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IMO democracy isn't working in the US since the political parties were whittled down to just two actors and they realized they can just fight over social issues

by munk-a 6y ago

IMO democracy isn't working in the US since the political parties were whittled down to just two actors and they realized they can just fight over social issues and have nearly identical stances on economic issues. This is one of the reasons I've been advocating hard to keep IRV in my local district (Chittenden County VT) and why I'm so happy to see Democrats, Republicans and Progressives all competing in the elections.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Actually yes, this is a good point, a large part of it can be attributed to the FPTP system enforcing two parties that can endlessly justify themselves by being marginally better on some issues (in this case, social issues). Do you see a possible path for something like IRV nationwide?
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  States are expressly empowered to choose how they run elections, although the current FPTP (at least for the House) is actually a law of Congress. That being said, the major issue with relying on states to do this, is that the first states to do this will probably lose out. In a parallel universe with orange and green parties, if, say, the orange state decides to move to proportional electoral college but the green state does not, then the green party will benefit because they get both split votes from the yellow state and the total votes for the green state.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I think something like the interstate voting compact is an extremely deft strategy for approaching a more proportional voting approach for the executive office - for congressional seats there might be a similar approach possible but I'm not certain - such an approach might need to be activated only when a much higher proportion of states sign on - I agree that the leaders would lose if they approached this individually and, honestly, I think we need a really big change to get into a good place - we might get a bit better incrementally. I'd really like to see the US have regional and balancing seats in congress - the former tied to districts and the latter allocated to maximize the correctness of the representation - so maybe the Purple wins all the races in Maine but Green had 40% of the vote in both races - Green would gain a non-regionally tied house seat[1] while purple gets both of the regional seats. 1. Potentially seats depending on how national elections go
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      The thing about the Interstate Voting Compact is that it's still winner-takes-all, so as long as a majority of states are on board it's fine. The problem with doing it with proportional voting is that you need every single state on board; any state still doing winner-takes-all has much greater power.
      - munk-a 6y ago
        Yea - but it should still be possible to structure such a compact in a way where you wouldn't create loser states - let's say you target 80% buy-in of states (by representative numbers) before activating and you're talking about the house (the same rule goes for the senate but the activation might fire at a different time) - The only scenario that would really flub the system is if the 20% of house seats not covered by the compact went all to one party (say the purple party) in close races while the green party and yellow party split the vote otherwise - in that case maybe the purple party won 11% of the popular vote and thus is over-represented by the 20% of control they have. Still the other states could balance the math to split the remaining 80% appropriately. Additionally, as long as that proportion is significantly high enough (say above the 66% mark) the two parties that were partially disenfranchised would still be left sharing a strong majority in the house between them and, if something similar happened with the senate, they could coalition up and force through a congressional amendment that would bring the remaining portion of the country in line for the next election. The Interstate Voting Compact couldn't be precisely similarly applied to congressional elections, it'd need more momentum behind it, but there is a way for the math to work out. All that said, IANAL and I have no idea if the legal shenanigans used to make the IVC binding could also be utilized for a similar movement around the house and senate.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  FPTP doesn’t enforce two parties. Canada uses FPTP and has 5 major parties (Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Bloc Québécois and Greens) that end up with seats. One of the first two ends up in power for the most part but minority governments often lead to de facto coalitions, the way the NDP is currently propping up the Liberal minority while the conservatives form the official opposition. I would love to see IRV in both places though as it would be nice to see something other than a Liberal or Conservative PM. Near miss with the NDP a few years back.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    When it matters, FPTP inevitably eventually whittles away all but two parties. Canada once had at least 18 active parties, and is now down to five, even with a system that encourages more coalition-building than its neighbor to the south. Eventually it will become two.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Just a note - in Canada there is a party generally called the Liberal party and another called the Conservative party - I've been careful in the text below to differential Liberal from liberal and Conservative from conservative - it can get a bit confusing (especially when the Liberals aren't liberal) but that's just Canada being confusing. As a Canadian - Canada is slipping into a two party system. There are, weirdly, regional variations of parties - that tends to lead toward the appearance of wider representation. I'm in BC and our conservative party is the Liberals while our liberal party is the NDP - with the greens eeking out a few seats on the sunshine coast and occasionally vancouver island in most elections - it's basically a two horse race provincially between the Liberals and the NDP. Since the Conservatives have essentially no chance of winning all their voters jumped on the Liberal bandwagon and made that party conservative (as evidenced by the pro-life Liberal candidate who recently described contraception as a form of eugenics). BQ is an interesting party that mostly exists because QC still kinda wants to be independent, and the greens essentially don't exist. The same is essentially true of the NDP when it comes to the national elections - please just look at these results[1] with the Liberal party at 157, the conservatives at 121 and the next most represented party at 32 (up 22 seats over the last election) - Canadian elections are essentially a two horse race and a lot of Canadians that aren't already in "safe" NDP, BQ or Green districts end up voting strategically for Conservatives or Liberals - whichever they hate less. Oh also there's the PPC but honestly they're a joke - I still think they should have a few MPs though (technically, five seats) - they did carry 1.62% of the national vote in a country where an MP represents .3% of the country. Here's a graphic demonstrating the full skew of voting in Canada, it's not nearly as minor as you might think[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election 2. https://www.fairvote.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Canada-votes-2019-website-square-box.png https://www.fairvote.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Canada-vo...
RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
The rhetoric of electoralism and the idea that votes for a third party are "thrown away" is intensely corrosive to representative democracy. I agree that ranked-preference voting looks like the best fix for our current hyper-stable two-party system, but it's going to be an incredible uphill battle to expand this style of voting.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Absolutely - mostly because it's in the interest of the establishment of both parties to keep the two party system. That's why I like advocating for it in local elections - it leads to a more wide awareness of the advantages of the system in the minds of electorates.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what's the justification for opposing a preferential voting system in the USA? Is it simply a case of "it would hurt my guy's chance of winning"? Or is there more principled reasoning at play? As an Australian, it makes perfect sense to me.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    There are two points 1. It's held up that it would disenfrancbise voters 2. Tradition (essentially) something being unconstitutional in the US has morphed into an extremely radical idea in the minds of most Americans - the electoral college is established in the constitution, but the US has revised that a bunch of times over it's history including the "undo" amendment (the 21st)
exmicrosoldier 6y ago
The first, hardest duopoly to fix in the United States is the two party system.

by munk-a 6y ago

sudosysgen 6y ago

Actually yes, this is a good point, a large part of it can be attributed to the FPTP system enforcing two parties that can endlessly justify themselves by being marginally better on some issues (in this case, social issues). Do you see a possible path for something like IRV nationwide?

bobthepanda 6y ago
States are expressly empowered to choose how they run elections, although the current FPTP (at least for the House) is actually a law of Congress. That being said, the major issue with relying on states to do this, is that the first states to do this will probably lose out. In a parallel universe with orange and green parties, if, say, the orange state decides to move to proportional electoral college but the green state does not, then the green party will benefit because they get both split votes from the yellow state and the total votes for the green state.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I think something like the interstate voting compact is an extremely deft strategy for approaching a more proportional voting approach for the executive office - for congressional seats there might be a similar approach possible but I'm not certain - such an approach might need to be activated only when a much higher proportion of states sign on - I agree that the leaders would lose if they approached this individually and, honestly, I think we need a really big change to get into a good place - we might get a bit better incrementally. I'd really like to see the US have regional and balancing seats in congress - the former tied to districts and the latter allocated to maximize the correctness of the representation - so maybe the Purple wins all the races in Maine but Green had 40% of the vote in both races - Green would gain a non-regionally tied house seat[1] while purple gets both of the regional seats. 1. Potentially seats depending on how national elections go
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    The thing about the Interstate Voting Compact is that it's still winner-takes-all, so as long as a majority of states are on board it's fine. The problem with doing it with proportional voting is that you need every single state on board; any state still doing winner-takes-all has much greater power.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Yea - but it should still be possible to structure such a compact in a way where you wouldn't create loser states - let's say you target 80% buy-in of states (by representative numbers) before activating and you're talking about the house (the same rule goes for the senate but the activation might fire at a different time) - The only scenario that would really flub the system is if the 20% of house seats not covered by the compact went all to one party (say the purple party) in close races while the green party and yellow party split the vote otherwise - in that case maybe the purple party won 11% of the popular vote and thus is over-represented by the 20% of control they have. Still the other states could balance the math to split the remaining 80% appropriately. Additionally, as long as that proportion is significantly high enough (say above the 66% mark) the two parties that were partially disenfranchised would still be left sharing a strong majority in the house between them and, if something similar happened with the senate, they could coalition up and force through a congressional amendment that would bring the remaining portion of the country in line for the next election. The Interstate Voting Compact couldn't be precisely similarly applied to congressional elections, it'd need more momentum behind it, but there is a way for the math to work out. All that said, IANAL and I have no idea if the legal shenanigans used to make the IVC binding could also be utilized for a similar movement around the house and senate.
arcticbull 6y ago
FPTP doesn’t enforce two parties. Canada uses FPTP and has 5 major parties (Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Bloc Québécois and Greens) that end up with seats. One of the first two ends up in power for the most part but minority governments often lead to de facto coalitions, the way the NDP is currently propping up the Liberal minority while the conservatives form the official opposition. I would love to see IRV in both places though as it would be nice to see something other than a Liberal or Conservative PM. Near miss with the NDP a few years back.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  When it matters, FPTP inevitably eventually whittles away all but two parties. Canada once had at least 18 active parties, and is now down to five, even with a system that encourages more coalition-building than its neighbor to the south. Eventually it will become two.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Just a note - in Canada there is a party generally called the Liberal party and another called the Conservative party - I've been careful in the text below to differential Liberal from liberal and Conservative from conservative - it can get a bit confusing (especially when the Liberals aren't liberal) but that's just Canada being confusing. As a Canadian - Canada is slipping into a two party system. There are, weirdly, regional variations of parties - that tends to lead toward the appearance of wider representation. I'm in BC and our conservative party is the Liberals while our liberal party is the NDP - with the greens eeking out a few seats on the sunshine coast and occasionally vancouver island in most elections - it's basically a two horse race provincially between the Liberals and the NDP. Since the Conservatives have essentially no chance of winning all their voters jumped on the Liberal bandwagon and made that party conservative (as evidenced by the pro-life Liberal candidate who recently described contraception as a form of eugenics). BQ is an interesting party that mostly exists because QC still kinda wants to be independent, and the greens essentially don't exist. The same is essentially true of the NDP when it comes to the national elections - please just look at these results[1] with the Liberal party at 157, the conservatives at 121 and the next most represented party at 32 (up 22 seats over the last election) - Canadian elections are essentially a two horse race and a lot of Canadians that aren't already in "safe" NDP, BQ or Green districts end up voting strategically for Conservatives or Liberals - whichever they hate less. Oh also there's the PPC but honestly they're a joke - I still think they should have a few MPs though (technically, five seats) - they did carry 1.62% of the national vote in a country where an MP represents .3% of the country. Here's a graphic demonstrating the full skew of voting in Canada, it's not nearly as minor as you might think[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election 2. https://www.fairvote.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Canada-votes-2019-website-square-box.png https://www.fairvote.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Canada-vo...

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago

The rhetoric of electoralism and the idea that votes for a third party are "thrown away" is intensely corrosive to representative democracy. I agree that ranked-preference voting looks like the best fix for our current hyper-stable two-party system, but it's going to be an incredible uphill battle to expand this style of voting.

munk-a 6y ago
Absolutely - mostly because it's in the interest of the establishment of both parties to keep the two party system. That's why I like advocating for it in local elections - it leads to a more wide awareness of the advantages of the system in the minds of electorates.
nmfisher 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what's the justification for opposing a preferential voting system in the USA? Is it simply a case of "it would hurt my guy's chance of winning"? Or is there more principled reasoning at play? As an Australian, it makes perfect sense to me.
- munk-a 6y ago
  There are two points 1. It's held up that it would disenfrancbise voters 2. Tradition (essentially) something being unconstitutional in the US has morphed into an extremely radical idea in the minds of most Americans - the electoral college is established in the constitution, but the US has revised that a bunch of times over it's history including the "undo" amendment (the 21st)

exmicrosoldier 6y ago

The first, hardest duopoly to fix in the United States is the two party system.