In the absence of a way to solve a large coordination problem, there’s no way for a third party to gain marginal influence over time.
This is wrong. It’s overgeneralizing based on one example of US politics. If you look at the world it’s easy to see third parties getting influence. The UK parliament (with first-past-the-post) has 8 parties and additionally five independents.The liberal party become part of the government in 2010 and todays UK government has the conversative party needing the support of the small DUP. It gives them policy concessions in return.
Discussing what’s wrong with US politics without speaking about lobbyists and campaign finance seems strange. It’s much more important than the voting system. Robert Moses became the most powerful man in New York politics without ever winning a public election.
I’m voting in Berlin and in the last election we had a small party that called themselves the humanists. Their stated objective was to be evidence-based and pro-human rights. Wouldn’t it be good if all reasonable people would come together and fought for supporting this party?
No, it wouldn’t.
Our current medical system in Germany has different insurance companies and insurance companies are allowed to pay for some treatment they believe to be helpful even in the absence of two studies with statistical significant results. This is supposed to encourage them to be in competition with each other and do what’s optimal in terms of preventive medicine. The agenda of the humanist party is that this provides the companies with too much freedom and that we need stronger medical regulation.
There’s also a complete absence in the program of the party for ideas such as running more trials for public policy. The party just treats being evidence-based as an ideology and as long as you do the things that the New Atheist crowd considers to be evidence-based everything is fine.
It’s not enough to have a politican who is “pro-evidence-based”. Voting alone isn’t enough. You need actual public debate about the policies and build an understanding among experts who spend more time with a topic than the average citizen about what’s the best solution.
>CECIE: There are indeed some voters who want stupid things, and under the European system, their voice can be heard. There are also voters who want smart things and whose voices can be heard, like in the Pirate Party in Finland. But European parliamentary systems havedifferentproblems stemming fromdifferent systemic flaws.
The UK has first-past-the-post in the for electing parliamentarians just as the US has first-past-the-post. Blaming the problems on first-past-the-post doesn’t explain the difference.
Closer to the US you have Canada that has a first-past-the-post and has 5 political parties who have parliamentarians with in the House of Commons.
The idea that you don’t get more than two parties just because you have first-past-the-post isn’t based on good reasoning.
The US does have more than 2 parties though. I think the argument being made is less about there being only 2 parties and more to do with how power is distributed. In a FPTP system, you will really only have 2 major parties that swap power around, even if a third party can attract a significant number of votes. That is essentially the main strength of FPTP, it almost always produces a dominant victor. In practice the Canadian system has seen power swap between the Conservatives and Liberals. In the UK power has swapped between the Conservatives and Labour. In India, power has swapped between the BJP and the INC. In Mexico there have only ever been 2 parties. I’ve tried to find more examples but unfortunately most countries with FPTP do not have good wikipedia pages for electoral results.
The US does seem to have a uniquely dysfunctional system, but I don’t really see any significant evidence from other countries with FPTP of third parties being able to enact real change.
The UK just left the European union because of pressures from UKIP. Now, third parties have less seats than before but they did produce change.
Furthermore, parties in FPTP don’t vote in block in the same way they do in states with proportional representation. A parliamentarian in a FPTP can often affect law without having to be in the majority coalition. Pork is likely the best way to measure individual power. You don’t see pork that’s added to bills completely shift in the US congress and senate when the congressional or senate majorities change.
Indirectly, pressure from UKIP led to the current Brexit situation—which as gjm points out, has not yet resulted in the UK leaving. However, UKIP’s vote increase didn’t cause Brexit, it simply led to a referendum. But the conservatives could have easily not called the referendum in the end since UKIP’s high vote share did not translate into any seats in government. I think it’s much easier to pin the blame on Cameron’s arrogance and putting party politics ahead of country, than it is on UKIP.
Nonetheless, even if you do not agree with that assessment, Brexit remains one data point. I am not personally aware of any other such events occuring in the likes of Canada or India, or similar examples in the UK.
I know little of the US pork barrel system, so can’t offer comment on that.
The UK has not left the European Union. It has (narrowly) voted to do so, and it has issued the EU with formal notification of its intention to leave, and the obvious assumption is that it will in fact leave, but right now the UK is still in the EU and it’s probably not impossible for it to stay in if its politicians thought they would improve their chances of reelection by making that happen.
I agree that UKIP seems to have had a lot of influence despite being a small party. I do wonder whether a group with similar goals that wasn’t an actual political party could have had comparable influence, but on the whole I think probably not.
The Coalition government of 2010 was the first coalition in almost a century, and indeed you can find only 2 coalition governments in modern British political history. It was not the norm at all, and was heavily influenced by the bizarre regional nature of British politics. Meanwhile the most recent election can be seen as another FPTP aberration, since the most representative government would have been a Lab-Lib-SNP coalition rather than a Con minority. What is more, 2017 saw minor parties almost completely wiped out with 82% of votes and 89% of seats going to the 2 largest parties. The UK is a poor example of third party influence, I would say.
Speaking about “bizare regional nature” of politics basically means that there are political factors in play that are outside of your model for analysis politics.
If you have learned in school that political power flows through very specific formal channels than you will find informal ways in which political power flows bizare.
Wikipedia summarizes the insight that got Robert Caro to write the biography of Robert Moses as:
As a reporter for Newsday in the early 1960s, Caro wrote a long series about why a proposed bridge acrossLong Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay, championed by Robert Moses, would have been inadvisable, [...]. Caro believed that his work had influenced even the state’s powerful governor Nelson Rockefeller to reconsider the idea, until he saw the state’s Assembly vote overwhelmingly to pass a preliminary measure for the bridge.
“That was one of the transformational moments of my life,” Caro said years later. It led him to think about Moses for the first time. “I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’”[...]
“Here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on,” he recalled, “and all of a sudden I said to myself: ‘This is completely wrong. This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don’t find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.’”
Telling people that American politics is so messy as it is because of formal arguments about first-past-the-post voting is similar to explaining that the way highways get build with formal mathematical formulas about traffic density.
Even if you would have ranked choice voting system that wouldn’t change anything substantial about the quality of political decisions. Yes, it might be a bit more optimal but it wouldn’t change anything about the underlying core problems.
Telling people that American politics is so messy as it is because of formal arguments about first-past-the-post voting is similar to explaining that the way highways get build with formal mathematical formulas about traffic density.
Related data:
A couple years ago, there were a bunch of sensational headlines along the lines of “US is an Oligarchy, not a Democracy, New Study Finds”. The actual study is an interesting read: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens It correlated the average preferences of average citizens, economic elites, and special interest groups (divided into “mass public interest groups” and “business interest groups”). Interestingly, Table 2 shows that economic elite preferences actually correlate with average citizen preferences at .78. Also, business interest groups correlate with mass public interest group preferences at −0.05, but all interest groups overall at 0.96, so I guess the vast majority of interest groups are business interest groups? Aside from “all interest groups”, business interests seem to correlate negatively with everything else, although not as negatively as I would have thought. They then looked at the probability of various legislation passing, given that various categories were for or against it on average. They focus on cases where, for example, economic elites favor something but average citizens are against it, and compare it to actual policy outcomes passing or failing. They build several models for power and influence, and do a bunch of statistics I haven’t read the details of to try to figure out how much influence various groups have on actual policy outcomes. Eyeballing figure 1, if looks like if 10% of average americans support something, it has maybe a 30% chance of passing, but if 90% of average citizens support something, it has maybe a 31% chance of passing. Conversely, if 10% of economic elites favor a piece of legislation, it has only a 10% chance of passing, but if 90% of them favor it, it has a 60% chance of passing. Both of those graphs were fairly linear, and had a good spread, with lots of legislation with both high support and high opposition. They also tried to graph the net number of interest groups in support or opposition to legislation, vs. the probability of it passing. However, in almost all cases, there were less than 4 more either supporting or opposing each bill, so all their data points are clustered in the center. I’m not sure I believed their model projections outside of that narrow range, but if you believe that weird-shaped s-curve, then more net interest groups in support of a bill does cause it to be much more likely to pass.
Take all this with a grain of salt, though. There have been a couple follow up studies which stepped this back substantially. As Vox puts it “When the rich and middle class disagree, each wins about half the time”:
That leaves only 185 bills on which the rich and the middle class disagree, and even there the disagreements are small. On average, the groups’ opinion gaps on the 185 bills is 10.9 percentage points; so, say, 45 percent of the middle class might support a bill while 55.9 percent of the rich support it.
Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant.
And also:
Bashir also notes that the Gilens and Page model explains very little. Its R-squared value is a measly 0.074. That is, 7.4 percent of variation in policy outcomes is determined by the measured views of the rich, the poor, and interest groups put together. So even if the rich control the bulk of that (and Bashir argues they do not), the absolute amount of sway over policy that represents is quite limited indeed.
That makes you wonder: If only 7.4% of the variance is due to these groups, then what on earth is determining policy??!!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Right. Obvious answer is obvious.
Or maybe the middle class, since they are conspicuously absent from “rich, the poor, and interest groups put together”? I think “rich” is still being defined as top 10% here, and “poor” as bottom 10%.
Or, some interest groups are much more effective than others, so their preferences will be the main driver of everything, but only weekly correlated with the average interest group preference. The same could be true of certain influential elites, if their opinions diverged from those of the rest of the elites. But, that’s a wild guess on my part. This whole thing is a mess I haven’t even begun to sort out in my head.
This is wrong. It’s overgeneralizing based on one example of US politics. If you look at the world it’s easy to see third parties getting influence. The UK parliament (with first-past-the-post) has 8 parties and additionally five independents.The liberal party become part of the government in 2010 and todays UK government has the conversative party needing the support of the small DUP. It gives them policy concessions in return.
Discussing what’s wrong with US politics without speaking about lobbyists and campaign finance seems strange. It’s much more important than the voting system. Robert Moses became the most powerful man in New York politics without ever winning a public election.
I’m voting in Berlin and in the last election we had a small party that called themselves the humanists. Their stated objective was to be evidence-based and pro-human rights. Wouldn’t it be good if all reasonable people would come together and fought for supporting this party?
No, it wouldn’t.
Our current medical system in Germany has different insurance companies and insurance companies are allowed to pay for some treatment they believe to be helpful even in the absence of two studies with statistical significant results. This is supposed to encourage them to be in competition with each other and do what’s optimal in terms of preventive medicine. The agenda of the humanist party is that this provides the companies with too much freedom and that we need stronger medical regulation.
There’s also a complete absence in the program of the party for ideas such as running more trials for public policy. The party just treats being evidence-based as an ideology and as long as you do the things that the New Atheist crowd considers to be evidence-based everything is fine.
It’s not enough to have a politican who is “pro-evidence-based”. Voting alone isn’t enough. You need actual public debate about the policies and build an understanding among experts who spend more time with a topic than the average citizen about what’s the best solution.
>CECIE: There are indeed some voters who want stupid things, and under the European system, their voice can be heard. There are also voters who want smart things and whose voices can be heard, like in the Pirate Party in Finland. But European parliamentary systems have different problems stemming from different systemic flaws.
The UK has first-past-the-post in the for electing parliamentarians just as the US has first-past-the-post. Blaming the problems on first-past-the-post doesn’t explain the difference.
Closer to the US you have Canada that has a first-past-the-post and has 5 political parties who have parliamentarians with in the House of Commons.
The idea that you don’t get more than two parties just because you have first-past-the-post isn’t based on good reasoning.
The US does have more than 2 parties though. I think the argument being made is less about there being only 2 parties and more to do with how power is distributed. In a FPTP system, you will really only have 2 major parties that swap power around, even if a third party can attract a significant number of votes. That is essentially the main strength of FPTP, it almost always produces a dominant victor. In practice the Canadian system has seen power swap between the Conservatives and Liberals. In the UK power has swapped between the Conservatives and Labour. In India, power has swapped between the BJP and the INC. In Mexico there have only ever been 2 parties. I’ve tried to find more examples but unfortunately most countries with FPTP do not have good wikipedia pages for electoral results.
The US does seem to have a uniquely dysfunctional system, but I don’t really see any significant evidence from other countries with FPTP of third parties being able to enact real change.
The UK just left the European union because of pressures from UKIP. Now, third parties have less seats than before but they did produce change.
Furthermore, parties in FPTP don’t vote in block in the same way they do in states with proportional representation. A parliamentarian in a FPTP can often affect law without having to be in the majority coalition. Pork is likely the best way to measure individual power. You don’t see pork that’s added to bills completely shift in the US congress and senate when the congressional or senate majorities change.
Indirectly, pressure from UKIP led to the current Brexit situation—which as gjm points out, has not yet resulted in the UK leaving. However, UKIP’s vote increase didn’t cause Brexit, it simply led to a referendum. But the conservatives could have easily not called the referendum in the end since UKIP’s high vote share did not translate into any seats in government. I think it’s much easier to pin the blame on Cameron’s arrogance and putting party politics ahead of country, than it is on UKIP.
Nonetheless, even if you do not agree with that assessment, Brexit remains one data point. I am not personally aware of any other such events occuring in the likes of Canada or India, or similar examples in the UK.
I know little of the US pork barrel system, so can’t offer comment on that.
The UK has not left the European Union. It has (narrowly) voted to do so, and it has issued the EU with formal notification of its intention to leave, and the obvious assumption is that it will in fact leave, but right now the UK is still in the EU and it’s probably not impossible for it to stay in if its politicians thought they would improve their chances of reelection by making that happen.
I agree that UKIP seems to have had a lot of influence despite being a small party. I do wonder whether a group with similar goals that wasn’t an actual political party could have had comparable influence, but on the whole I think probably not.
They don’t have FPTP for a broad national leadership, though, and that’s the important thing.
The Coalition government of 2010 was the first coalition in almost a century, and indeed you can find only 2 coalition governments in modern British political history. It was not the norm at all, and was heavily influenced by the bizarre regional nature of British politics. Meanwhile the most recent election can be seen as another FPTP aberration, since the most representative government would have been a Lab-Lib-SNP coalition rather than a Con minority. What is more, 2017 saw minor parties almost completely wiped out with 82% of votes and 89% of seats going to the 2 largest parties. The UK is a poor example of third party influence, I would say.
Speaking about “bizare regional nature” of politics basically means that there are political factors in play that are outside of your model for analysis politics.
If you have learned in school that political power flows through very specific formal channels than you will find informal ways in which political power flows bizare.
Wikipedia summarizes the insight that got Robert Caro to write the biography of Robert Moses as:
Telling people that American politics is so messy as it is because of formal arguments about first-past-the-post voting is similar to explaining that the way highways get build with formal mathematical formulas about traffic density.
Even if you would have ranked choice voting system that wouldn’t change anything substantial about the quality of political decisions. Yes, it might be a bit more optimal but it wouldn’t change anything about the underlying core problems.
Related data:
A couple years ago, there were a bunch of sensational headlines along the lines of “US is an Oligarchy, not a Democracy, New Study Finds”. The actual study is an interesting read: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
It correlated the average preferences of average citizens, economic elites, and special interest groups (divided into “mass public interest groups” and “business interest groups”). Interestingly, Table 2 shows that economic elite preferences actually correlate with average citizen preferences at .78. Also, business interest groups correlate with mass public interest group preferences at −0.05, but all interest groups overall at 0.96, so I guess the vast majority of interest groups are business interest groups? Aside from “all interest groups”, business interests seem to correlate negatively with everything else, although not as negatively as I would have thought.
They then looked at the probability of various legislation passing, given that various categories were for or against it on average. They focus on cases where, for example, economic elites favor something but average citizens are against it, and compare it to actual policy outcomes passing or failing. They build several models for power and influence, and do a bunch of statistics I haven’t read the details of to try to figure out how much influence various groups have on actual policy outcomes.
Eyeballing figure 1, if looks like if 10% of average americans support something, it has maybe a 30% chance of passing, but if 90% of average citizens support something, it has maybe a 31% chance of passing. Conversely, if 10% of economic elites favor a piece of legislation, it has only a 10% chance of passing, but if 90% of them favor it, it has a 60% chance of passing.
Both of those graphs were fairly linear, and had a good spread, with lots of legislation with both high support and high opposition. They also tried to graph the net number of interest groups in support or opposition to legislation, vs. the probability of it passing. However, in almost all cases, there were less than 4 more either supporting or opposing each bill, so all their data points are clustered in the center. I’m not sure I believed their model projections outside of that narrow range, but if you believe that weird-shaped s-curve, then more net interest groups in support of a bill does cause it to be much more likely to pass.
Take all this with a grain of salt, though. There have been a couple follow up studies which stepped this back substantially. As Vox puts it “When the rich and middle class disagree, each wins about half the time”:
And also:
That makes you wonder: If only 7.4% of the variance is due to these groups, then what on earth is determining policy??!!
Right. Obvious answer is obvious.
Or maybe the middle class, since they are conspicuously absent from “rich, the poor, and interest groups put together”? I think “rich” is still being defined as top 10% here, and “poor” as bottom 10%.
Or, some interest groups are much more effective than others, so their preferences will be the main driver of everything, but only weekly correlated with the average interest group preference. The same could be true of certain influential elites, if their opinions diverged from those of the rest of the elites. But, that’s a wild guess on my part. This whole thing is a mess I haven’t even begun to sort out in my head.
But it’s probably Moloch.
People like Robert Moses are neither “the rich” nor “the poor”. The same goes for various burocrats who have power inside of governments.