

Eliminating Political Parties (Scott Adams) - jokermatt999
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/eliminating_political_parties/

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GFischer
People will still be irrational.

It would simply move the irrationality to idol-worship, identifying with one
candidate.

I'm starting to believe that elections are more random than one would think,
and odd things decide elections (see for example the Spanish elections where a
politician's stance after a terrorist attack by blaming it on ETA completely
shifted the election - if the attack had happened another day or said
politician had blamed it on Al Quaeda instead he'd have won)

I recall some interesting studies that said that random selection of leaders
worked better than deliberate selection:

"Evidence That Random Selection of Leaders Can Enhance Group Performance"

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WYH-46NXKGF-3&_user=10&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F1998&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1527445910&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=1cbdb361856b43b50464b59afe84ead6&searchtype=a)

we cannot rationally assess each candidate, so we turn to substitutes. If it
isn't the political party, something else will have to do (his smile,
demeanor, clothing, whatever).

I've seen elected officials whom I expected to be bad perform better than
expected, and people whom I had big expectations turn out to be busts.

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JimmyL
> Imagine a democratic political system in which no one is allowed to be a
> member of a political party. How would things be different?

In many municipalities, this is how it works - all elections are non-partisan,
and setting up non-party slates is similarly prohibited.

What happens? Councilors are still widely known as being part of the left-
wing/right-wing/Conservative/Liberal/Labour factions of council, and form as-
hoc groups once elected accordingly. Low-information voters - the people who
would vote straight-ticket one way or the other in a partisan race - tend to
pick a single issue and vote for whichever candidate identifies with that
particular one.

One of the benefits (and I accept that this being a benefit may be
controversial) of a party system is that it makes it easier to participate in
the process for low- and medium-information voters. If you're super-involved,
I salute you - and you're more than welcome to do a detailed analysis of the
candidates and their positions, and pick whichever one appeals most to you. If
you're not that involved, you can pick the party that broadly represents your
values, and be confident that the local guy you'd end up voting for backs
those positions (for the most part) and will help move them forwards. It means
that someone who can't/won't spend an hour an evening reading up on the horse-
race has a way to contribute to the electoral process at a level of confidence
higher than "well, this guy is listed first on the ballot."

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jbail
Without political parties people would still self identify as "conservative"
or "liberal". It's human nature. These groups/labels form people's view of
self.

What we really want to eliminate is the divisive nature of political discourse
that pits "us against them." That's what makes government inefficient.
Destroying political parties wouldn't change that, I'm afraid.

~~~
jamesteow
Plus maybe a different voting system. The ability to only vote for one
candidate gives little incentive to vote for a third parties.

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vasi
In the spirit of evidence-based reasoning, why don't we look at what happens
where political parties are absent or weak? This includes the new Afghanistan
parliament, Colombia before 2005, Liberia, the Philippines, the Thai senate,
and numerous municipal councils. Some of these forbid parties entirely, some
discourage them by using electoral systems such as the single non-transferable
vote, others simply have a political culture that frowns upon them. A few of
the resulting characteristics may indeed be positive: debate is often
vigorous, attention is paid to local concerns, and populist movements can
rapidly reach power (though some may see that last one as a negative!)
Generally, however, there are a number of problems:

What are elections like? First of all, proportional representation is
difficult-to-impossible without parties, which eliminates one potentially
fruitful type of political reform. Second, without party organizations to
provide guidance as to a candidate's political stance, the "personal vote"
predominates. This means a candidate needs extremely strong name recognition
and personal financial resources: elected members are much more likely to be
former entertainment celebrities, business magnates, leaders of ethnic or
religious groups, local crime-lords or warlords, or of course incumbents.
Another way to get personal recognition is to take credit for local spending,
so candidates' campaigns tend to focus on the pork they'll bring if elected.

What about after the elections? Without a strong parliamentary whip, elected
members can vote however they want, which sounds great—but it means that every
single vote becomes an exercise in pulling teeth. Each member has an interest
in acting recalcitrant in order to receive compensation in exchange for their
vote. Governing coalitions end up ideologically incoherent, based mostly on
which members are most in need of money for local projects. Since there's no
ideological basis for government, changes of prime minister/president can
happen either extremely often or extremely rarely, depending mostly on whether
or not there are enough goodies to be passed around.

All this talk of weakening parties may show a lack of knowledge about the rest
of the world. If you look around, you'll see that other nations, and most
scholars, consider American political parties to be quite weak. Most countries
with healthier political systems have parties that are perhaps smaller than
the Democrats and Republicans, but are much stronger in the sense of having
control over their elected members and candidates.

I'd argue that in the USA, we should be strengthening parties. Allow party
whips to demand discipline from members, expelling those who will not vote
with the rest of the party. Once a party wins Congress, they'll have to
actually implement their agenda—no more making promises that are impractical
or that they know they can't keep, and then blaming recalcitrant party members
for preventing the passage of laws. Now, each party contains multiple opposing
factions that proclaim incompatible visions. Instead, parties could decide
internally what policies to support, and then the dissidents could just deal
with it. Or dissidents could go start their own party, and you'd finally have
some real diversity of views. Corporate influence could even fall. After all,
it's a lot harder to bribe (I mean, uh, "contribute to the campaign of") an
entire party to change their votes than to bribe one or two members.

One of the great recent successes of electoral design was in fact a party-
strengthening exercise. In the unrecognized pseudo-country of Somaliland,
political organization was nearly absent, and the nascent leaders worried that
the new democratic system would become corrupt, based on local warlords and
ethnic leaders. So first they held municipal elections across the country, and
only the three parties with the highest nationwide total vote in these
elections would be allowed to run in the subsequent national elections. Voilà!
A new, fragile country developed three ideological, non-ethnic political
parties; and while there are still serious problems there, the political
system is pretty good for that region of the world.

The one issue I haven't really addressed is "what about the Interwebs!?" True,
most of my information is from third world countries, where the Internet is
not a serious factor. Non-partisan municipal governments in the West also have
the problems I listed though, and have not typically been revolutionized by
the Internet. But who knows, perhaps Naheed Nenshi's election in Calgary is
the vanguard of a wave of social-network-inspired non-partisan renewal, I
guess we'll see!

------
powrtoch
While we're at it, can we eliminate campaigning?

Let's just have a nice web-app that will show you all the candidates for
whatever position, and factually list their previous political actions (votes
on various issues, etc), with perhaps a very small section wherein they can
list their stances on more current issues. Campaign contributions cease to be
a problem because there's no campaign to contribute to, and candidates are
free to support the wishes of their actual constituents.

Not saying it will ever happen, or that it would be as simple as I've
presented it, but it's at least an idea.

~~~
tocomment
That's really brilliant. I wish that were possible.

~~~
hga
No problem!

All you have to do is to amend the Constitution to remove this pesky bit:

" _Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech_ "

(Note that this has been incorporated on the states through the 14th Amendment
so you can't do an end run through them.)

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devmonk
But we really need to go one step further and only vote on the issues and then
hold candidates accountable for how well they addressed those issues.
Otherwise, it remains as a popularity contest for liars.

~~~
dkarl
That's harder than it sounds. I started paying attention a little too late for
the last election. With just a day to prepare, I couldn't figure out much
about my local candidates or the issues. I only had their own bland and
possibly false statements to go on, plus local newspaper endorsements. On
almost all of the races I ended up throwing up my hands and voting Democrat
because the Republicans have done more gay-bashing, Muslim-bashing, race-
baiting, and sucking up to stupidity than the Democrats have. Plus the
Democrats have been less aggressive about bashing all non-car-based transit.
Those are are the only issues I can wrap my brain around and really care
about. Pretty lame, huh?

I'm considering subscribing to my local paper just to get a daily reminder to
pay attention to what's happening locally. Any other suggestions?

~~~
tocomment
I had the same exact problem. And the lower level the position e.g., school
board, the harder it was to find any position information. Some of the
candidates didn't even show up in Google searches.

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mcknz
We have evolved into a two-party system because it fills a need: convenience.
When most don't bother to vote, and even fewer vote with a functioning
knowledge of the candidates, there is no need for a third party. This makes
things easy: red versus blue, good versus evil. Like two football teams.

There is a enough distinction (arguably) between the two parties that one may
confidently align themselves with one or the other. With extremely rare
exception I vote party over candidate, not so much because I like the party,
but because I dislike that party less.

The only way the current party system can be broken is if the system itself
breaks -- it's going to take systemic political and financial failure to see
any difference.

~~~
beagle3
> We have evolved into a two-party system because it fills a need:
> convenience.

No. Americans have evolved into a two party system because it suits those two
parties, and they were strong enough to make that happen very early on.

Did you notice that the distinction between parties (gay marriage, abortion,
government size) doesn't ever get addressed even though control has been
switching between parties regularly? (And if it does, it's in the court and
not in congress, e.g. Roe vs. Wade?)

That's because both puppets, sorry, parties are actually catering to a ruling
elite, rather than the voters. And it's good for those parties to have issues
that let voters identify with them (to the point of feeling unable to vote for
the other guy). If these things were actually addressed, they'd have to deal
with the real things like economics or policy. Which is kind of scary for
them.

I agree about the only possibility of breaking is from the inside, though.

~~~
cma
>Did you notice that the distinction between parties (gay marriage, abortion,
government size) doesn't ever get addressed even though control has been
switching between parties regularly?

Healthcare?

~~~
beagle3
I agree, healthcare has actually been sort-of addressed. (And by sort of, I
mean that while it is a move in the right direction, it is possibly the worst
in terms of cost, and is a freebie to the healthcare industry; it does nothing
to actually solve any underlying problem).

But are you aware that these healthcare plans have been debated since the
'30s? For all practical purposes, 80 years to solve a problem in a half-assed
way is in line with my original claim.

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hsmyers
Part of what Mr. Adams proposes is already happening. The fact that both
parties are entering a period of 'splinter' is an indication that even those
who identify with a party are not happy with the party in question. As this
gets both stronger and more wide spread we should see more and more 'sub-
splinter' groups form. This in turn will affect how the parent party is able
to perform--- or more importantly not perform. Consider that the democratic
party is still suffering from the 'rainbow' movement of some years back, this
sort of behavior will certainly increase the entertainment value of modern
politics. The new slogan could be 'More theater, less action!'...

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tocomment
One idea would be to remove party information from the voting ballots. It
would be interesting to see what effect that had.

Obviously the party information on the ballot is designed to give uninformed
voters at least some information about whom to vote for. Instead I propose
each candidate submits a 10 word or less description of themselves to be shown
under their name in the ballot. E.g.,

Joe Clown (More military, public praying, better schools)

I guess you wouldn't be allowed to mention a political party in your submitted
description or it would defeat the purpose.

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lusis
There's a theory that I can't recall the name of right now that says political
leanings natural coalesce around 2 "parties" regardless of how many there are
much less none at all. It makes sense really. Voting on something is a binary
action so logically groups coalesce around for or against.

