The votes are cast, the results are coming in. There’s not much more to do on the political front, other than wait for the final results. While I’m waiting for that to happen, a few remarks on a conversation that I recently saw too late to comment on.
The question was why is it so hard to get third party candidates on the ballot (e.g., libertarians, greens, etc.)? One person noted that even the Iraqis and Afghanis have more choices than we do in the U.S. where you have to decide between the Democratic and Republican parties.
I think that the major issue is structural. Iraq and Afghanistan are parliamentary systems. In a parliamentary system, people vote for a party. The party is given a number of seats in parliament based on the percentage of the vote they received in the election. Once the seats are assigned, the different parties have to create a majority coalition. This coalition then goes on to select the prime minister and govern the country.
In the U.S., we don’t have a parliamentary system. The constitution gives each state two senate seats and apportions the house seats every ten years based on the census population data. What the constitution does not stipulate is how the representatives or senators will be elected.
In most states, representatives and senators are elected by either majority or plurality of the vote. The result is that it is difficult for a third party to be elected. In a parliamentary system, all issues can have their own political party and still have a reasonable expectation of being represented in the government. In our system, we have to work out our coalition of issues in advance and all of these issues run as a party.
There is no, necessary, reason that all of the issues that are currently bundled under the Democratic or Republican parties need to be there. For example, Republicans currently comprise three main groups: religious voters, free market/big business supporters, and defense/nationalist voters. There is no natural reason that these constituencies need to be a part of the same party. Likewise, the Democratic party includes: environmentalists, social safety net supporters, women’s rights supporters, labor supporters, etc.
Arguably, there are segments of each party that have more affinity for each other than for the others in their own party. For example, you could imagine a religious, social safety net and environmental party. The key is that the party needs to have roughly have the electorate in order to be viable. A coalition that only has 30% of the vote will never be elected.
Reading the federalist papers and other early documents gives you the strong impression that the founders never imagined such collective parties. They primarily thought that people would vote for candidates and not for parties. However, political parties coalesced by the first real election between Adams and Jefferson. As far as I can tell, having two (and only two) viable parties a structural artifact of our political system.
Given a choice between our system and a parliamentary system, I would have to go with ours. We just have to deal with the fact that there will always only be two real choices. If you want to affect the choices, change the platform of the parties – but not too far or your party will be out of power.
as always, just a few thoughts, take ’em with a large grain of salt – preferably wrapped around a lime and taken with tequila.