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All of this seems to have an unstated prerequisite: The US two party system where voting for a third party actively damages your own interest. It's not perfectl

by Faark 6y ago

All of this seems to have an unstated prerequisite: The US two party system where voting for a third party actively damages your own interest. It's not perfectly solved in other countries, but having more "evils" to choose from is a good start. Obviously politicians have have little incentive to change the process they already had to master to gain power though in the first place.

notafraudster 6y ago
I agree that countries with more than two parties have more opportunities to create majority winning coalitions that cut across painful cleavages. In a three party system (for simplicity I'll do equal sized parties) there are four majority coalitions: all three parties, or each of the three two-party coalitions. This is very good for healing wounds and building bridges and very bad for stability (because there is a majority coalition that can always improve on the status quo, no matter what the status quo is, creating cycles between each of the coalitions). I definitely agree that it makes it easier for regular citizens to disconnect the party they support from sort of more mundane social interactions. I definitely agree it's better for negative out-group affect. It's much harder to hate the other if the boundaries of who is in the other changes regularly and people cycle in and out. But the US is a presidential system. While the presidency isn't everything, it is a big enough prize. No system can get around the winner-take-all nature of the presidency. I favour ranked choice and/or MMP and would support any reform proposed to achieve better institutions of electoral representation, but nothing is going to get around the fundamentally two-party nature of the contestation of the presidency. If we look at the whole history of the US, the party system has changed a number of times, but each time it has been around assembling roughly two groups contesting the presidency, regardless of how those groups map to formal parties (not at all in the JQA/Jackson era, very strongly today). Still, regardless of the institutional setup, it's the case that inter-party polarization can emerge from either increasing extremeness, or better correlation between party and ideology, or better correlation between multiple dimensions of ideology, and the same processes I mention above are visible in other multi-party countries as well, to a lesser degree.
- Super_Jambo 6y ago
  What, why is the presidency two party in nature? Any transferable vote system would change this surely?
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It adds alot of complexity with the questionable benefit of driving more extremism.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      The current system seems to be as extreme as it's possible to be without outright civil war. Generally the business of negotiating coalitions tends to temper extremism - see for example the new three-way Green and Centre-Right coalition in Ireland, which would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago. But considering the fact that political positions appear to correlate with brain structures, I honestly wonder if progressives and conservatives are no longer the same species. Speciation happens when two mutations can no longer breed with each other. There's nothing in evolutionary theory that says the impediments can't be social and behavioural instead of anatomical.
      - jacobr1 6y ago
        > But considering the fact that political positions appear to correlate with brain structures The do now, but didn't historically. So (presuming the correlation is true) are any of the historical factors relevant to changing things today? It seems like historically there were more dimensions to consider such as class, regional interests, religion and then within those combination of factors you could have a more-liberal or conservative view. > There's nothing in evolutionary theory that says the impediments can't be social and behavioural instead of anatomical. There is some data to support this. Charles Murray's Coming Apart cited a big trend of separation amongst the urban/liberal/educated and rural/conservative/religious. It really isn't enough to drive evolution, it certainly has an impact on culture and politics. There is no "reversion to the mean" if the distribution is binomial.
wahern 6y ago
The U.S. recently briefly had a three party system with the emergence of the Tea Party. All it did was radicalize the GOP. Just ask John Boehner. Arguably this radicalization was only possibly because of the Hastert Rule. Under the Hastert Rule the smart strategy was to only caucus with the GOP, and obstruct the GOP when they didn't get what they wanted. That provided the Tea Party with maximum effectiveness. Without the Hastert Rule and some other technical developments, the Tea Party could have and would have occasionally shifted their support. Another way to look at it is that without the Hastert Rule and similar mechanisms that bolster the power of parties, a two party system is largely a two party system in name only. What matters isn't the number of nominal parties, but the effective autonomy of individual representatives. You don't need 3 or 5 or 12 parties, which in almost every country invariably come to represent niche interests (similar to all the caucuses in Congress) but otherwise usually align with one of the main parties. You can have the same outcomes so long as politicians and informal caucuses can more easily defect. Not only will they defect, but it softens the official stance of the remaining parties. We don't need to copy the structure of multi-party European systems. Rather, if we want the same outcomes[1], we should understand the dynamics and replicate or the types of dynamics that matter. Without the latter, simply copying the structure is unlikely to be effective. With the latter, copying is unnecessary. [1] That assumes the outcomes are different and desirable. But the notion that multi-party systems tend to more centrist and inclusive politics seems stale to me. The rise of populism and even nationalism has hardly been confined to traditionally two-party systems, like in the Anglosphere. Heck, when it come to issues of abortion and immigration the U.S. has always been and remains more liberal than almost every European country.
- astine 6y ago
  The Tea Party was not a separate political party. It was a faction in the Republican party that was focused and non-compromise with the Democratic party.It's hard to argue that this would be the same dynamic with a true third party.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  "The U.S. recently briefly had a three party system with the emergence of the Tea Party. All it did was radicalize the GOP. Just ask John Boehner. " In a multiparty system they probably would have been a separate minority party. I think what the US is really suffering from is that the country is maturing. For a long time people could just claim new areas, start living there and create new lives. The country is now fully owned and populated so moving around to start anew from scratch is not that much of an option anymore. Basically the country is filling up with people. Europe had this going on for much longer and the US is going that way too.

by Faark 6y ago

notafraudster 6y ago

I agree that countries with more than two parties have more opportunities to create majority winning coalitions that cut across painful cleavages. In a three party system (for simplicity I'll do equal sized parties) there are four majority coalitions: all three parties, or each of the three two-party coalitions. This is very good for healing wounds and building bridges and very bad for stability (because there is a majority coalition that can always improve on the status quo, no matter what the status quo is, creating cycles between each of the coalitions). I definitely agree that it makes it easier for regular citizens to disconnect the party they support from sort of more mundane social interactions. I definitely agree it's better for negative out-group affect. It's much harder to hate the other if the boundaries of who is in the other changes regularly and people cycle in and out. But the US is a presidential system. While the presidency isn't everything, it is a big enough prize. No system can get around the winner-take-all nature of the presidency. I favour ranked choice and/or MMP and would support any reform proposed to achieve better institutions of electoral representation, but nothing is going to get around the fundamentally two-party nature of the contestation of the presidency. If we look at the whole history of the US, the party system has changed a number of times, but each time it has been around assembling roughly two groups contesting the presidency, regardless of how those groups map to formal parties (not at all in the JQA/Jackson era, very strongly today). Still, regardless of the institutional setup, it's the case that inter-party polarization can emerge from either increasing extremeness, or better correlation between party and ideology, or better correlation between multiple dimensions of ideology, and the same processes I mention above are visible in other multi-party countries as well, to a lesser degree.

Super_Jambo 6y ago
What, why is the presidency two party in nature? Any transferable vote system would change this surely?
- Spooky23 6y ago
  It adds alot of complexity with the questionable benefit of driving more extremism.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    The current system seems to be as extreme as it's possible to be without outright civil war. Generally the business of negotiating coalitions tends to temper extremism - see for example the new three-way Green and Centre-Right coalition in Ireland, which would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago. But considering the fact that political positions appear to correlate with brain structures, I honestly wonder if progressives and conservatives are no longer the same species. Speciation happens when two mutations can no longer breed with each other. There's nothing in evolutionary theory that says the impediments can't be social and behavioural instead of anatomical.
    - jacobr1 6y ago
      > But considering the fact that political positions appear to correlate with brain structures The do now, but didn't historically. So (presuming the correlation is true) are any of the historical factors relevant to changing things today? It seems like historically there were more dimensions to consider such as class, regional interests, religion and then within those combination of factors you could have a more-liberal or conservative view. > There's nothing in evolutionary theory that says the impediments can't be social and behavioural instead of anatomical. There is some data to support this. Charles Murray's Coming Apart cited a big trend of separation amongst the urban/liberal/educated and rural/conservative/religious. It really isn't enough to drive evolution, it certainly has an impact on culture and politics. There is no "reversion to the mean" if the distribution is binomial.

wahern 6y ago

The U.S. recently briefly had a three party system with the emergence of the Tea Party. All it did was radicalize the GOP. Just ask John Boehner. Arguably this radicalization was only possibly because of the Hastert Rule. Under the Hastert Rule the smart strategy was to only caucus with the GOP, and obstruct the GOP when they didn't get what they wanted. That provided the Tea Party with maximum effectiveness. Without the Hastert Rule and some other technical developments, the Tea Party could have and would have occasionally shifted their support. Another way to look at it is that without the Hastert Rule and similar mechanisms that bolster the power of parties, a two party system is largely a two party system in name only. What matters isn't the number of nominal parties, but the effective autonomy of individual representatives. You don't need 3 or 5 or 12 parties, which in almost every country invariably come to represent niche interests (similar to all the caucuses in Congress) but otherwise usually align with one of the main parties. You can have the same outcomes so long as politicians and informal caucuses can more easily defect. Not only will they defect, but it softens the official stance of the remaining parties. We don't need to copy the structure of multi-party European systems. Rather, if we want the same outcomes[1], we should understand the dynamics and replicate or the types of dynamics that matter. Without the latter, simply copying the structure is unlikely to be effective. With the latter, copying is unnecessary. [1] That assumes the outcomes are different and desirable. But the notion that multi-party systems tend to more centrist and inclusive politics seems stale to me. The rise of populism and even nationalism has hardly been confined to traditionally two-party systems, like in the Anglosphere. Heck, when it come to issues of abortion and immigration the U.S. has always been and remains more liberal than almost every European country.

astine 6y ago
The Tea Party was not a separate political party. It was a faction in the Republican party that was focused and non-compromise with the Democratic party.It's hard to argue that this would be the same dynamic with a true third party.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
"The U.S. recently briefly had a three party system with the emergence of the Tea Party. All it did was radicalize the GOP. Just ask John Boehner. " In a multiparty system they probably would have been a separate minority party. I think what the US is really suffering from is that the country is maturing. For a long time people could just claim new areas, start living there and create new lives. The country is now fully owned and populated so moving around to start anew from scratch is not that much of an option anymore. Basically the country is filling up with people. Europe had this going on for much longer and the US is going that way too.