Dual party governance? Would this work?

[Acid_Lamp]

@begbert2

Can you, or can’t you, write in a candidate? If you can, then Cheney simply doesn’t officially run, in either column. (Well, not officially - he might get voted in anyway, if the campaign to get him into the opposed side’s slot is strong enough.)

• You do realize that if there’s only one guy in each column, which is quite possible and nearly normal at some levels, then the vote itself would be a complete sham?

snip)

Okay Here is your ballot: CHOOSE ONE FROM EACH COLUMN. You May select None and replace it with a Third Party candidate of your choice. You may Only replace ONE candidate in this manner.

Conservative Candidates

Joe the Plumber
Dubya
Cheney
None

Liberal Candidates:

Pelosi
Obama
Jane Bleeding Heart
None

Third Party

Socialist party Sam
Communist party Charley
Anarchist Annie

Write in Vote (dissent vote): I choose to vote for none of the registered candidates and/ or instead nominate :

[Locrian]

Your idea might have some advantages. I will only ID myself as an independent, never a donkey or elephant supporter.

I would really like to have many parties to choose from. Heck, the Brits still have the wigs.

[Henrichek]

The conservative/liberal division seems rather arbitrary to me, and it appears like a strange idea to build a political system around it. I think a system should not make any references to specific ideologies.

[BrainGlutton]

@begbert2

Not to be too aggressive here, but what does this actually mean? The political spectrum is pretty evenly divided, depsite those pesky polls and elections saying otherwise?

Depends on how you define the lines of division. Center for American Progress study, State of American Ideology, 2009:

For years, traditional public opinion polling has broken down ideology into three distinct groupings: liberal, moderate, and conservative. Based on this categorization, there has been remarkable stability in ideological orientation, with roughly one-fifth of Americans identifying themselves as “liberal” and about four in 10 classifying themselves as “moderate” or ”conservative,” respectively, according to Gallup polling from 1992 to 2008.

In this study, however, the electorate is broken down using a more expansive five-point scale of political ideology that reflects the variety of approaches people ascribe to today. Employing this more calibrated measure, 34 percent of the country identifies as “conservative,” 29 percent as “moderate,” 15 percent as “liberal,” 16 percent as “progressive,” and 2 percent as “libertarian.” After moderates are asked which approach they lean toward, the overall ideological breakdown of the country divides into fairly neat left and right groupings, with 47 percent of Americans identifying as progressive or liberal and 48 percent as conservative or libertarian. The rest are unsure or scattered among moderate and other approaches.

Which presents a more complex picture than LW v. RW, but as all the groups on each side of a line in the middle do tend to vote more or less together, that’s what we get in results, and the resulting system is “evenly divided,” 47%/48% with significant margin of error.

The Pew Political Typology divides Americans into nine political categories, but the above conclusion probably applies just as well to it.

[Chronos]

I was envisioning their placement being determined by their platform, not by a candidate’s statement or voter will. So Cheney would be firmly in the “right” column, and only available there.

Who gets to decide what planks count for each platform? Right now, for instance, you might expect to see one candidate in favor of gay marriage and one candidate against it, since those are the liberal and conservative positions on the subject right now. But if current demographic trends continue, fifty years from now we can expect that almost everyone will be in favor of gay marriage. Will the ballot-writers be forced to dredge the bottom of the barrel to find “conservative” candidates who oppose it? Or will the gay marriage issue at some point be dropped from the official platforms? When?

[Chronos]

Oh, on the topic in general: This is not a new idea. In fact, it’s been done right here in America. But it was so inefficient and ineffective that we passed an amendment to the Constitution to get rid of it.

[Acid_Lamp]

@Chronos

Who gets to decide what planks count for each platform? Right now, for instance, you might expect to see one candidate in favor of gay marriage and one candidate against it, since those are the liberal and conservative positions on the subject right now. But if current demographic trends continue, fifty years from now we can expect that almost everyone will be in favor of gay marriage. Will the ballot-writers be forced to dredge the bottom of the barrel to find “conservative” candidates who oppose it? Or will the gay marriage issue at some point be dropped from the official platforms? When?

I had not given it a great deal of thought, but rather as demographics shift, it would allow for a gentler incline of change.