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How to fix democracy: Move beyond the two-party system, experts say

5 points by troydavis 6y ago

troydavis 6y ago
This advocates for proportional representation instead of winner-take-all for US federal legislative seats. Today, if a US House race ends 60%/40%, the 40% counts for zero. Instead: > Now consider the alternative: What would happen if that same district were represented by not one House member but five. There would be multiple Democrats and Republicans vying for the five seats. … with the results reflecting the actual electorate. In that 60%/40% example, 5 seats would yield 3 & 2 representatives. > Most plans for multi-member districts also call for reducing the number of districts overall. For a state such as Virginia, for instance, that could mean moving from having 11 single-member districts to three — two with four representatives each and one with three. Such proposals also typically call for expanding the size of the House, which would allow congressional delegations to more closely reflect partisan splits in their states. … > Parties also represent smaller slices of the electorate in multiparty systems, which incentivizes cross-party cooperation to create legislative majorities. This tends to foster moderation. “As a general rule, when a wider range of parties gets representation in the legislature, it’s hard to form a majority governing coalition that doesn’t include the political center,” Drutman wrote. As a result, moderate candidates are empowered and the extreme elements are banished to the fringe.
approxim8ion 6y ago
As someone in a country with a vibrant multi-party system (I'm not comfortable mentioning where), I would be wary of proposing it as a solution to fix democracy. Ours is very, very broken, but it is certainly a few steps ahead of a two-party system. I would also go so far as to say that representative democracy, where you vote for a party based on a broad raft of ideas they pose in their manifesto, and then leave it entirely up to them to implement them or make new laws based on their interests and interpretation, is not real democracy at all. The logistics of actually having informed citizens able and willing to participate in every decision, and making the process transparent and open for public participation is certainly a huge issue and it is not something I have a solution to. But that feels more like "real" democracy to me. Where the elected representative is just that. They represent their electorate (and not a "party") and are only there to put forward votes or policy drafts that their base has approved with a basic (or two-thirds) majority.
haspoken 6y ago
http://archive.is/l7AVV http://archive.is/l7AVV

5 points by troydavis 6y ago

This advocates for proportional representation instead of winner-take-all for US federal legislative seats. Today, if a US House race ends 60%/40%, the 40% counts for zero. Instead: > Now consider the alternative: What would happen if that same district were represented by not one House member but five. There would be multiple Democrats and Republicans vying for the five seats. … with the results reflecting the actual electorate. In that 60%/40% example, 5 seats would yield 3 & 2 representatives. > Most plans for multi-member districts also call for reducing the number of districts overall. For a state such as Virginia, for instance, that could mean moving from having 11 single-member districts to three — two with four representatives each and one with three. Such proposals also typically call for expanding the size of the House, which would allow congressional delegations to more closely reflect partisan splits in their states. … > Parties also represent smaller slices of the electorate in multiparty systems, which incentivizes cross-party cooperation to create legislative majorities. This tends to foster moderation. “As a general rule, when a wider range of parties gets representation in the legislature, it’s hard to form a majority governing coalition that doesn’t include the political center,” Drutman wrote. As a result, moderate candidates are empowered and the extreme elements are banished to the fringe.

approxim8ion 6y ago

As someone in a country with a vibrant multi-party system (I'm not comfortable mentioning where), I would be wary of proposing it as a solution to fix democracy. Ours is very, very broken, but it is certainly a few steps ahead of a two-party system. I would also go so far as to say that representative democracy, where you vote for a party based on a broad raft of ideas they pose in their manifesto, and then leave it entirely up to them to implement them or make new laws based on their interests and interpretation, is not real democracy at all. The logistics of actually having informed citizens able and willing to participate in every decision, and making the process transparent and open for public participation is certainly a huge issue and it is not something I have a solution to. But that feels more like "real" democracy to me. Where the elected representative is just that. They represent their electorate (and not a "party") and are only there to put forward votes or policy drafts that their base has approved with a basic (or two-thirds) majority.

haspoken 6y ago

http://archive.is/l7AVV http://archive.is/l7AVV