Now, let me preface this by saying, I KNOW this is not realistic. There is no chance of overcoming the party system in any sort of foreseeable or predictalble future. So, I don’t want the debate to be over whether this is feasable. It isn’t.
Currently, we have a system in the US where our legislators are essentially beholden to their party; if they have any hope of reelection, they can’t piss the party off by going to far from the party platform. Demorcrats have to be opposed to the war in Iraq, and Republicans have to be in favor, which as a Democrat in favor of the war in Iraq annoys the hell out of me.
If it were possible to have the Senate consist not of members of two parties, but simply 100 individuals who have been elected by their states to represent them, would this work better? I’m assuming a perfect world where fundraising and such could be performed by the individual and his/her supporters, and that the formation of alliances (and the subsequent parties) is not inevitable. In other words there would be no I’ll scratch your back on issue A if you scratch mine on issue B. Everyone would vote, and speak according to how they really felt about every individual piece of legislation.
Is the only problem with this Republic that it is unrealistic?
I’m afraid it would become chaotic and impossible to manage. The current system is far from perfect, but imagine how it would be with 100 different candidates. I for one would never be able to sort them all out.
Some of the Founding Fathers thought parties or “factions” were a bad thing, but they were wrong. Democracy needs parties to articulate alternative policy agendas. Citizens need them as a way to get involved in the political process. No, the problem with our system is that we have only two parties – and in real life there are usually more than two sides to any issue. More importantly, there are more than two currents of political tradition in America. Our single-member-district, first-past-the-post system for electing legislatures forces very different political camps to huddle under a major party’s “big tent” if they want to have any influence at all, but it need not be that way. See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=269169
I think that there is a lot more room for descent in the various partys then you are depicting. Many very prominant Dems were/are in favor of the war (Hillary and Leiberman for example), many Repubs are prolife (Arnuld, Gulliani), etc. Some former party members (Zel Miller, Jim Jeffords) would appear to have far more in common with the opposition then with their own partys.
I’d love it, but I do realise that it’s unrealistic.
How do you imagine you (ie, anyone) could get around the reality of “back-scratching”? (the fund-raising aspects are do-able, but the caucusing…not so much)
If you can answer that with a viable idea, you’ve got something worth debating…
Indeed. The FF clearly envisioned that elections would be about electing the best man for the office. Had they thought parties were a good idea, they’d have created a parliamentary system.
That’s another good point – voters need parties because a candidate’s party label tells them what policies the candidate stands for; nobody but a professional journalist or pundit has the time to research the background and politics of every candidate. At least, that’s how it should work. As it stands, there’s very little party discipline, no procedure for deciding who is a “real” Democrat or Republican and who isn’t, and in a given election the Democrat could be more conservative than the Republican. Both parties complain about this – Zell Miller is a DINO (Democrat in Name Only) and Arnold Schwarzenegger is a RINO.
If we had a multiparty system, the parties would be smaller and more coherent in their politics, and party labels would really mean something reliable.
Nonsense. Neither the separation-of-powers system nor the parliamentary system is any friendlier than the other to a system of political parties. The difference between them is whether the executive is separately elected (SOP system) or is set up by, and serves at the pleasure of, the legislature (parliamentary system). Either system could work on a two-party, multiparty, or nonpartisan basis.
The system the Framers set up for electing Congress and the president was based, IIRC, on the state constitution of New York, although every state had roughly the same system at the time. Publius provided theoretical justification for the separation-of-powers system, but the truth is it was something they just settled on by default. During the colonial period the legislatures were elected (by an elite) and the royal governors were appointed by the crown; no “prime minister” of any colony was ever set up – that probably would have been viewed as a challenge to the governor’s authority. At any rate, no such institution ever evolved in the colonies. After independence, the states simply retained the office of governor but made it an elective one.
Now I’m even more confused. Aren’t you a proponent of the parliamentary system, or am I mis-remembering? Could you be clearer on what your goals are via the US system of govt.? I thought they were multi-party, but I don’t see how a non-parliamentary system satisfies that goal.
<on preview>I see you’ve provided more info. It would be easier to digest if you could put it into your own (hopefully simpler) words, for political feebs/neophytes such as myself. Thanks in advance, and sorry for requesting the extra work on your part…
My goals are electoral-system reforms which would make it easier for third parties to compete and, in the long run, cause our major parties to break up along their natural fault lines. Essentially, that means:
Instant-runoff voting: A system where, if there are more than two candidates running for a given office, you the voter, instead of picking just one, can rank-order them by preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, then the last-place finisher is removed from the running and the ballots are recounted; in the second round, all ballots cast naming said candidate as first choice are counted for the voter’s second choice. The process repeats until a majority winner emerges. This eliminates the “spoiler” problem faced by a potential supporter of, say, Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan in 2000, under our present system.
Ballot fusion or cross-endorsement: Allows a candidate to run as the nominee of more than one party. This allows third parties to gain influence on the major ones by granting or withholding their endorsement of the major-party nominees; also allows several small parties to pool their strength behind a shared candidate.
Proportional representation: A system (of which there are many forms, but most of the world’s democracies use one of them) by which seats in a multimember policymaking body such as Congress are allocated to the parties in proportion to their share of support in the electorate.
But none of this means switching to a parliamentary system. To the contrary, retaining the SOP system obviates one of the objections to a multiparty system. A parliamentary system only works if there is either a majority party or a stable coalition of parties, forming a majority, in the legislature. If you combine PR with a parliamentary system you risk instability and frequent changes of government, as in Israel and Italy. But if you combine PR with a SOP system, the governor or president is elected separately from the legislature; thus, no majority or coalition in the legislature is necessary to “form a government.”
For more details on this and related topics, see the following threads:
“If we had a multiparty system in America, which party would you support?”
“A multiparty system is better than a two-party system!”
“What do you think about proportional representation in the US House of Reps?”
“Instant-runoff voting: avoiding the third-party “spoiler” problem”
“Yet another electoral-system reform: “ballot fusion,” or “cross-endorsement””
Not necessarily. The Prime Minister of Israel is now elected separately from the Knesset elections, but to govern he still needs to have a coalition of support from the Knesset.
Plus, you can have PR in a stable parliamentary system. For example, one significant difference between the German Parliament and parliaments on the Westminster model is that in Germany, you have a motion of confidence, rather than non-confidence. That is, instead of moving that the Bundestag has no confidence in the current government, the opposition has to move that the Bundestag has confidence in member X to become Chancellor and lead the government.
The difference is that it’s always easy to get a group of opposition parties to agree that they want to pull down the government (which is how Hitler manipulated the Reichstag to gain power), but it’s not so easy to get them to agree on what party should replace the current government. So, unless the opposition really gets its act together and votes for a certain person to form the government, the current government stays in power. It’s a simple change, but it’s contributed to the stability of the German parliamentary system.
5 year. We need a balance of power for one side of the aisle to keep tabs on the other. The problem we are in now is that the Republicans are no longer being led by a Republican. We are being led by the religious right which has split the whole party into minor divisions. The original GOP was based on limited government, individual freedoms and personal responsibilities and now under Bush we are governed by the bible with the Constitution totally out of the picture.
Bush realized he would have a hell of a time being reelected so he started his faith based grants and called in his markers to have the ministers explain to their congregations that only Bush could protect America. What a bald-faced two-timing thing to do to America. He bought a group of Christians who had never voted before and knew nothing of the job description of the President.
The democrats seemed to quit, starting with Gore in 2000. My God, isn’t there someone better than Gore or Kerry to run against what may be the most dangerous man in America?
I will not have moral values legislated by anyone! But there is no second party because the Democrats got lazy and they will have to live with the Bush Administration until 2008. Instead of slamming the GOP, why didn’t they come up with a different agenda? that whole campaign drove me mad!
We need a strong Democratic party to keep the American Citizens aware of what is wrong in the Bush Administration. Instead they come up with a miserable set of bitches called Pelosi and Boxer. Where are the men of the party? All you can come up with is Teddy Kennedy! None of these people have a clear message of their party and are simply using cute smart insults in front of a microphone.
Where is the investigations on Bush’s knowledge of 911? Hell, we have books all over the place but not one Democrat had the balls to bring this information to the public. Until the GOP dumps the relilgious right from their agenda items, they will win by default because the Democrats are not doing their research!
I’ve been a Republican since 1954 but no way in hell would I vote for anyone who claims Bush is a great American leader. He will destroy America and the Democrats sit and mumble and whine. Maybe a new DNC leader will be able to make some waves. Dean seems like a likely choice.
Even if Bush was the finest leader we ever had, the question of how to unseat him would remain. It’s hard to beat an incumbent. You have to have a STRONG candidate. You have to attack the record of the incumbent. You have no record of your own in that office. You have to convince people that they voted for the wrong person last time (not easy). So, the incumbent has an advantage. The incumbent can defend, and make it work. The wannabe has to attack. This last election, the roles were reversed. An attacking incumbent vs a defending wannabe results in re-election.
One reform I would like to add to BrainGlutton’s list is creating a nonpartisan commision in charge of redistricting. The way the congressional distrcits are drawn now is egregious gerrymandering which protects incumbants and increases division and extremism. Congressional distrcits should be as geographically compact as possible and follow logical geographic boundaries (i.e., not splitting up the city of Austin into a bunch of little slivers to dilute the voter’s power).
Upon preview, I see that Brain’s point 3 addresses this indirectly. I do not support this proposal, but I think all of the rest of Brain’s propsed reforms are spot on.
Nonsense – the current Republican Party is merely a straightforward (though not logical ) continuation of the same “keel to the far right” attitudes that began with Ronald Reagan and continued with Newt Gingrich. You may bemoan (as do I) at how the religious factions have increased their influence within the party, but the implication that today’s GOP aren’t “real” Republicans is a misnomer, IMO.
What exactly was wrong with Gore or Kerry, other than a relative lack of silver-tongued charisma? It isn’t as if either man was lacking in intelligence or insight, but merely that some folks’ requirements for a POTUS ends at how good he can convey an “aw shucks” veneer.
The Democrats have to stop playing Republican Lite, IMO. But that’s a topic for another thread.
) continuation of the same “keel to the far right” attitudes that began with Ronald Reagan and continued with Newt Gingrich. You may bemoan (as do I) at how the religious factions have increased their influence within the party, but the implication that today’s GOP aren’t “real” Republicans is a misnomer, IMO.