That really does not end up resulting that way.

EDIT: I didn’t have a lot of time to flesh this out at time of reply and I think the 10 upvotes for the person I replied to and single downvote for me might be an indication that my comment has been interpreted as disparaging preferential voting systems. For my comment to be understood correctly I should clarify that that is definitely not my intended meaning.

I was careful to say “resulting” because although perhaps theoretically you could say there isn’t a need for parties in preferential voting systems (though I think you could technically do the same in first past the post systems as well), the way it works in practice, and I speak from experience as a voting citizen in Australia where we have preferential voting, political parties are the dominant and indeed only viable political forces capable of weilding significant power and influence. There are a handful of state and federal independents but governments are formed today as they pretty much have done from our earliest days, by political parties. I’m not sure I can think of examples of representative democracies with preferential voting systems that don’t also exhibit this dynamic. I also strongly suspect if this state of affairs was reset tomorrow and we decided to run things closer to the way our Westminster system was initially conceived where the emphasis was upon individual parliamentarians representing constituentcies rather than parties; that voting blocks, factions and inevitably parties would rapidly form.

Parties emerge because of their branding and political machinery, they’re well financed and they’re organised with internal mechanisms to enforce member votes along party lines in Parliament making them more effective at forcing an agenda than loosely or temporarily coalesced independent representatives.

I might not like them and I feel like they undermine the whole point of having a representative supposedly chosen to represent me and my local area, given they first and foremost represent this other organisation instead but it’s naive to think that our voting system, while technically not mandating the existence of parties, would somehow eliminate them. They are also favoured by the public themselves as well, as a shorthand for a candidate’s platform and ideology which is more efficient and effective at messaging and communicating to the public than campaigns by multiple individual candidates with far smaller warchests and recognition.