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Originally Posted by Lisnaholic
Me too, I don't understand much about how the US and the UK sytems work, where they are the same, and where they are different. One thing that has always struck me though: in the US, there is always talk about how much money candidates are raising for their campaigns. In England, that is never mentioned afaik; campaign costs don't seem to be an issue either for Brit candidates, and perhaps that's why they feel free to branch out and risk losing an election: they aren't losing billions of dollars at the same time.
Screaming Lord Such, leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party is an extreme example of our multi-party political system:-
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I googled to see what would show up and it looks like there might definitely be something to the idea that US Politics is just more costly and that provides a natural barrier...
Because in googling i see they also use a first past the post system which is the same type of thing that creates the lesser of two evils logic that leads to a two party duopoly. So England, despite having a Parliament is i guess similar to America in that regard which i didn't realize. Like i said i don't really follow British politics at all.
But yeah according to what i googled the financial barriers to entry are very different and the UK actually seems to regulate how much money can be spent as well as how long the campaigns last... By a drastic margin.
Here's a post i found talking about this:
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One reason why the UK has more parties than the US is simply that it is cheaper to compete in the political game.
General election campaigning is effectively limited to four weeks before the election date in the UK, not two (or more) years. The maximum expenditure permitted by an individual candidate is either £10,000 or £16,000 depending on the number of voters in the constituency and whether it is rural or urban (obviously campaigning in a rural constituency will incur more miles of travel).
The maximum that a party can spend nationally on campaigning depends on the number of seats it contests, but if it contested all 650 parliamentary seats the limit is just under £20m.
The total campaigning expenditure in the 2017 UK general election by all parties and candidates, as monitored by the Electoral Commission, was £39.1m.
The total campaigning costs for European parliamentary elections in the UK are lower than for general elections - typically about half as much.
Note, these are the cost of campaigning only - the administrative costs, funded by general taxation, are higher than the campaigning costs, and estimated at £140m for the 2017 general election.
If US readers find those numbers incomprehensibly small compared with the total cost of a USA national election measured in $bn not $m, they are not typos!
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So yeah that does sound like something that would make a difference. But in addition to that, the lesser of two evils logic that naturally follows from a winner take all voting system also will by definition lead to party consolidation. So its not just about how expensive it is, it's also about the very type of elections we hold.
Apparently there's actually a name for this idea as well, according to Google. It's something known as Duveger's law
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In political science, Duverger's law holds that single-ballot plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system.
[T]he simple-majority single-ballot system favours the two-party system.[1]
— Maurice Duverger
The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle.
As a corollary to the law, Duverger also asserted that proportional representation favors multi-partism, as does the plurality system with runoff elections.
[B]oth the simple-majority system with second ballot and proportional representation favour multi-partism.[2]
— Maurice Duverger
Duverger's law draws from a model of causality from the electoral system to a party system. A proportional representation (PR) system creates electoral conditions that foster the development of many parties, whereas a plurality system marginalizes smaller political parties, generally resulting in a two-party system.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Back to your post:
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Connected to the above is why I bolded your bit about "shot down", which I don't understand. Who shoots down an independent candidate, and how?
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Well, with that specific comment I was making an offhand remark about the attitude the two parties and their supporters have towards the prospect of third parties. The typical rebuke is they will hurt whichever of the two parties is closer to their platform, so people invested in advocating political change in our country often dismiss the idea of third parties right out of the gate. Which of course is rational considering the system we have.
Remember though we are discussing this because you asked why other serious options don't exist. It's not necessarily about one person shooting them down. The deeper point is the general trend is that our system tends to weed out third parties as a simple function of the fact that if you can't win outright, you get 0 representation just for running. That is the dynamic that actually creates the incentive to compromise and vote for one of the two parties even if there might be a lesser known option that you more closely align with.
Even if you bring %20-30 voters on board... You get nothing if you don't win outright. That puts smaller parties at such a significant disadvantage that they might as well not exist.
Of course there are also ways in which specifically the parties, media etc also do a fair bit of gatekeeping which further props up the existing duopoly... For instance access to the debates etc as well as just access to legacy media in general though that is admittedly losing some of its influence with the rise of digital media... The debates are still pretty big national spectacles that unless you are firmly established within the two party structure with a full blown political machine backing you, you aren't getting on that stage.
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I have to think about those ideas before I can come up with a proper answer, but your first sentence is true for every election ever held anywhere in the world. Nobody runs on a message of "Vote for us even though the other guys are better." The other parties are always villians, it's just the accuracy and venom with which they are denounced that varies.
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obviously anyone running thinks they are better than the opposition. What I'm saying is that as long as the Democrats have a monopoly on "beating the bad guys" that gives them a pretty low bar they can set for themselves instead of appealing more to their own ambition to get stuff done. It instills a certain level of complacency.This is exemplified perfectly by how you couldn't understand why i don't consider them saviors of democracy for just showing up and being an option other than the fascists.
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With respect, I think you are mis-representing what I said, or at least what I meant. I'd like to see the Dems get more voter support within the democratic process, not let them stomp on democracy in a power grab.
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I wasnt accusing you of holding that position pal i was trying to lead you to it.
Can you answer the question just for curiosity's sake? You don't think the Dems would be more effective at attaining their agenda if they didn't have to constantly contend with the GOP?
Let's say hypothetically instead of a power grab they just happened to win every election and every seat consistently... Would that not be your ideal situation or do you still think we're better off with a mixed government intrinsically?
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This is also puzzling to me, jwb. The democratic ideal is that electors have the effect of monitoring the conduct of the party in power, and if necessary, removing them at the next election. Sometimes one party will have a run of election victories that keep them in power for a decade or more, but things can and do change - and that is drastically different from a one-party state, in which, frequently, the state screws the general populace and the general populace have no recourse at the ballot box. Isn't that Politics 101?!
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yeah but like i said the democratic ideal assumes there's an actual choice to be made where the answer isn't obvious. I.e. it assumes there are at least 2 democratic options to choose from.
If one of those options is a Trojan horse for fascism that actually leaves you with only one option. You can't then rely on the GOP to act as a reliable counter measure against the dems if the dems went tyranical because the GOP have already done so themselves.
So while i understand the hesitancy to place all your eggs in one basket, i can't help but feel that is basically already the situation we're in. So to me there isn't much utility to choosing between democracy and fascism every 4 years. Call me crazy but i just don't care about the ideal of having people vote just for the sake of having democracy. It's only valuable to me assuming that this is actually the best mechanism to reliably make the best decisions you can make on average.
I take your point about one party rule and how self serving it usually is. I'm not necessarily in favor of it either for those reasons though i have my days... But really i was using that just to highlight how little democracy your can really say we actually have to protect. It already seems like self interested self reinforcing system with only slightly more input from the actual populace than your average autocracy....In addition, I don't see the Democrats changing that dynamic, because they benefit from it.
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