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Be careful what you wish for. The alternatives to the two party system are: 1. Less internally democratic parties with more side-show parties like the UK. You'

Be careful what you wish for. The alternatives to the two party system are: 1. Less internally democratic parties with more side-show parties like the UK. You'd probably end up with 3 or 4 parties with name recognition, one of which acted as a kind of protest vote and occasionally came near enough to winning to be interesting, but which in reality never did. It would mean giving up things like presidential primaries. 2. PR. Look at European politics closely before deciding you want that. It's a recipe for not having a functioning/elected government for months or even a year+ after an election. In a system with elections every 4 years that'd lead to a situation where most of the time there wasn't actually any legitimate government at all and power would shift even more decisively to the civil service. There'd also be frequent collapses of government, and changes in government unconnected to any election. 3. Totalitarianism. The less said about this the better. The US has a two party system because both Democrat and Republican parties are extremely broad and loose coalitions, so it basically never makes sense to try creating a new party instead of taking over one of the existing ones. Hence people like Trump, Bernie Sanders, etc who aren't even really connected to their host parties at all. Americans like to complain about the two party system but also like to complain about primary elections getting fixed by the party machine. Well, get rid of your current system and you're going to just formalize and institutionalize that party machine, in return for a couple more parties that most people won't vote for. The US system has its flaws but it's not obviously worse than the alternatives. It's different, but both UK style Parliamentary systems and European style PR systems create different problems.

rich_sasha 5y ago
I’m probably biased, but European proportional representation seems to me much better than the bipolar mess of US and UK politics. It’s true, Belgium went through a long period of not having a majority government... mind you they still had one, just without major power. But that was a major exception. Otherwise, since it is rare that one party grabs a majority of seats on its own, it requires compromise searching. It makes big strategic moves harder, and everything is indeed a bit slower, but also less extreme and more predictable. Parties can’t carve out their niche simply by being more extreme, so you get more of a middle ground even before you get to elections. But also, other than various quirks of casting floats to ints, if a decision goes through parliament, it means it has the support of (MPs as of election time representing) the majority of the society. As opposed some strange nonlinear function thereof.
- native_samples 5y ago
  It's not really a bit slower. It's a lot slower. Germany has also recently gone through a long period without a legitimate government, it's not some one-off Belgian thing. Europeans like to call what happens after an indecisive election a "caretaker government" but this is a fantasy to cover up the ugly truth - caretaker governments invariably keep ruling as if nothing had happened. They often struggle to accept that legitimacy was lost and they should do nothing, especially leftist governments that are ideologically pre-disposed to government action in the first place. Even Merkel was still turning up at global conferences and speaking for Germany months after her coalition had failed. PR often results in bizarre, unwieldy and politically contradictory coalitions, like libertarians trying to make alliances with hard-left Greens. Hence the popularity of flag-colour names for German coalitions. The resulting governments are unstable, yield completely incoherent policymaking and frequently collapse. In places that don't have this problem they've often evolved other deeply questionable workarounds. Switzerland has some semi-formalized mechanism for dishing out cabinet seats across parties (literally called the "magic formula"), with the result that the government is run by people who fundamentally disagree on the most critical and foundational issues of government. Worse, they constantly pretend that they don't really disagree (collective responsibility), and that this state of affairs is normal. It normalizes and institutionalizes lying to voters about their actual beliefs. The result is a federal politics that feels fake and the whole thing becomes unaccountable because the politicians end up being more loyal to each other than their voters (e.g. Berset scandals, what happened to Blocher). I used to favour PR and thought it would be an improvement over the Parliamentary or US systems. These days I'm much more ambivalent. PR systems look more democratic on the surface but when you look at how they actually behave, I think they actually create perverse incentives. For example, the business of coalition building is pushed to politicians instead of voters themselves, although a stable society ultimately requires coalitions and understanding between citizens.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    It's interesting. I actually didn't notice that Germany didn't have a government (it's news to me, I need to do some research). Why did I not notice? Well, the country is functioning perfectly well. They have a coherent foreign policy. They have a coherent domestic one. A lot of their functions are devolved to local governments, so you're not relying on some centralised behemoth for everything. They are tackling Covid, I'm sure many would argue whether their decisions are right, but they are certainly efficient at implementing what they intent to do. Germany, despite all the tropes about their efficiency, is also very bureaucratic, which affects government more than other things. If I look at outcomes in genuinely democratic countries, I think UK and US - prime two-party democracies - come out top for dysfunctional politics. Perhaps one misconception is that governments need to spur a constant revolution. I'd much rather see governments with stable policy, which simply keep the barrel rolling down the tracks. In that respect, the "bizzare" coalitions are a good thing - change only happens when there is broad support for it. Otherwise, you see one government come in and revolutionise, say, foreign policy, then another comes in and turns it all around again. You point our various failures of proportional representation, I could do the same for first-past-the-post two-party politics: - Polarisation of politics. Both parties have an incentive to pull to the extremes, almost without bound, because the only differentiation is against "the other side". - Disconnect between popular support and the voting game. This is particularly painful in two-party systems, because the winner can easily have the minority of popular support. This used to happen regularly in the UK through "gerrymandering", I believe it happens in US in presidential elections. So you have a democratic process where the most popular candidate... loses? - Compromise-building only happens within parties, not between parties (rare exceptions excluded). To push something through, the party needs to trade horses with its own members (generally not on grounds of merit), as opposed to with other parties (where there is scope, at least, for policy horse trading). It can go wrong in any system, but I think it is more prevalent in two-party systems. See the running joke about how every major US government project ends up with financing split among all US states, because senators all want a piece of the pie. - Voters have almost no way to express political preferences. You can vote for 2 candidates, one of whom generally represents the opposite of your views. The idea of voting for a person, not party, is illusory IMO: MPs generally vote with their party, so it's voting for a party anyway. In proportional representation, at least you can express some mild preference as to which candidate from your party should go in, not in first-past-the-post. Whereas in proportional representation, minor parties totally can get votes, and can totally be a channel for voter preference, then in a coalition push their agenda through. This is not a bug, it's a feature. To restate, despite appearances, European politics are rather boring and keep the lights on. The exceptions - Italy for a while or Spanish secession are so notable precisely because they are exceptions. UK Brexit process (regardless of whether it should have happened or not) was an embarassing shitshow, US frequently is on the verge of bankrupting itself, and seems to have produced a society where two roughly equal halves hate each other.

rich_sasha 5y ago

I’m probably biased, but European proportional representation seems to me much better than the bipolar mess of US and UK politics. It’s true, Belgium went through a long period of not having a majority government... mind you they still had one, just without major power. But that was a major exception. Otherwise, since it is rare that one party grabs a majority of seats on its own, it requires compromise searching. It makes big strategic moves harder, and everything is indeed a bit slower, but also less extreme and more predictable. Parties can’t carve out their niche simply by being more extreme, so you get more of a middle ground even before you get to elections. But also, other than various quirks of casting floats to ints, if a decision goes through parliament, it means it has the support of (MPs as of election time representing) the majority of the society. As opposed some strange nonlinear function thereof.

native_samples 5y ago
It's not really a bit slower. It's a lot slower. Germany has also recently gone through a long period without a legitimate government, it's not some one-off Belgian thing. Europeans like to call what happens after an indecisive election a "caretaker government" but this is a fantasy to cover up the ugly truth - caretaker governments invariably keep ruling as if nothing had happened. They often struggle to accept that legitimacy was lost and they should do nothing, especially leftist governments that are ideologically pre-disposed to government action in the first place. Even Merkel was still turning up at global conferences and speaking for Germany months after her coalition had failed. PR often results in bizarre, unwieldy and politically contradictory coalitions, like libertarians trying to make alliances with hard-left Greens. Hence the popularity of flag-colour names for German coalitions. The resulting governments are unstable, yield completely incoherent policymaking and frequently collapse. In places that don't have this problem they've often evolved other deeply questionable workarounds. Switzerland has some semi-formalized mechanism for dishing out cabinet seats across parties (literally called the "magic formula"), with the result that the government is run by people who fundamentally disagree on the most critical and foundational issues of government. Worse, they constantly pretend that they don't really disagree (collective responsibility), and that this state of affairs is normal. It normalizes and institutionalizes lying to voters about their actual beliefs. The result is a federal politics that feels fake and the whole thing becomes unaccountable because the politicians end up being more loyal to each other than their voters (e.g. Berset scandals, what happened to Blocher). I used to favour PR and thought it would be an improvement over the Parliamentary or US systems. These days I'm much more ambivalent. PR systems look more democratic on the surface but when you look at how they actually behave, I think they actually create perverse incentives. For example, the business of coalition building is pushed to politicians instead of voters themselves, although a stable society ultimately requires coalitions and understanding between citizens.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  It's interesting. I actually didn't notice that Germany didn't have a government (it's news to me, I need to do some research). Why did I not notice? Well, the country is functioning perfectly well. They have a coherent foreign policy. They have a coherent domestic one. A lot of their functions are devolved to local governments, so you're not relying on some centralised behemoth for everything. They are tackling Covid, I'm sure many would argue whether their decisions are right, but they are certainly efficient at implementing what they intent to do. Germany, despite all the tropes about their efficiency, is also very bureaucratic, which affects government more than other things. If I look at outcomes in genuinely democratic countries, I think UK and US - prime two-party democracies - come out top for dysfunctional politics. Perhaps one misconception is that governments need to spur a constant revolution. I'd much rather see governments with stable policy, which simply keep the barrel rolling down the tracks. In that respect, the "bizzare" coalitions are a good thing - change only happens when there is broad support for it. Otherwise, you see one government come in and revolutionise, say, foreign policy, then another comes in and turns it all around again. You point our various failures of proportional representation, I could do the same for first-past-the-post two-party politics: - Polarisation of politics. Both parties have an incentive to pull to the extremes, almost without bound, because the only differentiation is against "the other side". - Disconnect between popular support and the voting game. This is particularly painful in two-party systems, because the winner can easily have the minority of popular support. This used to happen regularly in the UK through "gerrymandering", I believe it happens in US in presidential elections. So you have a democratic process where the most popular candidate... loses? - Compromise-building only happens within parties, not between parties (rare exceptions excluded). To push something through, the party needs to trade horses with its own members (generally not on grounds of merit), as opposed to with other parties (where there is scope, at least, for policy horse trading). It can go wrong in any system, but I think it is more prevalent in two-party systems. See the running joke about how every major US government project ends up with financing split among all US states, because senators all want a piece of the pie. - Voters have almost no way to express political preferences. You can vote for 2 candidates, one of whom generally represents the opposite of your views. The idea of voting for a person, not party, is illusory IMO: MPs generally vote with their party, so it's voting for a party anyway. In proportional representation, at least you can express some mild preference as to which candidate from your party should go in, not in first-past-the-post. Whereas in proportional representation, minor parties totally can get votes, and can totally be a channel for voter preference, then in a coalition push their agenda through. This is not a bug, it's a feature. To restate, despite appearances, European politics are rather boring and keep the lights on. The exceptions - Italy for a while or Spanish secession are so notable precisely because they are exceptions. UK Brexit process (regardless of whether it should have happened or not) was an embarassing shitshow, US frequently is on the verge of bankrupting itself, and seems to have produced a society where two roughly equal halves hate each other.