First Past the Post - the voting system used in the British and Canadian Houses of Commons, and the US House of Representatives.
In American parlance, first-past-the-post is called “winner take all.”
Not true in every state. Here you can vote in either primary, but you can’t vote in both.
In Arkansas, I declare which primary I want to vote in, and am given am shown which voting booth is for that party.
And it is unusual and institutionalized in the USA to hold primaries for what are essentially private organizations.
In a riding in Canada (or provincial elections) the riding association gets together and nominate a candidate. Depending on the level of contestment(?) and the liklihood the party will win, the meeting could be from a bunch of guys around a table to several thousand (usually of a specific ethnic group) signed up as members to vote for their chosen candidate. When it gets to the thousands, the meeting is held in a big big hall - but the party basically pays for this.
What happens inside the party is private, except insofar as a candidate wants publicity or the dirty tricks get interesting. Accusations of ethnic discrimination often fly when one mutlicultural group is pushing heir candidate; plus questions of who is eligible to vote. But it’s more like one town meeting in a straw poll than a full-blown primary.
I guess the question for the USA is - what would happen if a third party got organized enough to want or ask for full-blown primaries? Would US politicians from the entrenched parties agree to add the expense and trouble of rival a third party?
(Or am I mistaken, do the two parties pay for running the primaries?)
As I mentioned before, there’s a reason for this. The entirely close nominating system was a way to disenfranchise entire blocs of voters, particularly in the segregated South.
There are already some third party primaries. I don’t think that this would be much of an issue.
There are third-party primaries in a lot of cases.
In states with primary systems, primary elections are run by the state on behalf of the parties. There are minimum participation/size requirements for third parties to get access to the primary system; each state has different requirements. (And if they meet the requirements, they are not required to use the primary system if they don’t want to.)
In states with caucus systems, the parties bear the costs of organizing things, at least at the lower levels.
Not really. Black people could have been (and were) excluded just as easily from party conventions, which preceded direct primaries. The “progressive” “reform” movement for state-run primaries was just as strong, if not stronger, in the north where disenfranchisement wasn’t an issue. It arose as a reaction against nomination of candidates at boss-dominated state party conventions.
The UK is definitely a two-party system at the parliamentary level. It’s not as extreme as the US, but the same two parties combined have won more than 85% of the seats at every election since 1931, with no other party getting more than 10%. Essentially nobody alive today has voted in an election that didn’t result in a Labour or Conservative government with a Labour or Conservative opposition.
Do Canadian MPs vote in accordance with party leadership, like in the UK, or independently, as in the US? Or to put it a different way, are Canadian legislative campaigns funded by the party or the candidate?
I think the self-funded nature of most US legislative elections contributes to the two-party system. In the US, any candidate can call herself a Republican (or a Democrat), and if she wins, she just becomes part of that party’s coalition, which is itself formed out of all of the winning candidates. There’s little incentive to form a third party, because nearly anyone can find a home in one coalition or the other.
In systems where party leadership defines the party’s doctrine more carefully and determines who can and who cannot run as a member of that party, each party’s views are going to be more sharply defined and less flexible. Candidates who don’t fit that mold can’t just glom on to the party as in the US and try to pull it in their direction, so there is much more incentive for those who don’t fit to form a third party.
The Republican and Democratic party committees control a lot of campaign funding for individual candidates. I don’t think it’s such a clean distinction between self-funded and party-funded campaigns.
Whoever get’s the most votes wins, even if they have less than half of all votes cast.
Campaigns are funded by the party, party leadership allocates funds and decides who the candidates are. MPs almost always vote the party line; then they don’t they risk destroying their political careers & being deselected as a candidate next election. That’s normal in parliamentary systems.
Some movements , like Reform, have tried to give the individual backbench MPs more autonomy. However, this rarely works. Encouraging anarchy, generally (it turns out) only in your own party is usually a losing leadership strategy. Canadians generally have party line enforced in fed and provincial parliaments. The prime minister if he gets a majority is dictator for up to 5 years and he and his chosen people, the PMO and privy council, actually rule.
Canada has election spending limits, so a campaign can only spend so much in each riding plus the head office allowance. The conservatives were caught last election running federal costs through individual ridings that hadn’t spent their quota. Election spending is very tax deductible but only the. Head office can take donations for tax deductions outside a campaign. People can usually guess when an election is imminent but the official election is only about 35 days once declared.
The head office can refuse to endorse a candidate if they object to them, I.e. don’t toe party line.
I think that’s another reason for the US system - there is little party discipline, anyone who wins a primary can affix the party label.
In the US the worst the “party leadership” can due is cut the purse strings and leave the candidate to do all their fundraising themselves. The RNC did that to Todd Akin after his “legitimate rape” comments when he refused to resign from the ballot.
The head office in a Canadian party can refuse to endorse a candidate as an official candidate of the party, for whatever reason they like - again, usually because of inconsistent or foot-in-mouth issues. A few years ago the NDP “fired” a sitting member who refused to endore their pro-choice platform. That means the party designation does not appear on the ballot.
They can also appoint a candidate to run against him/her in the riding, all they need is the appropriate 200 signatures (?) and deposit before close of nominations. Plus remember the local association brass and bigwigs tend to be the usual syncophant party hacks, so they buck the head office at the risk of being ostracized by the party insiders. If the hea office says “hold another nomination meeting” they will likely go along.
Plus remember, you don’t vote for prime minister - your choice of MP determines who could be the prime minister, if the pary wins more seats than anyone else (usually). So it’s not like someone could vote for Akin and Obama too - you get one vote, for your MP. However, locals who really like an MP and dislike how the party treated him/her have been known to teach the head office a lesson.
I guess the question is to what extend does the head office actually help a candidate in the USA, unless it is a key/swing district? I guess there’s a coattail effect from other state-wide advertising… but from what I read, it seems that other than cooperation from the party bigwigs in fundraising, generally each candidate is on their own.
To expand on this, votes in the House of Commons can be “free” or “whipped”. If it’s a free vote, each MP votes however they please. If it’s a whipped vote, they are instructed by the party to vote in a particular way; they don’t have to obey this, but it’s a “good luck running for reelection as an independent” sort of situation. It’s possible for an MP to “cross the floor” and join a different party (which has agreed to accept them) as they break ranks with their old party, but this is generally bad for a politician’s reputation.
I get the impression that the U.S. has either very few or no whipped votes. I don’t know how much that contributes to a two-party system, but I get the feeling that “party discipline” curbs pork barrel politics to an extent. That’s probably beyond the scope of this thread, though.
In the German parliamentary system, you wouldn’t even be able to function as an independent member of parliament who is not a member of a parliamentary group. There are certain rights you just don’t have.
I remember cases when individual, unaffiliated members of the German parliament (the Bundestag) were seated at the very rear of the parliament floor where no camera would ever catch them. They had to use some make-shift folding seat and had no table to write something down. It was hilarious.
From wiki:
What has been said about the Whips is true, although it should be noted that Whipping has been less dominant in the UK in the past decade or so. We’re among the most rebellious Parliaments of the democratic age right now.
But those figures are precisely the problem. FPTP in the UK is biased towards parties that have specific strongholds rather than doing well nationwide. In the 2010 elections the Lib Dems got 22.1% of the vote and yet ended up with 8.7% of the seats (57 of 650).
That is just anti-democratic and precisely the result of the flawed UK system.
And before anyone accuses me of it, I have never voted Lib Dem for anything in my life.