[Nevermark]

> people voting in their own interest.

There are some people who care about policy, care about a generally healthy environment. Which has a strong self-interest aspect, as it should, but not narrow.

Few people manage to vote for their own narrow interests in a reliable coherent way. Even the rich and powerful reliably foot gun themselves.

I believe the vast majority, the vast majority of the time, reliably and enthusiastically vote for their group's shibboleths. Regardless of what they might say or believe their own motivations are. Even seemingly sophisticated and principled thinkers. It shows via the reliable, trivial to resolve, but reflection impervious group-coded "misunderstandings" that even "serious" people defend and nurture. The group reinforced, often meme-reflex deflected, unthinkables. Across the political spectrum.

People vote for brands.

[Xirdus]

I think people overwhelmingly voting in line with their group is the effect, not the cause. People start off by being in a group, and their group teaches them what's good and what's bad, as well as how different policies will affect them personally. Mind you, they're most often taught wrong - but uniformly wrong within their group. They're similarly taught about WHO's good and WHO's bad, and how different political parties will affect them personally. Loaded with all these misconceptions, they apply the self-interest mindset and end up with a voting pattern that to an external observer doesn't look like self-interest at all. That's an oversimplification of course, everybody is part of multiple overlapping groups at every point in time and joins and leaves groups frequently, creating a gradient of opinions in a society. But the main mechanism is the same.

The result is mostly the same as with your explanation, except yours doesn't explain why there are primary elections and how they can be so unpredictable.

[Nevermark]

> their group teaches them what's good and what's bad

Except the moment their group changes its views, almost everyone in it does to.

That is a different effect from being taught something.

[Jensson]

> People vote for brands.

Right, so the government should be based on brands rather than people. USA trying to make a people centric system still ended up into a brand centric republican vs democrat, just that now those brands changes dramatically every 4 years just people still vote for the brand even after it changes.

Its much more stable when you have stable political party brands like in multi party system, then a person voting for the same brand for 40 years will vote for roughly the same politics instead of it changing all the time.

[Nevermark]

Branding effects are not the core problem, they just make the core problems worse.

CORE PROBLEMS:

A system that continually converges down to only two viable parties, rewards divisive candidates and handicaps broadly-liked third or fourth party candidates.

A system that allows one party to capture all three branches of government. Incentivizing extreme power plays/centralization in and between parties. (Usually starts within a party.)

A system that lets parties integrate at Federal and State levels, suppressing or eliminating the otherwise strong benefits of Federal/State government decentralization. Creates massive incentives for out-of-state capture of state politics.

A permissive system for players to cache out as system-undermining lobbyists after a tour of "service".

CORE SOLUTIONS:

Maximum seat-run limits for parties, forces cross-partisanship and coalitions as some level. Any is better than none.

Separation of parties at Federal and State levels. And/or limits on numbers of states a party can operate in. Use the Federalized system of decentralizing Federal/State government to achieve parallel decentralization of parties.

Take money out of politics. Hard to do perfectly, but any limits make a big difference. Brands operate on pervasive non-rational visibility and repetition, i.e. money.

Voting systems that give wide-appeal candidates an advantage.

Voluntary acceptance of a post-tour lobbying bans, as a requirement for political and policy appointments. Remove that pervasive conflict of interest machine. Disincentivize game players from public "service".

[Xirdus]

In practice, multi-party systems rotate their brands in and out with much higher frequency than two-party systems.