So I was talking to someone at work who wished he could vote for a third party candidate because he doesn’t like either of the major party candidates. Tough, I said — the tyranny of basic arithmetic in a first past the gate system (i.e., guy with the most votes wins) pretty much guarantees a two party system (i.e., you need 50%+1 votes to guarantee election, thus the system will naturally settle down to two parties over time as smaller parties coalesce to guarantee themselves that 50%+1 votes).
So the next guy in the room says, “what we need is a parliamentary system.” I then pointed out that parliamentary systems that used a first past the gate system to elect MP’s tends to converge upon two parties also, with the exception that parliamentary systems also tend to spawn regional parties like the Bloc Quebecois in Canada or the myriad of regional parties in India. The net result is that the regional parties end up having an outsized influence on politics because nobody can have a majority without them, so they can get whatever they want by simply threatening to bolt the ruling coalition and caucus with the other major party. The minority tail wagging the dog isn’t any better than what we already have.
The next guy proposed a proportional voting system — if the Greens got 5% of the vote, for example, they’d get 5% of the members of Parliament. I pointed out that Israel has such a system — and it’s not working out so well for them. The problem is that you have to form a coalition with extremist wackos on either the left or the right to have a majority, which gets you the same problem as the parliamentary system with regional parties where the minority tail wags the dog by threatening to bolt the coalition if they don’t get their way — but worse, because the extremists always want something stupid like banning abortions or banning personal automobiles in exchange for their support. In this case, the extremist wackos on the right have basically made it impossible for Israeli Prime Munster Benjamin Nuttyahoo to get a budget passed, and so he’s calling another election hoping his party gets enough additional seats (and the even nuttier parties lose enough seats) that he doesn’t need the far right wingnuts to get a budget passed.
The final solution proffered at the table was an “instant runoff” preferential system such as Australia uses, where you rank the candidates according to who you prefer. But let’s look at Australia. In Australia, the Liberal (conservative) Party and Labor (socialist) Party have dominated politics in Australia since 1910 — every single PM in that time period has been a member of one of those two parties. In the 2010 elections, 11% of voters voted for the Greens, but the Greens only got 1 lonely representative in their House of Representatives (their version of the UK’s House of Commons), out of 150 total members. That 1 lonely Greenie turned out to be very important due to caucusing with Labor, which gave Labor the 1 vote advantage over Liberal needed to form a government, but the reality is that the results of instant runoff elections basically look the same as in a first past the gate election — the two biggest parties always end up in the runoff, and the members of the smaller parties then decide as their #2 preference which of the two biggest parties they want to run things. All that instant runoff elections give you over the current system is the joy of having voted for the Green candidate as #1 above the Democratic candidate at #2 — the Democratic candidate still ends up in the instant runoff, your #2 vote is counted for him, and he still wins (assuming you’re in a mostly-Democratic district). Mathematically speaking, there is no (zero) difference in the outcome, just a reduction in the number of votes held since the runoff is held on the same day as the election.
So there you have it. When it comes to elections, we seem to have a choice of either systems that give minority parties too much power to steer the body politic, or systems that give minority parties too little power. The math just doesn’t appear to support the creation of a system where minority parties have an amount of power equal to their representation amongst the general public. The tyranny of 50%+1 — the most fundamental number in a democratic system — applies regardless.
- Badtux the Numbers System
How about amending Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution by eliminating the electors and thus the actual 50 separate elections we have now?
Make it a truly national election where the vote total would reflect the will of “we the people” without the artificial and anti-popular level of state-level electors. This might even make it more difficult for the oligarchs to buy elections with misleading commercials in a few so-called key states where it is easier to sway voters with focus group targeted ads.
That would certainly be a good thing, Pa Joe. But that was irrelevant to the point that I was trying to make, which is that the only conspiracy enforcing a two-party system in the United States is mathematics.
- Badtux the Math Penguin
You have obviously devoted some study to various countries’ electoral systems. Allow me to expand a bit from what I’ve noticed.
As you know, Canada was dominated by two major political parties, one mildly leftish and the other increasingly rightist. And as you’ve pointed out, when leftish people split their votes between the established leftish party (the Liberals) and the upstart, even-Lefter New Democratic Party, that allowed Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to stay in power, even though a majority of Canadians voted for his opponents.
In the last parliamentary elections, the Liberals got creamed so bad for being wishy-washy centrist sellouts like the American Democratic Party that they’re now in third place in Parliament, behind the NDP. They might wind up dissolving as an organization, a la the Whigs. In British Columbia, the provincial assembly is now controlled by the Liberals, but they’re so unpopular that they might be mostly eliminated here.
Not that they’re going to be replaced by conservatives, though. The Cons have only ONE elected representative in the provincial parliament, and even he is a turncoat who jumped ship from the Libs after he had already been elected as a Lib. And at the recent Con Party convention, he was rejected when he had a leadership challenge to the encrusted good ol’ boy Con leadership, so now he’s jumped ship again to be an independent.
Which leads me to my point, after all this scene-setting. The NDP is likely to take control of this province (again, they were in charge in the early 2000s) in the next election, which the present premier is delaying because she’s gonna get her azz kicked. So there IS a chance for third parties to rise up. I takes a while, though. And they are likely to come from REGIONAL parties.
Canada, which is not as duopoly-oriented in its mindset as the U.S., does this a lot. In Alberta, the Texas of Canada, there was a recent provincial election where a new party named “Wild Rose” (that is Alberta’s provincial flower) almost unseated the Cons. Unfortunately, Wild Rose is to the right of the oil-and-gas-backed Cons, so that sucks. There have been ethnic-backed political parties like the Parti Quebecois, of course, and regionally backed ones like those in the Maritime provinces. It’s easier to get third-party stuff going at a local level and expand it nationwide.
Somewhat the same in Australia. You’ve probably read up on the politics there enough to know about the National Party, which was like the party of farmers and rednecks. They used to be a player, but have been subsumed by the Libs. Thanks to proportional representation, which only works in the Aussie Senate, there are some independent senators who aren’t just Greenies. One guy from South Australia, a colourful fellow named Nick Xenophon, keeps getting elected because his main platform is opposing “pokies,” the automated poker machines that so many people are addicted to (but the industry has a lot of clout because it pays taxes and bribes politicians.)
(continued)
You also did not get into the situation in non-English countries like Italy and Germany, where regional third parties like the Northern League in Italia have risen up and changed things. But I realize you’re writing a blog post, not a political science book, so you can’t get into every ramification.
Anyway, I say that third parties can have a chance if people are NOT SO FVCKING STUPID! Unfortunately, a critical mass of voters does not do any critical thinking, and they’re persuaded by whatever propaganda they’ve hear repeated most often on TV. And the propaganda will continue because the media oligopoly will keep getting bribed with advertising money so that it won’t raise questions about the failings of the entire system. Between lazy, stupid voters and a corrupt media/political complex, WASF.
I wonder whether humans have an innate bias towards duopoly bred into our genes. We are two sexes. We live in a world that has day and night. There is life, and death. So many things in our world, perhaps the nature of the universe itself, are binary. Perhaps a two-party, one-going-forward, one-wanting-to-stay-the-same system is inevitable because that condition mirrors reality.
The next guy proposed a proportional voting system — if the Greens got 5% of the vote, for example, they’d get 5% of the members of Parliament. I pointed out that Israel has such a system — and it’s not working out so well for them.
On the other hand, it works well enough for Germany and New Zealand.
http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esy/esy_nz
Bucko, the duology you notice is binary math. You either win election or you don’t. The bill either becomes a law, or it doesn’t. There is no Heisenberg’s Cat of elections or laws where something can be both elected and not elected, a law and not a law. It either is, or it isn’t. This boolean nature of mathematics is fundamental to our understanding of mathematics, it was proven many years ago that all mathematics in the end boils down to boolean true/false values and logical operations applied to those values. I.e., it appears to be the universe you have an argument with, not human nature
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BTW, I was quite aware of the proportional nature of representation in the Australian Senate, but because the Senate doesn’t make laws in Australia (like the House of Lords in Britain, they can only veto laws), it was irrelevant to my point.
Phoenician, it appears that New Zealand has a mixed system of sorts where you vote for both your local representative and for a party. One thing I’ll point out is that Americans, like Israelis, are not Kiwis. Israel and the U.S. are ethnically and culturally diverse states where various factions have completely contradictory views of what the nation should look like and where extremism and refusal to compromise is viewed as a virtue rather than as a vice by sufficient of the population to make the Kiwi sort of consensus government pretty much impossible. Meanwhile both New Zealand and Germany are largely ethnically and culturally homogenous (the Maori and the Turks nonwithstanding), which makes it far easier to arrive at a consensus without having to give extremists power the way that the Republicans in the U.S. and the Likud in Israel have had to give extremists power.