[jensen123]

> Members of Congress spend 70% of their time raising money.

Why do they do this? Because the politicians who spend the most money on advertising generally win the elections, right? I'm wondering if what we're seeing here is the failure of democracy with universal suffrage. Most of the voters don't seem to be independent thinkers. They could have voted for politicians who haven't been "bought". But they don't. For example, there are other political parties out there - Green Party, Libertarian Party etc., but almost nobody votes for those.

[aggie]

Lack of independent thinking may indeed be a problem, but the reason for a two-party system is mostly due to the mechanics of our plurality voting system [1]. People don't vote for third parties because voting for the lesser evil with the best shot to win produces a better outcome than voting for true preferences that are likely to lose.

This problem of plurality mechanics could be largely addressed by instant runoff voting [2], which allows people to vote for their true preferences without fear of throwing their vote away. Of course the people in power don't want to make it harder to retain power, so getting something like this implemented is very difficult without a referendum.

This is just my speculation, but it seems that a two-party system removes most of the incentive for pursuing nuanced, independent thought. The depth of the decision you have to make is choosing one team or the other, and defaulting to their stances on most issues, or by a mix of resignation and cognitive dissonance, ignoring the areas of disagreement. And once you've made the decision for which team to be on (or inherited from your parents), it's usually set-it-and-forget-it.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

[throwaway13337]

This is more a problem with vote distribution.

The parties outside the main two cannot win because they're always going to be a minority. If a minority could still hold a minority of the seats for getting a minority of the votes, the landscape would be vastly different.

Instead, we have an average vote system based on geographic region that can only allow for major parties to hold seats.

This is not the case in all democracies - most european parliaments have more than two parties because of the difference in the way minority votes are handled.

This is a failure of US-flavor representative democracy.

[Chathamization]

But we have primaries, where we get to choose who those candidates will be. It makes sense to winnow down choices from a larger group until you get to the top 2, and then choose between the top two. You still have lots of choices if you look at the process from the beginning, not just from the very last part of the selection process.

[vezzy-fnord]

Appointing electors is universally FPTP in the United States, sans a couple of states. Do primaries use a Condorcet method, or...?

[Chathamization]

Well, I'm saying that general elections in the US tend to be functionally the equivalent of run-off elections in many other places. For instance, in France you generally have candidates that weren't in a competitive primary run in an election, then have a runoff with the top two candidates (the Socialists seem to be introducing primaries for presidential candidates though). So you have an election, then the top two candidates compete in another FPTP election. In the US we have a (primary) election, then the top two candidates from each side (except for in places like California) compete in a FPTP election.

In the US, this differs state by state (California has their jungle primary system, some cities have IRV) and in Europe country by country and party by party (as I mentioned, the French socialists seem interested in have presidential primaries).

[jensen123]

I suppose you have a valid point. I have one question, though: aren't political TV ads actually illegal in most European countries?

[toyg]

European political campaigns are usually cheaper than US ones, but they're by no means cheap in absolute terms. We have corruption scandals here too... before '92, a lot of political parties were almost entirely funded by either the US or the USSR; they've been economically struggling ever since.

[SixSigma]

We have Party Political Broadcasts in the UK, which are scheduled and appear in tv listings one party at a time. They are usually after the news, but not always, and regular programmes are shifted by 5-10 minutes to accommodate them.

[JetSpiegel]

At least I never seen anything like what Jon Stewart showed. There are political TV ads during the official campaigns, but that's two weeks before the elections and it's just 1h where the ads run all in a big block.

[techdragon]

A big part of the problem is voter turnout.

If you make voting a requirement, like paying your taxes. It changes the environment around an election. You spend less time and money trying to convince apathetic voters to take time out of their work day to vote.

[vezzy-fnord]

You have the right to vote, not the obligation to vote. The latter is a clear coercive practice and free speech violation. It forces the uninformed to cast votes on issues they have no background in. It also criminalizes the legitimate protest activity of abstention.

[throwaway13337]

Voting hardly matters when there are two parties available representing largely the same company and pac interests.

I know this is unpopular to say, but if you'd like to make a difference in governance, you have to pay for it.

[jensen123]

Isn't voting a requirement in Argentina? Look at the politicians they're electing...

[Chathamization]

Pretty much this. In this day and age, it's easy for people to ignore the advertising and simply search online for the candidates positions, their history, which groups support them, etc. This probably takes less than an hour.

Granted, most people don't, and most people probably don't even know the names of the people running besides those in the biggest races (they might know the presidential or mayoral candidates, but they often don't know the state senate or state party candidates).

I disagree about third parties though - it usually makes much more sense to try to make changes during the primary, then trying to make them with a third party (there are a few exceptions, of course).

[rayiner]

People don't vote for those parties not because they aren't independent thinkers, but because they don't want what those parties are selling. They don't want some libertarian wonderland without consumer protection laws or Social Security. In broad strokes, they want what we already have, with small tweaks.