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Comment by aedron | Hacker News Reader

This kind of change could only happen in Europe, due to the multi-party system. In America, as has so often been proven, the system is rigged to prevent alternatives to the established parties.

I honestly believe this proves the superiority of this system, over the American one. The great advantage of democracy is that it provides an avenue for peaceful change, or, if you are more cynical, the appearance of such. This acts as a vent when the people are fed up to their neck with the powers that be - they don't have to storm the palaces and chop off heads but can engage in political activity. Unless the political system in the U.S. changes, how long before Americans will have to resort to this?

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> In America, as has so often been proven, the system is rigged to prevent alternatives to the established parties.

But the difference is that the parties in the US and the UK aren't very powerful in their own regard. Trump wasn't even a member of the republican party until very recently, and he won the nomination -- and Sanders forced Clinton very far to the left before dropping out.

On the other hand, the leaders of european parties are mostly selected through opaque backroom deals and yet are very powerful (through "party discipline", another throughly undemocratic concept, all but unheard of in UK/US parties). Policy is made by these leaders (or their appointed nominees) meeting each other and negotiating a compromise, and then (except in very rare cases) every MP of the parties in this negotiation defends in the media it as a solid and credible response to the issues faced by the country (despite, often to great hilarity, the compromise being orthogonal to several very firm positions and red lines drawn by that very same politician just days before) and then votes for it.

The mechanism for this power is that few individual MP carry their own seat, they're assigned proportionally, according to the national share of votes won by the party. Party leadership wields significant influence over who runs where (especially who runs in "safe" seats), and thus who gets in. MPs who cause too much trouble will find themselves campaigning in a difficult district, or next to a more popular/well-known candidate.

> But the difference is that the parties in the US and the UK aren't very powerful in their own regard. Trump wasn't even a member of the republican party until very recently, and he won the nomination -- and Sanders forced Clinton very far to the left before dropping out.

True in the US, not true in the UK -- May and Corbyn had been MPs and members of their parties for years before becoming leader.

> "party discipline", another throughly undemocratic concept, all but unheard of in UK/US parties

Again, not true in the UK

Indeed, the whip.

That is one of the problems with PR its bugging's turn and there is no direct relationship between the MP and there constituency.

And collective responsibility is not undemocratic in its self.

Why is party discipline undemocratic?

If you want to get the benefit of the support and branding of a political party it seems reasonable that you should have to follow their rules. The discipline only extends so far as removing that support. That seems fair to me. Does it not to you?

I personally have issues with the idea that having to conform/fit into a political party being the only/most effective way to gain political popularity

Why is party discipline undemocratic? Why is party discipline undemocratic?

Can you explain why you think it's not? I think party discipline is simply autoritarianism applied within a political party. If anything, it advertises to me that said party doesn't really believe in democratic principles.

You can still pick which parties to support or even create a new party and that choice seems to me to be the foundation of representative democracy.

The "foundation of representative democracy" is to have a representative in the decision making process (-cracy) for every part of the populace (demos). Political parties are not essential to that premise. Representatives that can have their voice heard are.

Sorry for being unclear, but it's having a choice that is essential, not parties themselves. It is a representative democracy, you just choose a party instead of a person but it's the exact same concept.

This answer does not reflect reality in the UK. Party discipline is extremely important in the UK system, maintained by the "whips". Few UK MPs carry their own seat as an individual, although good constituency work can be worth a few thousand votes. One or two have managed to run as independents; Peter Law (ex-Labour protesting against all-women shortlists), Richard Taylor (Kidderminster Hospital).

Tony Blair was notorious for imposing ideological coherence from the top on the Labour party with pagers in exactly the way you are talking about: MPs were expected to keep exactly to the media line agreed by Blair and Campbell, and hide all dissent to avoid "PARTY SPLIT" headlines.

Note how the conservative party managed to campaign against itself for the Brexit referendum and has now seemingly zipped that right up again. Although the three Brexit ministers keep issuing daft announcements that have to be countermanded by the PM (this is called "cabinet collective irresponsibility").

It's worth comparing UK parliamentary elections with the regional parliament elections, which are all run on different systems with very different results.

US parties have traditionally been extremely strong. What has happened is that the US rightwing media "bubble" has taken over doctrine and thrown away the doublespeak. Trump is winning because he can say all the unpleasant things that other Republicans feel they have to dogwhistle or hint at.

Not saying that either of these systems is better but when I look at the cost of the presidential campaigns in US, it seems almost impossible to be an excellent but poor newcomer [1].

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/111815...

> through "party discipline", another throughly undemocratic concept, all but unheard of in UK/US parties

Is that really true? Wikipedia's article on the subject says:

"Party discipline tends to be extremely strong in Westminster systems such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India...."

In the American Congress, votes are now almost entirely along party lines, which seems like more or less the same thing:

http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2015/04/24/poli...

> Sanders forced Clinton very far to the left

Not sure about it. Words are cheap.

> through "party discipline", another throughly undemocratic concept

I disagree, it's more democratic because I know the party platform is what I'm voting for. I don't have to know the individual positions of everyone.

Definitely agreed re. the inflexibility of the US system, but "Europe" contains a multiplicity of different parliamentary systems.

The UK for instance is sadly almost as stuck in a bipartisan world as the US, which makes change a slow and painful process (or quick and painful wrt this year's referendum!)

That's true for the Westminster elections but Scotland has a proportional representation system for its devolved parliament.

Yes, but most of the mainland countries have multi-party systems. Hell, the parliament of the Netherlands at one point consisted of 16(!) parties.

To put that in context: that is one party per million residents.

When you put it like that, it doesn't really sound like that many parties...

To me it actually sounds like more. That would mean about 324 parties in the USA.

I like the sound of that.

When that happened, there were fewer residents, so it was more like one party per half million.

Ah, I thought the GP was referring to when the LPF split into individual fractions.

If I count correctly, the 2003-2006 Tweede Kamer had 9 party fractions in it at the start and had 5 split-off groups, so there were 14 fractions in the end. Maybe there were more somewhere in the meantime?

But of course I don't know what xenobioticants was thinking about.

17; that was in 1918. They quickly increased the electoral threshold to 75% of a seat then. Then, in 1933 when there were 14 parties in parliament again, they increased it to 100%. After that, it has always hovered around 10 parties, and it's still one of the lowest electoral thresholds in the world; most countries have it at 5%-10% of the total vote.

There are advantages and disadvantages to all systems.

In European PR systems where many parties routinely end up in parliament, the real governing is done by elites stiching up a deal between themselves and all the proportinal voting just slightly alters the barganing chips brought to the table.

The biggest case of this is Germany, which will be ruled by the grand-coalition for the forseeable future, more or less regardless of what happens at elections.

This has worked OK in countries where people mostly trust their elites. But it is still not particularly democratic.

To be honest, it's quite similar in the US too. That's why there isn't much difference between the Obama administration and the previous Bush administration - there was a real continuity in most respects. And even if Trump got elected, not much would change either.

Dunno, if "drain the swamp" passes, that'de be a very significant change.

But I am talking about a different thing.

In any place where the big parties are old and "respectable", there will be a lot of similarities between them. But even if they are identical, they still compete with each other for power.

In a PR system, they compete less intensely. Indeed in Germany, with Merkel so firmly on top, the SPD leadership seems to be evolving to maximise its power as #2 rather than trying to win outright.

Dutch here. We need at least 5 parties to make a government in the next election. Nothing ever changes here because everything has to go through many iterations of compromises if it even wants to leave the negotiation table. I wish we had a system like the USA.

A system where you'd only have two prepackaged choices for ALL the possible complicated state issues? O.o

Those proportional system compromises aren't half as bad.

> Nothing ever changes here because everything has to go through many iterations of compromises if it even wants to leave the negotiation table.

That's a feature, not a bug.

> I wish we had a system like the USA.

You are missing the wood for the trees. The last thing you want in a country is an effective government that can push through it's majority agenda at the expense of the minority.

That's why EU countries are as a rule quite far ahead on the curve of progress, see: abortion, euthanasia, LGBT rights and so on.

It's also a way to keep religion out of government as much as possible, you won't see the separation between state and church in a country where the dominant political parties all have to nominally support the dominant religion.

So please, no system 'like the USA' in Dutch politics, though, you may get your wish soon enough. Personally I'd much rather have us adopt the very opposite, the Swiss system which requires a much more active electorate and a much more educated one too.

>That's why EU countries are as a rule quite far ahead on the curve of progress, see: abortion, euthanasia, LGBT rights and so on.

Except those are controversial with Americans. I'm not seeing how the system is to blame. Making the electoral process 'more democratic' isn't going to change that. It might make things worse ...

But controversy in the US is similarly limited to a two-party dialog: everything in your political system (its discourse, its reporting, its policies) is geared towards this artifical (and often false) dichotomy.

In my view, it is the discourse that needs to be fixed first. As long as your media keeps painting everything in black and white (and it is in their interest to do so, being part of the establishment), I don't think any electoral reform is useful.

"All or nothing", it turns out, is really appealing to people. It may be toxic to a functioning democracy with a diverse population, but doesn't seem to lessen the appeal.

We are very good at pretending that when we get "nothing", it is a temporary inconvenience.

It's more like that we are good at accepting this system as long as we're not the ones getting 'nothing'.

Is Europe ahead of the US on LGBT rights? Marriage equality is the law of the land in all 50 states here.

The first amendment of our Constitution separates church and state, for whatever that's worth. You might want to suggest that to Ireland. ;)

Is Europe ahead of the US on LGBT rights?

On the whole, not really. 11 European countries constitutionally ban same-sex marriage for example, and less than half the countries offer any sort of legal recognition for same-sex couples.

Of course the problem when talking about 'Europe' is that you have a very wide spectrum of opinions. For every country that is ahead of the US on LGBT rights you have another that is very far behind.

Yes, the EU is ahead, but just like every other part of the future it is unevenly distributed.

Some country in Europe will pioneer a concept, others will follow, some faster some slower. The US usually catches on long after the concept has already become normal in a fair chunk of the EU.

As for your constitution, America gets it right on paper, but in practice God (the Christian one) is all over American politics, whereas even in Ireland it seems to be less of a day-to-day influence.

So really you mean the Netherlands are ahead of the US in LGBT rights. I'm curious about what else the US should be doing. How is the Netherlands better?

How is the Netherlands better?

From a purely legal perspective not in any significant ways. However from a public opinion perspective the difference is more significant. Same sex marriage has ~90% approval rating in the Netherlands compare ~55% in US. I cannot imagine that those sorts of differences don't greatly affect the day-to-day reality living as a same sex couple.

Comparing the Netherlands to the entirety of the USA is just weird. What are the approval ratings in New York state for instance? That is closer in population to the Netherlands (and potentially more rural & thus more conservative but still likely closer).

On most day-to-day reality issues (for same sex couples or anyone else) local norms are probably much more important and I can assure you there are lots of parts the United States that have 90% approval rates for same sex marriage.

So if we are discounting the legal perspective (which just as a personal opinion, I wish the US federal law was more progressive), cherry-picking public opinion to match the more progressive parts of the sample seems like the US comes out about the same.

It is weird, and of course you're right, but to be fair: that's the question I asked. I'm setting the bar high for us. I'll be happy when we're as socially liberal as the most socially liberal country on the planet. :)

It goes much further than marriage, there is the whole decriminalization thing, which goes back to the 1930's in the case of some countries here.

As for how NL is 'better' than the US: It's a ridiculously small country and very densely populated so what works here would likely not work as well in places like Canada or the US, but as mentioned above I think coalition politics (het poldermodel) is an important part of making sure that minorities do not easily become the football of dominating majorities. Both large US parties would be considered right-wing here (roughly VVD), the US has no functional left which is a residue of the McCarthy years and the cold war. Somehow the US associates 'left' in politics with 'communism' and that has kept a very large chunk of the US population without representation.

In NL it is very hard to find any substantial chunk of the population without representation. We also don't jail 1% of our populace.

That said there is plenty of room for improvement, we still have corruption, racism, crime and so on at levels higher than what I'm comfortable with, and our government is excellent at wasting money, an area they are slowly improving on but in my opinion too slowly.

Sorry, of course there's a lot of things we could obviously be better at, things that NL is already far better about. I was asking specifically about LGBT rights.

Define "long after." Gay marriage became legal in France in 2014, the UK in 2014, the US in 2015, and is still not legal in Germany.

Abortion was legalized in the U.K. in 1967, abortion bans were made illegal in the US in 1973, in France and Germany in the mid 1970s.

Sure some Scandinavian country might be ahead in those issues, but if Vermont was a separate country the US still wouldn't be behind. Also, this is really a great example of why the EU is such a terrible idea.

It's also incorrect to assert Europe is more progressive on abortion. Europe's two largest countries, Germany and France, only permit abortion during the first trimester (12-14 weeks), and have mandatory counseling. Germany has a 3-day waiting period, and France had a one-week waiting period until last year.

The Supreme Court threw out Arkansas's 12-week abortion law earlier this year. Two states have 20-week bans, and those are being challenged. Almost all states are at 24 weeks, and most have no mandatory counseling or waiting periods.

And on same-sex marriage: it became legal in France only shortly before Ogberfell, and and is still not legal in Germany.

Germany also still has 'Kirchensteur', you'd almost think the two have something to do with each other, after all, a country where the government will happily collect the tithe for churches quite possibly has a large religious influence on its politics.

Some other countries also still have this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

And the sooner it dies out the better.

Europe might be more progressive on abortion. Ever notice the rhetoric on the "rare" part of "safe, legal and rare" is entirely limited to preventing unwanted pregnancies? Presumably abortions should be rare because they are intrinsically bad in some way. We use the tax system to influence all kind of behaviors, many of them health related, but we're not willing to use the tax system to make abortions more rare...

Using the tax system to discourage abortions must be the worst idea I ever heard.

Why? We discourage smoking with the tax system. And I'm not talking about a regressive tax, like on smoking. It can be purely for rich healthy women.

If abortion should be rare, than why not tax it.

Abortion should be rare the same way that heart surgery should be rare: not by stoping people from having one when they need it, but by preventing the unwanted condition (unwanted pregnancy, heart disease) in the first place.

People who say that abortion should be rare aren't saying that the procedure itself is bad. They're saying that unwanted pregnancies are bad.

Wow! I always thought the "rare" part was added because what happens to the fetus is, let's say, unsavory. Now I see it's one of those genius phrases where you can read your own feelings into it.

Whatever your feelings about it are, you can safely assume that most people who say "safe, legal, and rare" are saying that the state should have no role at all in women's reproductive choices. It's a pro-choice slogan, coined by pro-choice activists.

I think we're all a lot better off not getting any further into the details on this.

I don't think a purely legal view is a sensible way to look at this. In much of Europe, abortion is not a major political issue that motivates the voting patterns of a significant chunk of the electorate and hasn't been for a long time. In that sense, Europe is more progressive on women's reproductive rights.

That's a strange way to present the argument. In the early 1800s the electorate of the US South was unified in support of slavery. Not a motivating political issue. I would not say the south was particularly progressive on the issue of slavery.

You're reading what I wrote as some sort of weird 'therefore, Socrates was a cat' syllogism. Was the point I was trying to make unclear? Because I don't see how your analogy is at all related or even much of an analogy.

I don't see how "people don't care" -> "they are progressive". The logic of that escapes me.

FWIW my reading of your comment was the same as tedunangst's. Perhaps you meant something different from what you wrote?

>Is Europe ahead of the US on LGBT rights? Marriage equality is the law of the land in all 50 states here.

Europe got their through politics, US through courts. How long do you think that would take if it was left up to politicians?

> EU countries are as a rule quite far ahead on the curve of progress, see: abortion

EU (esp. Scandinavia) has much, much more tight regulations of abortion, compared to English world, esp. Canada, which has none. As a socially conservative I consider this good.

Has a democratic version been tried that fluctuates between duopole and multipole party systems?

This could easily happen in the US if a preferential ballot were adopted. (Rank candidates in order of preference.)

The Republican Party would immediately split into at least three parties and the Democratic Party would probably follow by splitting in two not long afterward.

All the time these days I here people describe economies and political systems as "rigged".

Do you actually mean the US political system was deliberately lain out by a mastermind with the goal of preventing the emergence of alternative parties?

Or just that the system has evolved (without design) to be hostile to minority parties?

If the latter, the word "rigged" seems misleading and inflammatory to me. If the former, where should I look to learn more about this conspiracy?

I've participated in Independent, Republican, and Democratic campaigns. The US system at the local level (at least Houston, Austin, and central east Texas) is actually pretty solid. Once you realize there's a fairly good sized contingent of busy-bodies who just want naked power, regardless of political position, it's pretty easy to see how things work. OTOH, the state- and federal- levels felt fairly divorced from their contingent. Except for the platform "branding" they're virtually identical. This is the reason I think it's so important to keep as many of the functions of the state at the local level, with rational oversight from the top in terms of protecting positive rights, i.e., restrictions of the powers of government.

The impression I got from studying the subject is that it is actually rigged, as in deliberately designed like that. Unfortunately I usually don't remember the details, only my takeaway, but I read very good objective treatise on the subject, I think it was in A People's History of the United States. I highly recommend it for a balanced and critical look at American history.

Depends where in Europe. In France, it's the same two party since a long time. One of them just change name from time to time (UDF, then RPR, then UMP, then Les Republicains).

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