You can register as a Republican or a Democrat and not vote for a Republican or a Democrat. So, you shouldn’t let the fact that you sometimes vote for members of both parties keep you from registering with one or another.
Well, there’s more to it than that. I’d really rather NOT be registered to any particular party.
How come, out of curiosity?
Not exactly true for Louisiana… if a candidate gets >50% vote, there is no runoff. they are elected.
The two-party system is guaranteed by the first-past-the-post voting system we have. Nothing else really matters: If you have first-past-the-post, you have a two-party system.
Is this really true? The French National Assembly has no less than six parties with 15+ seats each and several smaller parties; this is a pure single-seat constituency-based system, winner-take-all with no “party lists”, no? U.K. House of Commons is similar with several parties represented; in fact no single Party has an absolute majority in the present U.K. House.
Considering the huge divergence across the U.S.A., one might argue that persistence of a two-party system in the U.S. is an aberration that needs explanation. :rolleyes:
And in Canada - we’ve always had a first-past-the-post system, but that doesn’t translate to a rigid two party system like in the US. There are usually two main parties, but which are the two main parties can change over time.
For instance at our federal level, the Official Opposition party, the NDP, was only formed in the 60’s, and in the 1993 election, was almost wiped out.
The party that was the Official Opposition after the 1993 election is down to only three MP’s currently, and doesn’t even qualify as a party in the House of Commons.
So, first-past-the-post does not lead inevitably to the rigid “two and only two” parties which is such a feature of US politics.
I disagree with your take. Certain districts are very red and others are very blue. Those districts are non-competitive at the moment. The Green party would have a better chance competing in a safe Democratic district while the Libertarian party would have a better chance competing in a safe Republican district. And since this would only happen in a few places initially, it would allow them to concentrate their resources on relatively few electoral locations.
That’s a downside of the proposal in my view incidentally. But I find the Schumer plan superior to the status quo, which encourages primary voters to ponder imponderables such as electability rather than relatively straightforward policy preferences. My first choice is a smoke filled room though.
When parties are born in Canada, do they start off as squirrely wack-a-doodle parties? Serious question.
Some do. They tend not to survive. The Yogic Flying Party hasn’t been around for awhile.
Some start with serious policy positions, but don’t get much traction if they’re too specific. The Marihuana Party has a serious policy base on one issue (legalise it), but not much more, so it’s never done very well. There was also a party dedicated to ending fractional reserve banking and other monetary policy reforms. Didn’t get much traction. Neither did the Christian Heritage Party. I wouldn’t say any of them were whack-a-doodle, just didn’t garner support.
Two of the most successful new parties at the federal level in recent years tapped into strong regional discontents: Bloc Québécois and Reform party out west. They fractured the old Progressive Conservative party which triggered a decade of party realignments in the mid-90s to the mid-2000s. The shake-out was:
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the old PC party never got back in the game. It no longer has any representation in the. Commons.
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the PC Party has been replaced by a new Conservative Party, which has inherited much of the Reform agenda, picked up most of the PC right wing, and dropped the Red Tory left wing, some of whom migrated to the Liberals.
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the Liberals, long known as the “natural governing party”, is in third place in the Commons for the first time in Canadian history.
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the Bloc, a separatist party created in 1990 from a mixture of PC and Liberal MPs from Quebec, was actually the Official Opposition from 1993 to 1997. However, with the decline in sovereigntist fervour in Quebec, it’s gone into a sharp decline and will probably cease to exist at the next election.
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the New Democratic Party, which was formed in the mid-60’s as an alliance between a former socialist party and the union movement in Canada, has long been the traditional third party at the federal level. They also took a drubbing in the 1993 election, but unlike the PC party, they recovered. In the 2011 election, under the leadership of a charismatic leader with Quebec roots, they demolished the Bloc in Quebec, picking up much of the leftist, “soft” sovereigntists who were abandoning the Bloc. The NDP’s success in Quebec put them in second place nationally, so they are now the Official Opposition.
All of which makes me very sceptical of the “first-past-the-post guarantees a two-party system” theory.
How many votes does each person get - 1, or 2?
If it’s one vote per person, then what stops most people in a particular party from voting for the most extreme candidate in their own party?
If it’s two votes, then wouldn’t most people vote for (a) the most extreme person in their own party and (b) the most extreme person in the other party, figuring that the moderates might switch sides in the general election?
If it’s done like the way they used to have House elections in Louisiana - where a candidate was elected automatically with a majority of the vote in the primary - then it might save some time and money by not having a House election with a foregone conclusion.
I think one thing that makes the US a two party system is the fact that we don’t actually recognize parties as part of our constitutional system. Since literally anyone can be a Republican or a Democrat and there’s nothing the party can do to boot them out because the parties have no legal sanction beyond the 1st amendment’s guarantee of freedom of association, there’s not much point in having 3rd parties. In a nation where a party can decide who is and is not a member, people of certain ideologies can be left out entirely, thus forcing them into a 3rd party. The Democratic and Republican Parties are whatever the membership says they are. In 100 years, the GOP could be Communist and the Democratic Party could be a theocratic party following the precepts of transcendental meditation.
Sure. Let’s look at the “Counterexamples” section of the wiki page you cite. It notes that the UK, Canada, India and the Philippines all use FPTP, yet have do not have a two-party system, but multi-parties. Those are pretty substantial counter-examples.
The wiki article also notes that FPTP tends to favour parties that have strong regional support, and not to favour parties that have general support spread thinly. That is part of the explanation for what is going on in the UK, Canada, and India: there are strong regional interests in each of those countries, and therefore FPTP in those countries actually favours the development of a multi-party system.
Duverger also theorised that a multi-party system in a FPTP environment was necessarily transitional, and that eventually a two party system would emerge. The experience in Canada, at both the federal and the provincial levels, runs directly counter to that: we have had stable three party and sometimes four party systems both federally and provincially for some time. Where there are enough divisions in political thought, and diversity in the voters, multi-party systems can be stable under FPTP. Ontario is perhaps the best example at the provincial level: it’s had a stable three party system since the end of WWII. Similarly in the federal Parliament.
As well, Duverger did not state that a duopoly system (two and only two parties) was the inevitable result of FPTP. At most, he theorised that FPTP tended to favour two parties, and to discourage third parties, as stated in the wiki article:
The fluidity of party structure in the federal Parliament in Canada, and in Quebec, stand as strong counter-examples.
But even taken as qualified, all Duverger appears to be saying is that FPTP favours a two party system; it doesn’t require it.
The US duopoly, two-and-only-two-parties, therefore cannot be explained simply by a FPTP electoral system. Something more is going on to explain the stable duopoly. Personally, I am not aware of any other country which has had a duopoly last for over a century and a half, as is the case in the US. The US strikes me as an exception, one that cannot be explained simply by FPTP.
What countries do? Not the UK or Canada; parties don’t have any constitutional recognition.
As well, parties in the US may not have constitutional status, but they certainly do have public, statutory status. The primary system, where the states run the party nomination process through public elections, gives the parties far more legal status than is the case with parties in Canada or the UK, which choose their candidates on their own, through their own procedures, without government involvement.
Again, that’s because of the primary system: where the state runs the party nomination process, with wide open voting, parties don’t have much control over membership. It’s the fact that the state runs the nomination process that prevents parties from having much control over membership.
nm - simulpost
This is, of course, the major reason why the United States has two-and-only-two parties, which will persist until either (a) the Sun burns out or (b) we abolish state-run primaries–whichever comes first.
Consider the Tea Party. The Republican establishment opposes it. In any other country, that would be sufficient to ensure that no Tea Party candidate gets a Republican nomination, anywhere, ever. The Tea Partiers would have two choices–organize a third party or go home.
In the United States, they just run in Republican primaries and sometimes win.
I’d think the Texas experience (as described above) would tend to disprove that. Our system nominated and elected fucking Ted Cruz, for God’s sake!
I wouldn’t call it stable exactly; only the names have stayed the same over the last 150 years. We have every bit as big of political shifts as other countries, but the two parties’ names don’t change.
An example:
The mass defection of Southern Democrats to the Republican party in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s changed the landscape significantly- the names didn’t change, but the lay of the political land definitely did. Elsewhere in the world or historically in the US, this would have been a change in parties, but for whatever reason, the party names stayed the same.
Exactly. The state-run primary ensures that change will occur within the framework of two parties having the same name, rather than via new parties with new names supplementing or displacing the original two.