The Two Party System Sucks

It's troublesome both at the grand strategic level with FPTP and Duvuger's Law and such systematic issues, but also at the local tactical level. Ballot access laws are written by the two major parties and often designed in a way to thwart third party ambitions, probably fear of competition that could drive the spoiler effect. This extends to everything from higher signature requirements to get on ballots all the way to requiring an impossibly high percentage of the vote to qualify for FEC primary matching funds, let alone being invited to the presidential debates.

It'd be lovely to see a government experiment with an issue based information system someday. Agree to move beyond open debate, & compel representatives to explicitly structure out issues, positions, & arguments for topics they discuss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system

Just being able to capture what the different elements of policy debate really are would let so much more nuance be retained. And when going back to assess the impacts of a policy, there'd be such a clearer record of argumentation to assess: what did happen, what didn't happen, who was right here?

The "magic quadrant" chart is what I was alluding to in my top post, although none of those references is the paper which first brought it to my attention.

> There's also the matter that there's an entire quadrant of the political map that appears to be unsupported by either party.

Are you referring to "the underrepresented cohort in American politics is the opposite of libertarians: people with right-wing social views who support big government on the economy," in your second link?

I think you are, but I think there's also a chance you're referring to libertarians, which are also poorly served by the parties, because, as the article points out, voters with such views "are functionally nonexistent."

Hey, that’s my quadrant. This article is good but I’d go further than just trying to add nuance to arbitrarily binary stances. The distinction between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” among normal people that I interact with is certainly going to be different in aggregate, but there’s a very blurry frontier and you can easily find “pro-lifers” who are more tolerant of abortion than their “pro-choice” neighbors.

That's obvious. That's like saying cancer or hurricanes are the problem.

The question is what causes them (FPTP, transaction costs favors coordination and consolidation, power tends to increase itself) and how causes can be changed.

> Good, wise and just men and women should be chosen to govern, not people who tell us what we want to hear.

2016 elected US President who cannot reasonably be considered part of a party. He was a "host unto himself". He flipped-flopped affiliation over decades, and steamrolled over the Republican party international power structures to win the voters in primary and general.

I agree.

Interestingly, so did the founders -- even the ones that started the first political parties. So it seems that even though political parties are a disease, it's one that's very hard to avoid.

While I'm not a big fan of all of them, Germany saw the rise of three different new parties in the last 40 years (Green, Linke, AFD). They are all relevant political players and came out of the existing parties not representing sentiment felt by substantial portions of the electorate. I hate the AFD and Linke, but gotta say this is awesome and how the system should work.

I'm not sure what would happen without parties entirely. I expect you'd see some natural alliances between politicians arise and you are back to parties. There is a somewhat related learning from German history. During the Weimar republic Germany had many very small parties represented in there parliament. This led to it becoming very hard to make progress which led to high churn of who was in power and allowed weird candidates to rise and take a shot at it. The criticism was that three parliament is just debating and debating and nothing ever happens. Weimar cycled through an unreasonable amount of politicians and eventually ended up with Hitler. This is why Germany now requires a minimum of 5% of votes for a party before they get any seats. If you'd somehow manage to keep parties from emerging, I'd expect a worse form of this problem to happen.

Except that without parties, its really hard to tell who stands for what. In the local elections where I live, there aren't parties. Voting requires researching each candidate carefully to determine what they stand for. Now, I'm nerdy enough to do that research. But the general population isn't.

George Washington pointed this out in his farewell address and it’s almost prophetic to read in 2023, skip to the last paragraph if you’re in a hurry:

“I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

…

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

…

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

Parties exist to solve a collective action problem: getting your face and message out to enough people to win elections means that in the absence of political parties, the odds that a non-oligarch will achieve high office becomes even smaller than it is right now. Plebians very rarely held high office in ancient Rome.

Doing away with political parties is advantageous to the status quo, because, in the absence of parties pooling resources to promote an individual, gaining sufficient power to change the status quo requires first leveraging the status quo to acquire sufficient resources.

There is also the issue that exercising the kind of power that goes with these high offices requires a sort of moral ambivalence that I think precludes "good" people pursuing, let alone holding, these offices.

But good, wise, and just men and women cannot effectively win races in our current political system. Instead, power-hungry, hyper-wealthy sociopaths willing to form unconditional alliances with powerful groups and sacrifice any moral principles to 'win' debates, bury controversy, and gain advertising dollars will instead get selected at every first-past-the-post race above the hyper-local.

When you write:

> People should vote for good people that they believe will do the best possible job.

The most important part of that sentence is the "that they believe" part. The actual goodness, wisdom, and justice of the people who form the set of all eligible candidates has almost nothing to do with the distributed beliefs of those eligible to vote; the process of disseminating information about the former to the latter is EXTREMELY lossy. And power-hungry, hyper-wealthy sociopaths can successfully exploit that.

There's a big difference that your life choices mostly only affect you. Governments specifically are focused on issues that affect lots of people. If everyone only votes for a candidate whose views perfectly match their own they'd only have one candidate they can vote on: themselves. At the end of the day the government has to make a decision that hopefully reflects as close to consensus as we can get. You could get there with direct democracy, or representative democracy where the representatives reflect proportions of their views in the public. I'm not sure we can get there when our representative has to simultaneously reflect the views of everyone in a localized region. Across the country there may be enough vegans for instance to have their own representative but in any particular district they will never have enough numbers to have their concerns addressed.

> Having grown up in a country with a vibrant multi party system, I can tell you it's no panacea.

In Sweden, the multiple parties self-organized into 2 blocks, so for a while it was effectively like a 2-party system. But occasionally some small parties would switch blocks, disrupting the balance for a while.

If we're going to get technical, throw this on the reading list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

> 1950s

For those of us who missed the 1790s.

Thank you! I’ve always suspected that the natural equilibrium of a winner take all system was 2 parties.

How is they worse than the current weak majority that has largely hamstrung the government?

This reads like a comment on Canadian politics. afaik this post is very US centric.

That's an imagined and unrealistic scenario.

Most countries with proportional systems have a threshold that requires something like 5% of the vote to earn seats. So nobody with 2% of the vote is going to be part of the coalition. Furthermore, pulling out of coalition, without a very good reason, is an excellent way to ensure that nobody wants you as a coalition partner in the future.

Yes, some countries with PR have government stability issues. So does the US, see government shutdowns, accusation of obstructionism, etc. That's just an inevitable consequence of humans disagreeing about policy.

> all it takes is for someone with 2% of the vote to pull out of the coalition to bring the government down

If you have a proportional voting system with 5% electoral threshold, they you don't have any 2% parties in the parliament, as the smallest possible is 5%.

Only if (1) the proportionality is fine-grained enough to have a 2% party, and (2) the governing coalition is narrow enough to only have a <2% margin

And “bringing the government down” often just means a new coalition is formed with a couple cabinet seats changing hands; multiparty proportional systems have less cabinet change as a proportion of the cabinet than duopoly systems, though they have more frequent partial cabinet changes. The dramatic langauge may be appropriate with FPTP in a parliamentary system, but is less so in a multiparty proportional parliamentary system.

And, of course, since TFA addresses particularly the democrat-republican-independent dynamic in the USA, a proportional multiparty electoral system is actually a whole separate change from a parliamentary system, and the “a 2% coalition partner defecting can bring down the government” concern only applies to parliamentary systems, even if you adopt multiparty PR in US legislative elections (even for the elections of Presidential electors) it does not apply to the US without the separate and larger change of adopting parliamentary government. Multiparty PR (using, say, STV within states) for the House and even approximately (via the safe harbor statutes) as a norm for Presidential electors is viable by statutory change, a parliamentary system would take Constitutiional change.

> The purpose of parties is to put someone in power.

But in a 2 party system, the odds are very good that neither of the parties adequately represents you. That's the problem with it -- no nuance. As a result, every election is about choosing which candidate will do the least damage rather than which candidate will do the most good.

> Arguing about positions or policies or whatever else some 101 class tells you about makes no sense.

I’m not sure I follow. The elective office isn’t magically conferred to a person, it’s voted on. And arguing about positions and policies is exactly how we decide who is worthy of this office.

> Aggregations of different people over different time with unformed beliefs are meaningless.

Really though? Isn’t that how society has progressed?

I want to understand this comment but all I’m hearing is “why care about policies and people in power, someone’s going to be in office and most voters are clueless anyway”.

> Confusing, "i hate repubs and dems" with "i hate the 2 party system" is a mistake.

Eh, depends on the era. It’s always been a 2-party system and for the present day it’s effectively R+D. Maybe there will be a resurgence of parties like the Know Nothings but for the average person today, it’s the same thing.

I think many people hold the opinion that Republicans and Democrats behave in a way they disapprove of _because_ of the two party system.

Wouldn’t any two party system converge to the same useless equilibrium?

If it was just about installing someone, anyone at all into power we would have maintained a monarchy. Instead, ideally, political parties and their representatives are meant to, well, represent the political views of their supporters.

For instance, my beliefs are not well represented or even respected in this “two” party system, so I don’t vote. A lot of people are disillusioned with the current power struggle in the US, finding it an ever-increasing joke. Until we get politicians that actually represent and more importantly respect the people, then that won’t change.

So no, saying “I hate the repubs and dems” synonymously with “I hate the ‘two’ party system” is not a mistake. Because they are synonymous.