On Nov 3, 2009, at 5:27 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Juho wrote:
If one really wants a two-party system and doesn't want voters to
change that fact then one could ban third parties and accept only
two. That would solve the spoiler problem :-).
Who is this "one"? Since that one is at odds with the voters, that's
not very democratic, is it?
I was thinking about the voters or their representatives who want to
have a two-party system. Those groups can be considered to be the key
decision makers in a democratic system.
I guess that one "democratic" way of doing it would be to have the
question itself posed to the voters, but with a suitable low-pass
filter (e.g. supermajority required to change it, or a majority over
a long time); though then I think it'd be better just to have the
filter on the decision process itself.
This is a good definition of democracy. I tend to think that if the
voters have the opportunity to change any old rule if they really so
want, then that society can be called democratic. (Also the two-party
status (=one current practice of decision making) can be a topic to be
changed.)
From this point of view e.g. the US system is not really intended to
be a two-party system but just a system (target state unspecified)
that has some problems with third parties.
That's most likely the case. AFAIK, the founding fathers just copied
Britain's election methods (first past the post, etc.), and by the
time parts of the US noticed this wasn't really optimal, those who
benefitted from said methods' unfairness had acquired enough power
to block the adoption of better methods (e.g. the red scare campaign
leading to STV's repeal in New York).
One old proverb says that people tend to get the kind of government
that they deserve. If people want change in a democratic system they
should 1) understand and 2) act/decide.
There are some exceptions. To my knowledge, some state governors are
elected by runoff rather than just "winner takes it all". FPTP
runoff may fail (such as with Le Pen in France, or more relevant -
the "better a lizard than a wizard" second round in Louisiana), but
at least it can't elect the Condorcet loser, which plain old FPTP
has no problem doing.
The Le Pen case was maybe not a full failure. Although it was shocking
to many that a candidate that large majority of the voters definitely
didn't want to elect got to the second round he was not elected anyway.
(Btw, I think it is ok to elect the Condorcet loser in some extreme
situations. If for example the target is to elect a candidate that
would be stable in the sense that there is no major interest to
replace her soon after the election with some other candidate then
Condorcet loser can be a better candidate than any of a badly looped
Smith set. Group opinions are not linear and therefore the fact that
one of the candidates seems to be "last" can not be automatically
taken as a conclusion that some other candidate should win.)
Juho
On the other hand the option of third parties could be left in the
rules
intentionally. The voters are given a chance to change one of the
two parties to some third party if they want that so much that
despite of the associated spoiler problems they will eventually
give the third party enough votes to beat one of the leading
parties. Actually two-party systems need not be based on two
parties only nation wide. In principle each district could have its
own two parties that are independent of what the two parties are in
other districts. There is however some tendency to end up with two
or small number of parties nation wide.
As another reply mentioned, this has happened in Canada. With very
local exceptions, it hasn't happened in the US - at least not
recently. I think a key difference is that the large US parties can
gerrymander, whereas that is not the case in Canada (since Elections
Canada does the redistricting there). When parties can pick their
constituents before the constituents can pick their representatives,
competition suffers because third parties can't get off the ground.
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