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I disagree. I think plurality tends to create a polarized system where there are two parties with opposite extreme views.

The two parties don't have an incentive to represent the entire populace, they simply have to represent half the voter base as best as possible. A two-party system is a zero sum where shooting down the opposing party advances you just as much as making meaningful positive contributions.

Also, a two-party system means that views that overlap both of the two extremes on different issues aren't represented.

Approval voting could potentially fix these problems, without any additional complexity at the ballot box (it's really simple! the only difference is you're allowed to vote for more than one candidate), but sadly has seen almost zero traction. Adopting approval voting more broadly could go a long way towards fixing the somewhat broken political system we have in the United States, for example.

I'm not a political scientist so take my opinion with a few grains of salt :)

[1] Approval Voting on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

My sense is that approval voting will just select a milquetoast agreeable candidate who lacks any real conviction or vision, other than avoiding upsetting anyone. It is the ultimate protector of the status quo and the enemy of bold leadership.

I feel like score voting is much better in that regard. It lets people express their whole range of opinions.

In my opinion, that's actually better. In the United States the Republicans are actively trying to dismantle all the legislation that was passed by the previous Democratic congress, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason to their platform other than that if the Democrats support it, they're against it. This is especially noticeable with healthcare, and the volatility around the government's stance on healthcare has lead to real uncertainty for insurance companies that has led to higher premiums and spottier coverage.

Approval voting actually allows candidates that break the mould of existing parties, because voters can support a candidate with unorthodox views without compromising the campaign of their party's primary candidate.

I have a favorite article on voting [1]. It has good visual descriptions of how different systems favour different styles of candidates.

Plurality voting is a lot better than not having a democracy; imho at least the worst candidate will be excluded. My understanding is also that democracies of any form (including republics) tend to get much better military results than dictatorships, but I don't have any actual evidence to cite :(.

[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith is about just this issue, and if you want a more theoretical take (along with a detailed model) try The Logic of Political Survival by the same writers.

While good and illustrative, that page is based on the very restrictive view, that of choosing only one candidate. This applies to presidential elections, sure. There can be only one president.

But most countries don't have one-member sized voting districts in their parliament elections, rather they choose 10 to 30 members per voting district.

At recent times, American politics seems to suffer from getting stuck in a near 50-50 position with only two parties, and this probably is a direct consequence of the first-past-the-post voting system.

The Continental European system with proportional voting and multiple political parties with changing support seems more agile. New parties can form, gain and lose support, not quite as quickly as in one 4-year election cycle, but in about 3 or 4 election cycles the political landscape of a country can change.

But then again, the American democratic system has already had a pretty good run for over 200 years, so can we know if present-day problems are indicative of actual problems in the system, or something that will pass?

It’s hard to argue against the longest running democratic system in current existence.

No, it's not. American politics, especially recently, draws heavy criticism every day in a multitude of newspapers.

There are many other nation-states around the world that have been drawing heavy criticism for their politics. Even ones with different voting systems (or none at all). Such as UK, France, Netherlands, etc. Perhaps it’s not the system but some other factor influencing the current political climate. To me, the fact that political turbulence is occurring worldwide indicates that the issue is not with how one country votes, but likely from some other factor.

USA is not the longest running democratic system. Even if it were, it wouldn't mean anything.

Why do you think that people have a hard time choosing which of two parties to vote for? My impression is that the opposite is true, at least in the United States. My impression is that most elections are largely decided by the relative turnout of existing populations of individuals, each of which are firmly committed to one party and simply haven’t decided whether to actually show up and vote.

You make a good point, but a good percent of the population is swing voters and they do decide elections, in addition to turnout dynamics. All of the movement that you see in polls is people shifting their opinions, as well as moving from undecided to a particular preference. Some polls account for intention to vote, but others are of all registered voters, and others even all Americans. They see a lot of movement too.

Actually, apparently there is some reason to think that a lot of poll movement isn't really people shifting their opinion. Instead, people shift in how willing they are to talk to pollsters. On good news day for your candidate, you are much more likely to be willing to talk to a pollster about it.

> You make a good point, but a good percent of the population is swing voters

No, they aren't. Studies have repeatedly shown that US voters have very high party voting consistency, and that those that identify as independents are almost as consistent as those that identify with a party.

Turnout and change in composition of the electorate decides elections, more than anything.

> I think plurality/first-past-the-post gets an unjustified bad rap. If you focus only on the moment of election, it is not a very good system. But a broader view reveals something else.

Yes, it reveals that empirically, it produces a narrower political dialogue, poor participation, and low satisfaction with government compared to systems that produce better proportionality. See Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

For us who haven't seen Lijphart's _Patterns of Democracy_, how does one establish such a conclusion, measure the width of political dialogue, for that matter? It would seem that a proper, randomised trial could be difficult to make, or has it been done on a small scale and extrapolated to country size?

One measure could be the typical voter turnout in elections. Lower turnout could mean less trust in the political system.

    United States (2016): 56%
    India (2014):         65%
    Germany (2017):       76%
    Denmark (2015):       86%

Voter turnout essentially reflects whether their vote is worth it. If they think everything is going to get worse no matter how they vote, they won't bother. But the same happens when they think everything will be alright no matter how they vote! So you can't really distinguish between those cases based on voter turnout alone.

The short version is you compare actual existing democracies on multiple axes.

The long version is, well, Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

>it reveals that empirically, it produces a narrower political dialogue, poor participation, and low satisfaction with government compared to systems that produce better proportionality.

I am very skeptical of studies purporting to run statistical analysis on such small data sets as the recent history of countries, let alone the recent history of democracies. It seems that in the quest to produce quantitative political science research, people forgot all the statistical lessons about sample size, confounding factors, and so forth.

Weak empirical data is still stronger than abstract speculation with no evidence.

That's not true. The conclusions you derive from the data can be totally wrong because of how weak the data is, but now you have a false confidence in it.

First, that's at least as much of a danger with basing conclusions on abstract speculation without evidence, and second, that's not a matter of which is stronger, it's a matter of treating either as stronger support than it is.

FPTP leads to the long-term creation of a duopoly. That's bad for humans in any situation. You need for parties to refresh their platforms, as well as politicians, and the fastest way to do that is to have competition among parties. Also, primaries are made to make people think they have a multitude of options, but it's usually people within the same line of thinking with the party that win, and the rest are marginalized.

Proportional voting also has higher turnout rates and especially the list-based system seems to have a higher number of women in politics.

FPTP countries tend to have the highest inequality, too, likely because there is that lack of competition, which tends to allow powerful people to have a bigger influence on the two parties over time.

Coalition of parties is better than the alternative of one party dominating the whole government, because then parties are forced to work with each other and compromise on their most extreme views. That's usually a good thing. Plus, you don't get totally opposite platforms every 4 years. Like say if Democrats were to dominate once, raise taxes for everyone to 40%. Then Republicans came. Lowered them to 10%. Then Dems came again, raised them to 30%, and so on.

RCV is a little harder to understand. But so is the caucus system, and the electoral college system, and other quirks the current American political system has.

RCV has some real advantages, like optimizing for positivism in elections rather than negativity (because you may need your opponent's voters). That's usually a good thing.

I don't believe people have a hard time choosing parties. If anything, what happens in most countries, even PR countries, is that people say that they don't have a good option.

Ultimately, FPTP is also undemocratic, because it allows parties to dominate the government when they have less than 50%, sometimes even less than 40% of the voters' support (at it has happened in Canada, and sometimes in mid-terms in the US). I don't know why anyone would support FPTP when that is the case. Why would a party dominate the government with less than 40% support in election day?

RCV has some weaknesses compared to Condorcet methods (which use the same voting mechanism of ranking candidates but different ways of determining the winner). RCV can punish people for voting according to their true preferences.

For example, say a country is 49% Republicans and 51% Democrats. In addition, a Socialist candidate is running. 30% of the Democrats actually prefer the Socialist candidate, but under a plurality system they would vote for the Democrat candidate because the Democrat has broader appeal.

If those 30% chose to rank the Socialist as their #1 choice, then the Republican will win the election, because the Democrat will be eliminated in the first round. So the Democrats are incentivized to not vote their actual preference.

Look at the various Condorcet methods [1], and also check out Approval Voting [2] for a system that produces fairer outcomes without the complexity of RCV/Condorcet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

I'm with you on Condorcet methods producing more equitable results between tactical and non-tactical voters, and I'd love it to be used for the election of singular positions (e.g. a mayor, a president, etc). But all single winner systems distort outcomes in parlimentary bodies (house of representatives, Canada's parliament, etc). Look instead to MMP or STV.