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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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*.

[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.