If it weren’t for this Futurama clip (1999) I would have completely forgotten how everyone considered it a huge problem that American political parties were so similar.
Right now we have problems due to polarization, but that does not mean that all major parties being too similar is not also a problem. There are many reasonable political positions that nobody can vote for because neither major party endorses them, so in this respect we are still suffering from the parties being too similar.
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.
even though it was ultimately fruitless for them to [vote for Clinton]
As of Election Day 2016, there looked like a significant chance that Clinton would win, but by a margin substantially smaller than the size of the Sanders contingent. In the nearby Everett branch where this happened, would you have said that the Sanders voters made a wise or unwise choice?
You might want to pick another example; the assertion “ground troop deployments are politically infeasible” is looking more dubious this year than before.
I’m saying that major deployments might well happen in 2026, not that they already have.
Most obviously, he’s already sent a small number of troops into Venezuela for a mission, plus he’s literally said that he wants the US to be in charge of Venezuela (his Administration walked it back, but he himself still seems happy with the thought). There are plausible things that could happen that would lead him to send in a significant number of soldiers.
Secondly, he allegedly asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up an invasion plan for Greenland. Which would certainly cause a surrender rather than a fight, but a non-dangerous mass deployment would still be a mass deployment.
Crucially, he’s not paying any domestic political price for talking as if he wants to deploy troops in either country, which contradicts your assertion already even without those events (yet) happening. The GOP in Congress once again chickened out of taking any action to constrain him, when they saw that his base wasn’t bothered by it at all.
Add to that his saber-rattling against Cuba, and the possibility that something big happens in Gaza or Iran and he feels like it’s an opportunity.
I’m not claiming a major deployment is over 50% likely, but I’d say it’s over 5%, which is enough that I think your footnote is wrong.
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.
You’re wrong when it comes to the mathematical definition (cosine similarity is looking for normalized dot product ≈ +1, not −1), and wrong in the important practical sense that “similar parties” should result in similar policy outcomes if elected, whereas strongly polarized parties result in quite different policy outcomes if elected. Stop doubling down.
I did not say cosine similar. I understand why you would take it as the default, but it is not the only measure of similarity, and there is no single mathematical definition of similarity. Don’t stoop to pedantry if you’re not going to be precisely correct yourself. (Normally I would not be rude like this, but you have exhausted my goodwill)
The policy outcomes of the two major US parties are similar. I think we have different perspectives on how varied outcomes should be between dissimilar parties. For the most part, both perpetuate the status quo.
If it weren’t for this Futurama clip (1999) I would have completely forgotten how everyone considered it a huge problem that American political parties were so similar.
Right now we have problems due to polarization, but that does not mean that all major parties being too similar is not also a problem. There are many reasonable political positions that nobody can vote for because neither major party endorses them, so in this respect we are still suffering from the parties being too similar.
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.
As of Election Day 2016, there looked like a significant chance that Clinton would win, but by a margin substantially smaller than the size of the Sanders contingent. In the nearby Everett branch where this happened, would you have said that the Sanders voters made a wise or unwise choice?
You might want to pick another example; the assertion “ground troop deployments are politically infeasible” is looking more dubious this year than before.
What deployment are you referring to?
I’m saying that major deployments might well happen in 2026, not that they already have.
Most obviously, he’s already sent a small number of troops into Venezuela for a mission, plus he’s literally said that he wants the US to be in charge of Venezuela (his Administration walked it back, but he himself still seems happy with the thought). There are plausible things that could happen that would lead him to send in a significant number of soldiers.
Secondly, he allegedly asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up an invasion plan for Greenland. Which would certainly cause a surrender rather than a fight, but a non-dangerous mass deployment would still be a mass deployment.
Crucially, he’s not paying any domestic political price for talking as if he wants to deploy troops in either country, which contradicts your assertion already even without those events (yet) happening. The GOP in Congress once again chickened out of taking any action to constrain him, when they saw that his base wasn’t bothered by it at all.
Add to that his saber-rattling against Cuba, and the possibility that something big happens in Gaza or Iran and he feels like it’s an opportunity.
I’m not claiming a major deployment is over 50% likely, but I’d say it’s over 5%, which is enough that I think your footnote is wrong.
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.
You’re wrong when it comes to the mathematical definition (cosine similarity is looking for normalized dot product ≈ +1, not −1), and wrong in the important practical sense that “similar parties” should result in similar policy outcomes if elected, whereas strongly polarized parties result in quite different policy outcomes if elected. Stop doubling down.
I did not say cosine similar. I understand why you would take it as the default, but it is not the only measure of similarity, and there is no single mathematical definition of similarity. Don’t stoop to pedantry if you’re not going to be precisely correct yourself. (Normally I would not be rude like this, but you have exhausted my goodwill)
The policy outcomes of the two major US parties are similar. I think we have different perspectives on how varied outcomes should be between dissimilar parties. For the most part, both perpetuate the status quo.
Aroooo!!!