In the Netherlands, a changing of the whole guard

The Dutch coalition government collapsed last month after just two years in office, leading to early elections that will be held in November. Mark Rutte, the longest-serving Prime Minister in Dutch history and the second-most senior EU head of government, has announced he would retire from politics. Many other major parties, including Labour (PvdA), Christian …

What Institutions Should Look Like

(initially April 2022; revised August 2023) I’m planning for this to be a running list of prescriptions about what sort of democratic institutions are optimal, hopefully adding citations as I go through the literature, and hopefully keeping a record of where I’ve changed my mind and why. 1. Legislative supremacy. Growing up in the American education …

Canada’s Provincial Politics: Flux in the Western provinces

Continuing on my exploration of Canadian provincial politics, I've made province-by-province graphs tracking vote share (the line charts) and seat share (the stacked bar charts). Only parties that have won government are included. Various "Progressive" and "United Farmers" groups are grouped together under a bright lime green. I intend to eventually do the Atlantic provinces. …

Toronto Transit in the Future (Redux)

I made a better version of this map from last year of Toronto transit projects under construction. Because I find that black-based maps are too intense, I attempted an alternate colour scheme with a white background, using a font similar to the TTC station sign font for a bit of character. I'm not completely satisfied …

Some Urbanism Note-Taking

I attempted to do these as Twitter threads, but — and this was completely unsurprising in hindsight — this is not something that Twitter's format does well at all. Building on threads over time can work if I'm reinforcing the same point (cf. my climate optimism thread and full-employment optimism thread) — but not really …

Things Get Better Slowly: Toronto Urbanism Edition

It's very easy, and very valid, to declare that Toronto is irreparably broken. But I don't think it's quite fair to describe the city as lazy or complacent with the status quo. Toronto has already thoroughly transformed itself — to an extent that required a lot of big decisions from a lot of actors — …

Canada’s Provincial Politics: Underhill, Revisited

I am following up on this recent analysis on the history of the federal party system by diving into the history of provincial politics. To begin, here is a diagram of all the provincial governments since Confederation and their partisanships, as well as (in the narrower bars below) the main party of opposition: Governments of …

The Problem With MMP, and How Germany Is Fixing It

The mixed-member proportional (MMP) system has had durable popularity among electoral-reform fans online, with the reasoning that it lets them have the best of both worlds: local representatives and proportionality. (One of countless good explainers here.) A reasonable enough idea, but there’s one problem it should fix first. Germany has a form of MMP where …

Recent election results in the GTA

In the aftermath of the federal Liberals' crushing victory in Mississauga—Lakeshore, a riding that provincial Liberals had lost just 6 months before, I mapped out the victors in the various GTA ridings, both federally (left) and provincially (right), for the current and previous sets of riding boundaries. Here I included the Guelph—Kitchener-Waterloo—Cambridge triangle in "GTA" …

The False Promise of “Fixing” American Politics

For about six years now I've been contemplating the perfect, comprehensive piece that would lay out how America's institutions are ruining its politics and how a new set of institutions would save it. (Contemplating, mind you; not actually writing.) American citizens are currently focusing on zero-sum issues and forced to choose between suboptimal options, and …