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Comment by yunruse | Hacker News Reader

The problem with politics is that it’s rarely made of binary issues, and yet the voting experience so often is. But the democratic process of the US (and to some extent the UK) is that inevitably two parties will appear, and this sort of forces this broad-church experience, smushing it all into one “left and right” axis [0].

Even if we smush things onto an axis, the Overton window of people’s views [1] can probably be approximated as a bell curve, and so it stands to reason that the Republicans, too, are full of extremes, and also full of moderates. Both parties would benefit from the clarity of being split up, I think; it’s just genuinely unclear how the process could be changed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

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The simple solution is voting system reform. The two party system is a symptom of first-past-the-post voting. Switch to plurality voting and suddenly the quality of representation skyrockets. The system isn't designed to maximize equitable representation and is very resistant to change.

But things that the two-parties agree on (to not implement) will have very little political willpower to implement. And a system that gives more power to parties that are not the two-parties is such a thing.

That's the "resistant to change" part. NH has the highest number of state reps per capita and three plurality bills were shot down this year by an overwhelming majority. From the richest superdelegate to the smallest fry: every politician toes the line right now.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Should-NH-adopt-ranked-choice...

That is often repeated, but not based on facts. Several nations have FPTP voting and more than two parties, including Canada and the UK.

Canada is very rapidly heading towards a two-party system. The Greens barely count as a party, the NDP have joined forces with the Liberals, the Conservative-Reform Alliance Party is desperately trying to subsume the breakaway PPC Party, and the Bloc is specific to one province.

Every election boils down to a choice between two parties: Liberal and Conservative. When the Conservatives are too socially regressive (“barbaric cultural practices hotline”, Pierre Poilievre) many NDP voters hold their nose and vote Liberal.

If the Conservatices continue down their current path, Canada will inevitably become a strictly two-party country: the NDP will cease to exist as an alternative.

Im not sure every governments voting system is comparable. THe nature of the parties certainly plays a factor. American R and D parties are so heavily polarized and unable to work together, and the existing voting system does not provide a path out of that. Yes other countries have other parties, but other systemic issues affect how viable they are.

Even if they don’t, the TV broadcast of presidential debates is a duopoly. If they were required to have five candidates, then perhaps the US would have better executive branch

You described exactly how the process could be changed: the way in which we largely elect officials in the US is First Past the Post, which intrinsically favors coalescing into monolithic entities. To change this, you must change how we elect officials; the fracturing of the parties would follow. While it's not exactly as simple as that, it's probably the single largest step that can be taken. There are some other glaring issues that come to mind, though.

Unfortunately a lot of systems have been built up to largely favor maintaining power with the two major parties in the US. The third largest party, the Libertarian Party, still does not earn enough votes to earn federal funding. They also do not poll high enough to enter the national conversation through televised debates based on the rules set by a bipartisan (emphasis on bipartisan, not nonpartisan) committee.

The most successful Libertarian candidate has been Gary Johnson, who, coincidentally, went viral for his, "What's Aleppo?" response on mainstream media, and still was well off the threshold for federal funding. The most successful third party candidate in history was arguably Ross Perot, who was high profile, covered by the media, and was able to participate in the televised debates. He shot past the threshold for funding but ultimately the Reform Party has never been able to repeat the success they had with its founder, probably because they aren't billionaires that can bypass the enormous brick wall that is mainstream media.

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