It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".
If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts.
That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people. That said I think it’s a serious missed opportunity to press RCV without multimember districts.
IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution
The hack worked in Canada and GB, where it was used to divide, confuse and ultimately scuttle the electoral reform process.
I'm not sure why you are phrasing it this way. Voters don't pick a party for their House representative, they pick a candidate. Each House district election is independent of all the others.
Third party legislators are shunned. Their bills get no traction, and they get no committee assignments. If they are seriously divergent, the House could easily have them removed.
Texas removed it a few years back and it’s removal was challenged (and lost) by Democrats: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/30/texas-2020-election-...
MMP provides local representation, and proportional representation (at the expense of having larger local seats, or more representatives).
Presidents, prime ministers, and governors are always enemies of liberal democracy (the republic for those more familiar with American terminology). Nobody should be given that kind of power, but unless we can figure out how to run a country without such leaders, we have to tolerate them as a necessary evil.
There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he can work with if they're OK with him. Macron won with 20 something % in the first round ( second round was against the aforementioned National Rally, so his victory was guaranteed), but his party got 50%+ in the legislative elections because people decided to give him a chance to enact his program, even if he wasn't their first choice. That isn't always the case, and if the far right wins the presidential elections next year i'm certain they won't have a parliamentary majority.
To avoid a popular wave sweeping everything, the legislature id bicameral, the aforementioned legislative elections only for the lower chamber, the National Assembly. The higher chamber, the Senate, which is more limited in powers but can still exert influence over the lower chamber's law making, is indirectly elected by mayors, local/departmental/regional councilors with staggered 6 year terms ( every 3 years half the seats are up for election).
IMHO it's overall a good system that allows for everyone to be represented, enables governments to be stable ( but doesn't force it). The main thing i'd improve is ranked choice voting for single seat elections ( presidential, local).
And besides all that specific to France, i disagree about "classic" MMP. It forces cooperation and compromise, much better than a party forcing through with whatever they want because there's nobody that can opose them.
> The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity
Yeah, but 7 years is a lot and it's a remnant of when France wad supposed to be a monarchy, so i completely understand why they changed it.
I for one, have more in common with a minority identity widely dispersed across the country but connected through the internet than I do my next door neighbors. My niche identity never gets proportionately represented in government because I'm overwhelmed by local majorities.
For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them.
Likewise, nobody in NYC is affected by the repeat wildfires we’ve had recently on the west coast. Letting them directly say, “Nah, it’s no big deal” is also unfair.
I definitely empathize, though. Lots of my beliefs aren’t represented where I live, either.
Albany bailed us out, so it retains oversight. But the vast majority of the MTA’s decisions are made by people with boots on the ground.
When it comes to regional representation, the right district size depends on population and mobility. If you live in a rural area, a single-member district probably covers you local area reasonably well. In major cities, the boundaries of electoral districts are often arbitrary and meaningless. If you live in one district, work in another, and use shops and other services in a third, which of the three is most important to you? And what happens if you move to another place within the city?
RCV has a bigger impact when used in conjunction with primaries. The is a not unusual situation where more extreme candidates win primaries when the more moderate candidate would have won the election by a larger margin. The more extreme candidate then ends up elected because the district has been jerrymandered to belong to their party.
Although I think they’re unnecessary already under the current system and the US would be a lot better off without them. You could get rid of them and just leave it up to the parties themselves to decide which candidate they will back for each district via whichever means they prefer internally amongst party members.
All in all RCV can be a moderating factor AND it does not require top down changes to the election system.
There's much more to it than that. The two-party system is codified into many laws. A lot of effort goes into maintaining it; the voting system isn't up to that job.
There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution.
In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch).
But that gets at one possibility of why these minor parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale.
It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US.
And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years.
If there is interest in altering the equation, I would suggest https://conventionofstates.com/
The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly idea if you ask me.
So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years.
Calls for substantial reform.
Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems.
Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day.
But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.
I submit that perhaps the communication challenge may be rooted in the modern insistence in making ansolutely everything political.
A Federalist construct would seek to assign appropriate tasking to each level of government, and have DC manage international and inter-State concerns.
Arguably, a single, monolithic state try to manage every personal and local concern leads to gridlock, Q.E.D.