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

[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.