Allies Believe U.S. 'No Longer a Good Model of Democracy,' Poll Shows
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
As an Australian, I also think mandatory voting would fix other problems with the US electoral system, like perceived voter fraud (since most of the population votes, to cast a vote as someone else is harder and more easily detected), access to polling places (since it's a more obvious and immediate injustice to fine someone for not voting at a polling place with a three hour line than to merely deny them a vote), and the election of presidents who didn't have anything close to a majority of the population voting for them. Mandatory voting is much more controversial than ranked voting when I bring it up with Americans, though, and a less important fix.
I support anything that we can most easily convince the people to accept the change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Electoral_Commissio...
Mechanisms like mandatory voting and greater access to polling places (and holidays on voting day) are exactly the opposite of what is desired by those talking about voter fraud. So while there is much talk of voter fraud, those options are always off the table.
Voter fraud just isn't a significant thing in the US. The perception of it won't be fixed by dealing with voter fraud, one way or the other.
Unfortunately, that means that the real problem is much harder. It's a combination of authoritarianism, partisanship, and xenophobia, deliberately exacerbated both within and without. We don't get to spend much effort on the genuine issues because we're too suspicious of each other, and spend all of our time fighting about non-issues.
There may not actually be fraud, but strengthening the election system wouldn't hurt, and it would calm those who think there is and help stabilize the system during a tumultuous time in our country's history.
And putting in stricter voting controls will not stop people from crying foul. These people aren't working off the facts in the first place, so what difference would it make? If their people don't win they'll call it rigged. If these laws don't give them the result they want, they'll continue to claim fraud until they get enough of an advantage to ensure victory.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/29/texas-voting-restric...
It creates the perception that it has nothing to do with ensuring the quality of the vote at all.
With anything political, you can almost always find politicians contorting them for their own benefit. That doesn't mean the underlying concept is bad, only the contortion is bad.
Even if you consider two-party system as failed multiparty one, it has advantage of being already past that bifurcation point. And, considering that alternative route is death of parliamentarianism, it's a nice advantage.
Yes, same failure can happen in two-party system, but chances are different - 'usurper' party has to fight against single opponent, rather than against multiple smaller ones. Question of 'whenever opposition can unite' is trivially true if opposition consists of single party.
My country is starting to look like a fascist authoritative regime run by a megalomaniac.
Both sides have significant doubt about whether the mechanisms used to count votes are accurate, and it's growing worse. It looks very much like a situation where sooner or later we, too, could lose the ability to have a peaceful change of power.
Extrapolations about the future are always fraught, so take that with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, the fact that everybody is making the same extrapolation just makes it more likely.
the popular vote is not the popular preference. it's just the total number of people who voted for each candidate under a set of rules where that number doesn't matter. the popular vote would likely look quite different if the popular vote decided the election. people who live in overwhelmingly red or blue states often don't bother voting in presidential elections outside of the primaries.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/06/10/americas-image...
I wish anti-trust actions apply to political parties and break them both apart.
One of the ways to change that is to adopt a Ranked Choice voting system. For some reason Americans seem to be very opposed to this idea.
Can you imagine a reasonably large group of politicians to move from R to D or vice versa, and not lose the voices of their electorate?
At least this way you have a 50% chance of getting your guys in power. And if you don't it's just a waiting game til you do again.
There are hundreds of political parties in the US; the stable equilibrium is only two competitive factions because of the electoral system. Breaking up currently dominant parties without addressing the electoral system won’t change anything meaningful. You need to fix the electoral system.
Specifically, the solid evidence from across modern democracies is that if you want multiple competitive parties, you need to adopt a system which tends toward proportional representation, like STV with multimember districts, and it helps further to maximize the relative power of the proportionally representative body (Tinkering with voting methods for single-member legislative districts wouldn't actually help much.)
Having winner-take-all elections for thr legislature, investing wxtra power in the less represntative body within the legislature, and having a strong Presidency that is indirectly elected all tend against having multiple competitive parties.
Then, frankly, the framers were completely incompetent, because they couldn't have designed a system designed better to guarantee a stable national partisan duopoly if that had been their intent.
> and Washington warned against the siren call of the National political party when he left office.
That wasn't a forward looking warning; the duopoly guaranteed by the Constitutional structure of government had already been firmly established by the end of Washington's first term, with the leaders of both factions in his Cabinet.
The manner of Presidential elections is a whole lot less important to having a partisan duopoly than the manner of legislative elections and the fact we have a strong Presidency.
I agree with the first part of your analysis, but the rest seems a bit off.
Firstly, the fact that the US is effectively a two party system comes from the fact that your electoral systems is based on district representatives. This winner-takes-all approach will by nature lead to a two-party system, same as it has in the UK.
Secondly, you do not have to assume dark motives ("... badly wants to become an autocracy...") to arrive at extremism within the parties: This is a natural result of gerrymandering and segregation, where safe districts leads to candidates that pander to there single-party base only.
Compare this with most of continental Europe, where you have proportional representation. Here multi-party systems prevail, and as you indicate in the start of your analysis, this does indeed appear to lead to a "better" democracy in the sense that it can handle multi-dimensional shifts in voter attitude much better than entrenched two-party systems.
the incentives of the system reward trying to gain control of the system by demonstrating how the party in power failed - then compromise and give the party in power points
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...
The US has a lot of problems and has had a lot of problems for a long time. The country might not be capable of overcoming some of them, and that also might not be something new. But, going by the strict definition of democracy, it has never been a good model for democracy, by design. The US is a dictatorship of laws, a dictatorship where the dictators are dead. Maybe it was a good champion of liberty for a long time and faltering more brazenly in that role as of the last couple of decades, but that's not the same thing as being a model for democracy.
The continued attempts to make the U.S. a national democracy is an ongoing problem, we need and should revert many of the "democratic" elements that have been put into our system, such as repealing the 17th amendment, we should more limit the power and scope of the federal government reversing bad Supreme Court Rulings such as Wickard v filburn which expended the power of the federal government far beyond what is should be, we should also expand the size of the House (using the Wyoming Rule) there by limiting the power of any one representative person. We should also make the House a 4 year term Elected with a 2 year offset of the president.
And Ofcourse we should be using Instant Runoff / Ranked Choice voting not First past the post.
This is, in essence, a substantial portion of what is asserted in The Federalist Papers, an 85-part series of letters and treatises written and distributed in 1788 by three proponents of adoption of the US Constitution.
To understand how the US government works it is very similar to the UK under Oliver Cromwell prior to the attempted creation of the third house, it was basically modeled after that period of UK government.
Personally I like the idea of devolving authority away from the Federal side and towards the States but honestly it's a giant rat hole that mixes power politics (something Americans do well enough with) and history (something that Americans do not do so well with).
In any case more centralized or less centralized is the work of decades not years so I would hope no one is holding their breath in any direction.
We have professional police, slavery dressed up as prisons, fiat currency, income taxes, a standing army, no meaningful access to trial by jury for most people in most situations, closed borders, rampant eminent domain to build freeways... it's hard to recognize this state as any serious resemblance to a properly functioning republic.
But I think your overall point, and suggestions, are basically sound and, hopefully, the kind of direction we'll take increasingly seriously as our current state falters.
I'm a brit, we're not doing much better than the US. But no one really takes the US seriously as a democracy.
Partly for the reason you yourself give: propoganda and fake news. Partly because the US system is just such a mess (the senate has so much power and seems designed to be antidemocratic for a start). Trump and Jan 6th are just the icing on the cake.
That is because it is.... and that is a GOOD thing
The Senate is designed to be the State's (i.e the state governments) representative in the federal government, We are a union of 50 independent states, people seem to forget that. it is the United *States* of America, The House of Representatives is the People i.e the citizens chamber, and the Senate is the States chamber of government
it was not until 1913 that Senators were elected by voters, before then State legislators appointed the Senators and IMO we should return to that model
Fyi, I'd say the senate is more like a house of Lords. Before it was required to be elected it was routinely bought by the richest interests in a state. It represented the interests of the Uber rich. Again, not a judgment just an observation...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402382.2016.11...
Same with Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat, today.
At the very least, it's debatable whether a state legislature's (hypothesized) collective power to appoint U.S. senators would be an especially-salient consideration for voters in individual legislative races. Quaere whether any light might be shed by data available from before adoption of the 17th Amendment.
We haven't forgotten it because it's not the case: First, the Constitution's opening words are "We, the People of the United States," NOT "The States of the United States ...." Second, the issue was conclusively settled at Appomattox and with the ensuing enactments of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
> The Senate is designed to be the State's (i.e the state governments) representative in the federal government
In the modern era that might still be viable if the Senate's power were only to veto enactments by the House, perhaps by a supermajority vote — and with that veto power being waived after X days — instead of what it is now, i.e., a roadblock even for popular House bills. The old "cooling saucer" notion seems outdated.
That would not be proper English nor make any sense linguistically.
If you believe that the Founders thought the States were not independent, and sovereign in their own right then you clearly have not read the Federalist Papers. Take a close look at Federalist 17 as an example
If the States were not separate but equal, i.e the foundational principle of our style of governance, then why call the nation the United *States*, why not just call it America or some other name all together
No the founders clearly believed the States should not be servant to the Federal Government, nor should the Federal Government be servant to individual state governments.
>>Second, the issue was conclusively settled at Appomattox and with the ensuing enactments of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
I disagree that it was conclusively settled, nor do I agree that application of the federal constitution to the states by default makes the states Subservient vassals of the federal government
Further last I check the passage of an Amendment requires the ratification of said amendment by 3/4 of States thus proving they are in fact not vassals as if they were then their consent would not be needed.
>In the modern era that might still be viable if the Senate's power were only to veto enactments by the House, perhaps by a supermajority vote
Yea... no
That does not make any sense historically, legislatively or logically. Having a chamber that can only act in the negative would be a pointless chamber of government.
Bills should be assumed to be Bad and at every level require affirmation.
Your process of legislative review makes about as much sense as a criminal system on the principle of Guilty until Proven innocent.
Laws should be hard to pass, laws should be extremely hard to pass, and federal laws should be almost impossible to pass ensuring the federal government does very little and most governance is done at the local level where it should be done.
In general the government that governs the least, governs the best, and this is quadruple true for a Federal Government
If by that you mean, cover-to-cover since the Con Law course during the first semester of law school, then yeah, you're right.
> In general the government that governs the least, governs the best
That'd be true if men were angels. (And yeah, I do mean men, pretty much; we'd likely all be a lot better off if women ran things.)
The whole reason the Framers wrote the Constitution was that the Articles of Confederation were based on the "governs least" principle, and that didn't work out too well.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/06/10/americas-image...