from Hacker News

The two party system is killing our democracy

by dangjc on 1/23/20, 4:05 PM with 71 comments

• by jkingsbery on 1/23/20, 4:36 PM

  > Understandably, many on the left believe the problem is simply the Republican Party, and if only Democrats could win decisive majorities, American democracy would work better.

  I was waiting for a paragraph that started "On the other hand, many on the right believe the problem is the Democratic party," or something to that effect. The author says the problem is the two party system. I think this article shows that the problem is that half the country pretends the other half doesn't exist, and doesn't even bother addressing them, let alone convincing them to change their minds.

• by Finnucane on 1/23/20, 4:15 PM

  There are a lot of things that could be done. Electoral college voting is required by the Constitution, but 'winner take all' apportionment by the states is not; that is just imposed by the states to protect partisan results. Can imagine what presidential campaigns would be like if candidates had to actually campaign for every electoral vote in every state? The number of seats in Congress has been fixed for 100 years, so we no longer have anything close to equal representation by district.

• by zakum1 on 1/23/20, 4:28 PM

  South Africa has a proportional representation system for similar reasons - to recognise plurality. It has some significant downsides. It weakens the ties between a representative and a specific district / constituency. In exchange it strengthens the hands of party decision makers who are the final brokers of how seats are apportioned.

  Having grown up in South Africa and having spent a reasonable amount of time in the USA, I admire the local civic mindedness of American communities and the accountability of the political representatives. I am also appalled by the partisanship. I worry that proportional representation could make it worse.

• by onychomys on 1/23/20, 4:19 PM

  The technical jargon for what the article is describing is Duverger's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

• by matttproud on 1/23/20, 4:25 PM

  Support https://www.fairvote.org. They are making good progress on incremental but substantive reform.

• by bryanlarsen on 1/23/20, 5:04 PM

  In my opinion, even better than multiple parties is no or weak parties. The US used to have parties that were weaker than those in British parliamentary systems. Most votes in a parliamentary system are "whipped"; members are forced to vote along party lines. The US doesn't have whipped votes, but party line votes have increased dramatically.

  https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2017/12/13/a-gro...

• by jfengel on 1/23/20, 5:48 PM

  While I favor proportional voting, I don't expect it to solve the problem because the legislature still works on an all-or-nothing basis. A law either passes or it doesn't. Adding more parties just tweaks the alliances and horse-trading that have to be formed to reach the 50%+1 required for it to pass. Those alliances have to be durable for the quids-pro-quo to work. You can call those alliances parties or not, but they work in similar ways.

  Any chance would tweak the existing sets of alliances, and that would a time confuse and quite the partisanship. But sooner or later somebody is going to realize that pledging fealty to each other is the best way to get their personal priorities achieved. Partisanship happens because it's effective, and encouraging more parties won't deter the fact that 50%+1 of the country can shut the remaining parts out entirely.

  Partisanship in the US these days has little to do with agendas and more about identity. Elections have become more about shutting the others out of power. I see that the article hopes that by introducing more parties, they can remove the urge to see one other party as the enemy to be destroyed at all costs.

  But I don't think it works. A variety of social and political factors have pushed us here, and they won't be removed by rearranging the names of the alliances. The causes run much deeper, and tweaks to the process won't do more than confuse that for a while. So I'm all for proportional voting, or really any change, just to give me a break from the constant drumbeat of animosity. But I don't expect that break to last more than a few cycles, at most.

• by Symmetry on 1/23/20, 5:23 PM

  A potentially easier fix would be to roll back the changes made to the US primary system in the 70s and go back to letting parties pick their candidates internally rather than throwing it open to an electorate where only the most partisan bother to vote in primary elections.

  The old system had its share of problems but I think that, all in all, the old smoke filled rooms worked better than what replaced them. Using approval or ranked choice voting to have more than 2 parties would solve most of the issues with the system anyways and we ought to do that as well but that seems harder to get in place.

• by beagle3 on 1/23/20, 4:56 PM

  Somewhat relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law ; It’s an observation about why e.g. Whole Foods and Trader Joe would have branched next to each other, but also explains why in a two party system, parties end up having very similar platforms in practice with respect to most ”sliding scale” issues, like war. (And then there’s the polarizing no-middle all-or-nothing issues like abortion or immigration that are not addressed by this explanation)

• by nkingsy on 1/23/20, 4:24 PM

  Is there a place I can donate to support an amendment?

  I see this from a quick search: https://www.fairvote.org/donate

• by jwlake on 1/23/20, 4:43 PM

  I'm always amused when people propose what the problem is and a fix for it, and then they immediately think "congress" should do something about it. Democracy happens at the state and city level. The federal government is mostly ineffectual and not really the right place to do most things. If you beleive in rank choice voting get your city to do it, then your county, then you state. The federal government doesn't run elections.

• by jhoechtl on 1/23/20, 4:50 PM

  Put differently: Real change in such a voting system can only come by turmoil. Like war. You shouldn't pray for that and vote for a change.

• by jccalhoun on 1/23/20, 4:52 PM

  The article doesn't seem to mention that on a state and local level the republican and Democratic parties have conspired to pass laws that make it harder for third parties to get on ballots. In many places third party candidates have to get a lot more signatures than Republican or democratic candidates which makes it harder for them to get on the ballot let alone elected.

• by arexxbifs on 1/23/20, 4:59 PM

  As someone living in a multi-party system, I'd say the difference is probably negligible. Having several smaller parties usually means the forming of two political blocs, within which the different parties must get along reasonably well while still trying to keep their constituents, which usually leads to compromises nobody is really fond of.

• by ClayShentrup on 1/23/20, 7:53 PM

  Unfortunately the author doesn't have a good understanding of the process required to end two-party domination.

  https://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/...

• by RickJWagner on 1/24/20, 12:51 AM

  I was surprised to enjoy reading 90% of this article.

  There was a little gratuitous Republican-bashing (it is Vox, after all), but outside of one paragraph it was remarkably even-handed. I liked a lot of the ideas presented, too.

  I hope we do find a way out of the two-party gridlock.

• by hootbootscoot on 1/23/20, 6:41 PM

  Yeah, I get the gist of this, but I'll counter-propose: RANKED CHOICE VOTING as the single most effective means of getting out of the various traps a 2 party system (among other things) creates.

• by mindtricks on 1/23/20, 4:49 PM

  While I'm sympathetic to the author, we have a significant amount of history showing that two parties work quite well. We certainly have our issues with long-term thinking that's not helped by this system, but in general, America is still doing quite well.

• by simonsarris on 1/23/20, 5:25 PM

  As long as parties are default opposed instead of default collaborative, Democracy necessarily heightens group divides: Anyone who leaves your group gives power to your enemy, so the enemy must be demonized. Demonizing the Outgroup is how you police Ingroup. This is true even in multi-party democracies, though its not always as apparent.

  (Of course, once you see someone demonizing you, there's very little choice on your side but to fight them...)

  > we now have... a genuine two-party

  Okay, but how did we go from non-genuine-two-party to this so-called genuine two-party? The policy proposals here are fine but they didn't exist in the 60's either. Something non-mechanistic changed.

  I don't think its exactly the two party system, but the concept of ideology as an identity that is the modern component of this problem. Rather than dwelling in their own thoughts, being a human being, living and experiencing things and gaining wisdom, people restrain all of their wisdom faculties with these chastity belts of ideology. If ideology becomes one's identity, having impure thoughts is not thinking, it is a blow to your sense of self and therefore dangerous. In the political realm, it means that compromise simply isn't possible in ways that it may have been 100 years ago. There's no "if we get this, you can get that", ideology doesn't see differing people with differing interests, it sees you — sacred, you could never compromise yourself — and when it thinks about the obverse, it can only see an enemy.

  Many willingly fit themselves into ideological categories that are quite narrow, and by "identifying" with these labels, they are depriving themselves of the contemplation and reflection befitting the question of a person's identity. I wish for no one's life to be easily summarized by the contortions of such machines, but many seem to welcome the labels. When you express concern publicly that politics has taken over people's lives, this is fed into the machines that have taken over, and they churn out their answer: "Everything is political." You might ask them if they have the causality reversed, but at that point you must wonder who, or what, you're having the conversation with.

  I've written about this before and I think this has been a long time coming by the way, starting with the printing press which enabled massive one-way communication over what came before it as the default, two-way communication. (TConsider: Before the printing press, you talked to more people, perhaps in a day, than you would read in a lifetime. Now it's the opposite, you will always read/consume more media than talk to others, by a huge margin. This split is imo not well understood). I'm not exactly convinced it can be defeated merely with mechanistic changes to how voting and representation is done, though that's sure to help, otherwise. The real problem is bigger, deeper, and much more subtle.

• by bassman9000 on 1/23/20, 4:29 PM

  Or maybe we should fix the divide itself, given that the system has worked reasonably well during 200+ years, more than most Western democracies

  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/201809/...

  But a 2012 study by Stanford University political science professor Shanto Iyengar and colleagues offers another way of looking at this apparent split.2 It examined political polarization from a different angle — not from how Americans stand on policy issues, but from the perspective of “affect” — how they feel about those on the other side of the political fence. Drawing from survey data spanning several decades, the study found that the feelings of those who affiliate as Democrat or Republican towards members of the opposing party have become increasingly negative since the late '80s.

  Another study published earlier this year by Texas Tech University professor Bryan McLaughlin provides additional insight regarding the contributing role of the media in the political polarization of the country.

  Media, and social media, have a lot to answer for.

  EDIT: here's a CNN political analyst joking about a conversation he made up.

  https://twitter.com/joelockhart/status/1220064298925461505?s...

  Vox doesn't even remotely address any possible role they must have had in furthering the divide. But sure they have solutions.