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The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting a
by tveita 7y ago
The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting all the options and letting the voters choose for themselves.
- umanwizard 7y agoIn most democracies that don’t suffer from the two-party system, there is as far as I’m aware nothing like the American primary/caucus system. The parties just decide who their candidates are with no input from anyone but dues-paying party members.
- dmurray 7y agoThe last UK leadership election for the Labour Party [0] had a turnout of 500k+, or roughly 1% of the population. I won't bore you with the details of whether it's correct to think of all 500k as "dues-paying members". That's a lot less than the 30 million or 10% of population [1] who voted in the last Democratic primaries in 2016, but not "nothing like" it. And we could pick other years the turnout was much lower, e.g. 7 million [2] in 2012 where Obama did not have meaningful opposition). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership_election_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership_e... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presiden... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Democratic_Party_presiden...
- tveita 7y agoUK is not a good counterexample here. It also uses the first-past the post voting system, which trends towards two parties since any third party becomes a spoiler. With a different voting system there would be a wider range of smaller parties, so you don't need to wrest control of a major party to be represented.