Explain three disadvantages of proportional representation

This piece will cover three key disadvantages with the proportional representation (PR) form of voting. The first of these is to point out that PR elects weak governments. The nature of PR is that every vote counts as seats are divided on national vote share rather than by winning a plurality of votes in an individual constituency. As a result, many parties emerge and votes are split meaning coalitions need to be formed. For example in October 2017, the Dutch government was formed from four different parties: VVD, D66, The Christian Union and the CDA. This coalition of parties is the only way that a majority government can be formed because of the split votes. These governments tend to be weak and less able to rule effectively and efficiently because they have to constantly negotiate with eachother on every matter of rule. This process time consuming, exhausting and prone to collapse as parties will often be very close to dropping out of the coalition as a result of ongoing disputes that just require one event to spark. This was seen in the case of Northern Ireland in 2017, when an ongoing RHI dispute led to an escalation of events, eventually causing the break up of the DUP/Sinn Fein power share. 

Moreover, the issue with PR is that it's governments often take a very long time to negotiate coalitions. This is because coalitions include parties of very differing ideologies and thus there are often many policy differences that need discussion. This is problematic because all the time governments are not legislating, they are effectively redundant and dysfunctional. This is compared to a First Past the Post system of voting in which governments take around a day to switch hands once votes are counted. This time delay has numerous examples. Foremost in our current imaginations is that of Germany which operates under a PR system. Germany's two leading parties (Christian Democratic Union and The Social Democratic Party) have been locked in negotiations for 125 days now. In Northern Ireland, talks to form a new government have been going on for 11 months. Stunningly, it took Belgium's parties 353 days to negotiate a coalition from 2010-11. Thus it is clear that PR is flawed because governments end up wasting time negotiating when they should be legislating.