3 ms·

Parties exist to solve a collective action problem: getting your face and message out to enough people to win elections means that in the absence of political p

Parties exist to solve a collective action problem: getting your face and message out to enough people to win elections means that in the absence of political parties, the odds that a non-oligarch will achieve high office becomes even smaller than it is right now. Plebians very rarely held high office in ancient Rome. Doing away with political parties is advantageous to the status quo, because, in the absence of parties pooling resources to promote an individual, gaining sufficient power to change the status quo requires first leveraging the status quo to acquire sufficient resources. There is also the issue that exercising the kind of power that goes with these high offices requires a sort of moral ambivalence that I think precludes "good" people pursuing, let alone holding, these offices.

jfengel 3y ago
Arguments for ending political parties always seem to come down to "the government should do more of what I want it to do". They solve the collective action problem by making sure I get more of what I want, somehow without anybody else getting less of what they want. Your problem is never your political party. It's the political part of the people who oppose you. They don't cease to exist just because you've divided them into more political parties. No change to the voting system will alter that without making you a dictator. I think people imagine that if you stir the pot around enough suddenly they'll find a huge pool of people who agree with them. That's just not the case. The political system is intended to do the will of most people, without trampling the rights of minorities. That's an inherent conflict, and nothing you do will ever get around that. It would sure be nice if people at least adhered to some semblance of reality when forming their preferences, but no voting system can fix that. The whole point of voting is to avoid having to determine who actually knows what, and count on the wisdom of crowds. If the crowds have deliberately made themselves unwise, we're in trouble, and it won't be fixed by the voting mechanism.

jfengel 3y ago

Arguments for ending political parties always seem to come down to "the government should do more of what I want it to do". They solve the collective action problem by making sure I get more of what I want, somehow without anybody else getting less of what they want. Your problem is never your political party. It's the political part of the people who oppose you. They don't cease to exist just because you've divided them into more political parties. No change to the voting system will alter that without making you a dictator. I think people imagine that if you stir the pot around enough suddenly they'll find a huge pool of people who agree with them. That's just not the case. The political system is intended to do the will of most people, without trampling the rights of minorities. That's an inherent conflict, and nothing you do will ever get around that. It would sure be nice if people at least adhered to some semblance of reality when forming their preferences, but no voting system can fix that. The whole point of voting is to avoid having to determine who actually knows what, and count on the wisdom of crowds. If the crowds have deliberately made themselves unwise, we're in trouble, and it won't be fixed by the voting mechanism.