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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that we do not have effective third parties, because

* elections in the US require a fuckton of spending. AOC raised millions for a House district that wasn't even competitive, meanwhile the British Parliament has a 30,000GBP spending limit. It is a lot easier for upstart parties to raise tens of thousands of dollars rather than millions.

* third parties in the US have a habit of mostly trying to go for broke and failing. The general track record of successful ones elsewhere is that they usually cut their teeth in lower levels of government before they start competing well in national elections, and on top of that the lower level elections are generally easier to win (much lower voter count = much lower spending, thinner electoral margins, etc.)

* the US lacks regional parties, which is another source of third-partyism, but depending on your views this might be a good thing.

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> * the US lacks regional parties, which is another source of third-partyism, but depending on your views this might be a good thing.

IIRC, for a lot time the two major US parties were effectively federations of different regional parties (e.g. your farm-state Democrat had a very different set of positions that your northeastern urban Democrat, ditto for Republicans). That's collapsed in the last 20 years, and everything's basically national, which is a big part of the problem.

The lack of 3rd parties is not a function of spending - it's due to one-winner voting. With only one winner in each election, voters who would prefer a 3rd, 4th, or 5th place candidate quickly figure out that this is a waste of time and they had better line up behind one of the top two. This is how the US does end up with a small handful of 3rd party candidates here and there - because there were enough concentration of voters in their (usually small) district to make them the top candidate in that district. Very hard for smaller parties to have this level of concentrated support over any medium or large area.

An alternative voting system might have voting for many offices together, with many winners. In that case the winners can be distributed among the various voter preferences proportionally. Some countries already do this and therefore have reasonably robust multi-party systems - though I don't think it's at all clear that this is better at serving the needs of the public.

Eh, third parties are plenty viable in the FPTP UK, Canada and India.

It's just a feature of US politics that movements like the Tea Party or DSA decide to shake things within existing parties rather than launch new ones. Even the new ones that launch like the Working Families Party often just support two-party candidates.

I'm not from the UK, but CGP grey is AFAIK. He has a short video called "Why the UK Election Results are the Worst in History" (2015). IMO, it seems like First Past the Post voting is the problem still.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I

I mean, there's also only one winner in French presidential and national assembly elections, and we have a lot more than two big parties.

No mention of FPTP voting system?

You can have third parties under FPTP. The UK, Canada, India to name a few have them.

So does the US, they even occasional win elections, even to Congress (historically, there is at least one case where one displaced a major national party in the state-level duopoly), that doesn't mean FPTP doesn't tend toward duopoly. (FPTP plus a strong Presidential system tends more strongly toward duopoly; FPTP plus a strong Presidential system plus an indirectly-elected President where Presidential electors are mostly elected by multimember FPTP tends even more strongly to duopoly.)

Isn't it more of a property of single-member districts rather than voting system?

No, multimember FPTP districts would be the same but worse (that's pretty much what most states use for Presidential electors, though), whereas you could construct a single-member district system with an electoral system producing proportionality and supporting multiple parties (though it would probably be ugly to administer) [0] which would not have the same problem (though it might have all kinds of other problems). It's a absolutely an FPTP problem, though most reasonable solutions also involve multimember districts.

[0] for an example of the top of my head: vote as in single-member FPTP, determine the proportion of first place votes globally by party to determine how many seats each party must win, and then globally order candidates from each party entitled to at least one seat in descending order of their vote share in their district. Starting with the party with the candidate with lowest maximum vote share, assign that candidate as the winner from their district, removing all other candidates from that district and dropping the party from further consideration if it has been assigned the number of seats it is entitled to; proceed until all seats are assigned.

> determine the proportion of first place votes globally

This sounds to me like artificially creating an election-wide multi-member district. I don't think it's standard to allow votes outside of a particular voting district to affect the results in that voting district.

I'm not claiming that making districts multi-member is a solution (as you mention, multi-member, winner-takes-all districts are also bad), just that it is a necessary condition to arrive at results that are closer to representing the choice of the voters.

Edit: apologies if this feels like moving the goal-post. I need to think a bit more about what could happen for example in single-member voting district with ranked-choice voting system - I think it would not lead to a 2-party system, so you're right here and changing the voting system may be sufficient.

> This sounds to me like artificially creating an election-wide multi-member district

I can see that.

> I'm not claiming that making districts multi-member is a solution (as you mention, multi-member, winner-takes-all districts are also bad), just that it is a necessary condition to arrive at results that are closer to representing the choice of the voters.

Ranked choice methods with single-member districts can slightly mitigate some of the problems, but yes, I’d agree that realistic solutions that do more than nip around the edges require multimember districts.

Does the 30kGBP limit include money that other people spend on you? If not, that sounds like a way to guarantee that big third parties (who can write checks independently of the campaign to support their candidates) will always be able to outspend grassroots donations organized by the campaign.

3rd parties are actually subject to stricter spending rules: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/p...

(30K GBP is an average, since consitutencies in the UK have variations in population size. Constituencies do not get regularly recalculated unlike Congress redistricting every decade.)

It's amazing that we don't have a middle ground party. The compromise between left and right since they can't compromise on their own.

A lot of people would argue that they're both middle ground parties that pretend to have big differences for the show of it.

> A lot of people would argue that they're both middle ground parties that pretend to have big differences for the show of it.

Even though a lot of people argue that, if it weren't true things would be far worse. Despite the differences, there needs to be something resembling a governing consensus.

Absolutely amazing you can look at the state of American politics and think "what we need here is more centrism".

We do have centrist parties in general elections. The non-centrist tendencies arise in the primaries. Then the non-centrist primary voters get miffed after the general election on account of the centrist lurch to collect independent votes.

Most Democrats are right of center on the political spectrum. (IMO)

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