This is important so it deserves many more comments: it's not a two party system, it's a first past the post system. So long as we continue to use an inferior, outdated voting system, having two dominant parties is inevitable. Talking about overthrowing the two party system is pointless and misguided; it's a red herring.
It's troublesome both at the grand strategic level with FPTP and Duvuger's Law and such systematic issues, but also at the local tactical level. Ballot access laws are written by the two major parties and often designed in a way to thwart third party ambitions, probably fear of competition that could drive the spoiler effect. This extends to everything from higher signature requirements to get on ballots all the way to requiring an impossibly high percentage of the vote to qualify for FEC primary matching funds, let alone being invited to the presidential debates.
I was going to add a comment like "No Kidding!" or "Duh!" but if you click through to the article, it's a dude asking for a system which can represent more nuance in policy arguments. I completely agree and think it's worth the 90 seconds it takes to read. My opinion is a better title for this article would be "We Need Something Better Than The Two Party System."
It'd be lovely to see a government experiment with an issue based information system someday. Agree to move beyond open debate, & compel representatives to explicitly structure out issues, positions, & arguments for topics they discuss.
Just being able to capture what the different elements of policy debate really are would let so much more nuance be retained. And when going back to assess the impacts of a policy, there'd be such a clearer record of argumentation to assess: what did happen, what didn't happen, who was right here?
The "magic quadrant" chart is what I was alluding to in my top post, although none of those references is the paper which first brought it to my attention.
> There's also the matter that there's an entire quadrant of the political map that appears to be unsupported by either party.
Are you referring to "the underrepresented cohort in American politics is the opposite of libertarians: people with right-wing social views who support big government on the economy," in your second link?
I think you are, but I think there's also a chance you're referring to libertarians, which are also poorly served by the parties, because, as the article points out, voters with such views "are functionally nonexistent."
Hey, that’s my quadrant. This article is good but I’d go further than just trying to add nuance to arbitrarily binary stances. The distinction between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” among normal people that I interact with is certainly going to be different in aggregate, but there’s a very blurry frontier and you can easily find “pro-lifers” who are more tolerant of abortion than their “pro-choice” neighbors.
There’s the American Solidarity Party, which is sort of a niche take on the concept (since they’re based on Catholic Social Teaching, they’re liberal on matters of immigration and race), but curiously they’re like the only attempt at the quadrant after decades of the Libertarian Party being the biggest third party, alongside the Greens and countless further left, further right, centrist, single issue, and smaller libertarianish third parties.
The problem is political parties at all. People should vote for good people that they believe will do the best possible job.
Parties instead confuse and obfuscate the issue as the parties abandon responsibility in favor of scoring points. I mean England, Germany and France all have more than 2 parties yet the people there have similar complaints and arguments as the people in the US.
The problem is parties themselves. Good, wise and just men and women should be chosen to govern, not people who tell us what we want to hear.
George Washington pointed this out in his farewell address and it’s almost prophetic to read in 2023, skip to the last paragraph if you’re in a hurry:
“I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
…
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
…
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”
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.
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.
That's obvious. That's like saying cancer or hurricanes are the problem.
The question is what causes them (FPTP, transaction costs favors coordination and consolidation, power tends to increase itself) and how causes can be changed.
> Good, wise and just men and women should be chosen to govern, not people who tell us what we want to hear.
2016 elected US President who cannot reasonably be considered part of a party. He was a "host unto himself". He flipped-flopped affiliation over decades, and steamrolled over the Republican party international power structures to win the voters in primary and general.
Except that without parties, its really hard to tell who stands for what. In the local elections where I live, there aren't parties. Voting requires researching each candidate carefully to determine what they stand for. Now, I'm nerdy enough to do that research. But the general population isn't.
The same way that review sites are good because they help people buy products without doing work. Or Hacker News is good is because it finds news stories that interest us without us doing the work.
Interestingly, so did the founders -- even the ones that started the first political parties. So it seems that even though political parties are a disease, it's one that's very hard to avoid.
While I'm not a big fan of all of them, Germany saw the rise of three different new parties in the last 40 years (Green, Linke, AFD). They are all relevant political players and came out of the existing parties not representing sentiment felt by substantial portions of the electorate. I hate the AFD and Linke, but gotta say this is awesome and how the system should work.
I'm not sure what would happen without parties entirely. I expect you'd see some natural alliances between politicians arise and you are back to parties. There is a somewhat related learning from German history. During the Weimar republic Germany had many very small parties represented in there parliament. This led to it becoming very hard to make progress which led to high churn of who was in power and allowed weird candidates to rise and take a shot at it. The criticism was that three parliament is just debating and debating and nothing ever happens. Weimar cycled through an unreasonable amount of politicians and eventually ended up with Hitler. This is why Germany now requires a minimum of 5% of votes for a party before they get any seats. If you'd somehow manage to keep parties from emerging, I'd expect a worse form of this problem to happen.
But good, wise, and just men and women cannot effectively win races in our current political system. Instead, power-hungry, hyper-wealthy sociopaths willing to form unconditional alliances with powerful groups and sacrifice any moral principles to 'win' debates, bury controversy, and gain advertising dollars will instead get selected at every first-past-the-post race above the hyper-local.
When you write:
> People should vote for good people that they believe will do the best possible job.
The most important part of that sentence is the "that they believe" part. The actual goodness, wisdom, and justice of the people who form the set of all eligible candidates has almost nothing to do with the distributed beliefs of those eligible to vote; the process of disseminating information about the former to the latter is EXTREMELY lossy. And power-hungry, hyper-wealthy sociopaths can successfully exploit that.
I'm honestly not convinced that good and wise men or women can effectively rule.
I'm not sure how to get around the necessity to occasionally make decisions that will cause suffering and death, either through violence or neglect. Occasionally, the most well-intended of decisions will cause death or suffering by accident. And the reality of the situation is that we need leaders who while trying to minimize the harm of their decisions, keeps making clear decisions even after their decisions cause enormous harm. Ordering a missile strike that kills 100 people, even if they are evil to the last, requires a certain kind of callousness, a certain amount of seeing the bad people as bad first, and people last. I think a lot of folks in the military square that spiritual cost as their obligation and find strength in being the one to make that sacrifice. To win elections, you have to want to be that kind of person from the jump.
I'd argue that someone unwilling to choose the lesser of two evils is either not good, not wise, or not good and not wise. Sure, if you believe that your goodness, wisdom, and competence are less than that of your likely successor, even after you recruit advisors who can help you be more competent, surrender that mantle... but that's an unlikely level of humility to find in someone who needs to win a popularity contest.
I agree that the lack of nuance and effective choice sucks in politics, but the root of the issue is that inevitably each individual vote is all-or-nothing for that politician's or party's agenda.
In our everyday life we have plenty of options for most basic purchases, and can pick-and-choose whatever combination of goods/services we want (though there are of course market failures, but let's not get sidetracked).
Imagine if you could only pick either prepackaged life choices A or prepackaged life choices B? It would be a dystopian hell (and only marginally improved by additional packages).
Yet that's what we've got when it comes to politics.
There's a big difference that your life choices mostly only affect you. Governments specifically are focused on issues that affect lots of people. If everyone only votes for a candidate whose views perfectly match their own they'd only have one candidate they can vote on: themselves. At the end of the day the government has to make a decision that hopefully reflects as close to consensus as we can get. You could get there with direct democracy, or representative democracy where the representatives reflect proportions of their views in the public. I'm not sure we can get there when our representative has to simultaneously reflect the views of everyone in a localized region. Across the country there may be enough vegans for instance to have their own representative but in any particular district they will never have enough numbers to have their concerns addressed.
> I'm not sure we can get there when our representative has to simultaneously reflect the views of everyone in a localized region.
They are meant to represent the general sentiment of their communities, not every person’s individual concerns. Most communities aren't starkly divided on major issues, and when they are it’s usually a sign that you’re not actually dealing with a single community in any meaningful sense of the word, but two or more that have been thrown together politically. You can even fairly reliably map out which neighborhoods go which way on a given issue and it’s usually not difficult to parse out deeper cultural differences at play.
> Across the country there may be enough vegans for instance to have their own representative but in any particular district they will never have enough numbers to have their concerns addressed.
I’m not sure if you’re saying this is good or bad. They may be related by virtue of being vegan, but their communities are not vegan. You aren’t owed a representative because you’re part of a fringe subculture that doesn’t even have the political will to actually coalesce into a real community.
Having grown up in a country with a vibrant multi party system, I can tell you it's no panacea. Two things end up happening: parties that are so fragmented you don't know what each stands for anymore. Or single issue parties like the pirate party, green party, gay party etc that offer you no indication or consistency with issues outside their core.
2 parties might not be awesome but maybe 3 or 4 parties would be ideal.
> Having grown up in a country with a vibrant multi party system, I can tell you it's no panacea.
In Sweden, the multiple parties self-organized into 2 blocks, so for a while it was effectively like a 2-party system. But occasionally some small parties would switch blocks, disrupting the balance for a while.
If the Gallup poll indicating that 49% of people identify as independent is anything to go off of, this is more urgent of a matter than it seems. We're actually hitting an inflection point where voters can deny the presidency to either party, but if no third party is available, it would default to a vote by the house from the top 3 candidates by votes, aka a contingent election[0]. This is less than ideal. The majority party of the House would likely just insert their candidate, which would only further disenfranchise voters (who would have voiced their majority desire to not have that candidate.)
Provided, people would have to stop falling for the "lesser of two evils" rhetoric, a deliberate ploy to stop the formation of a third party.
However, should ideals fracture too much, too many new parties form, and you end up in a contingent election again, as was the case in 1824.
A multiparty system, while it may represent more diverse interests, invariably leads to weak majorities that ends up hamstringing any changes that government wants to make because all it takes is for someone with 2% of the vote to pull out of the coalition to bring the government down.
Only if (1) the proportionality is fine-grained enough to have a 2% party, and (2) the governing coalition is narrow enough to only have a <2% margin
And “bringing the government down” often just means a new coalition is formed with a couple cabinet seats changing hands; multiparty proportional systems have less cabinet change as a proportion of the cabinet than duopoly systems, though they have more frequent partial cabinet changes. The dramatic langauge may be appropriate with FPTP in a parliamentary system, but is less so in a multiparty proportional parliamentary system.
And, of course, since TFA addresses particularly the democrat-republican-independent dynamic in the USA, a proportional multiparty electoral system is actually a whole separate change from a parliamentary system, and the “a 2% coalition partner defecting can bring down the government” concern only applies to parliamentary systems, even if you adopt multiparty PR in US legislative elections (even for the elections of Presidential electors) it does not apply to the US without the separate and larger change of adopting parliamentary government. Multiparty PR (using, say, STV within states) for the House and even approximately (via the safe harbor statutes) as a norm for Presidential electors is viable by statutory change, a parliamentary system would take Constitutiional change.
Good question. There’s certainly some consensus on the status quo.
But, then we have things like health care, abortion, and firearm regulation. Americans largely want better/cheaper access to the first two and more of the third. Yet, we can’t get any of them.
You have to be careful with these reads on sentiment, because they're based on public opinion polling, which is incredibly imprecise. You can get majority support in a policy opinion poll for almost anything, but when we have actual tests of those policies at the ballot box, support crumbles --- the best example for that is single-payer health care.
I happen to agree with you about abortion, and thing the opposition party is and will continue to be punished for passing unpopular restrictions on reproductive health care. But one thing I don't think anybody can reasonably say is that GOP voters were bamboozled into voting for curtailment of reproductive rights; abortion and public schools are the two fundamental defining differences between the parties!
Which efforts are those? The last congress passed historic amounts of funding for infrastructure and technology investment. One of the primary powers of congress is that of the purse. What's the significant policy thing congress should clearly have done, because the polity so obviously supports it and is being thwarted by structural and elite factors? I bet it's not as clear as it seems.
If you're talking about the US, then I believe it's actually a strong minority that generally hamstrings the government and occasionally rules using non-democratic methods as needed.
> all it takes is for someone with 2% of the vote to pull out of the coalition to bring the government down
If you have a proportional voting system with 5% electoral threshold, they you don't have any 2% parties in the parliament, as the smallest possible is 5%.
Most countries with proportional systems have a threshold that requires something like 5% of the vote to earn seats. So nobody with 2% of the vote is going to be part of the coalition. Furthermore, pulling out of coalition, without a very good reason, is an excellent way to ensure that nobody wants you as a coalition partner in the future.
Yes, some countries with PR have government stability issues. So does the US, see government shutdowns, accusation of obstructionism, etc. That's just an inevitable consequence of humans disagreeing about policy.
A lot of politicians have challenged the two-party system over the years. Some examples: Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Ventura, Gary Johnson, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and now Cornel West. One thing you might notice about this list is that they all have crowds of highly vocal opponents. In fact, practically everyone strongly opposes at least one of these individuals.
One sort of catch-22 about the opposition to the two-party system is that the people who are unwilling to hold their noses and support a major party despite its flaws are usually also not willing to hold their noses and support an imperfect movement against the duopoly. In fact, those who are still active among the aforementioned don't cooperate with each other, either.
> People are increasingly identifying as “independent” because the two parties don’t have enough nuance.
Seems incoherent. The purpose of parties is to put someone in power. Arguing about positions or policies or whatever else some 101 class tells you about makes no sense.
The thing that really exists is an elective office which confers power on the holder. Aggregations of different people over different time with unformed beliefs are meaningless.
Confusing, "i hate repubs and dems" with "i hate the 2 party system" is a mistake.
> The purpose of parties is to put someone in power.
But in a 2 party system, the odds are very good that neither of the parties adequately represents you. That's the problem with it -- no nuance. As a result, every election is about choosing which candidate will do the least damage rather than which candidate will do the most good.
I dont think those statements are connected at all. I dont know what adequate representation is but I'll assume something like a similarity measure over preferences. The claim of no nuance is applied to parties. But parties aren't voted for candidates are.
So sure, parties aggregate the preferences of their members and the distribution of members has some variance. So parties are bad because voters are different? And the solution is, what, smaller parties with less variance? The best political party has 1 member?
I can't differentiate between the utility of gaining a want or avoiding a harm, so Im not sure what the point is when you introduce the damage vs good comparison. Seems like pretending "zero" has meaning. When really only differences in utility have meaning.
I think that most people vote based on party affiliation rather than the candidates. At least, that's what I see.
> So parties are bad because voters are different?
No, parties are bad because they reduce the variety of candidates. In the US, you effectively only have a choice between two candidates for most elections. The Democrat and the Republican. If you find them both objectionable, then tough luck.
This isn't by accident, this is the result of the two parties working together to shut out any other "competitors".
> The best political party has 1 member?
I would say so, yes, since that's the same as no parties whatsoever.
But, realistically, that's not ever going to happen.
> Im not sure what the point is when you introduce the damage vs good comparison.
The point is that it's common that you have to vote for someone you object to, because if you don't then someone you object to even more is more likely to win.
It would be healthier if it were possible to have candidates that you're actively in favor of instead. But if you don't philosophically align with the Dems or Reps, that's not an option. So every election becomes a depressing expression of futility.
> Arguing about positions or policies or whatever else some 101 class tells you about makes no sense.
I’m not sure I follow. The elective office isn’t magically conferred to a person, it’s voted on. And arguing about positions and policies is exactly how we decide who is worthy of this office.
> Aggregations of different people over different time with unformed beliefs are meaningless.
Really though? Isn’t that how society has progressed?
I want to understand this comment but all I’m hearing is “why care about policies and people in power, someone’s going to be in office and most voters are clueless anyway”.
> Confusing, "i hate repubs and dems" with "i hate the 2 party system" is a mistake.
Eh, depends on the era. It’s always been a 2-party system and for the present day it’s effectively R+D. Maybe there will be a resurgence of parties like the Know Nothings but for the average person today, it’s the same thing.
> every issue and potential solution is nuanced. By extension, this means that every person outside of the most extremist is nuanced as well.
I think the article has it backwards. It asserts complicated people with uncorrelated beliefs (random vectors) and how impossible the task of self-categorization becomes (i'm so unique that im far from each parties centroid, which of course neglects those who are close to the centroid). This is a fake task. Candidates self-sort into parties to gain nominations by making promises to party insiders and voters choose among candidates during elections. The apparatus of party isn't relevant to the choice in the ballot box. Neither is the alignment of the candidate with the voter. You make a choice A or B. It's only the difference in A vs B not the alignment with A or with B. Alignment is correlated with the difference, sure, but its not the reason to choose A over B.
That's what I meant by the aggregations comment. Parties cover/split voters and the centroid drifts over time. That drift is irrelevant to the task of candidate choice.
If it was just about installing someone, anyone at all into power we would have maintained a monarchy. Instead, ideally, political parties and their representatives are meant to, well, represent the political views of their supporters.
For instance, my beliefs are not well represented or even respected in this “two” party system, so I don’t vote. A lot of people are disillusioned with the current power struggle in the US, finding it an ever-increasing joke. Until we get politicians that actually represent and more importantly respect the people, then that won’t change.
So no, saying “I hate the repubs and dems” synonymously with “I hate the ‘two’ party system” is not a mistake. Because they are synonymous.
Cogent analysis - part of the problem is that the two parties have each become more ideologically rigid, so that every issue seems to come down to a binary choice between the intransigent D and R positions.
What's needed is a new politics that is open to compromise and to finding common ground between Ds and Rs so that we can actually get something done on issues like immigration and gun control.
Having two completely polar opposite group-thoughts is how we retain nuance (largely through compromise). If you want gray, you mix black and white; you don't go around throwing red, blue, green, etc. into the mix. Multi-party is not the solution.
Having spent enough time around politics and politicians to realize you need as many different words for misrepresenting the truth as the eskimos need for snow there's a lot to unpack in that statement and the article kind of feels around the elephant (maybe you can discern a rough outline) but I don't think it gets to the heart of the two most common meanings of "two party". Yeah I agree that the political system in America favors two political parties, but why is that and what is a political party anyway?
The first item I want to point out is that externally both extant parties (D and R) work hard to force the voter's exercise of choice into a first around the post model: if there are for instance two legislative reps they both run in separate elections. However internally both parties operate delegate systems much the same, and you vote for representatives as a bag (one election): if there are two slots then you cast two votes and the top two vote recipients become the delegates. This is emphatically not ranked-choice voting; I make no comment on the fitness of RCV except that some of the edge cases may be surprising.
The second observation has to do with the nature of differences. Assuming that we can agree that the extreme right favors unfettered capitalism and the extreme left favors unfettered social mores (forgive me): in what calculus is unfettered capitalism the negation of social freedoms and vice versa? It gets a lot more interesting if you rotate the (horizontal) line representing that "continuum" 45 degrees and put it in a box and then label the other two corners "strict economic regulation" and "conservative social mores". Now ask yourself: where do people really lie in those quadrants? (I didn't come up with this, I read an article about it a few years ago and I've come to a greater appreciation for it over time.)
The third observation has to do with an antipattern for consensus building. In this antipattern, a large and diverse body of constituents is divided into smaller groups and told to come up with let's say 5 issues and then they come together and somehow figure out the top "priorities" for the entire body to work on together. The antipattern manifests in that second step due to a flaw in the first one. In most if not all of the smaller groups there will be one tool, the architecture astronaut, who says "save the whales!": the fact that we don't live by the ocean is irrelevant, but in an act of appeasement this one always makes it onto the short list. So at phase 2 according to the antipattern the top fives from all of the small groups are added together aaand "save the whales" ends up at the top of the list. The real politicians who are leading this exercise know exactly what's going on, and this is why real legislative bodies have caucuses: that one group was concerned about sidewalks, another crosswalks, and another about signage is dropped on the floor rather than being resolved in conference to a single concern about pedestrian / vehicle interactions.
I agree that we now have a problem, particularly with the republican party going haywire, but let's not pretend that our two party system hasn't been extremely beneficial to us up until now. Historically for game theoretic reasons the parties have been pretty moderate: if one went off the deep end, centrists would flock to the other party. Having two large, stable, and moderate parties over the years has kept our government from rocking back and forth in extremism and paralysis. Witness Italy, with many dynamically changing parties and which can't keep a stable government longer than about 9 months on average. This stability is one of (several) factors which has made the US a safe haven for finance, etc. and which has benefitted us greatly on the world stage over the last century.
So the issue is how to give other parties a seat at the table, and an opportunity to be heard and responded to, without destroying the very stability that has helped us for so long.
