4 ms·

There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. You can always say: "We tried, bu

by mamon 9y ago

There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. You can always say: "We tried, but we didn't have a majority and our allied party was against that".I can't count how many times I heard that being said in my country. Also, there's another bad consequence: In two party system when you lose the elections you really loose: other party takes the whole prize, and for you there's really nothing to do for the next four years. In multi party system even if you finish the elections on 2nd or 3rd place you may still end up joining the ruling coalition of parties, just maybe with somewhat weaker position. Basically European system shifts focus of political parties from making deals with their voters to making deals with other parties.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. The US two-parties-that-are-obviously-fractious-coalitions plus separation of powers system provides far more of those for any elected leader (because it's not a parliamentary system and lacks real mechanisms for party discipline, even a party with control of both political branches and the judiciary isn't analogous to a parliamentary-system ruling party with an outright, non-coalition majority, and isn't held accountable the way those can be. Keeping separation of powers and adopting a more proportional system for the House of Reps, even straight party list (which would require Constitutional change), or state level party list or STV with or without some level of districting (which may or may not require Constitutional change) would not meaningfully add to the excuses for failure to deliver on promises. In fact, systems with greater proportionality in legislative elections produce higher satisfaction with government, which should be unsurprising: electing a government that's views actually align with those of the population results in government policy more aligned with public preferences. Which, after all, is the whole premise of representative democracy.
tripzilch 9y ago
> There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. You can always say: "We tried, but we didn't have a majority and our allied party was against that".I can't count how many times I heard that being said in my country. Well yes, but since you have more than three parties (I don't know what country you're from, or how many viable parties you have), voters can be less forgiving. I heard somewhere[0] that a market needs at least four somewhat viable players, in the sense that one is a monopoly (bad), but two and three players can still control the market in an undesirable manner. It probably also depends very much on the particulars of the government, how much power the opposition parties still have versus the coalition, if there's multiple Houses and how they interact, etc. Either way, I do believe that having multiple viable parties (and preferably at least four?) is a good thing compared to having only two real contenders. But this is mainly because I'm looking at the UK and US for examples of two-party systems. From both I understand that a very large portion of the voting population are rationally aware that their votes will almost certainly not make any difference whatsoever. If anyone knows about other countries with two-party systems that actually make many voters feel well (or at least fairly) represented, I'm curious to hear about them. [0] I don't have a citation sorry. It was on the news, in the context of the number of mobile network operators in the Netherlands being down to three, due to a merger. And afaik all of them are now multinationals. But not only do I not have a citation, neither can I really say whether the same holds for political parties in a democracy. So take this for what you like :)

by mamon 9y ago

dragonwriter 9y ago

> There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. The US two-parties-that-are-obviously-fractious-coalitions plus separation of powers system provides far more of those for any elected leader (because it's not a parliamentary system and lacks real mechanisms for party discipline, even a party with control of both political branches and the judiciary isn't analogous to a parliamentary-system ruling party with an outright, non-coalition majority, and isn't held accountable the way those can be. Keeping separation of powers and adopting a more proportional system for the House of Reps, even straight party list (which would require Constitutional change), or state level party list or STV with or without some level of districting (which may or may not require Constitutional change) would not meaningfully add to the excuses for failure to deliver on promises. In fact, systems with greater proportionality in legislative elections produce higher satisfaction with government, which should be unsurprising: electing a government that's views actually align with those of the population results in government policy more aligned with public preferences. Which, after all, is the whole premise of representative democracy.

tripzilch 9y ago

> There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. You can always say: "We tried, but we didn't have a majority and our allied party was against that".I can't count how many times I heard that being said in my country. Well yes, but since you have more than three parties (I don't know what country you're from, or how many viable parties you have), voters can be less forgiving. I heard somewhere[0] that a market needs at least four somewhat viable players, in the sense that one is a monopoly (bad), but two and three players can still control the market in an undesirable manner. It probably also depends very much on the particulars of the government, how much power the opposition parties still have versus the coalition, if there's multiple Houses and how they interact, etc. Either way, I do believe that having multiple viable parties (and preferably at least four?) is a good thing compared to having only two real contenders. But this is mainly because I'm looking at the UK and US for examples of two-party systems. From both I understand that a very large portion of the voting population are rationally aware that their votes will almost certainly not make any difference whatsoever. If anyone knows about other countries with two-party systems that actually make many voters feel well (or at least fairly) represented, I'm curious to hear about them. [0] I don't have a citation sorry. It was on the news, in the context of the number of mobile network operators in the Netherlands being down to three, due to a merger. And afaik all of them are now multinationals. But not only do I not have a citation, neither can I really say whether the same holds for political parties in a democracy. So take this for what you like :)