Eliminating Political Parties (Scott Adams)

People will still be irrational.

It would simply move the irrationality to idol-worship, identifying with one candidate.

I'm starting to believe that elections are more random than one would think, and odd things decide elections (see for example the Spanish elections where a politician's stance after a terrorist attack by blaming it on ETA completely shifted the election - if the attack had happened another day or said politician had blamed it on Al Quaeda instead he'd have won)

I recall some interesting studies that said that random selection of leaders worked better than deliberate selection:

"Evidence That Random Selection of Leaders Can Enhance Group Performance"

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

we cannot rationally assess each candidate, so we turn to substitutes. If it isn't the political party, something else will have to do (his smile, demeanor, clothing, whatever).

I've seen elected officials whom I expected to be bad perform better than expected, and people whom I had big expectations turn out to be busts.

> Imagine a democratic political system in which no one is allowed to be a member of a political party. How would things be different?

In many municipalities, this is how it works - all elections are non-partisan, and setting up non-party slates is similarly prohibited.

What happens? Councilors are still widely known as being part of the left-wing/right-wing/Conservative/Liberal/Labour factions of council, and form as-hoc groups once elected accordingly. Low-information voters - the people who would vote straight-ticket one way or the other in a partisan race - tend to pick a single issue and vote for whichever candidate identifies with that particular one.

One of the benefits (and I accept that this being a benefit may be controversial) of a party system is that it makes it easier to participate in the process for low- and medium-information voters. If you're super-involved, I salute you - and you're more than welcome to do a detailed analysis of the candidates and their positions, and pick whichever one appeals most to you. If you're not that involved, you can pick the party that broadly represents your values, and be confident that the local guy you'd end up voting for backs those positions (for the most part) and will help move them forwards. It means that someone who can't/won't spend an hour an evening reading up on the horse-race has a way to contribute to the electoral process at a level of confidence higher than "well, this guy is listed first on the ballot."

Without political parties people would still self identify as "conservative" or "liberal". It's human nature. These groups/labels form people's view of self.

What we really want to eliminate is the divisive nature of political discourse that pits "us against them." That's what makes government inefficient. Destroying political parties wouldn't change that, I'm afraid.

In the spirit of evidence-based reasoning, why don't we look at what happens where political parties are absent or weak? This includes the new Afghanistan parliament, Colombia before 2005, Liberia, the Philippines, the Thai senate, and numerous municipal councils. Some of these forbid parties entirely, some discourage them by using electoral systems such as the single non-transferable vote, others simply have a political culture that frowns upon them. A few of the resulting characteristics may indeed be positive: debate is often vigorous, attention is paid to local concerns, and populist movements can rapidly reach power (though some may see that last one as a negative!) Generally, however, there are a number of problems:

What are elections like? First of all, proportional representation is difficult-to-impossible without parties, which eliminates one potentially fruitful type of political reform. Second, without party organizations to provide guidance as to a candidate's political stance, the "personal vote" predominates. This means a candidate needs extremely strong name recognition and personal financial resources: elected members are much more likely to be former entertainment celebrities, business magnates, leaders of ethnic or religious groups, local crime-lords or warlords, or of course incumbents. Another way to get personal recognition is to take credit for local spending, so candidates' campaigns tend to focus on the pork they'll bring if elected.

What about after the elections? Without a strong parliamentary whip, elected members can vote however they want, which sounds great—but it means that every single vote becomes an exercise in pulling teeth. Each member has an interest in acting recalcitrant in order to receive compensation in exchange for their vote. Governing coalitions end up ideologically incoherent, based mostly on which members are most in need of money for local projects. Since there's no ideological basis for government, changes of prime minister/president can happen either extremely often or extremely rarely, depending mostly on whether or not there are enough goodies to be passed around.

All this talk of weakening parties may show a lack of knowledge about the rest of the world. If you look around, you'll see that other nations, and most scholars, consider American political parties to be quite weak. Most countries with healthier political systems have parties that are perhaps smaller than the Democrats and Republicans, but are much stronger in the sense of having control over their elected members and candidates.

I'd argue that in the USA, we should be strengthening parties. Allow party whips to demand discipline from members, expelling those who will not vote with the rest of the party. Once a party wins Congress, they'll have to actually implement their agenda—no more making promises that are impractical or that they know they can't keep, and then blaming recalcitrant party members for preventing the passage of laws. Now, each party contains multiple opposing factions that proclaim incompatible visions. Instead, parties could decide internally what policies to support, and then the dissidents could just deal with it. Or dissidents could go start their own party, and you'd finally have some real diversity of views. Corporate influence could even fall. After all, it's a lot harder to bribe (I mean, uh, "contribute to the campaign of") an entire party to change their votes than to bribe one or two members.

One of the great recent successes of electoral design was in fact a party-strengthening exercise. In the unrecognized pseudo-country of Somaliland, political organization was nearly absent, and the nascent leaders worried that the new democratic system would become corrupt, based on local warlords and ethnic leaders. So first they held municipal elections across the country, and only the three parties with the highest nationwide total vote in these elections would be allowed to run in the subsequent national elections. Voilà! A new, fragile country developed three ideological, non-ethnic political parties; and while there are still serious problems there, the political system is pretty good for that region of the world.

The one issue I haven't really addressed is "what about the Interwebs!?" True, most of my information is from third world countries, where the Internet is not a serious factor. Non-partisan municipal governments in the West also have the problems I listed though, and have not typically been revolutionized by the Internet. But who knows, perhaps Naheed Nenshi's election in Calgary is the vanguard of a wave of social-network-inspired non-partisan renewal, I guess we'll see!

While we're at it, can we eliminate campaigning?

Let's just have a nice web-app that will show you all the candidates for whatever position, and factually list their previous political actions (votes on various issues, etc), with perhaps a very small section wherein they can list their stances on more current issues. Campaign contributions cease to be a problem because there's no campaign to contribute to, and candidates are free to support the wishes of their actual constituents.

Not saying it will ever happen, or that it would be as simple as I've presented it, but it's at least an idea.

But we really need to go one step further and only vote on the issues and then hold candidates accountable for how well they addressed those issues. Otherwise, it remains as a popularity contest for liars.

We have evolved into a two-party system because it fills a need: convenience. When most don't bother to vote, and even fewer vote with a functioning knowledge of the candidates, there is no need for a third party. This makes things easy: red versus blue, good versus evil. Like two football teams.

There is a enough distinction (arguably) between the two parties that one may confidently align themselves with one or the other. With extremely rare exception I vote party over candidate, not so much because I like the party, but because I dislike that party less.

The only way the current party system can be broken is if the system itself breaks -- it's going to take systemic political and financial failure to see any difference.

Part of what Mr. Adams proposes is already happening. The fact that both parties are entering a period of 'splinter' is an indication that even those who identify with a party are not happy with the party in question. As this gets both stronger and more wide spread we should see more and more 'sub-splinter' groups form. This in turn will affect how the parent party is able to perform--- or more importantly not perform. Consider that the democratic party is still suffering from the 'rainbow' movement of some years back, this sort of behavior will certainly increase the entertainment value of modern politics. The new slogan could be 'More theater, less action!'...

One idea would be to remove party information from the voting ballots. It would be interesting to see what effect that had.

Obviously the party information on the ballot is designed to give uninformed voters at least some information about whom to vote for. Instead I propose each candidate submits a 10 word or less description of themselves to be shown under their name in the ballot. E.g.,

Joe Clown (More military, public praying, better schools)

I guess you wouldn't be allowed to mention a political party in your submitted description or it would defeat the purpose.

There's a theory that I can't recall the name of right now that says political leanings natural coalesce around 2 "parties" regardless of how many there are much less none at all. It makes sense really. Voting on something is a binary action so logically groups coalesce around for or against.