[rsp1984]

The boring but true answer is that the only thing people should be protesting for is a change of the electoral law. Everything else is downstream of that.

In the US, it's a de-facto duopoly on power, held up by a number of "winner-takes-all" rules. Politicians of either party will do everything in their power to keep "outsiders" (i.e. people/parties that are not entrenched in the two-party system and might actually drive positive change) from ever gaining a foothold.

In Germany it's the famous 5% rule that virtually ensures that every new party must maximize populism or perish.

I'm sure it's very similar in most other "democratic" countries.

Laws aren't perfect. In fact they often are buggy as hell. The electoral law is certainly no exception. However it is ultimately the law that matters most as it determines who can raise to power and who can't. Ensuring it fair and democratic should be the #1 civic duty.

[jhbadger]

I'm not sure "keeping out outsiders" is a bug. The US is experiencing what it is like to be governed by an outsider with no previous political experience and who thinks things like "laws" don't apply to him, and who thinks experts can't be trusted and puts unqualified people in charge of the military, science and health. Politicians need to develop -- they should start with a local position, and "graduate" to a national-level position before they even attempt to rule a nation.

[fc417fc802]

Notably, we could do that while still abolishing first past the post. Requirements for holding a previous position could be added while simultaneously reforming the federal (and hopefully also state) systems to be compatible with multiple parties. I imagine it would be sufficient for each level to require a single term served at the previous level - city or county, state, and federal.

The downside is encouraging career politicians, but the upside is that if you can't win increasingly high stakes elections over a period of 10 years or so then you probably have no business being the president of a country this size.

[Atreiden]

I think this take highlights one of the core problems our democracy faces - winning elections and governing effectively are entirely different skill sets. These things may even be, in part, antithetical.

[fc417fc802]

I merely intended it as a reasonably general proxy for relevant experience whose ruleset would be difficult to weaponize. I agree that in theory there almost certainly must be better methods than elections by which to select legislators, leaders, and other official positions. However I'm not aware of any in practice, particularly when the inevitability of bad faith attempts to abuse the system are taken into account.

[pousada]

IMO the 5% rule is pretty good.

Otherwise we would have loonies like the Grey Panthers (old people party), the “Spiritual Party”, or the extreme right-wing “Republicans” (AFD is moderate compared to those) being able to vote on laws etc.

Of course that also cuts out some parties that I have supported in the past, but the system allows a lot of parties to participate that aren’t _that_ populist (e.g. the Greens, the Left, the Pirates (I think they managed to get a seat or two in the past))

Of course it’s not perfect, but I still think it’s one of the best flawed systems we came up with so far. We should keep iterating on it but very slowly and carefully.

[rsp1984]

The obvious problem with the 5% rule is that voters who don't like any of the established parties are faced with the decision between voting for something they don't like or most likely throwing away their vote.

As someone who writes algorithms for a living I can think of ~ 100 ways to resolve this bug without limiting the original intent. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to come up with one. However the fact that this %5 rule hasn't been changed tells you everything you need to know about the legislators.

[Timwi]

I would consider a world in which loonies have a couple insignificant seats in parliament to be a more democratic system than one that shuts them out.

[pousada]

It doesn’t shut them out though, they can still effect change on smaller scale - for example smaller regional and state governments. They don’t need to sit in the nation wide parliament and add noise. The rule also encourages cooperation and compromise which is arguably also more democratic than everyone staying in their more extreme position