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I live in the US but I keep up with the home country. Australian politics is, relative to US politics, a hugging contest with the parties all singing kumbaya w

I live in the US but I keep up with the home country. Australian politics is, relative to US politics, a hugging contest with the parties all singing kumbaya with perfect choristry. As for the two-party system, it's not perpetuated by how you count the vote. It's perpetuated by the economics of capturing single-member electorates. Australia has multi-member electorates for its Senate and most state upper houses and, unsurprisingly, that's where minor parties largely succeed in gaining representation.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> it's not perpetuated by how you count the vote. It's perpetuated by the economics of capturing single-member electorates One of the simplest tweaks to the American system might be consolidating e.g. Senate elections so that the states elect two Senators at one time. It's simpler than combining House districts in that it's merely a scheduling change.
- twblalock 4y ago
  It would require an amendment to article 1, section 3 of the US constitution which explicitly requires that senators should serve staggered terms, with 1/3 of the senate up for reelection every 2 years. This was done intentionally to make it difficult for the Senate membership to be swept in a landslide at the same time as the House, which can happen to the House every two years. Compared to the House, the Senate was intended to be a more deliberative body, changing its composition on a longer timescale, and less responsive to short-term political opinion. Whether or not that works as intended is certainly debatable, but every time we change the Senate to work more like the House it raises the question of why we should bother having a bicameral legislature if both chambers are increasingly similar.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > would require an amendment to article 1, section 3 of the US constitution which explicitly requires that senators should serve staggered terms The Constitution doesn't, to my knowledge, require both Senators from a single state be in separate classes [1]. You'd still have a staggered Senate with consolidated elections. A third of the states would simply vote their Senators together every two years. [1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-3/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-3...

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> it's not perpetuated by how you count the vote. It's perpetuated by the economics of capturing single-member electorates One of the simplest tweaks to the American system might be consolidating e.g. Senate elections so that the states elect two Senators at one time. It's simpler than combining House districts in that it's merely a scheduling change.

twblalock 4y ago
It would require an amendment to article 1, section 3 of the US constitution which explicitly requires that senators should serve staggered terms, with 1/3 of the senate up for reelection every 2 years. This was done intentionally to make it difficult for the Senate membership to be swept in a landslide at the same time as the House, which can happen to the House every two years. Compared to the House, the Senate was intended to be a more deliberative body, changing its composition on a longer timescale, and less responsive to short-term political opinion. Whether or not that works as intended is certainly debatable, but every time we change the Senate to work more like the House it raises the question of why we should bother having a bicameral legislature if both chambers are increasingly similar.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > would require an amendment to article 1, section 3 of the US constitution which explicitly requires that senators should serve staggered terms The Constitution doesn't, to my knowledge, require both Senators from a single state be in separate classes [1]. You'd still have a staggered Senate with consolidated elections. A third of the states would simply vote their Senators together every two years. [1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-3/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-3...