[shrimpx]

> Looking from abroad, democrats and republicans are almost the same. And this is the core of the problem, and the deeper root of polarization.

Can you elaborate on this? How does similarity between the parties cause polarization?

[vidarh]

Because when the points of meaningful disagreements are few, people often have a need to emphasise those points in order to justify their choice.

I don't think this is by any means universal and it doesn't need to get hostile.

Proportional systems often force parties to be prepared to cooperate or be left with no influence so even with starkly polarised views on certain issues it doesn't pay to get too hostile about it. To take a concrete example, in Norway the two centre-right centrist parties are classical liberals (Left/Venstre) and Christian democrats (KrF/Christian Peoples Party). The Christian democrats are hardline on abortion by Norwegian standards. It's of course genuinely important to them, but it's also clear that it's gained extra importance to them as one of the few areas where they clearly stand out to their potential voters. Yet they remain on "friendly terms" with the liberals who are one of the most firmly pro choice parties. I'm guessing part of this is that in addition to being aligned on a number of policy areas they're also not competing for the same voter base, so letting the polarisation escalate to hostility serves no purpose for either of them.

But when you have two parties fighting over control in a non-proportional system and you care about power in the short term, it pays for them to both seek towards the other to fight over voters near the centre and to exaggerate the importance of the remaining differences.

[Taniwha]

Yes, NZ had 2 parties trading off power for decades until we got rid of the FPP system (like the US/UK), we now use MMP (the same as Germany) and we haven't had a government that wasn't a coalition since (even this time when one party did get more than 50% of the votes).

What it means is that to form a government parties have to form a coalition and that means compromise, done in public - compromise is a good thing, a mediating thing, if you're a party that can't compromise you'll never be part of a government - and voters understand this, they understand that it takes time to compromise, we might not have a government for 3 months and all of a party's promises might not be able to be kept as part of a compromise.

It's not perfect, but I do think it's far better and far fairer that the governments we elected under FPP (when sometimes the party with the most votes didn't get the most seats, and smaller parties could never realistically get a look in)

[shrimpx]

Thanks that makes sense.