Do Political Parties Hold Established Values That Separate Them?

Great Debates
21

MsWas:

You people are keeping me at work on a Friday night posting. Why don’t we just talk over a few beers one of these days?

Why Do Parties Exist (in a nutshell)
By Maeglin

  1. Duverger’s Law says so. Read this.

  2. There are high entry costs to candidacy. Parties help to solve the coordination and distribution problems. Where do you get the money to run for election? How do you make sure that important elections get the most money? Parties.

  3. Because there are just too many damned preferences. Elections serve as one way we aggregate the nation’s preferences. Imagine you want to make margaritas. You dump everything into a blender. If you fill it with too much ice and other stuff, you will make a mess. So you put some of the contents into the blender at a time and dump the results into a bowl. Parties are the pre-blending. They are a heuristic to make voter choice easier.

  4. Branding.

I will try to think of some more and add them later.

22

There are a little over 200 million of voting age and around 120 million voted in 2004. So 60% which is a majority but not much more than half.

If there is not consistency in these core values, how are they really at the core of what a party is, does, or gabs on about?

It may be, yes. Politicians claim to run on values and parties seek identification with these values but I do not see them operating at the core of politics. Not if they are unstable and subject to the winds of change.

What I’ve been saying is that while individuals, citizens and politicians alike are and ought to be able to change their views, values &c., there isn’t any point in the institution of two opposing parties if these parties themselves don’t provide a stable establishment… both for candidates to slot themselves into and for voters to choose up at election time.

You say we have exactly the politicians we deserve because you believe the system is correct because it is as we have set it up to be. I started this thread to find out if there was anything these parties truly represented or if, to return to my metaphor, its just that the Eagles’ Endzone is on the eastern side of the stadium for this half of the game.

23

I’d be more than happy to.

I’ll read up on this.

I am not opposed to parties, I am opposed to two parties getting preferential treatment at the exclusion of the rest. I certainly know the value of organization.

They make it harder for me.

Coca Cola doesn’t change it’s formula every 4 years, while maintaining it’s branding.

Erek

24

I’ll do the reading, but I didn’t ask why parties exist, I asked why we’ve got shitty ones that seem completely compromised.

Two responses.

i - Free and equal broadcast time for candidates because that broadcast bandwidth was doled out free to broadcasters with the notion that it’d have a public service burden.
ii - More emphasis on local, community and state elections.

As this system is self-perpetuating and now forces everybody to slurp down $12.00 watered-down margaritas, there’s noplace in the political scene for somebody who wants a mojito. Additionally, it’s not like you can even tell me the Republicans are Lime and the Democrats are Mango. My whole gripe the whole time is we simply don’t end up knowing what we’re getting and are less likely to enjoy the results.

Politics is certainly going into a hangover phase lately.

And the whole time I’ve been saying that these parties don’t actually do that job well. You can refer to what Erek says about Coca Cola and it’s formula. But I’d add that the Republicans keep power because they are really good at branding the Democrats as well. And you know very well what advantages they have sitting in the incumbent-seat.

25

Coke doesn’t, but most other consumer products do. They are new and improved. They have new model years. There are new players on the Yankees (curse their shriveled, blackened hearts).

If people are involved, changes are required. Even companies like Coke where the formulas stay the same, change their marketing all the time.

If parties couldn’t change, think of all the planks that would still be on the books. Suffrage, slavery, prohibition, income tax–all of these political issues have been decided and aren’t really up for discussion any longer. Why would a party want to reference them? Is it important which party pushed for abandoning the the gold standard and which signed the Emancipation Proclamation?

26

I’m sitting around tonight. Mizzywuzzy has a birfday party though.

27

Change is fine, it’s when the parties become so nebulous that they are pointless that I find issue with.

Erek

28

Your point seems to be that a core value defines a party. People will choose to join a party based on many things, but the core values will remain constant. If we get to a point where not enough people agree with the core values of a certain party, then that party will go out of existance, or at least become a marginal player.

In the US two party system, there’s no real point in sticking to an unpopular core value. Once you lose that position as one of the two parties, you cease to be important and will quickly die off. Politics is the art of the possible, no party will willingly drive itself out of the game.

Politcal parties are what their current members agree on, nothing more, nothing less. To assign them lofty eternal values is, IMO, an oversimplification of the political process.

29

Remember how bewildered people were when Coke changed their formula and then the whole New Coke fiasco? I’m surprised more people aren’t more bewildered about their political parties.

Those are fairly topical issues-based positions. If you want to take those same issues [suffrage, slavery, prohibition, income tax] and re-cast them as values you’d get these:

1 -Voter Rights [there’s even a thread today about whether voting should be mandatory]
2 -Labor [you cannot say this one isn’t still hot]
3 -Personal rights [vis a vis consumption in this case – there’s a drug war on certain substances, others are unregulated, much is debated even now on this issue. NYC has a smoking ban.]
4 -Taxation

Now the last one, #4 is the closest any party comes to having a core value. The Republicans supposedly close ranks on this issue in their effort to shrink the government that FDR and LBJ bloated for us. Yet now the Bush gov’t is keeping pace with Johnson’s and I’m not certain how we’ll pay for it. Likely, a Democrat government will be forced to tax the shit out of us so that George P. Bush can take over in 2012 or 2016.

30

My point is that the parties do not define core values. [and perhaps they should]

I don’t think values like “small government” or “a social safety net for all” or “emphasis on state and local governmental power” or “strong executive power” or “fair labor” or “openness in government and society” will ever go out of style. But they are compromised by the system we’ve got and it’s not getting done.

The political parties are what have held on to power as elections got progressively more expensive and less interesting. The members agree on them because the choices are limited and they follow the money anyway.

I did not assign the parties lofty eternal values. I happen to think that if people actually had them when they ran for office and brought them into office, this country would be far closer to the ideal it claims to be than it actually is.

31

Both parties ultimately support the idea of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. The problem is, how those goals are pursued is the heart of the difference in our system.
Conservatives tend to believe that by favoring the group first, the individuals in that group will benefit. So, conservatives favor business (if a business suceeds they pay higher salaries to their employees), church (a strong church will provide for the poor in the community), etc.
Liberals on the other hand tend to believe that by favoring the individuals the group will beneift. So, liberals favor groups such as the ACLU or any number of “minority” groups who feel drowned out by the group as a whole.
Since we are, in fact, individuals living within a group we benefit when these two ideologies are in balance and we suffer when one side gains too much power.
The problem in our parties today is that we try to force all of our beliefs onto a party which gives them a certain moral authority. In my time lurking on this board I have seen an almost religious ferver from both sides stating that if you don’t agree lock step with their beliefs you are labeled as evil and immoral. But that’s a debate for another day.

32

I do not think both parties support the idea of life or that we need a political party to do that. Officials on both sides advocate to varying degrees the death penalty, war and other policies that are deleterious to life.

I do not see liberty being promoted. Both sides just have laundry-lists of things they want to ban to enforce a certain way of life. And by your reasoning, both their approaches to liberty come off as lopsided, which is basically what I am saying too.

Both political parties make me unhappy and I cannot think of a candidate who actually ran by saying “I’d like everybody to join me and be happy.”

Hehe had to.

Meanwhile, lots of folks tend to conflate Republican:Democrat :: Conservative:Liberal :: Right:Left. I do not see this as a reasonable equivalence.

33

Let’s back up. Let me know if I am mischaracterizing your views, Noctolator.

You believe each party should have a “core value” in order to identify it from its adversary and so that you, as an elector, know what you are buying when you pull the lever.

I contend that this is neither possible nor desirable. In a nutshell, your two questions are at the heart of political inquiry. I have a book that I think you might get something out of, but I doubt you will enjoy it.

The first problem, that parties should have some “stable” and differentiating core values is explained fairly neatly by one of the many flavors of median voter theory. To make a long story short, if voter preferences have a few formal characteristics (single-peakedness, among others) and can be arranged in a number line, the preferences of the median voter dictate.

Suppose 100 voters under simple majority electoral rules. Suppose two parties. Suppose one issue: the tax rate. Suppose your platform is equivalent to the tax rate you would set when you are president, and say this is a number between 1 and 10, with three decimal places.

Everyone has preferences over what tax rate he wants to be charged. Now, sort everyone by preference over tax rate from 1 to 10.

One party’s platform favors high taxes, the other party’s platform favors low taxes.

The utility of each voter is determined by the difference between his policy preference before the election and the actual tax rate implemented after the election. If I like tax rate 3 and that is the actual rate, I get buckets of utility. If I like rate 1 and we are stuck with rate 10, I am not so happy.

So the candidates are running for election. Both want to capture 51 votes. What tax rate do they choose?

They choose the tax rate of the median voter on the number line. By choosing a platform to maximize this voter’s utility, the parties are guaranteed the votes of everyone else within their class.

This is an excruciatingly simple version of the model. The actual outcome is that both parties converge to the same platform, no one votes (not even the median voter), and the election is determined by a coin toss. But the logic is crystal clear.

Parties will attempt to maximize the utility of the median voter. The reason republican and democrat platforms are not identical is largely because people are not necessarily single issue voters, so they have to deal with multi-issue space. This is a very difficult problem.

So the answer to your question is any party that tries to proceed consistently from a core of values rather than outcomes that maximizes the preferences of the median voter is doomed to irrelevance. The Libertarian Party, which likes to call itself “the party of principle” is case in point. Its platforms do proceed from relatively unchanging axioms.

It also wins few votes.

This is not an “unstable” system. In fact, it is remarkably stable and has been in a comfortable equilibrium for a long time.

The second problem is that voters never know what they are getting into when they pull the lever. This has nothing to do with core values but with a gigantic issue called “the credible commitment problem”.

Parties choose platforms to maximize vote share. Individual politicians seek office to maximize personal utility. Politicians make promises to voters that they are not externally compelled to keep. So the question becomes, how much can a politician promise and actually deliver to voters while still maximizing his personal utility? How much can he renege on his promises without getting thrown out of office?

A politician wants to deliver the bare minimum, and the electorate wants to elect someone whose preferences are concordant with theirs. But all preferences are private information, so everyone is constantly guessing.

The literature on this is enormous. Suffice to say, core values are not the answer, as they are promises as empty as anything else. There are few good answers. Most of them hinge on electoral rules and, even more so, institutions.

34

The differences between Democrats and Republicans:

Unlike the Greens, Libertarians, Socialists and Progressives, the two main parties have (through decades or centuries of entrenchment) figured out how to raise huge amounts of money. Democrats raise it from labor and disenfranchised special interests, Republicans raise it from management and “sin” special interests (tobacco, alcohol, small arms manufacturers). Republicans have fewer–but richer–supporters in this regard. Democrats have more (but poorer) active supporters. The numbers would logically favor them, but the average voter doesn’t (directly or knowingly) contribute money or activist effort to either party.

Republicans tend to own too many guns; Democrats tend to own too many cats. (I cribbed this from PJ O’Rourke.)

Democrats want to save the Spotted Owls and their habitat; Republicans want to offer Spotted Owls tax breaks.

Until around 1930, the Democratic party was clearly the more conservative party and the Republicans were the more liberal. Both were founded with conflicting aims: The first Democrats were southern slave owners who got misty-eyed about the French Revolution. The first Republicans were abolitionists backed by northern business interests. If one party had favored slave-owning tories and the other had favored poor abolitionist Jacobins, we’d have a clearer difference between them. But America’s two-party systems (Dems and GOP haven’t always been the only choices; Whigs and Federalists have had their day in the sun) always tended to have some ideological overlap and have clustered more around the personalities of the leaders than around their ideas.

35

So this is not desirable because of maximizing utility and the credible commitment problem. I see what you’re saying with this.

Why do we vote on candidates who want to do the bare minimum instead of just voting on Tax=5 or Tax=3.527 or whatever and subsequently vote on whoever has the best plan to do just that? Given how many people vote for candidates for the wrong reasons, what would be a good way to actually put voter utility first and decrease the credible commitment problem?

36

First, there are lots of good reasons why the founding fathers created a republic instead of a direct democracy. I am sure you are already familiar with the philosophical reasons. Direct democracy has many extremely unpleasant formal properties, especially when we allow for strategic voting.

Before you try to meditate for too long on ideal voting rules, wrap your mind around Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. This is one of the most important and truly dismal results in all of economics and political science.

I have not reviewed the proof linked in the article, so I do not know whether or not it contains errors.

The bottom line is, there can be no aggregation rule without unfairness. Someone’s preferences, no matter what the rule, always dictate.

I dislike your premise that voters vote for candidates for the “wrong” reasons. There are no such thing as wrong reasons. People vote for precisely the candidate they want. If a person likes a candidate’s face or has met him personally, he votes to maximize his “ego rent.” To a certain voter, this may be more important than the candidate’s expected foreign policy choices.

This is not wrong. It simply is what it is. Asking why people form preferences like this is fodder for philosophy and psychology. The fact that you believe that domestic policy is more important that, say, a candidate’s height or demeanor is simply your preference. It carries no more weight than anyone else’s preference.

Solving the commitment problem is one of the goals of many formal political theorists, so suffice to say, cut and dried it is not. The usual answer is that institutions can help to ameliorate this problem by providing checks on the behavior of elected officials. A free press, for example, can reveal when an official is maximizing his personal utility a little too much. So when an official makes a utility extraction decision, he has to take into account the probability that he will be caught and suffer massive disutility. By increasing this probability, you raise the stakes on graft.

Like I said, the literature on this is very large. If you want to do a little reading, I can make a few suggestions.

BTW, as I am sure you know, I am not a professional political economist. I just play one on the SDMB.

37

Heh, you know me well enough to know I’d probably be happiest if we did the Plato thing. :wink: Hell, I wouldn’t mind too much if Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush stepped forward and declared Themselves Polemarch and Hegemon, respectively.

Yeah, I get all of this stuff instinctually. I am not against the inherent “unfairness” because of that aspect. Don’t get me wrong. I am not against how preferences are dictated or against anything you’ve told me [or reiterated from our past conversations] in voter preference theory. My bag is with certain of the political feedback loops specific to the United States of today which I find to be unhealthy.

I believe that not only are the two parties bloated and excessive, they are a racket and it is hurting us. They do their ought to make sure the buy-in for politics can only be met by their club, [while the “free press” reviles “free air time” as a violation of their free speech, despite it being commercial speech over govt.-granted airwaves] and they perpetuate each other as the only viable and legitimate political choices. I think their legitimacy is seriously tarnished and the endless back and forth ethics scandals, digging of and flinging of mud is getting worse. The signal to noise ration is becoming more of a problem and we are overdue for one of the healthy revolutions Jefferson called for.

This is true and it is wrong even if all the voters in America continue to vote for their candidates in a sheer preponderence. My view is that there is enough damage to the system now that what we are initially offered as candidates to vote on by our system are inutile choices, compared to what we could get.

Since they do not really differ on core values [in the same way two opposing sports teams don’t] you have elections that, when played out through our particular electoral rules and system are in fact quite inconclusive. You get a candidate MVP. It’s an aesthetic choice.

At which point my argument is that we are not choosing between Michelangelo and Rembrandt, we’re choosing between Mitchell Goldberg and an art student.

By wrong reasons, I really meant this:

I think I used the word “wrong” in a fashion that even you might accept.

I believe we live in a political world where those checks are breaking down, rapidly and dangerously. This is true particularly in the area of the free press. That’s what I see as the biggest [and most preventable] problem. I can lend you Tom Fenton’s Bad News when I return The Spread of Nuclear Weapons which I finished last night. [And I’ll even tell you why I still think Sagan wins]

I’ll read anything you can lend me absent stuff that is topheavy with formal equations. I don’t know how to read that and I don’t think I’ve the time, the will or the discipline to self-train in that right now.

38

I disagree. Parties have powerful incentives to support third party spoiler candidates. The republican party helped put Nader on the ballot in several states. The democratic party, as I recall, treated the Reform Party with kid gloves. There are strong incentives for the mainstream to support third parties, and equally strong incentives for these third parties to implode. Did you read about Duverger’s Law yet?

I think free air time is a suboptimal idea, too, and not on free speech grounds.

The two major parties perpetuate each other as the only viable political choices largely because they are. Populist, libertarian, green, and reactionary elements have systematically failed to put a real dent in republican/democratic ownership of the political process. When people make their funding and voting decisions, the vast majority does not believe that their marginal contribution in either money or votes will swing the election in the third party’s favor.

This belief perpetuates itself because at the local, state, and national level, alternative parties lose.

By what measure do you believe that the signal to noise ratio is getting worse? This claim has a quantifiable ring to it. How can we go about evaluating it?

Continuing to repeat this mantra does not make it true.

You are asking two things: parties must differ in “core values” and that these values not change over time. The first is definitely true, the former is not.

Both of these premises do not have to be true for the parties to differ.

Furthermore, two sports teams may not differ in core values, but their constituencies do differ. As such fans have different preferences over the outcome of any contest. You (speaking generally) may not think this difference is meaningful and you may feel isolated from the hoopla surrounding a football game. But millions of people do care, and they vote with their feet, their wallets, and their remote controls.

That one does not agree with the way their preferences are formed does not mean that their preferences are merely “aesthetic”. This is rather patronizing and presumes that people are incapable of making choices that maximize their utilities. I believe that people are capable of making these choices.

Funny you should mention the PIPA report. I spilled a great deal of ink here in GD arguing that this report is inconclusive at best and probably worthless.

This is a case that one has to make. What one is trying to prove should not be assumed.