In the English-speaking Western world, I believe this would be considered a complete discussion of the subject matter.
In the non-English-speaking Western world, there is the insertion of the role governments play or should play. For them, the voters are the government and decisions that concern citizens are the natural purview and co-responsibility of government.
It matters if our society is based on winner-take-all (and losers then not represented) or on fair representation (all are represented at the table of decision makers).
In district elections, only the majority gets ALL the seats. The minority is not represented. When not represented, guess what, the decisions may not fall toward you ever. Only when the problem becomes large enough it has the chance to impact the majority, only then does the mechanism grind toward the ignored people. Yet it will only do so in as far as to please those until that majority has become a minority again. The issue itself is not addressed satisfactorily.
In nations with proportional voting, all voters are at that table. If a nation has, for instance, 150 seats, then 99.3 percent of the voters are certain that their pick is expressed at that table. That is actually the minimum number. The minimum number in district voting is 50 percent plus one vote.
When all sit around the table, then all can speak up. And when we look at the distribution of wealth, then it matters in what system voters vote. As visible in the graph, the US really does not give anything about the bottom of its own society. I created this graph using nationmaster.com and other sources, back in 2006.
No system with proportional voting or a mixture (but not the ones with a winner-take-all president) gets to the same bottomless level of the United States. We give less than 2 percent of what we all have (per this data) to the bottom ten percent of our people. And yes, going from 2 percent to 3 percent ain't much in our minds, but $500 or $750 is quite the difference if that's all you got. Changing voting systems would benefit those at the bottom in extreme-substantial manners. In plain English: they would be better off.
The English-speaking Western world is based on competition for the sake of competition to the point that even voters compete with other voters for representation. I call that bestial democracy because people are not appreciated for who they are. Rather, they are voting cattle. The ones winning the seat had the majority in mind, of course, but they also had other interests in mind that helped improve them getting that seat. The voters are less important in district voting than in nations with full representation where special interests are out in the open; they are a party themselves.
So, I hope you get good replies from everyone, but the overarching theme that should have been included of what a good government is to do about its own people in need was not included.
