Party Line – 1:1 chat across the political spectrum
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In Norway, we have 9 parties in our parliament. No parties are perceived as the exact opposite of the other. Friends and family often vote for different parties, and loyalty changes over time. And this is how it is across almost the entire continent, with the UK as the major exception (with their voting process favoring a two-party system).
If Americans could somehow get a taste of this freedom of choice, I'm certain many of them would demand the same things at home. I'm amazed that there's often 10s of kinds of peanut butter in an American super market, but only two political parties. Could it be done with tech? I'm not sure, but I would like to see someone give it a go.
Case in point - without the threat of UKIP taking votes from the Conservatives, it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held.
A concerted effort to consolidate votes behind the Liberals gave us Justin Trudeau, a do-nothing neoliberal whose hobbies include brownface and giving indigenous people's land to oil companies.
I will say though that the US two-party system seems to promote a deadlock / winner-take-all scenario that doesn't seem as common in other countries. So I do think having something like ranked choice voting will help. It's just not the full solution.
If the UK had actual proportional representation, it is also unlikely the EU referendum would have been held. The referendum was entirely a fault of the conservative government at the time, a gambit made not to appease potential UKIP voters but instead to satisfy in-fighting within the conservative party.
>some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation.
Your definition of 'reasonable' differs from mine. Reasonable implies that the representation is fair/proportional to the amount of votes received. In 2010, the results were as follows:
Conservatives: 36% of votes, 47% of seats.
Labour: 29% of votes, 39.7% of seats.
Liberal Democrats: 23% of votes, 8.8% of seats.
A 'reasonable' level of representation for the 2010 election would've drastically reshaped British politics and the country would be much less divided than it is now. I feel strongly about this, since the UK used to be my home, but I couldn't bring myself to continue living there as a contributor to such a broken system.
These have been big gambles by the major parties, the details and direction of which have mostly been dictated by marketing and in-fighting. Despite having multiple general elections with these as the main issues, the public has only been presented with coarse yes/no choices and false dichotomies.
In a multi-party system (e.g. proportional like STV) I'm pretty sure we'd see ERG as a separate party to Cameron-esque Tories, and Momentum as a separate party to the NewLabour/Starmer side of Labour. I'm not sure who would get the keep the old Labour/Tory names, though.
I think that's kind of the point.
Like I can't taste the difference between the 10s of kinds of peanut butter, I'm not sure the half dozen different political parties in my home country (France) offer a real variety of choice.
I generally agree with this take, but lately I’ve actually been considering the opposite: that the two-party system is the only thing truly holding the country together as a union. The two party system has two consequences: one, making the federal government more amenable to bottom-up change; and two, by making fringe movements morph themselves to fit into the federal structure, rather than simply exit and secede.
As an example, imagine that there were a “West Coast” party which had control over California, Oregon and Washington. In a multiparty system, what incentivizes them from not just declaring independence? At least by forcing them into Democrats or Republicans, they become unified with the rest of their party country-wide.
In a proportional system, California and the west coast is not pure blue or liberal or some new "independence party". Without even looking at numbers I'm sure California alone has as many or more conservative leaning voters than Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas combined, we just never see it thanks to our antiquated setup.
And there's no unity in the party, either. A California democrat could have more in common with a Missouri republican than his same-party counterpart. The democratic platform this year includes a number of promises that the presidential candidate does not agree with. The republicans did not publish a platform this year. It's essentially a directional signal more than any concrete unifying measure, a party-for-all-people-except-the-ones-we're-against.
If the democrats and the republicans are supposedly holding the union together, they're doing an absolutely awful job at it.
not being part of the Union != not cooperating
(although currently the EU is attempting to block all cooperation outside the bounds of the Union in an effort to keep the UK practically a member, but without voting rights)
I don't understand what evidence has led you to these conclusions.
It seems clear to me that both Trump and Sanders (outsiders / fringe movements) have had an immense impact on their respective parties, far more than they would have with a separate political party.
To use another example: the two party system ensures that everyone is in the same room and has to use one of two microphones to speak. Since there are limitations, everyone has to compromise: the establishment and the newcomers.
A multiparty system lets everyone have a microphone (which drowns out all the voices) or lets you simply go to a different room. Both don’t require much compromise and I don’t see either as effective for maintaining the union.
I suspect Sanders would have higher impact in a multi-party system, because apparently there is a group of maybe 30% of Americans who would be his fans and could vote for a progressive party under his leadership.
What I would really like to see is a comparison of the political systems, across different countries perhaps. To take an issue and compare how it was pushed through the different systems. I can't help it but today, EU seems more progressive (in the sense of trying to make life of citizens better) than the U.S. (and UK).
That’s where I disagree. I don’t think the percentage is anywhere near that high. Instead, I’d say that by latching onto the Democratic Party apparatus, his ideas have become far more popular and relevant in the party (and subsequently the country) than if he was running the Green/Libertarian party equivalent.
In the 2nd sentence, you're assuming exactly the conditions of the two party system. In Europe, new parties (like Greens or Pirates) were successfully able to bring new issues to the traditional political divide.
But I'm not sure why you think having more parties would make them more regionally split, they could (and arguably "should") be more interest and policy based, but still nationwide.
>But this means that although there are many parties, there are still only two sides (practically) to chose from.
I believe you've answered your own question.
two party system != there are two parties
the system != the current situation
The federal government invading and re-establishing control, which they would be able to do with incredible ease.
I actually believe that a larger issue is both sides being unable to have a conversation. I get my news and someone else gets their news and when we try to talk we find that we don't even have the same facts to start from. Imagine not being able to talk to half of your country? Your neighbors?
In America, people voluntarily subscribe to the propaganda channel because it makes them angry. shrug
People share a lot of similar ideas but I find I have to switch out words depending on whether I’m talking to someone with left leaning or right leaning tendencies.
What makes it worse is they’ve spent decades listening to propaganda that turns words from the opposing languages into trigger words and trigger phrases. As soon as they hear those trigger words, they begin to parrot talking points that have been drilled into them.
It’s pathetic.
Uh, as shown in numerous democratic countries like Norway and other European countries, you don't need tech for this. You just need something that isn't first-past-the-post.
Given the failures of campaigns in the UK and Canada to change the voting system, I think that a requirement for proposed systems has to be that the ballot papers (and voter instructions) must be the same as FPTP, and the constituency/district boundaries (and number of representatives) have to stay unaltered too.
That may seem like too stringent a set of requirements, but as you say, a top-two run-off system does satisfy them. Unfortunately, such a system can still be attacked on the basis of cost, since having two election days is roughly twice as expensive as having just one. Not only is there the administrative cost to the government, but the time cost for voters themselves.
The only remaining solution that I have found is Asset Voting, in which votes are cast and tallied just as in FPTP, but then the candidate with the fewest votes gets to reassign their votes to one of the remaining candidates, with this process repeating until a candidate has a majority. This should remove the problems of spoiler candidates and tactical voting.
The same, presumably, applies in America. Parties are willing to sabotage elections altogether there rather than risk making them fairer.
That depends what you mean by "campaign"[0] (or "is", I suppose[1]).
We saw in the 2019 election that individual MPs[2] and even the parties themselves[3] were willing to create electoral alliances for a single issue goal. It is not inconceivable then that an alliance could be formed (perhaps in the aftermath of a hung parliament, or in the run up to a close election) where MPs agreed to introduce a voting system which made the minimum possible change to the existing procedure while also making all future "standing down candidates" alliances unnecessary.
[0] https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/the-conservatives-just-p...
[1] https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50398820
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/07/lib-dems-gr...
However, in a two-party "run-off", the sides are pressured to polarize and rile up their voters. It's a very different game!
The pressure to rile up voters exists either way. You saw this in the UK recently, where there are plenty of parties, and the election was incredibly awful. The winner of the election was, as usual, the one that had eliminated the second, third, and fourth parties that split the vote.
I'm not saying there aren't differences, but I think it might help Americans to think of it as if it were more similar. They cast one vote, and if their candidate lost, they get to vote for their second favorite. It's not identical to a runoff election, but there are enough similarities to make me believe that a change to true runoff elections would not alter how people perceive the result.
Voting reform _should_ be the long term goal and choice would come from it but the main reason the US is in a rot to the level it is is probably more down to the various areas of control (specifically the Senate, judicial system and the utterly insane amounts of money running through the whole political system).
So in the end, there are fewer sides/groups/blocks than parties and people tend to switch between parties within a block, but rarely between blocks.
If the US wants more than two colours in their spectrum, they need proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
I agree that proportional representation would help shift things, but I don't think it is necessary for the reform to work. For example, it doesn't seem far-fetched that over time, Democrat seats in Congress could be lost to Green or Socialist candidates in some areas, and different factions within the Republican party could also start to win elections under their own banner too.
With some clever campaigning (and/or a lot of money) a popular figure like Bernie or Trump could bring supporters to a "New Left" or "New Right" party that eclipsed the current mainstream parties.
I find many of my positions represented in the American mainstream but not by any (viable) parties domestically.
Also a big reason for the fragmentation of parties is simply how rigid they are internally. Most political parties in Europe are governed like private companies. Few have primaries and when they do they tend to be fairly limited. When there's infighting between major players the simplest thing to do is often to just setup a new party. There's not much of a culture of political affiliation or involvement. Just because you might have identified with some party doesn't give you much of a platform to advocate for anything internally. If you don't like it you need to find a new one.
no thanks. I don't want to give a random website my phone number
Examples:
> We use the above Tracking Technologies (...) to deliver content, including ads, relevant to your interests on our Services and third party sites based on how you interact with our advertisements and/or content.
> We use your personal data, Demographic Information and Usage Information for purposes of: 1. Sending you marketing information about Dialup; 2. Sending you email communications such as electronic newsletters about our Services; (...) 8. Providing mobile marketing messages and other communications and messages;
Nope. Better luck next time, data pickers.
Political issues exist in more than two dimensions. I am not a member of a political party. I don’t exist on a political spectrum. I’m not a liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, socialist, capitalist. I’m an independent individual, not a category, and I can vote for whoever I think is best.
"Socialist" and "capitalist" aren't party alignments, they have concrete meanings. As an independent individual you no doubt have some preference.
I agree that they're not party alignments, but do they really have concrete meanings? In my experience they seems to mean different things to each person who uses them.
> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
Both of those definitions encompass a wide range of economic systems, but they are fixed definitions. There's never going to be some inversion where "socialism" suddenly describes the private accumulation of capital.
Is a market-based system with strong progressive taxation and a large basic income capitalist? Is it socialist?
IMO it's not obvious and you could argue it either way for both terms.
If someone has capital invested in a business, and votes for government health insurance, are they a socialist or a capitalist? Would it mean they prefer the government to run everything? Nonsense.
Are the Democrats the socialists and the Republicans the capitalists? These words are little more than partisan shibboleths. The media portrays the Democrats as socialists, and the Republicans capitalists. Yet Republicans vote for socialist policies (Medicare, social security, unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, etc.)