It seems like partisanship is ruining our government, especially congress. Everyone just follows party lines, and does whatever it takes to make the other side look bad. What if we got rid of political parties and had candidates run based purely on their own ideas and beliefs? Would this make things better?
Yeah, IF ONLY! Partisanship is what Washington feared, and he was right to fear it.
Unfortunately, it’s an inescapable consequence of the system. Any given legislator is more powerful if he or she can band together with like-minded legislators. This also applies for candidates (with other candidates, or with legislators). Worse yet, the “optimum” number of parties (from the advantage standpoint of the legislator, not the public) is two; if you started the system with more, it’d evolve to two pretty quickly.
What I’d like to better understand is why other countries seem to have more than two relevant parties; whether this is due to having Prime Ministers elected by the legislators, encouraging coalition governments. If so I don’t quite see how, but I don’t know what else it might be.
They already do that. That’s where we get the expression “all politics is local.” A republican from New York doesn’t act like one from Mississippi. A county DA doesn’t have the same stances as their party mates in Federal office.
Thing is, the local party branch selects who they want to nominate for election, and they bring the money with them. If you want someone else, you have to vote independent. If you wanted that independent to win, you’d have to convince a lot of other people to do the same, maybe get them all on the same mailing list, and probably take up a collection for the candidate. Of course, if you did all that, you know what you’d have, don’t you?
Lack of party discipline in the USA might play a part? Your partie are loose coalitions and individual legislators vote as they see fit most of the time. In most countries, a legislator is hardly ever allowed to vote freely. He must strictly follow the party line. So, if there’s a strong divide over an issue, parties will split. For instance, the right might split between the social conservatives and the liberals (liberals in the european sense : favoring a free economy). Just an hypothesis.
Anyway, American parties don’t seem to be more than electoral machines. They don’t develop clear programs, their leaders aren’t proeminent politicians, etc… That’s different from what parties are pretty much everywhere else.
And of course, in countries where MPs are elected entirely or in part following a proportional system, multiples parties are inevitable.
Generally, by having electoral systems which put more power in the hands of the voters. The choose-one-candidate winner-takes-all US system gives the established political parties enormous power. It’s practically impossible to be elected if you aren’t the candidate of one of the two established parties, and voters who vote for any third-party candidate have a strong sense that their vote is wasted; registering a protest is the best outcome they can hope for, but they do that at the expense of having any effective say in the outcome of the election.
Some system of proportional representation (so that candidates/parties achieve representation in approximate proportion to their voting support) and preferential voting (so that voters can express more sophisticated views than “this is the one I like the best”, and have that reflected in the outcome of the election) would seem to be indicated.
Exactly. It’s not that anyone set out to change the American political system. It’s just the people found political parties worked better than a bunch of independents. (Note, I’m only saying they work better not that they are better.)
I agree with much of this. Both US political parties are more loosely based than their European counterparts. At least this was the case until very recently. If you want party dominated partisanship come to the UK. I assume France is much the same.
Which reminds me that the UK “first past the post” system prevents multipartism. Isn’t it the same for the election of US congressmen?
Because, there you have your main reason for bipartism. With such a system, voting for any other party than the two main ones means that your vote is almost certainly wasted, so you don’t do that. With a run off, you vote for your prefered party on the first round. If you’re lucky, your minor party will make it to the second round in your district. Most of the time, it won’t, but then, you’ll vote for the major party closest to your views during the second round.
As a result, some people from minor parties will be elected in a straightforward way, and others as a result of electoral alliances between majors and minor parties, post vote (two or more parties agreeing that the best placed candidates amongst them after the first round will run alone, the others renouncing, or leaving some candidates of the minor party be elected unopposed during the second round in exchange for the minor party calling his electors to vote for the major party everywhere else ), or before vote (instead of running agtainst each other, let’s have common candidates, say, 20 of yours and 120 of ours).
Wealthy candidates would dominate such a system.
If it didn’t take so much money to run, third parties would be more prevalent, IMO.
It’s not correct to say that the US two-party duopoly (two and only two) results from first-past-the-post, because other countries which use first-past-the-post do not show a similar trend.
For example, in the UK itself, there are currently 12 parties represented in the Commons. There is a coalition government, with two major parties, and a third major party on opposition, plus nine small parties in opposition.
In Canada, there are currently four parties in the Commons, down from a high of five parties in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The experience in Canada and the UK is that FPTP encourages the formation of two major parties, but it permits smaller parties as well.
That’s not the case in the US, which suggests there are other reasons for the duopoly.
I don’t know of any large democracy–rich or poor, old or young, parliamentary or presidential–that functions without political parties. They seem to be an organic outgrowth of the democratic process. I would be reluctant to tamper with centuries of hard-won experience.
We do have experience with non-partisan government at the local level. In Chicago, for example, aldermanic elections have been non-partisan since 1919, and mayoral elections since 1991. The results are unimpressive. The City Council is a sewer of incompetence and corruption, and the government faces dangerous levels of indebtedness despite high taxes.
We also had a unique experiment in our Southern states from 1900 through 1960, where for race-related reasons all successful politicians were Democrats, and thus there were effectively no parties at all. Ad hoc coalitions formed around charismatic individuals; for example there were pro-Longs and anti-Longs in Louisiana and the Byrd machine in Virginia. I’m not sure there was anything in the results that would recommend this as a model to be emulated.
FPTP may not be the sole cause of the American two-party sack-of-fail, but it’s definitely a major contributing factor, and is a powerful force against fixing said sack. It’s a system in which a third party simply cannot form - a few people voting for it are simply throwing their vote away, and a large number doing so might actually lead to the election of the candidate they like less.
I doubt it. The party system emerged long before the current big-money campaigns. The dominance of money is the current political system is more a factor of the introduction of mass advertising methods in political campaigns. Once people realized you could sell a candidate like you could sell a car or a cigarette, they began doing it. But advertising campaigns cost money so people who could supply that money grew in influence.
You need an organization to run for political office. Even local politicians need someone to help them ring doorbells, pass out literature, make phone calls, etc. Political parties are permanent organizations so candidates don’t have to spend all their time and money just finding someone to help put together a mailing list.
How, specifically, would you do that?
This.
I get frustrated - I swear, I should run for office on the platform of ‘I couldn’t do any worse than these jackasses’ when our elected officials do something particularly stupid. Honestly, between poly sci in college and paralegal studies I at least have a slight idea of what is going on in the government - after all, these morons can be full on degreed and tenured lawyers and politicians … and they pull all sorts of dunderheaded shit.
Yep. Third parties would be more prevalent if we had a parliamentary system or if we used a voting system that was not winner-take-all. The money aspect isn’t primarily what keeps them out.
What is the rule regarding presidential candidates? It can’t be that they only take ones from a party, since the early presidents didn’t have a party. What I mean is that a few years ago, after our CA governor Grey Davis was recalled, there was a special election called that brought in all sorts of people running (some seriously, most jokingly) for governor. As I recall, over 100 people were on the ballot that Schwartzenegger eventually won. Yet I noticed that during our regularly scheduled governor races, there’s only a few people on the ballot
What if they opened up the presidential ballot to anyone who can meet a very basic criteria? You’d still have a the party favorites, but each year you might get a Ross Perot or Ralph Nader that captures some significant portion of the electorate’s imagination. While they probably won’t win themselves, they can siphon off votes from a party candidate that may matter in a close election
So what’s the current requirements to be on the presidential ballot? And how hard would it be to change that? Would it even work?
You do realize that dozens of candidates run for President in every election? It’s just that none of them except for the Democrat or the Republican has any chance of winning, so their candidacies aren’t newsworthy. Even the handful of independents who get some recognition like George Wallace or John Anderson or Ross Perot, still lose the election.
This illustrates the point many of us have made - there’s nothing stopping a political candidate from running as an independent. But he’s virtually certain to lose the election to a candidate who belongs to a political party.
So if your only goal is to run for office, go ahead and do it as an independent. But if you want to actually hold a political office, you need to join one of the top big political parties in order to have a realistic chance. It isn’t a legal requirement, it’s just an acknowledgement of what works.