Is there a tested system that has, in practice, avoided this issue, in your view?
The European system with a bunch of parties would, in theory, avoid this, but, looking at the politics of the countries that use it, I don’t see a huge difference. Canada, for instance, has (effectively) got the same deal as America has:
A giant Liberal party and a giant Conservative party, both of which are generally considered tepid and uninspiring (at best) by their constituents.
A regional party that is more or less a subdivision of the giant Liberal party, akin to the one or two Independent congressmen America occasionally gets, or the DFL in MN.
Three “Parties without official status” with negligible seat counts. New Democratic can maybe serve as a spoiler occasionally if the next-best party upsets its supporters, but the libertarian/green parties in America can already do that, just in a slightly different way.
It’s a similar story for the rest of the anglosphere. Game theory dictates that making a few compromises and joining into a bloc that can capture a majority is better (for politicians, at least) than sticking it out as a principled minority, so you end up with political K-means N=2 regardless of the political architecture you use. This is especially notable in recent years, as nationalism has grown in Europe and there’s been talk of the ostensibly right and left wing established parties forming into a bloc to keep nationalists from governing. Even when a “third party” faction gets big enough to nearly capture a majority, and even in the system that’s generally considered fairer to them, you still end up with two giant blobs duking it out.
Third parties serve as kingmakers in parliamentary systems when no party has a majority, and in return get concessions for priorities that neither the left nor the right parties care about.
In theory, that’s the idea, but that’s also the idea behind third parties in FPTP. The Ulbricht pardon, for example, was promised and acted upon to mitigate the impact of a libertarian spoiler. Likewise a lot of things that the GOP was forced to adopt to avoid being flanked by the Libertarian party, such as some substantial pushback on neoconservative foreign policy[1].
I’ll grant that left-leaning third parties in America have had considerably less success on this front, but I think this is primarily due to an unwillingness to play hardball. There is an understanding that Trump primary voters would’ve been happy to punish the Republican Party establishment severely if they had taken the same measures to suppress their candidate as the Democratic Party’s establishment had taken to suppress Bernie Sanders. However, upwards of 90 percent of Sanders primary voters capitulated and voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general, even though it was ultimately fruitless for them to do so.
In the opposite direction, as mentioned above, we see considerable electoral success for nationalist parties in Europe, but any policy gains they’ve seen have come from either capturing an outright majority or from other parties fearing a “quasi-spoiler” effect from losing seats to a nationalist party that they are, for one reason or another, not permitted to form a majority with. The intended behavior of the system, in which strong third parties can extract policy concessions by acting as kingmakers, has not occurred.
As best I can tell, it is the respective personalities of establishment and populist leadership that determine the effectiveness of third parties, rather than the system in which they operate.
The Obama policy of trying to avoid ground troop deployments in favor of drones and indirect measures was, if anything, followed even more closely by the Trump administration—the Afghanistan surge, for instance, in which 30,000 additional troops were deployed into Afghanistan in a single burst, has no counterpart in either of his terms, and the Bush policy of major foreign occupations is completely gone, with every candidate that tried to promote it being considered unelectable. A 2% Libertarian defection rate is enough to sink them, and the party at large knows it.
Most of the anglosphere outside the US inherited the Westminster system from the UK. Look at France instead, for example. It totally avoids that issue, but instead there are too many different (along more than one axis) parties not willing to collaborate with each other, so forming a government and passing a budget is very difficult
so forming a government and passing a budget is very difficult
I feel like that can’t be the core problem of their system, since budgets do get passed, governments do get formed, and policies do get enacted. Somebody is clearly getting their way.
A look at their Senate indicates a giant block of the sort of sort of squishy Conservative Liberals that European countries are all well-known for (SR), a smaller group of squishy centrists somewhat to their left (UC), and then a variety of different socialist parties, with a few seats going to other centrists of different stripes. The ruling government in the national assembly is formed from two liberal parties and a pro-EU liberal-conservative party. It’s supported by a socialist party and a “center-right to right-wing” party, neither of which seems to have sufficient influence or will to meaningfully alter the status quo, and opposed by RN, the largest party in the National Assembly, which has almost as many seats as all three governing parties combined, alongside some socialist parties that weren’t interested in playing ball and a handful of fringe regional parties whose policies are impenetrable to me as a non-Frenchman. Which seems about in line with the various non-America anglosphere countries in terms of who has power and who doesn’t.
Non sequitor. In a high dimensional space, things varying greatly along only one dimension and being exactly the same in all other dimensions are similar. This feels like an argument over definitions, but I disagree with the implication in this context that a single axis of differentiation is good enough for political parties.
That’s not a problem of similarity, it’s a problem of one-dimensionality, caused by FPTP’s destruction of third parties.
Is there a tested system that has, in practice, avoided this issue, in your view?
The European system with a bunch of parties would, in theory, avoid this, but, looking at the politics of the countries that use it, I don’t see a huge difference. Canada, for instance, has (effectively) got the same deal as America has:
A giant Liberal party and a giant Conservative party, both of which are generally considered tepid and uninspiring (at best) by their constituents.
A regional party that is more or less a subdivision of the giant Liberal party, akin to the one or two Independent congressmen America occasionally gets, or the DFL in MN.
Three “Parties without official status” with negligible seat counts. New Democratic can maybe serve as a spoiler occasionally if the next-best party upsets its supporters, but the libertarian/green parties in America can already do that, just in a slightly different way.
It’s a similar story for the rest of the anglosphere. Game theory dictates that making a few compromises and joining into a bloc that can capture a majority is better (for politicians, at least) than sticking it out as a principled minority, so you end up with political K-means N=2 regardless of the political architecture you use. This is especially notable in recent years, as nationalism has grown in Europe and there’s been talk of the ostensibly right and left wing established parties forming into a bloc to keep nationalists from governing. Even when a “third party” faction gets big enough to nearly capture a majority, and even in the system that’s generally considered fairer to them, you still end up with two giant blobs duking it out.
Canada also uses FPTP, so this is not the example you should be using for examining alternatives.
Proportional representation, which is common in continental Europe, does result in a diversity of parties in practice.
Going back to my original question, which country do you think is the best representative of a non-FPTP system?
Third parties serve as kingmakers in parliamentary systems when no party has a majority, and in return get concessions for priorities that neither the left nor the right parties care about.
In theory, that’s the idea, but that’s also the idea behind third parties in FPTP. The Ulbricht pardon, for example, was promised and acted upon to mitigate the impact of a libertarian spoiler. Likewise a lot of things that the GOP was forced to adopt to avoid being flanked by the Libertarian party, such as some substantial pushback on neoconservative foreign policy[1].
I’ll grant that left-leaning third parties in America have had considerably less success on this front, but I think this is primarily due to an unwillingness to play hardball. There is an understanding that Trump primary voters would’ve been happy to punish the Republican Party establishment severely if they had taken the same measures to suppress their candidate as the Democratic Party’s establishment had taken to suppress Bernie Sanders. However, upwards of 90 percent of Sanders primary voters capitulated and voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general, even though it was ultimately fruitless for them to do so.
In the opposite direction, as mentioned above, we see considerable electoral success for nationalist parties in Europe, but any policy gains they’ve seen have come from either capturing an outright majority or from other parties fearing a “quasi-spoiler” effect from losing seats to a nationalist party that they are, for one reason or another, not permitted to form a majority with. The intended behavior of the system, in which strong third parties can extract policy concessions by acting as kingmakers, has not occurred.
As best I can tell, it is the respective personalities of establishment and populist leadership that determine the effectiveness of third parties, rather than the system in which they operate.
The Obama policy of trying to avoid ground troop deployments in favor of drones and indirect measures was, if anything, followed even more closely by the Trump administration—the Afghanistan surge, for instance, in which 30,000 additional troops were deployed into Afghanistan in a single burst, has no counterpart in either of his terms, and the Bush policy of major foreign occupations is completely gone, with every candidate that tried to promote it being considered unelectable. A 2% Libertarian defection rate is enough to sink them, and the party at large knows it.
Most of the anglosphere outside the US inherited the Westminster system from the UK. Look at France instead, for example. It totally avoids that issue, but instead there are too many different (along more than one axis) parties not willing to collaborate with each other, so forming a government and passing a budget is very difficult
I feel like that can’t be the core problem of their system, since budgets do get passed, governments do get formed, and policies do get enacted. Somebody is clearly getting their way.
A look at their Senate indicates a giant block of the sort of sort of squishy Conservative Liberals that European countries are all well-known for (SR), a smaller group of squishy centrists somewhat to their left (UC), and then a variety of different socialist parties, with a few seats going to other centrists of different stripes. The ruling government in the national assembly is formed from two liberal parties and a pro-EU liberal-conservative party. It’s supported by a socialist party and a “center-right to right-wing” party, neither of which seems to have sufficient influence or will to meaningfully alter the status quo, and opposed by RN, the largest party in the National Assembly, which has almost as many seats as all three governing parties combined, alongside some socialist parties that weren’t interested in playing ball and a handful of fringe regional parties whose policies are impenetrable to me as a non-Frenchman. Which seems about in line with the various non-America anglosphere countries in terms of who has power and who doesn’t.
One-dimensionality is similarity (lack of differentiation along other dimensions).
Strong correlation and strong anticorrelation are different things.
Non sequitor. In a high dimensional space, things varying greatly along only one dimension and being exactly the same in all other dimensions are similar. This feels like an argument over definitions, but I disagree with the implication in this context that a single axis of differentiation is good enough for political parties.