political independents

[eirias]

Andrew Sullivan linked to a New York Times blurb showing that lots of people (esp. in the southwest) are uncomfortable with party labels these days, and that in a recent nationwide poll, a majority of respondants said they would prefer elections sans party labels. At first blush, this is interesting and maybe important -- but then I think about it and I realize I'm pretty sure that parties, labeled or no, are an emergent property of political landscapes. I have a strong suspicion that the two-party system is so entrenched here that even if we scrapped the current one, even if we abolished labels, an effectively two-party system would emerge as the new stable state within a few election cycles. I think that all that this might be signalling is disillusionment with the two current parties. What do you all think? (Bonus points for answers deeper than "Of course they're disillusioned; [party of choice] sucks!")

Comments

[tla]

I should be going to work, but what the hey.

I think that is pretty much precisely it. People are tired of the baggage of "Republican" vs. "Democrat" and want to start it over. But the current system grew naturally (and pretty rapidly) from the system laid down in the Constitution, which doesn't say anything about political parties.

A more interesting speculation is "why is it always a two-party system? Would it be possible to get a multi-party system working here without collapsing into a two-party one?" Will have to think about that one on the way to work.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if a multi-party system is more stable in a parliamentary system than in the system we have ("congressional system"? what is the proper term?).

[eirias.livejournal.com]

My gut feeling is that people are so used to thinking along two-party lines that coalition-style government would quickly devolve into a two-party system. But obviously it's an empirical question.

The way I see it, we do have some of the properties of coalition governments hidden within our two-party structure: specific constituencies within both major parties are well-known, though they are more complicated in that they may overlap (there are most likely some people, for instance, who live in both the "neocon" sub-party and the "evangelical" sub-party). On an even smaller scale, interest groups can put forth endorsements encouraging their members to vote in a particular direction -- harnessing some of the power of the voting bloc. But again, citizens are members of multiple interest groups, typically -- in Wisconsin I'm sure we have our fair share of gay hunters, for instance -- and so there are competing "sub-sub-parties" vying for the allegiance of individual voters.

I guess what I'm positing is that multi-party dynamics aren't totally absent here, they're just different.

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

It's fairly clear that caucusing, at least, is an unavoidable fact of life in any democratic system -- forming an interest group, voting within that group, and everyone in the group then voting with the group decision in the "real" election is the outcome-maximizing strategy in a democracy. Political parties seem to be the manifestation of that at the level of the popular vote. So you're not going to get rid of parties, alas, without getting rid of the whole notion that the majority gets what it wants.

As for two versus more than two, it's basically inevitable that you're going to have at most two substantial candidates for one office (and three for two offices, and so forth) if voters can work out who the front-runners are. This is the whole "wasted vote" notion. Alternative voting schemes (IRV, Condorcet voting, approval voting, etc.) can in theory reduce the "strategic ignoring" of third-and-lower candidates, but the benefits remain largely theoretical since almost nobody does this and it has little demonstrable effect.

Of course, two candidates per election doesn't have to mean two parties per election -- we have an initiative on the ballot here to allow ballot fusion, that is, allow voters to vote for the same candidate under different party labels. This at least would allow voters more freedom in voting for parties than in voting for candidates. Ballot fusion, again, is theoretically interesting, and it has some slightly weird effects where it is used, but has not yet proven an ability to discipline or supplant the two major parties.

A final note is that in many places -- my state, for one -- the general election for most offices is a pointless vestige; the only actual choice occurs in the primaries. I frequently wonder why people don't form sub-parties, with meta-primaries before the party primaries to nominate their sub-parties' candidates for the primaries. I guess that sort of thing used to be taken care of in the stereotyped smoky back-rooms.

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

A futher note about political power.

I don't think I need to drag out an elaborate proof that a voter's political power is maximized when the probability is highest that that voter's vote will actually make a difference (that is, swing the election between substantially different outcomes). Thus you have more power in an election that is small (few voters), close (evenly split between two or more leading outcomes), and diverse (having very distinct leading outcomes).

Now, power has to go somewhere. In a big, lopsided, low-stakes election, the political power was all exercised beforehand, by whoever was responsible for setting the terms of the election (picking the outcomes, eg candidates). In practice, this chunk of political power is what demands the existance of parties -- organizations that can capture the political power not wielded by voters.

Thus, there is a direct trade-off: The political power of parties is at the expense of voters, and vice versa. To the extent that elections are national, or lopsided, or between indistinguishable candidates, the parties win and the voter has nothing but an amusing tradition of marking boxes; to the extent that elections are local, even, and diverse, the voters win and the parties are forced to do the grungy work of informing voters, getting them to the polls, etc.

(This is one of the reasons to keep the electoral college, by the way: A state election gives slightly more power to voters than a national election. In general a win-the-most-districts election increases voter power by the square root of the number of districts over a total-popular-vote election. Weighting the districts unevenly introduces a complicated logarithmic term, so the US electoral college only increases average voter power by a factor of two or so if I recally correctly. Do the math yourself if you're bored; I don't have it handy.)

Of course, if the balance of power between voters and parties is going to be a problem, the answer might be to lower the stakes. Winner-take-all democracy with unlimited stakes has a tendency to turn out poorly, because as parties capture more and more of the power, the differences between parties times the government power at stake eventually exceeds the value of public order -- c.f. much of pre-WW2 Europe, but the Weimar Republic in particular. Limitations on the stakes of elections -- devolution of power to localities, constitutional limits on central government authority, term limits in some cases -- can help, but are generally unpopular for public choice reasons.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

These are a really interesting couple of notes.

I feel like the statement "power has to go somewhere" ought to be justified. How does one calculate the power associated with a given election? How do we know that it's conserved across all possible versions of that election? I still feel like there's something missing here.

I like your argument for the electoral college, though I will note that proponents of fairness in California still won't be happy at how much *more* the system advances the political power of those in Wyoming -- the willingness to shoot yourself in the foot if it prevents your neighbor from getting more than you is a fundamental aspect of human psychology, as far as I can tell.

Another thing about the electoral college, now that I think of it -- doesn't it increase voter power but lower the stakes over which that power operates? You're basically getting a larger share of x/537 of the outcome for the presidency (or whatever) instead of a smaller share of the outcome for the presidency. Is this a good tradeoff? I'm not an expert in this, so forgive me if my questions are dim :).

[upsilon.livejournal.com]

"it's basically inevitable that you're going to have at most two substantial candidates for one office (and three for two offices, and so forth) if voters can work out who the front-runners are"

This may explain why there are only two significant contenders for any given race, but does not explain why there are only two parties. Compare us to England or Canada, where there are multiple parties with representatives in their Parliament. Each seat may only be competetive between two candidates (I don't know for sure that this is so, but I'll stipulate), but across the country they have three or four parties wielding a not insignificant amount of power.

Why is that not the case here?

[eldan.livejournal.com]

Each seat may only be competetive between two candidates (I don't know for sure that this is so, but I'll stipulate)

That is how it usually turns out in Britain. The thing is that there are many seats where the competition is between one of the two biggest parties and either the third party, an independent, or occasionally a member of one of the fringe parties that never manage to get more than one seat at any given time.

I'm not sure, but I think the difference is that the British system emphasises local work more, so an MP is both an area's representative in the House of Commons and their lead politician—it's a bit like being both Governor and Senator for a very small state, or perhaps a better analogy would be if a city's mayor were also its Representative—and this increases the emphasis on local issues in a general election. Subjectively at least, I get the feeling that voters in US elections choose a party more than they choose an individual representative, whereas in Britain the individual has a lot more influence on each seat's outcome. That allows independents to run on single local issues ("don't close our general hospital", etc.), fringe parties to get a toehold in constituencies where things have gone badly wrong (the nationalists (http://www.bnp.org.uk/) have occasionally grabbed a seat this way), and the more mainstream third party to hold a decent number of seats.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, but I think the difference is that the British system emphasises local work more, so an MP is both an area's representative in the House of Commons and their lead politician—it's a bit like being both Governor and Senator for a very small state, or perhaps a better analogy would be if a city's mayor were also its Representative—and this increases the emphasis on local issues in a general election.

This is really fascinating. I love the effect you describe, but am not sure whether I would love the effect if it were here! It would be a very interesting experiment, though. The mayor here, of whom I'm quite fond for local issues, is not someone whose views on national policy I would necessarily trust. (Of course, to extend this to a country as large as ours on the city-by-city scale would be impossible, so perhaps the governor is a better person to consider. Unfortunately our governor is a less interesting case.)

[eldan.livejournal.com]

Of course they're disillusioned; every party except the MRLP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_raving_loony_party) sucks!

Britain actually is quite an interesting case study for this, because there are more than two parties that get seats in parliament and have some sort of influence, in spite of the extreme difficulty with which a third party ever becomes a second party, by which I mean a party that's regarded as having a chance of forming the next government. I'm only aware of that kind of shift having occured once, when the Labour Party was new, and managed to push the Liberal Party / Whigs out of contention, changing the game from Tories v Whigs to Tories v Labour. Since then, the Liberal Democrats (descendants of the Whigs) have stuck around, and have at times been a very useful moderating influence on politics, without ever having real political power directly.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Oh eldan, your comments make me smile :).

The point about influence vs. ruling power is really interesting! That's a dynamic that hadn't occurred to me as a possibility. How does it work? What can the Liberal Dems do if they don't like what's going on in Parliament?

(I'm also happy to finally learn what a Whig is...)

[eldan.livejournal.com]

Bonus points for telling me where the name "Whig" actually came from!

The influence that a third party can yield depends on the electoral system. In a country that tends to produce hung parliaments, third [and fourth and fifth] parties can be kingmakers, which is arguably not such a good thing because a party with 10% of the votes can end up having effective veto power over a party with 45% of the votes. It's not simply the electoral system that governs how this works out, but also other things [I'm being vague because I'm not sure what the other factors are]; hence how this tends to produce stable, sensible governments in Germany, and very unstable governments in Italy.

In a country that doesn't tend to produce hung parliaments—I'm not sure this has ever happened in Britain, and it certainly hasn't in my lifetime—the influence of minority parties is more subtle. It's exerted in two ways: the first is that having even one representative in parliament gives a viewpoint a far better opportunity to be aired in both the media and the corridors of power, and that representative is able to draft laws and submit them, so a moderate one who might be able to persuade MPs of either big party to vote with them has a chance to make laws. The second is that while no-one expects any party other than Labour or Conservative to actually gain power, third parties do win individual local seats, and therefore can still be a threat that MPs have to worry about. This has a major influence on get out the vote operations: the main parties can't get away with extremism to bring out their most hardcore supporters, because they will lost the moderates to a moderate third party, so regardless of their particular policies, any non-extremist third party exerts an automatic moderating force on politics.

It's an odd situation, because it doesn't necessarily give a third party that much influence to get their platform aired, but the possibility of their getting more power inherently improves politics anyway.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

I would think that now the time would be ripe for a third party to develop -- one that's fiscally conservative and socially moderate-to-liberal -- but maybe right now what's happening is that the Democratic party is slowly changing to fulfill that need.

Certainly the Republicans have abandoned all pretenses at fiscal conservatism and states' rights, because they've slowly changed to respond to the neocons and evangelicals.

[feuervogel]

So, then, a new Progressive party needs to spring out of the no-longer-progressive Democratic party. Of course, that'll never happen, because "liberal" is a curse word.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Since when is "progressive" a synonym for fiscal conservatism? My impression is that "progressivism" has more to do with things like unions, populism, more rather than less spending... in combination with certain social causes (education? women's lib? prohibition?). Someone who has a better handle on the history spanning that 19th-20th c. boundary should feel free to correct me :).

By contrast I think what rms10 is describing is closer to Libertarianism (though not whole-hog; see "social moderate") or old-school laissez-faire Liberalism.

The usage is hopelessly confused in America these days, where "liberal" and "leftist" are synonyms (they haven't always been, and in some elsewheres they still aren't). But these are my understanding of the terms.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Oh oh OH, maybe I misread you and you're saying that as the Democrats change to accomodate the fiscal conservatives, the "other branch" should break off and form its own party. Which would be entirely sensible :).

[feuervogel]

Erm, yes, that's what I meant. "Democrats become conservatve, so progressives make our own party." Because the Leadership doesn't want us, either.

[kirin]

So, I was about to say: "Wait, wait... I was following your mis-reading up until 'prohibition'. Huh? Where'd that one come from?"

And then I went and googled some history and oh look, "Progressive" used to be applied to the "moral fabric" movement that gave us Prohibition. Huh.

You're right, I give up; political labels are completely useless.

(But yeah, as you figured out, *today's* meaning of the label Progressive tends towards the socially liberal and plenty of social programs sector. Not likely to be prohibiting much of anything.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Progressive makes lots of sense in conjunction with prohibition! The temperance-movement types were generally women -- politically disenfranchised (I mean, literally, at first) with a burning desire to induce social change and betterment. Don't look at an axis of permissiveness vs. repression here; look at the underlying utopian themes in both temperance and modern progressivism. Both are strongly about imposing a particular moral vision on society in service to utopian ends -- ie in order to progress toward some imagined better future state -- even if the specifics of the moral vision differ.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I think that from your point, we can extrapolate some political advice: never assume that the axis you care about is the axis on which a particular party is operating.

(Gosh, I wonder what politics would look like if people followed this advice. Would it change anything?)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I am used to not making that assumption ;), but then again, I am a cranky third-party type. This is why I understand when people say "the major parties aren't really distinguishable" and get grumpy at people who yell at them for saying that ;).

[blimix.livejournal.com]

(According to Noam Chomsky) The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a populist political party.

People may not understand that both major parties here are under the thumb of big business, but people might easily perceive that these parties do not represent *them*.

[feuervogel]

Populism plays really well in the South. It's too bad the neocons and televangelicals have worked everything to be around religion and Biblical Values (whatever that is), because folks in the South tend to see a more authoritarian God, and there are correlations between authoritarian religion and authoritarian government (cf Lakoff.)

[leora.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't expect more than two parties with real power, other than during transition times when one party is being born and one is dying, because we don't have proportional elections. I would prefer a proportional system where if the Republicans got 40% of the vote and the democrats got 50% of the vote and the Greens got 10% of the vote (numbers made up and skewed to make me happier than some other possibilities) then we'd have 40% of the seats going R and 50% going D and 10% going G... maybe a system where you can vote for the party and the person of your choice in the party. If the greens win 3 seats, the top 3 greens votewise get those seats, but people who voted green and for green guy #4 still help give the greens a seat. And maybe with the ability to vote for an individual of X party and vote for Y party if you don't like X party except for Y guy. I'm not sure... I'd have to give thought to the details, but I think something working along those lines would please me a lot more. Because currently if your party gets 10% of the vote, it's 100% useless, so your party doesn't, it gets 1% of the vote, because lots of people don't see the point, and so it's hard for parties to grow even when people like them, since everyone has to decide it's worth it at the same time.