In your case I would vote for the person rather than the party, because one of the things needed in gov't is the ability to sometimes work together in a nonpartisan way to make something happen, and somebody whose experience as a legislator (well, MP in your case) I respect, even if I don't agree with the political views, would be a better choice for me than someone who shares my views generally but would do a dreadful job.

I miss voting in New Zealand's MMP system, which meant that we had two votes, one for a person and the other for a party. Parliament is made up of electorate members of parliament (MP)s and list MPs, and the proportion of list MPs in parliament per party depends on the party votes. I don't think I ever voted for the same party with my two votes, because the MP for my region was really good, but not in a party that I would ever vote for. I happily voted for him though.

Tactical voting, always. ALWAYS always always.

Well, the British system seems to have at least one great advantage: it's very easy to understand. The system used around here has proven to be quite difficult for most people to understand. They don't see how it can be that someone who got 100 votes got elected while some other person who got 5000 votes didn't. The way the system works, we basically only get to vote for a party (since a person will only get elected directly if they get a large enough number of votes) and individual candidates are just a "face" given to the party. As a result, the party lists usually consist of maybe a dozen celebrity politicians and an army of mostly anonymous "party soldier" who, when elected, never stray from the party line in votes. The parties that have the most celebrities (or "decoy ducks", as they are called) on their tend to do the best. Another side effect is that some people just don't vote in the elections at all, since they have no idea who they're voting for. But most of the problems with this system can be attributed to the fact that people haven't quite got used to it yet - it's been in use for only five electoral cycles or so, which, according to some political scientists, is just barely enough. The next elections should prove quite crucial in this respect; I'm hoping that people will finally start to vote with their brains, not their... well, whatever it is that you use for processing the information you get from commercials (your liver, I think). And start voting based on what they are offered, not on whether they recognize the celebrity at the top of the party list.

JanetLand, I think I agree (and here, MP = legislator)

gaspode, the New Zealand system sounds like a nice compromise - in a fully proportional system you risk losing the link between legislator and constituency, but in our system you have no direct way of indicating which party you would actually like to govern.

Daniel Charms, the Estonian system looks really complicated... is there a programme in place to make sure people are educated about it?

BTGOG, I'm not sure what my tactic is, really, apart from to keep the Tories out. Nationally, what I'd most like to see is some kind of Lib-Lab coalition, but I've no way to vote for that, apart from voting for the status quo in this particular constituency. The LiB Dems are in third place here anyway, and I don't want their candidate here to win, though I would like to see them doing better nationally.

is there a programme in place to make sure people are educated about it?

Nope. There is no such thing, even though each time there is an election, people complain about it in the media. It's either because somewhere higher up, it is assumed that everyone knows how the system works (yeah, right) or because someone benefits from such general ignorance of the rules (someone always seems to). I don't remember if we were told about how the system works in school. Probably not. Hell, I only learned about the three rounds of counting from the link I posted! (I always assumed there were two rounds).