[dukeluke]

In our FPTP voting system, a two party system naturally emerges. And during times of hardship, instead of a middle-ground being found like would occur in a multiparty system, things become even more partisan and contentious. It's a fundamental facet of our political system, and won't ever change by using the political system. The political momentum needed is just too great.

[dbcurtis]

Exactly. I heard it well put the other day: "Trump didn't cause the current political divisiveness. The current political devisions caused Trump."

[delinka]

I have a feeling this is How Things Work in societies. Similar theories exist about time traveling to the past to kill Hitler: the nationalist population of Germany will then elect the same personality in a different person and we'll still get the same atrocious WWII.

You have to make changes in The Little Guys, The Average People to actually effect change. This is where community comes in: get to know people, hang out with them, openly discuss your opinions on basic rights.

I feel like once in my life I was able to do exactly this, but I don't want to hijack the thread for that story.

[dukeluke]

Extremism & partisanship does naturally occur, and is seen in every country. However, instead of keeping those groups on the fringe like some political systems do, the American political system amplifies those groups. The majority of people don't like Trump. The majority of people didn't like Clinton. Yet our political system made those our choices. If we want to change our government, we need to find a way to make it capable of changing over time to reflect its people.

[magic_beans]

Please share your story!

[delinka]

I was called for jury selection. I'd forgotten about the summons and failed to show up the first two days, so I called the clerk who said that as long as I showed up on the third day, I wouldn't suffer any consequences. They had me at the bottom of the list so I sat there all day making small talk with potential jurors. I discovered that the first two days had seen few (if any) selections and there was speculation from both attorneys that they'd probably need to call another round of potential jurors.

I found out in the first ten minutes of waiting that our case would be a murder trial. I expressed my opinion many times throughout the day that I could never give someone the death penalty simply because humans make mistakes. Not the defendant, but those collecting evidence and providing testimony. There'd been recent news at the time about a few cases that had been overturned years later - rape cases with better DNA testing, manslaughter cases with new evidence, that kind of thing. My peers dwindled throughout the day and we heard from the deputies guarding us that selection had picked up and just maybe there wouldn't been the need for another set of potential jurors. I was the last in the room, the deputy received word that the last person before me was selected and completed the jury pool, but I needed to hang around because the judge wanted to speak to me. He arrived with both lawyers in tow, I expressed my apologies and was dismissed.

The defense attorney was a former client of my computer hardware business. (The relationship was known to the court.) Because of my familiarity with the lawyer, and because I'd been there during jury selection, I followed the case in the local news. The accused denied he was the perpetrator and maintained his innocence. His lawyer, my acquaintance, argued that his client was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was mistakenly identified as the assailant. (The details about whether this meant he was indeed near the scene elude me, but it's not important to my point.)

I was disappointed to find out the man was convicted. Perhaps the jury was afraid of releasing a criminal back onto the streets. I was relieved that he was given life in prison instead of the death penalty. Six months later, new evidence came to light, the right man was arrested, and our poor innocent soul was released.

Perhaps even if he'd been given the death penalty, he wouldn't have been executed in six months. But what if it had taken years or decades to discover the new evidence? I feel certain that my discussions with other potential jurors kept this man from receiving the death penalty.

[tdb7893]

If you think about it a two party system has a tendency to make the parties move towards the center in general. If a party gets much more extreme than the populace then they will lose easily against an opponent just a little more moderate than them. Trump's views seem a little more extreme than the general populace but if you look at it he didn't even win the popular vote.

[dragonwriter]

> If you think about it a two party system has a tendency to make the parties move towards the center in general.

No, it doesn't.

> If a party gets much more extreme than the populace then they will lose easily against an opponent just a little more moderate than them.

This requires lots of assumptions that may not be true in the real world. First, it assumes a party in power can't shift the electorate by suppressing voting rights of its opponents. Second, it either ignores propensity to vote effects, or assumes a unimodal distribution of preferences so that moderation not only brings you closer to the median voter but also doesn't make people who are closer to your position less likely to vote; whereas a two-party system over time promotes a bimodal distribution where moving away from one of those peaks, even toward the center between them, reduces enthusiasm and votes recieved.) It also ignores communication assymetries and their relation to money, and therefore support from moneyed interests.

[tdb7893]

There are a lot of things to pulls the two parties back out from the middle again and I'm aware that practically it's not like both parties are actually centrist. Maybe I should've been more clear but my intent was saying that a two party system leads to more centrist parties than a multi-party system. I honestly think that multi-party systems might be better but I also think that two party systems aren't completely aweful

[dragonwriter]

> Maybe I should've been more clear but my intent was saying that a two party system leads to more centrist parties than a multi-party system.

It might result in more centrist parties (though I've never seen a convincing comparativr argument or evidence; median voter theorem is fine and all for the abstract idealized world it applies to but ignores pretty much every significant aspect of real-world political dynamics), but even so it doesn't seem to lead to more centrist governments.

> I honestly think that multi-party systems might be better but I also think that two party systems aren't completely aweful

Among democracies, degree of proportionality of representation is pretty directly correlated with popular satisfaction with government, and smaller numbers of parties are correlated with poorer proportionality; from the perspective of providing people the government they want, two-party systems turn out to mostly be, empirically, pretty awful, and the US's particular implementation near the bottom of the barrel among established democracies.

[normaljoe]

> Among democracies, degree of proportionality of representation is pretty directly correlated with popular satisfaction with government

While dual or multiple parties can affect this, the degree of representation currently in the US is currently more of detriment to finding a middle ground.

The average member of the lower house has around 650K constituents more then any senator did at our founding. The US Constitution was suppose to allow the House to grow and expand as the country did, however Congress passes a law setting the limit of members to the House almost a century ago.

If we multiply the House by 10, each member represents 65K we are still within the Constitution and will get closer to what you are stating then a complete overhaul. This has the effect of give more representation to people and makes it more likely to get to a middle ground. As an example a district votes 60% for one party in the current system results in 40% being unheard. With a 10x, keeping in mind it wouldn't really work entirely we have, 6 members that agree with the 60% and 4 members that agree with the 40%. It's not going to be that exact but hopefully you get the idea. This is going to decrease the power of each member of the lower house to state "Mandate" and force getting closer to middle ground.

In the 60/40 example it is mostly likely gerrymandered or a state with a single member in the House which results in no general election. The district is already assumed to win the general and thus the primary becomes the real election which is nominally 50% of the a general election. So in the current system 30% of the 650K in our example district effectively elect the member to House. Given typical 50% voter turnout we then can say that basically say that about 15% of of a district pick the representation. So in our example 98K are represented fully and 552K people are under represented. By scaling that back we would probably have less gerrymandered districts but even in this extreme we have 10K people vs 55K people and may even be able to increase voter turnout since a vote actually matters at this point. In my district my vote is worthless, I still vote in primary and general, but I live someplace more gerrymandered than the 60/40 it's closer to 80/20.

[sidlls]

On the other hand, in America both parties have moved to the right at a clip. The Nixon administration was to the left of Obama (and Clinton) on a good number of the most high-profile social and economic issues we face today. This country's "center" is firmly in the right-authoritarian section of a political compass.

[dukeluke]

That's true, except both of our parties have been taken over by corporations & the system makes a third party candidate almost always unviable. It's an illusion of choice where the people always lose, and the system didn't work in a way that can recover.

[tdb7893]

Obviously you have less choices than the in the two party system but it also means that the choices need to appeal to a broader subset of the audience. Third parties don't win but they can make one of the main parties lose so if there is a really popular third party one of the main parties would probably just absorb most of their ideas into their main platform. I'm not saying that the two party system is perfect (or even good), just that the parties have to fight for votes has a tendency to move the parties to where the voters are.

[int_19h]

It's not just FPTP. FPTP creates the two party system, but something else creates partisanship (as evidenced by numerous other countries that have FPTP and two parties, but they're nowhere near as diverged).

My theory is that what creates partisanship in US is primaries. It might sound counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

In the system without primaries, the candidates that run in general elections are decided through inner party politics, in which only party functionaries participate. Said functionaries generally wield influence proportionate to the amount of time they spent within that system, and they constantly fight each other for power and influence. Since they don't have to explain themselves to the voters in the process, ideological concerns are secondary to influence. Furthermore, because of how byzantine such systems can get, you get a lot of compromise and power sharing happening on all levels - and any functionary has to go through multiple levels to get to the point where they can contest for general election nominations, so they are well-conditioned in power sharing / compromise arrangements, and consider them natural.

This system naturally rewards more moderate politicians that are capable of such compromises, and sideline more extreme (ideologically pure) ones that might not compromise for the sake of ideology. So by the time the voters have their say, they usually pick between two moderates. Overall, the parties remain relatively close, with a lot of overlap on their respective moderate/centrist flanks.

Now consider what happens when you add primaries open to the voters (even if it's just registered party voters). On one hand, voters don't participate in the routine, day-to-day party politicking - they show up to vote once per cycle, and that's that. On the other hand, because primaries are perceived as less important than the general, the turnout bar is higher, and only the more motivated voters show up at all. These voters tend to be more extreme, because ideology is a strong motivator to vote, and comparatively fewer centrists/moderates feel strongly about their centrism. Thus, you get electorate that 1) is more towards the extreme end for the party, and 2) is not inclined to compromise or power share.

Now your candidates need to pander to that electorate in order to win the primaries and advance to the general. Initially, it wouldn't make that much of a difference, because embracing the extreme views becomes a detractor in the general - so long as parties remain close, moderates from either party can swing easily, and so it's important to both attract as many moderate voters as possible from the other party, and to not let your own moderate voters defect. However, there needs to be some pandering in the primaries, and so the rhetoric there becomes a bit more extreme - and the parties start slowly drifting apart.

And this becomes a positive feedback loop. As more extreme positions get gradually normalized, party platforms drift apart, and those stuck in the middle are forced to sort themselves out. At the same time, because of increasing distance, each party sees the other as more hostile, which drives more heated rhetoric that further promotes more extreme sentiments. A lot of it becomes less about policy rationalizations, and more about emotional appeal (just look at most of the arguments surrounding abortion today, and compare to the same 40 years ago).

This, in turn, decreases the utility of pandering to moderates in the general. Once parties are sufficiently far apart, most moderates will start voting for extremists in their own party over moderates in another party (even if they hold their nose). So the risk of pushing away your own moderates by adopting extreme views in the primary is reduced substantially, and at the same time the moderates from the other party are no longer a viable target demographic. At this point, primaries become a race to embrace more and more extreme politics, because whoever does it best moves on to the general. This accelerates the loop further.

The other aspect that I think plays into it is the desire of people to "belong". When parties are close, ideology matters less, and it's possible to self-identify with one of the parties while not adopting large parts of its platform - and, for that matter, the platforms themselves are much more vague and have fewer uncompromising points in them. But when the parties spin apart ideologically, and ideology itself becomes more prominent in party identification, there's a trend for people who initially joined the party because one of its positions to adopt its other positions as well, as a single ideological packet. So, for example, 40 years ago, someone might be a Democrat because it was a pro-labor and pro-union party (and they didn't really care about the rest); and another, because it was a pro-civil rights party (and they didn't really care about the rest); and so on.

But today, most members subscribe to most or all of these positions, with deviation on even one of them often seen as ideological betrayal, triggering a rejection response (all those labels like "RINO" or "Fox News liberal"). The resulting ideological packages aren't even particularly coherent - consider a triad of taxation, gun control and abortion for an example of seemingly unrelated things that have an extreme correlation today - and largely represent the amalgamation of ideas that parties acquired in their historical evolution. But because each package has so many "wedge" issues, their broad acceptance pretty much guarantees polarization in the electorate, because at least one, and often many, are strongly emotional. So for a Republican, the notion of compromising with a "baby murderer", for example, becomes unthinkable. And for a Democrat, the notion of compromising with someone who "denies the right of LGBT to exist" is unthinkable. And they both carry those concepts to their respective primaries, and elect such candidates that promise to be as hardline as possible in the ideological struggle against those unthinkables.

The worst part of all this is that it's not a problem that can be easily solved unilaterally. If a faction in one of the parties realizes that this all is not in our long-term advantage, and decides to dial its rhetoric down, it'll get hammered in the primaries. And if it manages to advance to the general, it will often get punished by partisans from its own side (either not showing up at all, or showing up to vote for some independent or third party "alternative candidates"), and lose to the other party that remained true to its partisans.

Same thing goes for cooperation and compromising after election. Because elected representatives have to contend with primaries, they cannot be seen as too weak, otherwise the partisans in their own party will throw them out as not sufficiently ideologically pure (again, "RINO" etc) and replace with hardliners, like Tea Party did in 2010. So the advantages from cooperation across party lines are diminished to the point where it basically stops altogether, and anything and everything becomes a straight party line vote. Partisanship defines politics in all respects: everything that is legal is fair game to stop, or at least frustrate, the other party, because you know they will do the same to you when it's their turn. To maximize the gains from a political victory (in terms of ability to push your ideological agenda) in such a system, you need to mercilessly steamroll over the opposition when you're the majority party, and obstruct as much as you can when you're the minority.

I think we're already in that endgame. Republicans have arrived here first, with the Tea Party. Democrats are now learning that this approach works best, the rules being what they are, and are adopting similar tactics. The inevitable outcome is complete deadlock of the government, with occasional bursts of frenzied activity when one party happens to take over both legislative chambers and the presidency (as seen currently), to cram as much as possible in while they can.

The only legitimate way out, so far as I can see, is to rewrite the rules. But it needs to apply to both parties at once to be effective, it can't be a unilateral attempt. So most likely we're talking about a revision of the electoral system here. A true proportional representation, or at least some sort of transferable vote, would make centrism more viable, and push the extremes back into the fringe. But such a revision is made extremely hard by the existing rules (it would probably take a constitutional amendment), and there will be considerable resistance from the partisans who would stand to lose political power in it.

Which means that the current dysfunction will continue until a truly major crisis breaks the system to the point where it can be rebooted.

[int_19h]

BTW, this model makes a falsifiable prediction: that any system with FPTP and primaries (and specifically "one member, one vote" primaries) will have runaway partisanship. So if there's a country out there that has FPTP and broad primaries, and doesn't have an increasing trend of partisanship, then that would disprove the theory, or at least poke a big hole in it.

I haven't really looked at all other countries to verify if this is the case, and I would appreciate if other people more familiar with their respective political systems could do so.

So far as I can tell, based on my limited reading, UK and Canada have FPTP, but they don't have primaries similar to the likes of US, or (in case of UK) didn't until very recently.

[dTal]

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.