Wouldn't it be amazing if we had a viable third party? I can dream, can't I?
for example the UK's most recent election had the following
- one party has 410/650 of the seats in government with a third of the popular vote
- they gained 211 seats from the previous election off the back of a 1.5% swing in the popular vote
- another party has 65/650 of seats with 12% of the vote, another has 5/650 seats with 14.5% of the vote
Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system? It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties and it doesn't guarantee proportional representation. The presidential election is a winner-takes-all system and in the election for the Assemblée Nationale each constituency is a winner-takes-all.
I would say yes in the sense a new party can (and did) emerge and rise to power when there is demand. Even before that you had some healthy rise and fall of political parties and political alternance beyond just two main contenders.
> It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties
There are like 6 parties with more than 10% of seats, the current government is a coalition of five parties (from two main "families") and no shutdowns or hung parliament.
> Doesn't guarantee proportional representation
That however is true, and by design. This is a property the french voting system share with eg: ranked choice and other systems that aim at resolving the compromise as part of the election rather than afterwards.
I don't mean to say that the french voting system is perfect (I quite like ranked choice), simply that it is a functioning one with interesting properties.
The left-wing coalition was about 9~10 parties, Macron's coalition was around 6~7 right leaning/centrist parties, and Le Pen's block joined by one or two smaller far right/conservative parties.
They are just spoilers; you don't see the Libertarians or Greens saying "you know what, forget the presidency, obviously we aren't going to win--let's field candidates for like mayor, city council, DA, state legislature, etc. in really swingy/purple districts and show people what we can do"
If I were to guess why third parties don't make much of a dint it'll be because successful movements gradually get incorporated into one party or the other via the primary system. Once a party has drained away the core appeal the third party or outside movement will flounder.
WTF? I didn't know UK had such a weird voting system
Here's an election in the SDP split largely from Labour; the result was ultimately the Conservatives gaining 10% more seats when their vote share went down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_United_Kingdom_general_el...
Both of the last two elections were heavily impacted by Nigel Farage's parties in different ways; gaining very few seats but acting massively to the detriment of Labour in 2019 and even more to the Conservatives in 2024
Right now the governing party is a Liberal/NDP alliance, and it's possible that the next election will result in a Conservative government with a Bloc opposition.
I live in Colorado and couldn't be more pissed off. We had a shot at viable 3rd parties and blew it.
So maybe we should be learning from them?
I feel like a broken record, but God, Americans need only look beyond their own borders for just a SECOND to see real-world examples of almost every other ‘hypothetical’ posed by all the armchair political scientists in this thread.
The problem is that there's not much money in third party politics...
The Electoral College + the Twelfth Amendment.
The problem: The EC requires a majority, not just a plurality, of 270 EVs. If you bring in a competitive third party, the EVs get split three ways. If no one hits 270 EVs, the presidential election goes to the House. The House also requires a majority, not just a plurality, of state delegations. If you bring in a competitive third party into the house, the state delegations get split three ways. If no one hits 26 state delegations, the House just has to keep voting, and the Speaker of the House serves as President in the meantime. Structurally, as it is, the Republicans have a major advantage in state delegations, such that if no one reaches 270 EVs, the Republicans will pick the president. This is either a bug or a feature depending on perspective, but either way it's not friendly to a third party.
The lack of solution: Ranked choice voting does not solve this. That just makes it more likely that third parties will screw up presidential elections. The NPVIC does not solve this, because our current Supreme Court would never let it take effect. A constitutional amendment will not overturn it because one of the two major parties has a structural reason to leave it in place. The Electoral College + the Twelfth Amendment are here to stay. There is no way around it.
But by casting an actual vote for “green party”, you are not only electing green party, but you are also sending strong signal to other parties, that there is an active voter who cares for “green” ideas. (Other parties may opt to include some “green” green ideas into their campaign, or even schedule)
Today, the Conservative Party is a centre-left party. They support big government, taxation, immigration, interventionism, and other policies that are inherently not compatible with "right wing" ideologies.
Comparing the Conservative Party's platform to that of the centrist People's Party makes the Conservative's centre-left positioning more obvious.
Recently, the Conservative Party's platform has more closely resembled the farther-left Liberal Party's platform than it has the centrist People's Party platform.
I understand that your political views might see the Tories as Centre-Left, but your pegging of the PPC as centrist strikes me as mischaracterizing the present federal landscape.
Even the conservatives, while courting some hard right views, is arguably not that far right.. evne though I would put them firmly in the right wing.
There is no silent majority. Turnout was >60% in 2020, so by that measure there's a silent minority at best.
Hate to break it to you, but that's the GOP at this point.
It feels like there are lots of people in the GOP who want to go a lot farther than "Ordinary people" do.
The entire system needs an overhaul.
I think putting preferences is more comforting to people than the idea of approving people equally if you have preference.
I strongly disagree. "Vote for one or more candidates" is even easier to explain than "sort all these candidates in the order of your preference".
And once you start trying to explain the potential adverse effects there's no contest. Approval voting today, tomorrow, forever.
* What adverse effects are there that are worse than FPTP?
* I think if someone loathes candidate A, doesn't like candidate B but would tolerate them, and REALLY LIKES candidate C, they should be able to express that preference. Approval voting demands they express B and C with equal endorsement. Personally, I think that's discouraging.
* The results of close elections become basically random (due to results swinging wildly depending on the order in which the first few candidates are eliminated)
* You have to convey results with a series of graphs rather than a single graph (which confuses voters)
* You need all ballots in-hand to start an official count, so you can't call elections early
* You lose the ability to perform risk-limiting audits, which are the cheapest and easiest way to audit elections
So bad actors can trivially affect RCV elections by destroying or delaying a few mail-in ballots, as well as cast doubt on RCV results as a whole
2) Any confusion is due to lack of familiarity and the additional information can be useful beyond determining the winner.
3) This is only true when hand counting a lot of votes (just because you don't want to do it multiple times). Portland just had an election with STV for council seats and IRV for Mayor and these elections were (when possible) called early. You can see the early results here:
4) From a quick Google Scholar search there are risk-limiting audit options for IRV that usually work with few ballots but in occasional worst cases can need a full recount. See Blom et al. Ballot-Polling Risk Limiting Audits for IRV Elections:
[PDF] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michelle-Blom-3/publica...
I agree with buzzy_hacker that proportional representation is the most important thing to aim for. The main advantage of IRV is that it is easy to understand for single winner elections if you use STV for proprotional representation (which seems like a good choice for the US to me). As far as I know Ireland only has the President (a ceremonial role) individually elected but the US has a bunch of individually elected positions so going directly to the Irish system would be a bigger change.
https://abc7news.com/amp/ranked-choice-voting-oakland-school...
2) You're saying that a series of graphs is only harder to understand than a single graph due to lack of "familiarity?" This seems disingenuous. With single-graph results, you can show geographical heat maps of voting behavior which is paints a vivid picture of the vote. Heat maps for RCV are misleading and/or require additional context (this shows 1st choices).
3) Hand-counted ballots are a must in my opinion (for audit-ability). And hand counts of RCV are time-consuming so are typically only done once. I guess runaway elections can be called early with RCV, but my point is that it will happen far less often and most election results will be significantly delayed (waiting for all mail-in ballots to start a hand count)
4) I admit I didn't read this paper nor understand it at a cursory glance, but I know this was a drum that approval voting experts beat a while back. Maybe these strategies are new, or have downsides I'm unaware of.
Why do you see proportional representation as the most important thing to aim for? This is the only argument for RCV over approval that holds water, but my mental model for the need for proportional representation is of politics being a 0-sum game where everyone needs to vie for themselves (which I disagree with).
2) Anyone who cares to look at a heat map will need to learn how the new system works then will appreciate the additional information (the ballot could usefully also include approval information as a distinct aspect that doesn't affect results so that it is possible to determine how many voters like their representative, but I would say that approval voting does not communicate that).
3) Why do you think hand counting improves auditability? Being able to hand count does of course but actually doing the main count by hand doesn't seem to me like it would add anything. Not that I am opposed to hand counting, in that case you just wait for the ballots. As issues go it is way down the list from the other properties of the voting system in my opinion.
4) That one was 2018 or 2019 I think and an older one I saw was published in 2013 so yeah it sounds like this research is fairly recent and still being improved.
I don't see politics as a 0-sum game but people absolutely have fundamental differences where politics is the non-violent way to come to a resolution. These differences can be non-obvious if it isn't important to you and proportional representation gives a better chance that an elected representative will be able to understand and care about your issue (which increases the chance it can be solved easily if it isn't a contentious issue even if your favored representative doesn't otherwise have power). To put it another way, if the point of an election is to elect a represetative then proportional representation aims to give everyone representation within the practical limits of the number of representatives. Ideally, this would also make it easier for the representative to explain actual points of contention and tradeoffs (and basic stuff like what they are actually able to affect) to constituents and build general political competence, although I can't say that what I know of countries that use proportional representation is as promising as I would like on that. Ultimately a voting system alone can't do everything, representation isn't the only possible reason to ever have an election, and my personal ideal of how political resolution of differences can or should work involves a number of things quite different from currently common methods. Overall I see FPTP elections as more of a show to distract from behind the scenes power than a system designed to resolve differences peacefully and approval voting seems similar to me (in my opinion one of the most important things a voting method should try to do is limit the effect of strategic voting).
I'll comment on the last point: I know that multi member districts with proportional representation would be better. Hell, I am closer to convinced that a parliamentary system would be better for us, but I think the people of the US like having a directly elected head of state.
Democracies have evolved in 250 years. We're running old software.
(I haven't seen which of those passed or failed yet.)
MAGA is the third party. Nobody ceded power to Trump. Both R and D tried really damn hard to get rid of him. His biggest detractors are GOP royalty.
He got enough people behind him to get established. In his remarks following this election, he even referred to it as the MAGA Party.
Dems employed some similar strategies with Sanders in 2016, despite his decision to run as a Democrat.
It is interesting to look at the intersection of positions held by the likes of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul, especially where they differ from their respective “most aligned” mainstream party platforms, where they are marginalized. The most prevalent of these are the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes, and in my anecdotal experience 98% of the people agree regardless of their socio-economic status
To be clear voting third party in anything close to a swing state rather than whoever you feel is the lesser of two evils is not something I would do. I don't think third party voting makes sense in a US (or UK) system beyond being a protest vote, I was just trying to show what happens when a remotely supportable third party candidate emerges.
I don't think trying to shame those who did is going to do much to win them back for more than one election cycle without providing a candidate they can believe in though (somehow a lesson the democrats continue to drag their heels on every single time). Especially when in the case of Florida there were other factors on hand that were far clearer miscarriages of justice which they decided to accept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr. >He said that the financial industry and the military–industrial complex are funded at the expense of the American middle class; that the U.S. government is dominated by corporate power; the Environmental Protection Agency is run by the "oil industry, the coal industry, and the pesticide industry";
>In an interview with Andrew Serwer, Kennedy said that the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. had become too great and that "the very wealthy people should pay more taxes and corporations". He also expressed his support for Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax plan, which would impose an annual tax of 2% on every dollar of a household's net worth over $50 million and 6% on every dollar of net worth over $1 billion.[147]
>Kennedy attacked the operations of former CIA director Allen Dulles, condemning U.S.-backed coups and interventions such as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état as "bloodthirsty", and blamed U.S. interventions in countries such as Syria and Iran for the rise of terrorist organizations such as ISIS and creating anti-American sentiment in the region.
>In an article titled "Why the Arabs Don't Want Us in Syria" published in Politico in February 2016, Kennedy referred to the "bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mideast nationalists 'hate us for our freedoms.' For the most part they don't; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed those freedoms—our own ideals—within their borders".
>Kennedy has advocated for a global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy,[169][170] but has opposed hydropower from dams.[129][130][131][132][133][134] He has argued that switching to solar and wind energy reduces costs and greenhouse gases while improving air and water quality, citizens' health, and the number and quality of jobs.[171] Kennedy's fight to stop Appalachian mountaintop removal mining was the subject of the film The Last Mountain.
>As a "well-respected climate lawyer" in the 2000s,[204] Kennedy was "often linked to top environmental jobs in Democratic administrations", including in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections.[209] He was considered as a potential White House Council on Environmental Quality chair for Al Gore in 2000 and considered for the role of EPA administrator under John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.[209]