Even if we only take the last 30 or so years, I think their would be a huge difference in results if the election results were changed. Imagine if the Democrats had won the presidency consistently since then, with Carter winning in 1980, Mondale in 1984 and 1988, Gore in 2000 and 2004, and the same Clinton and Obama victories. Now imagine if the Republicans had run the board during this same time period, with HW Bush winning in 1992, Dole in 1996, McCain in 2008, and the same Reagan and W Bush victories. I would think that in both of these cases, we would be looking at a vastly different current day USA.
Well, I thought I knew what you were saying but apparently not. As I said, I posted “The only way those third parties are going to get an equal share of the pie is by throwing democracy out of the picture.”
You then quoted my post and posted your own comments. From this, I assumed you intended your post to be a response to what I said about third parties getting an equal share of the pie.
If you were talking about something else, I don’t know why you quoted my post.
Neither Canada nor the UK have proportional representation. Nobody votes for the greens or the Libertarians, because its understood that they are spoiler parties. This fact causes them to pursue a smaller pool and become even squirellier. If the US adopted a PR system, then presumably both of the major parties would split apart. Business Republicans would split from Christian Conservatives (though they might later form a coalition). Democrats would cleave between moderates and greeny ones.
Again, Germany, France and the Netherlands are examples of PR systems. Italy and Israel are PR systems where they have no minimum hurdles for very small parties.
Good question. It says here it would bring in $17.7 billion over 10 years, which isn’t small but isn’t exactly a game-changer either. This site drills down further and discusses the tax break’s distortions on the economy. They think the total foregone revenue could amount to several billion per year.
As far as parties “primarying” undesirables, that really comes down to a matter of money. We shall see how much of a real impact money has in a few weeks, but come on, politicians have to spend a lot of their time fundraising for re-election: just imagine how the landscape would change if big money could be somehow marginalized throughout the whole process. Even FPTP might start to be a little more functional if the system were not being strangled by the cost of getting in in the first place.
But Canada and the UK do have legitimate third parties. Which proves that third parties can exist without proportional representation.
This is a delusion some third party supporters have. That there’s something in the American political system that’s keeping people for voting for third parties. And if whatever that problem was was fixed, suddenly people would be free to vote for the third parties they had always wanted to vote for.
But there is no hidden factor. People are free to vote for third parties now. They just don’t want to. If you switched to a proportional representation system tomorrow, you’d see the same two parties still getting all the votes (which makes it unlikely either party would split up as you suggest). Same thing with transferable votes and ranking votes and cumulative voting and approval voting. None of these proposals will make people vote for third parties if they don’t want to.
As regards to Britain’s third party, I think the last two and a half years of coalition government has really soured most people’s interest in PR and coalition government. It’s been largely unrepresentative of the people’s wishes and the two parties have been leaking against each other and pursuing their own particular obsessions and policy concerns.
I wonder if our main third party - the Liberal Democrats - will implode in 2015.
Sorry, I have to nitpick: I don’t think France is a PR country at all. They have Second Ballot, which is where any candidate that doesn’t pick up 50% of the votes has to try again against the immediate runner-up a few weeks later.
As for Germany, it’s a kind of mix between PR and majoritarian: most of the seats in the Bundestag are elected on FPTP (like UK and US), but a minority are elected on straight PR on a regional basis.
The Netherlands, Italy and Israel are straight-up party list PR, however.
The problem is when you aren’t getting what you want done, either. For a lot of people it’s not so much a matter of “ideological purity”, it’s about how neither of the major parties is interested in doing anything that even approximates what they want; or even in listening to them, really. Compromising your “ideological purity” to get things done only makes sense if by doing so you can get things done that you actually want; otherwise, you just end up without either the desired results or the satisfaction of adhering to your principles.
And then there’s the problem that we are often talking not about compromising ideological purity, but dumping your ideology entirely. American “mainstream” politics are restricted to a very narrow part of the political landscape.
And you are still the sole commenter in this thread who has asserted that the goal of any kind of election reform is “equal share” for third parties.
Perhaps I was being generous in giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that your use of the term “equal share” was less-than-perfect-word-choice. I didn’t take your “equal share” literally. Now it seems clear that what you were doing was actually arguing in bad faith. Neither I nor anyone else here has suggested that third parties ought to be given a third of the representation regardless of the share of actual votes they get in an election.
They have parliamentary systems. When none of the parties gain a majority of seats two or more parties are forced into a coalition to run the government. That puts minority parties directly in the game, which is a powerful incentive. The whole multi-billion dollar campaign for president in the U.S. comes down to persuading a tiny percentage of idiots who haven’t made up their minds yet to push the whole over 50%. Similarly, larger parties offer huge incentives - cabinet positions, laws being introduced - to tiny parties that can put them over 50%. Happens in Israel a lot.
Our system provides no such incentives. That’s why third parties don’t get traction nationally. You need something that gives a party actual power to get people to give up their vote for other parties that are guaranteed to have some.
Right. But this whole “let’s stick to our principles and not let the big parties co-opt our agenda” thing does not achieve the results. You want the parties to feel it’s in their interest to co-opt your agenda to a certain degree because that’s how it becomes part of the larger national conversation on the issue.
Even if it’s true, in terms of the economy? Does truth have any value here?
Point taken, but I see it as supporting my point. He caucuses with the Dems, but is not part of them, because there is no progressive party strong enough to get anything done in Congress, mainly because it’s pretty much … him.
It’s not ideological purity, it’s power politics. If the progressives are able to build a strong third party movement, enough to scare the Dems into trying to co-opt them, they need to deal with the Dems with extreme suspicion, or they will wind up being tools. The Democrats are not progressives’ friends any more.
Their argument was to vote for Nader, like this would magically make their movement strong. Wrong! All it did was weaken the Dems, to no real advantage for progressives. We gotta build from the ground up, local, state and Congressional reps. If we can grab some statehouses and some big cities, we’ll get much more attention. May hurt the Dems down the road, but they have sown the wind by ignoring progressives and letting Wall Street buy their Congressional delegations out.
Yes. And the only way they will be willing to co-opt an agenda of a third party is because they are scared shitless of that third party, because it is beating their candidates in races all over the country. Even then, their instinct will be to try to give nothing but bland promises of working toward goals while secretly doing nothing or next to nothing to achieve them.
I don’t know about Italy, but Israeli political parties must pass a 2% threshold to sit in the Knesset.
Alessan and Malden Capell: sincere thanks for your factual corrections.
Yes, the truth has value. Your contention that the parties are the same in terms of economics is false. Democrats historically tend to have lower deficits and a better performing stock market for example. Ryan wants to phase out medicare. There are pretty big differences. Before 1980 you would have had a point though: back then Club for Growth wasn’t huge and Republicans tended towards the incremental. As did Democrats.
OK, Nemo, here it is. I’m possibly going to vote for Jill Stein. I voted for Nader. There, I said it.
Do you know how many times I’ve been told that the Bush administration is my fault? That I should have voted for Al Gore? That I’ve thought it myself? In this thread we’ve seen people say, “Oh, you Greens must vote tactically, vote for a moderate Democrat, not a Green.” All the time.
But if those Green votes could be counted as, “Really Green, but I’ll take a moderate Democrat over another Reaganite,” then it would allow us to vote our consciences.
Give me a instant runoff voting system*, and I would give the greens a polite hearing. They would not necessarily win my vote, but nor would I dismiss them.
Under the current system, voting your conscience is arguably an act of vanity. That’s not healthy.
- …or approval voting, or any number of schemes other than winner-take-all.
Preferential or Proportional Voting methods may have merit, but even more urgent is reducing Conflations and Confusions in discourse:
Vote Green for Congressperson, Democrat for President; what’s the problem?
Er - I’m not too happy with a person who votes Green on the congressional ballot, only to throw the election to a Tea Partying Republican opponent of mainstream science.