Cultural divisions along linguistic, religious and political fronts. That’s why the Cantons have so much autonomy. The Swiss Federal government has a much smaller much less high stakes political portfolio because the largest points of controversy, like naturalization, are handled by referendum at the Cantonal rather than the Federal level.
The Federal Council is also elected by the legislature, the Federal Assembly, with the precise composition negotiated through Parliamentary procedure. Every member of the Council has parties to answer to, more so than a directly elected individual with a mandate that can appeal directly to voters and have more popularity than the party backing them. As Swiss culture is far from monolithic, all Federal politics has to be conducted within a coalition. This is true in America as well, it’s just the coalitions are formed under the auspices of the political parties when they form their platforms, which is why it causes problems when you have a directly elected President that is more popular than the party that nominated him.
There’s a lot of lessons here for America, but we wouldn’t be able to transplant the Swiss system here without heavy modification. For example, almost the entirety of the referendum process described in the original article could have been a description of California’s ballot initiative process, with only minor differences in details and processes, and I would argue has been to the detriment of the State of California.
> ... and I would argue has been to the detriment of the State of California.
I am suspicious of all of California's policies, your opinions and the apparent link between direct democracy and material success (Switzerland and California both being synonymous with outrageous wealth).
If the US just tried direct democracy without heavy modification the complaints would be thunderously louder than they are now. No question. The oligarchs would be furious and the media would never shut up. What would actually happen on the ground is unclear.
> The oligarchs would be furious and the media would never shut up.
It’s not hard to find people who follow along party lines 90+% of the time, and who support policies basically because they’re told that’s what they should support. It’d be incredibly easy to game.
One thing that stands in the way of people shooting themselves in the foot with bizarre, harmful policy is the sometimes decent court system. And people regularly get pissed at court decisions even if they rule in favor of betterment for the people.
You know, I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or disagreeing with me. I’m very critical of the process in California, but I don’t know enough about Swiss culture to be critical of their usage of referendums so I avoid having opinions on it altogether. I suspect a National popular ballot initiative process in the US would be closer to California’s failures than to any of Switzerland’s successes though, though to be fair, I don’t know that. The rampant populism of the past 10 years doesn’t make me feel good about the idea of giving it a shot though.
Civic understanding is just much different; the 7 seats aren't actually allocated proportionally through a legal mechanism, the parliament just voluntarily chooses to keep the balance in the executive. If they were willing to violate that they could form a coalition in the parliment and actually take all 7 seats of the executive.
Firstly, a councillor is supported by a party. If you don't have the support of your party anymore, you are gone. Secondly, a federal councillar is "above" the party. You are representing first the federal council and not the party towards the public (i.e. a federal councillor represents the opinion of the federal council and not that one of his party).
It's basically just an agreement among the larger parties to share the government, which has been upheld since its inception. In German it is called 'Konkordanz'. I think that direct democracy leads to this agreement being upheld since there is a general fear of any party going into the opposition - direct democratic votes make an opposition overly powerful, in some ways more powerful than governmental powers.
In America the bipartisan system has corrupted our culture to the point that there really are only two normative agendas. In other countries, it’s still possible to have agendas that are sometimes in common, yet sometimes differ, without getting hit by either side’s cancel culture. In the US there is simply no common ground between the parties, so no reason not to join a team permanently.
> I find it hard to believe that politicians are just so honourable as to not team up to pass their agenda.
It seems to me that this turns out to be a chicken-egg, self-fulfilling prophecy: places where people do not trust government often elect corrupt(able) people—perhaps those types are the only ones available.
I think all stable systems are in some self reinforcing loop, otherwise they wouldn’t be stable. It just seems to me that Switzerland has, maybe by chance, found one with a more long term focus on improvement. I believe that shared government without term limits and direct democracy as a replacement for the opposition is key to this, and that it can and should be replicated elsewhere.
As I wrote, it's probably a power balance thing - parties in the Swiss system are actually more interested to 'bind' other parties into the government so they can't go out and do populist opposition politics as effectively. Think of it as a stable local optimum that seems to be better (by being more long term oriented) than the typical government/opposition party system.
Some times they team up, BUT if the citizens dont like what they do, both teamed up partys will loose in the next elections, so it's in the interest of every single one party to bind the voters they care for, sometimes they overlap and than they team up.
Politics is not a zero-sum game. When parties discuss with each other they have a chance of all furthering their agendas to some extent, and have all parties mostly support the compromise.
It's also the case that if a party campaigns strongly one subject and win votes with that, its ministers will tend to get the ministries that allow them to implement their ideas. So if you're tough on security you might get the police, if you're a fiscal conservative you get finances. It's more complicated than that, but the longer they stay on the bigger the chance they end up where they want.
I don't know about the Swiss system, but I do know a bit about coalitions.
I'll assume you're American and are not familiar with them.
Coalitions are much less stable than 2 party systems, which is great. Political positions don't ossify and get turned into sports and people rooting for their camp.
Plus representation is in my opinion better since the big guys frequently have to accommodate the little guys just to get the majority.
I'm actually Australian but previously lived in Switzerland and currently in the US.
Australia's political coalitions have been pretty stable despite instant run-off voting and not having any mention of political parties in the constitution.
Politicians just gravitated towards forming parties and coalescing those parties into two sides because it was effective to do so.
> Australia's political coalitions have been pretty stable despite instant run-off voting and not having any mention of political parties in the constitution.
Coalitions plural? I'll echo the earlier sibling comment that LNP is effectively one party - a coalition by name only now, a marriage of sometime convenience.
Other coalitions are rare, to my memory, and I suspect the distinction between an ephemeral coalition and actual representative democracy is a bit fuzzy, if the end goal is to obtain compromise and consensus between multiple representatives with disparate opinions.
As to the AU constitution - it was penned at a time when the dangers of party politics, let alone two-party politics, were not as obvious. Remember, our constitution doesn't mention a role of Prime Minister either.
I'd be very happy to move towards a Swiss style approach here, or even just start with a triumvirate.
Except there's only really one stable coalition in Australia, and that's the coalition between the Liberal Party and some state divisions of the National Party (the Nationals in SA and WA, for example, are not part of the Coalition). The Lib/Nat Coalition has lasted so long that they are treated by the public as if they're one party, and indeed in Queensland and the NT they've merged. It's not a good example of political coalitions in general.
In recent years, there have been Labor-Greens and Labor-Nationals coalitions at a state/territory level, and of course the Gillard minority government federally, but they aren't stable - they last for as long as Labor can't form a majority government.
(Instant runoff voting doesn't necessarily tend towards formation of multi-party systems, it merely removes the risk of three-cornered contests that comes with FPTP (which is still a significant improvement for the chances of minor parties, obviously). The electoral system factors that really determine how multipartisan a political system is are whether you use proportional representation vs majoritarian (see Duverger's Law), and within PR systems, district magnitude. Proportional representation is the reason that in Australia you regularly see minority/coalition governments in the ACT and Tasmania but much more rarely elsewhere, and we see plenty of minor parties in upper houses rather than lower houses.)
>* Plus representation is in my opinion better since the big guys frequently have to accommodate the little guys just to get the majority.*
This is a double edged sword. Saying “little guy” makes it sounds like it’s always a noble cause that doesn’t get enough attention. It can also be an openly racist party, or perhaps a wealthy special interest group that wants some special treatment.
The recent coalition government in Britain was much more stable than the following Conservative government. E.g Only one prime minister in 5 years and no major chaos. The two party system fails when both parties consistently fail to supply an effective leader, which has been the case since 2015 in the UK
The most recent election went from a hung parliament in coalition to delivering a huge majority to the new leader. The two party system had failed, but it fixed itself.
Also the UK isn't actually a two party system. There's the Conservatives and Labour, but also the SNP which is important, and the Lib Dems who used to be more important than they are now, and of course UKIP/Brexit Party who never won seats but proved highly effective at getting their desired political outcome by posing a credible threat as a third party.
In the sense that the country flip flops between two political ideologies at huge expense in changes to procedures and physical infrastructure rather than agreeing a course to steer and sticking to it with occasional course corrections at elections. In the sense that the influence of small minorities like UKIP happens in back rooms of the Conservative party and likewise with Momentum in the Labour Party. If we had a fair voting system, which reflected the true voting intentions of the whole electorate, rather than the voting intentions of a small number of people in swing constituencies, a centrist party can say ‘if you don’t like it start your own party’ and the debate then happens in public. If the extreme socialists or the nazis make inroads then a centrist party either becomes more socialist or nazi or you end up forming a coalition, but at least it’s transparent and it’s a lot more predictable. No-one cared about the EU until Cameron sprung the referendum on us, that referendum was entirely the result of back room shenanigans in an attempt to reduce the influence of UKIP.
First past the post means it is a de facto two party system. This is because people know that there is no point voting for a party that can’t win and in ~75% of constituencies there is a large enough majority that there is no point in voting at all unless you are supporting the incumbent. The only time that one of the main 2 parties was usurped by another was when the liberal party got us into a war that lead to decades of turmoil and killed vast numbers of people. I would rather that my vote could have some influence before things get that bad.
I can't agree that there's flip flopping going on. Corbyn would have been a flip-flop if elected but instead he was electorally destroyed.
When looking at actual leaders, the UK has had highly stable government for decades. It may not feel like it because of the manic focus of the press on a tiny number of issues at any one time but Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson are extremely comparable in general world and politics. If it weren't for the single divisive issue of the EU you'd struggle to tell their administrations apart. They're all middling elite/centrist types who aggressive optimise for voter preference via focus groups and polls, even outside of election time. They're all lacking in any clear vision for what to do or change, and thus delegate relentlessly to civil servants and assorted academics.
No-one cared about the EU until Cameron sprung the referendum on us, that referendum was entirely the result of back room shenanigans in an attempt to reduce the influence of UKIP
This statement is self-contradicting: the reason Cameron 'sprung' the referendum on the UK was exactly because UKIP was taking a lot of voters and was getting dangerously close to the threshold where it'd start denying the Tories seats. BTW it wasn't really sprung on people: in reality an EU referendum had been debated for years, in fact the Lib Dems had once been the primary party pushing for one. They called for an in/out referendum in 2007 for example, and the rise of UKIP showed that many people cared.
FPTP clearly can't mean always a two party system because otherwise the SNP would never have existed. Scotland would have remained Lab/Con forever.
It may appear to be very different to a coalition-oriented PR system on the surface, but it's not really in the end. You tend to get two parties because FPTP incentivises what are basically large coalitions posing as single parties. The Conservatives aren't really a single party, nor are Labour. That's why there are so many factions within them like the ERG on the right or Momentum and its offshoots on the left. They're uneasy coalitions of people who often don't agree on all that much, but who agree with each other more than the other side.
In PR systems these factions are much more prominent, but still have to assemble themselves into what are effectively make-shift political parties in order to form a functional government. It happens after the vote, rather than before it, which isn't actually better. It just means people have no idea what set of strange compromises they're actually going to get by casting a vote in any particular direction, because those compromises weren't made yet. It also tends to mean very long periods of suspended government whilst the different factions try to thrash out a coalition. This is why Belgium managed to go nearly two years without a functioning government.
The UK didn't have a "terrible time" with the coalition government from the point of view of having a stable government (whether or not you agree with the policies enacted).
In fact, the single party governments (plural, since during the 5 year fixed-term parliament following the coalition there were three prime ministers and two general elections) since have been _far less_ stable.
A couple of the things, why this just doesn't make much sense to do:
- Except on specific topics, the different parties don't actually agree on much. E.g. during the last cycle the center-right to right parties had the majority in parliament, but they barely got anything trough in four years
- Besides having the role of head of state being shared among 7 people, the federal government also has much less power compared to other countries. Most domestic things happen at a canton (state) and municipal level.
- Basically everything that the council decides, or parliament for that matter, can and often is challenged via popular referendums.
If you don't establish the coalitions trough the entire system they will be pretty much useless. Also because of direct democracy, I think political discourse more often centers around the issues being voted on, rather than the parties and coalitions.
That is what in my opinion is the strength of the Swiss political system. It is very hard for someone, be that a person or party to obtain enough power to really cause long lasting damage. The other side of this coin of course is, that any change will happen extremely slowly. Which can be both good and bad
that's something I never understood about US politics, what prevented Sanders from creating its own party for the US election and not run for the democratic primaries?
The primary attribute of American politics that encourages a two party system is what’s known as “first past the post” elections.
America’s two main parties have changed over the years (remember the Whigs?), so the existence of a two-party system cannot be attributed purely to control exerted by the current two parties.
Yes - it’s the fact that the race for the presidency is a winner-takes-all game. When Clinton lost, she didn’t get a diminished, minority, but still proportional say in the running of the government - she was completely out and Trump got everything.
The US system wasn’t engineered with the possibility of coalitions and compromise governments in mind (at least not in the Executive).
> Clinton spent $1.2B in 2016 and Trump spent $680B. These are formidable sums for non-establishment parties.
I was going to write a comment about how shocked I was that Trump outspending Clinton by a factor of 500 didn't see any media coverage, but it looks like that's supposed to be 680M.
> In the 2017 general election, 75 parties and 18 campaign groups reported spending more than £41.6m between them. The Conservatives spent most at £18.6m. It fielded 638 candidates, winning in 317 constituencies. Labour came in at £11m and the Liberal Democrats at £6.8m.
The BBC figures are a million times larger than yours if you meant it as a total, and a hundred times smaller than yours if you meant it as per-capita.
Or instead of being purposely obtuse, realizing the same exact mistake (leaving off an M) happened here as well.
BBC, same article:
> Political parties' spend is also capped at £30,000 for each constituency that it contests in a general election. So if a party stood a candidate in each of the 650 UK constituencies, its maximum spend would total £19.5m.
Mathematically it makes sense for a two-party system to emerge, after the smaller parties are weeded out after some years of running unsuccessfully. Most people will accept compromise of their ideals to "fight some greater evil".
Maybe tone doesn't come across well in written communication, but dismissing this as "clearly nonsense" without bothering to engage with the merit of the claim or, seemingly, even read the link seems disrespectful, to say the least.
I wonder if you read the linked Wikipedia entry, which includes:
> In political science, Duverger's law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tendtofavor a two-party system.... In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle.
(Emphasis, of course, added.)
The article goes on to note counterexamples, to drive home the point that this is not, as you say, like a law of physics.
Perhaps a more constructive phrasing you could have tried would be something like,
"As noted in the linked article, there are many counterexamples, so while as you say first-past-the-post may encourage two-party systems, it doesn't preclude more parties from existing."
This would have been a more polite phrasing, one that shows you read and comprehended both my comment and the article I linked to, and one that would not exhibit the logical fallacies your original comment does (to argue that the existence of counterexamples precludes any causal relationship between first-past-the-post and two-party systems).
Aside from the UK (which does have two major parties) and Canada (which has only had one of two parties in power for almost all of its history), what other examples are you thinking of? There are very few countries that still use FPTP, the vast majority use some kind of preferential or proportional representation system.
> Aside from the UK (which does have two major parties)
In the UK:
A small but national party was in government a few elections ago. They had multiple ministers and could influence the policy narrative.
In the previous government, the DUP, a tiny regional party had a big influence on major policies that mattered to them.
The SNP, a regional party, has wiped away the national parties and now has many seats in the national parliament, and was recently part of frustrating the main party from doing anything.
This is all possible, even with FPTP.
Imagine if a party like the Greens, or the SNP, or the LD, but in the US, controlled a few seats in the Senate or the House of Representatives - think how much power they'd become king-making between the two parties. They'd be able to insist on a couple of their key policies for the deal and be able to enact real changes.
"There are also cases where the principle appears to have an effect, but weakly...In the United Kingdom, the SDP–Liberal Alliance, and later Liberal Democrats, between the February 1974 and 2015 elections obtained 1–10% of seats forming a third party, albeit with significantly fewer seats.[16] This share of seats is despite gathering around a fifth of votes consistently over the same time period.
In the UK there is no president and thus no unifying election to force party mergers and regional two-party systems are formed. This is because Duverger's law says that the number of viable parties is one plus the number of seats in a constituency."
> Other countries with first-past-the-post have many parties
Which ones do you have in mind? The one's I'm thinking of have two main parties, and then strictly regional parties which displace them entirely in their regions.
> So FPTP does not cause two-parties - that's clearly nonsense.
The UK has two major parties. The fact that the LibDems were in a coalition government once due to a hung parliament (and the last hung parliament was in 1974) isn't really evidence that the UK has more than two major parties. A major party actually has a chance to have a plurality. I also hasten to point out that the LibDems currently have 11 seats (the SNP has four times as many).
Many European countries with non-FPTP systems have coalition governments all the time and there really are several viable major parties.
To be fair, preferential voting isn't a panacea (and arguably should be paired with multiple-representative electorates). Here in Australia we have instant run-off voting and there are still two major parties with even less crossbenchers than the UK parliament -- though our Senate does have a fair few independent and third-party candidates, likely because Senate seats aren't winner-takes-all (like electorate seats are for the House of Representatives). I think voter education is also partially to blame -- many Australians seem to not be aware of how preferential voting works.
He easily could but would end up taking votes from the Democrats, thus helping his opponent in the process. The American system doesn’t work well with third-party candidates and mostly incentivizes against them; see the 1992 election for a recent example.
Ok, but in Canada a new upstart Conservative party (Reform) took away Votes from the existing Conservative Party (PC) and over several elections eventually got a majority.
So sure, Bernie might take away votes from the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean support will eventually shift to him.
Much more money and resources at play in the U.S., and Bernie is also fairly old and doesn't really have a 'party' or a clear successor. He/his followers wouldn't gain much from starting a new party.
1. The media would ignore him if he did. He wouldn't get to take part in any of the debates, and most people would have no idea he was even running.
2. It might not even be possible for him to get on the ballot in most states as a third-party candidate. Election laws make it nearly impossible for third parties to get on the ballot in many states. In the last 20 years, the Green Party has never managed to get on the ballot in more than 45 states. In 2004, they only managed to get on the ballot in half the states. The Democratic party fights tooth and nail to keep them off the ballot (just like the Republican party fights to keep the Libertarians off the ballot). Because almost all the local and state election officials and judges are Democrats and Republicans, the deck is stacked against third parties.
Finally, Sanders would be viewed as a spoiler, robbing votes from the Democratic party. Most people would feel like they would be throwing their votes away.
Third parties tend to emerge when one party has been in too long and has a large percentage of the vote. New party tries to take 30% of the 70% and 10% of the 30%
He's a Democrat senator and got Biden to essentially support most of his platform. Running as an independent or 3rd party would be political suicide and wouldn't help his agenda.
But aside from that most countries have a single process to get on the ballot country-wide. In US you'd have to navigate this process for each state.
I'm sure Bernie could pull that off. But it is definitely the reason you see many fewer randoms making a dent.
Also if you consider the way primaries work in both parties it's way more transparent and approachable than most other places. Many major parties around the world don't have a primary process at all. And even when they do it's usually limited to insiders. So if you want to change things you're almost forced to create a party by default.
If you couldn't make it in a primary of a party that's closer to your beliefs than the general population - how can you expect to make it on a national level?
Presumably the proportional representation part of what he said empowers a team which has even 14% of the vote and so being independent is way more powerful than glomming together (where you’re likely to lose supporters who don’t like the guy you decided to get in bed with and you’re not likely to gain any new supporters).
