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Surely it's more that they don't want to understand what they're voting for. Their main concern is to keep the other party out of power no matter what. Any thou

Surely it's more that they don't want to understand what they're voting for. Their main concern is to keep the other party out of power no matter what. Any thoughts about whether the party they're voting for is actually doing what they want are secondary and end up getting ignored if they conflict with the primary goal of not letting the "baddies" win.

zanny 9y ago
You can't blame individual citizens for structural (sometimes intentional) flaws of first past the post voting. All discussions on politics really boil back down to this - representation sucks because first past the post sucks. Changing the voting system in most places is a constitutional amendment. Hence, it will never happen. Nothing can get better because the only people who can change it (and don't say third parties, remember, we are in a system structurally designed to kill opposition to the ruling duopoly) are the ones in power because of the system the way it is. If people could vote for the person they want to rule, with (preferably) proportional instant runoff elections (and thus no fear of "the lesser of two evils"), almost none of the current politicians in any state would be in power.
- BigJono 9y ago
  That's evidentially false though. We have a much better system in Australia and all the exact same problems. Most of it boils down to what the previous posters said. People are completely and wilfully uneducated. More than half the country (I'd say closer to 80-90%) are literally just voting for red team vs blue team with zero basic understanding of how the voting system even works. The majority of people in Australia don't even know that we don't have FPTP voting, despite being asked to fill out preferences on the voting form. They also have no knowledge of how the senate voting works or even the senate's purpose in the government. The major parties and media conspire to keep this attitude prevalent. The situation seems unsolvable. There's no incentive for the average person to dedicate any more time to politics than it takes to read a headline each day when they have their own lives to worry about. And such a shallow level of understanding is totally abusable by anyone and everyone with a pen in their hand. The system is broken, but the voting system is just the tip of the iceberg.
  - zanny 9y ago
    I absolutely agree that the voting system is the tip of the iceburg, but Australia is actually progressing towards getting deeper into the bottomless hole of broken incentives. The US, due to its founding documents, is permanently stuck on the surface, where at best people see the iceburg and can't even fathom the depths beneath - hence the near willful ignorance. But isn't your example just demonstrating the incentives problem? Instead of it being at the level where, in the US, politicians are incentivized to preserve the status quo because that is what elected them, and to enable better representation would be to use power only they wield against their own self interest, you are just a graduated level lower - you start to enable more democratic elections, but then have the problem about educating anyone about it. It is truly a hydra, because the education example plays out the same way - those that set the policy agenda of what is taught in schools, where civics and voting and taxes and budgeting should be taught but are not (at least stateside) were put in power by the ignorant, and thus it is in their own self interest and continued viability in politics to keep their voters ignorant. And it really does not matter who is elected or when - any person elected is always in a position to minimize the degree to which their electorate is educated, because emotional appeals are much simpler, and much more useful for personal ends, than rational and factual ones. You can't say one thing and do another and still get reelected when being scrutinized by an engaged, logical electorate who operate in a system that enables them to actually pick who they want to rule.
- ameister14 9y ago
  We are in a system designed to kill opposition to the ruling duopoly and yet the ruling duopoly has changed multiple times.
ameister14 9y ago
That would possibly have been the case in 1965, but party membership is at historically low levels and in multiple states independents outnumber either single party. Unfortunately, 50-65% of people who are eligible to vote actually do so. Often, they do end up voting along party lines, but that's not because of party loyalty so much as a lack of knowledge regarding the candidates. If you give people the opportunity to learn about these things and impress upon them the importance of doing so, they will be more likely to vote rationally.

zanny 9y ago

You can't blame individual citizens for structural (sometimes intentional) flaws of first past the post voting. All discussions on politics really boil back down to this - representation sucks because first past the post sucks. Changing the voting system in most places is a constitutional amendment. Hence, it will never happen. Nothing can get better because the only people who can change it (and don't say third parties, remember, we are in a system structurally designed to kill opposition to the ruling duopoly) are the ones in power because of the system the way it is. If people could vote for the person they want to rule, with (preferably) proportional instant runoff elections (and thus no fear of "the lesser of two evils"), almost none of the current politicians in any state would be in power.

BigJono 9y ago
That's evidentially false though. We have a much better system in Australia and all the exact same problems. Most of it boils down to what the previous posters said. People are completely and wilfully uneducated. More than half the country (I'd say closer to 80-90%) are literally just voting for red team vs blue team with zero basic understanding of how the voting system even works. The majority of people in Australia don't even know that we don't have FPTP voting, despite being asked to fill out preferences on the voting form. They also have no knowledge of how the senate voting works or even the senate's purpose in the government. The major parties and media conspire to keep this attitude prevalent. The situation seems unsolvable. There's no incentive for the average person to dedicate any more time to politics than it takes to read a headline each day when they have their own lives to worry about. And such a shallow level of understanding is totally abusable by anyone and everyone with a pen in their hand. The system is broken, but the voting system is just the tip of the iceberg.
- zanny 9y ago
  I absolutely agree that the voting system is the tip of the iceburg, but Australia is actually progressing towards getting deeper into the bottomless hole of broken incentives. The US, due to its founding documents, is permanently stuck on the surface, where at best people see the iceburg and can't even fathom the depths beneath - hence the near willful ignorance. But isn't your example just demonstrating the incentives problem? Instead of it being at the level where, in the US, politicians are incentivized to preserve the status quo because that is what elected them, and to enable better representation would be to use power only they wield against their own self interest, you are just a graduated level lower - you start to enable more democratic elections, but then have the problem about educating anyone about it. It is truly a hydra, because the education example plays out the same way - those that set the policy agenda of what is taught in schools, where civics and voting and taxes and budgeting should be taught but are not (at least stateside) were put in power by the ignorant, and thus it is in their own self interest and continued viability in politics to keep their voters ignorant. And it really does not matter who is elected or when - any person elected is always in a position to minimize the degree to which their electorate is educated, because emotional appeals are much simpler, and much more useful for personal ends, than rational and factual ones. You can't say one thing and do another and still get reelected when being scrutinized by an engaged, logical electorate who operate in a system that enables them to actually pick who they want to rule.
ameister14 9y ago
We are in a system designed to kill opposition to the ruling duopoly and yet the ruling duopoly has changed multiple times.

ameister14 9y ago

That would possibly have been the case in 1965, but party membership is at historically low levels and in multiple states independents outnumber either single party. Unfortunately, 50-65% of people who are eligible to vote actually do so. Often, they do end up voting along party lines, but that's not because of party loyalty so much as a lack of knowledge regarding the candidates. If you give people the opportunity to learn about these things and impress upon them the importance of doing so, they will be more likely to vote rationally.