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

[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.