you can't very well vote for someone else because SPD sold one of your ideals down the river in a compromise with the CDU - since that someone else would be CDU, who are even worse. So you hold your nose and vote for the SPD while they continue to sell you down the river.

If, on the other hand, you have a continuum of parties, you can shuffle your vote around within the bloc to reflect your support for the stances the different parties take in the internal compromises of the bloc, without giving the other bloc (who are presumably even worse than your own, or you would have switched) an advantage.

Roughly speaking, in the short term the same compromises are going to get made, whether there are more parties or fewer (unless you propose to use the few, big parties model to effectively disenfranchise a large part of the population - the way they do it on the other side of the Pond). So having fewer parties just means that the voters have a harder time booting out the leadership of their bloc. I'm not sure that's desirable. To put it mildly.

Regarding the FDP sell-out, I can't say I'm surprised. Neoliberalism isn't so much an ideology as it's an excuse to further narrow special interests - a scam, in other words - so one should not be surprised when neoliberal politicians cater to special interests. That's a feature, not a bug.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.