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”The lesser evil” is the essence of any two-party system. Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system as. Abolish ”first past the post” and intro

• bell-cot 1y ago
  Disagree. If the society is essentially "broken", with little sense of everyone working together to build and secure a positive future, then two-party systems can degenerate into "but they're even worse!" races to the bottom. But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future. (Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly remain.)
  • Jolter 1y ago
    I would say that what you wrote in the first two paragraphs is all equally true of a system with proportional representation. But you’d avoid a lot of problems: - people in ”safe” constituencies being permanently represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no recourse except for moving - policies that constantly pander to voters in ”swing” constituencies - the two major parties constantly triangulating their policies around the center, rather than voters moving their votes to the party representing their opinions, which ensures that government is always centrist or near-centrist Etc — these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK systems, I know there are more. Plus, I think it’s good if a system is more robust against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue that in the UK, society hasn’t yet been broken, but looking at the US, don’t you think it’s better not to have that vulnerability?
  • dragonwriter 1y ago
    > But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future. No, there isn't, and comparative study of democracies has shown that there is a pretty direct relationship between effective degree of proportionality and a wide range of positive democratic outcome measures, as well as producing a richer national dialogue. A two-party system doesn't just break down into an us-v-them negative dialogue in bad conditions (it pretty much gets permanently stuck there because it works in a two-party system, and it is consistently easier than deepe discussion of issues), it also narrows the space of of potential solution sets that are even available for discussion to an approximation of a one-dimensional space. Multiparty proportional systems leader to a search space with greater dimensionality, as well as making “well, they are worse” politicking generally ineffective.
• deleted 1y ago
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• mrmlz 1y ago
  Sweden has more parties than two and it's the lesser evil here as well - in what world would a party perfectly align to every single thing you like?
  • Jolter 1y ago
    It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than one with 2 or 3. In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues: - Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism - Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism, again Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity, environmentalism, racism). I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative did. But I hope I’m about to be proven wrong on the first point.
    • pastage 1y ago
      The christianity party in Sweden could have been classified as "rascist" because that is how they voted many times, but they also had a humanist streak which took over in a lot of issues they engaged in. I find these changes in tides between parties interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific takes issues not parties.
      • Jolter 1y ago
        I agree regarding the Christian Democrats. But wouldn’t you agree that both NYD and SD were both founded on populist principles? Apart from racism, neither had any clear cut policies when they started, yet they both got pretty massive boosts from their populist streaks. I think the populist label on them is pretty well established by policy researchers. It’s in the first sentence on both parties’ Swedish Wikipedia pages.
    • mongol 1y ago
• account42 1y ago
  It's the essence of any representative democracy - you'd need as many parties as there are citizens for everyone to be able to vote for one that truly represents their views on all relevant topics.
  • Jolter 1y ago
    True, but please see my reply to the sibling comment. I suppose when choosing between electoral systems, the choice is indeed a matter of the lesser of two evils!
  • eru 1y ago
    That might be true in some theory, in practice you can find reasonably good alignment for most people at five or six viable parties.
    • account42 1y ago
      No, in practice I don't find that. In practice I find people actively voting against their interests because no matter who they vote fore the party is going to push for something they don't want.
      • eru 1y ago
        What countries (or states or counties or cities etc) or time periods do you have in mind here?