[mullingitover]

Winner-take-all voting systems naturally tend to produce a two-party system. There's an aversion to vote third party due to the problem of throwing your vote away. So, before you can have viable third parties in this country, you have to revamp the voting system to something like instant runoff.

[icebraining]

We have a Parliamentary system with six parties with at least one seat. For the most part, I'd say it barely has any effect, except maybe on some important social issues (same-sex marriage and drug use decriminalization), but which could have passed without them.

The problem is that the two major parties coalesce the broad ideology-less voters, and while the others have a solid core of supporters, they can never really get a meaningful number to really force change.

I mean, even during one of our worst economical crisis, with unemployment and poverty hitting record highs, the polls barely show any increase for the other parties.