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I'm probably going to get massively down voted for this, but here it goes. I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans thi

I'm probably going to get massively down voted for this, but here it goes. I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans think they can only have a viable 3rd party with ranked choice voting. The response I hear all the time is "We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. All politics is zero-sum, including in every other country. Actually, parliamentary democracies are even more winner take all than in the US, because they (typically) replace much more of their bureaucracy than Americans do after their elections. Other countries have viable 3rd parties and when no one has a majority you build a coalition. I really fail to see why Americans insist they can't have a viable 3rd party other than sheer historical prejudice, ignorance, and inertia. Perhaps the one difference is that 3rd parties would be spoilers in a Presidential race, but splitting your ticket is easy enough (and if it's not then this country is irretrievably ignorant). My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US, and all the CGP Grey fans will have to go back to the policy drawing board. I'll be the first one to be pleased if I'm wrong, but I doubt I will be. The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional. Edit: I want to be clear that I'm not against RCV, I just don't think its going to do anything.

jaredklewis 6y ago
> Yeah, so does everyone else. But they don’t. For example, Norway, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, none of which use the first past the post voting system (winner takes all) that most of the US does. As a result, those countries all have a healthy number of parties for voters to choose from.
- hacknat 6y ago
  Ranked choice voting doesn't eliminate the winner-take-all, zero-sum nature of politics. That's entirely my point. All political power is zero-sum (the more I have the less you have), it doesn't matter what voting system you implement. So my broader point is that, given that plenty of other countries don't have ranked voting of any kind and plenty of viable 3rd parties, Americans really have no valid policy argument to make as to why they don't have viable 3rd parties. The only arguments that hold any water are cultural.
  - jaredklewis 6y ago
    First of all, the countries that use FPTP voting systems and do have more than two parties (like the UK) have the highest measured levels of misrepresentation error in the world, so I don't think it is a goal we should strive for. Further, I disagree that politics is inherently winner takes all. For example, ranked choice voting allows that I can be represented by a moderate candidate. If I can't get my first choice (a liberal candidate), I would prefer a moderate candidate to a right wing extremist. In this case, compromise (the opposite of winner takes all) is possible. Another example is proportional representation, which allows for views with less than 51% of the vote to get representation. So for example, say a Green Party gets 30% of the vote, so they will get 30% of the representation. These minority parties are still often able to implement their agenda by making deals with the other parties. If Green is willing to compromise with either the Labor party or the Conservative party on their union stance in exchange for environmental votes, they can achieve their goals with less than a majority.
    - hacknat 6y ago
      I'd be genuinely interested in a paper, citation, article, or whatever for your misrepresentation claim. I've never heard that before (not saying you're wrong).
      - Kliment 6y ago
        Looking at any recent election will show you the discrepancy quite clearly - the difference they are referring to is the difference between popular vote percentages (nationwide) and number of MPs for a given party (FPTP split by constituency). Parties with high popular vote percentages often get very few to no representatives because they were never the top candidate in any constituency.
      - jaredklewis 6y ago
        Can't bring to mind a good book or paper that compares all the countries side by side, but still fairly sure UK would top the list. For a good introduction to the sad state of UK elections: > The electoral process is "rigged". In 2005, if you total all the votes cast for the main parties, it took an average 26,906 votes to elect a Labour MP, 44,373 to elect a Tory MP and 96,539 votes to elect a Lib Dem MP. Not since the rotten boroughs of the 18th century have elections been so corrupt. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/democracy-first-past-the-post https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/democr... > All votes should be worth the same, right? With First Past the Post votes are not equal. In the last election it took 26,000 votes for the SNP to win a seat compared with over 800,000 for the Green Party. https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/first-past-the-post https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/first-past-the-post
vkou 6y ago
Parliamentary democracies are more winner take all when you only vote for one chamber (as in Canada), because that one chamber has more power than any one chamber in the US. However, in parliamentary democracies, especially if they use proportionate representation of some form, coalitions are typical, which produces much better governance than perpetual two-party rule, where the two parties agree on ~70% of issues, and one of the two is absolutely insane on the other ~30%. Hell, Canada uses FPTP, which results in some very weird election results, but even so, it has multiple parties - because coalitions are possible, and a minority party actually has some political power. There's criticism that proportional representation results in fringe, whacky parties getting into parliament, but I am no longer swayed by that argument - because over the past ~twelve years, one of the two parties in the US has become a fringe, whacky party, and it routinely wins elections.
- hacknat 6y ago
  There is no reason coalitions could not be possible in the US legislative branch. You could argue that they existed here in the 1950s and 1960s, to some extent, when the parties were so race-scrambled that there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats (i.e. there were effectively 4 parties in the US at the time).
DougWebb 6y ago
CGP Grey has excellent videos on this. Here's one that discusses the problems with the system the US uses now (in most states): https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
- hacknat 6y ago
  Plenty of other governments have first past the post voting and viable 3rd parties. The only argument where this holds water is with executive elections (president, governor).
  - DFHippie 6y ago
    > The only argument where this holds water is with executive elections (president, governor) If you concede this point then I don't think there's much more to argue about. Nobody argues about the many third parties in the US that just endorse some major party candidate for the chief executive positions. When they run their own candidates for these positions is when they become spoilers.
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Executives are pretty much what we're talking about with RCV, yes. We may be paying too much attention to those, but that's a bit of a different problem.
jopsen 6y ago
In scandinavian countries each party typically belongs to either the red block or blue block. Some of them do flirt with the idea of switching sides. But it's typically always the red or the blue block that forms a coalition (or minority government with supporting parties from same block). So you effectively have two sides. And parties are pressured by the media to declare which block they support before each election. And they rarely switch sides. Which party within a block you vote on, does matter.. because it gives those parties more influence on the government. But you could also say that what you vote for during the primaries on US elections does matter.. however, at each stage on use election a group that only makes up 30% of the population gets no representation.
- hacknat 6y ago
  Still not a valid argument for why the US couldn't have a valid 3rd party. The same would be true here. No one who votes Green is going to vote for Libertarians or Constitutionalists.
  - DFHippie 6y ago
    It doesn't work here because we don't have a parliamentary system of government. That is, our executive is chosen separately from the legislature, so in that contest, the presidential contest, third parties act as spoilers. There's no sense in which Nader could have said he was in the "Democratic block" and thereby given the power of his voters to Gore.
    - hacknat 6y ago
      France is in a similar position. Granted France is 2-round, but arguably the US is too.
    - jopsen 6y ago
      Well, even in the legislative branches, your party could get 10% of votes in 3 states and still not get any representation. As I understand it, all of your votes must be concentrated in a single district to get any representation. Hence, you end up with two choices.
huevosabio 6y ago
A lot of the other countries that do not have RCV also have one or more of the following features that help keep a healthy number of parties (not an exhaustive list at all): - parliamentary system - proportional representation [0] (e.g. party list systems, mixed member proportional representation [1]) - two-round voting [2] (like France) RCV is not the only way, but it is _a_ way to foster viable 3rd parties. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#PR_electoral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#PR... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
- hacknat 6y ago
  Yes, but there are still first-past-the-post governments with viable 3rd parties.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I actually think ranked choice voting would destroy our relatively successful third party here in Canada (the NDP). Essentially when you survey voters you'd find that there's three voting blocs: a) First choice Conservative, Second choice Liberal b) First choice Liberal, Second choice NDP c) First choice NDP, Second choice Liberal Given this, ranked voting would probably just produce permanent majorities for the Liberals, and wipe out the NDP almost entirely. The Liberals are the first or second choice for most voters. I'm not sure why 'progressive' voters here in Canada often seem to prefer this voting methodology when advocating reform. Experience in Australia should show them what happens, where both major parties are now pretty close to the right and left wing options are basically off the table. I'm not the only person who thinks this. When the Liberal gov't tried to push ranked ballots through a few years ago analysts in the NDP clearly saw this as a threat, and did everything they could to stop it (along with the Conservatives), seeing it as a nakedly cynical attempt to ensure nearly permanent Liberal majorities. I would far, far prefer a mixed-member-proportional system like in Germany. And so, yeah, I agree I don't think in the US it would do anything. The same forces of conformity towards the right would still happen. Effectively the US already has a kind of ranking choice through its primary system. The two parties shift and "become" representative of whatever plurality can capture and win the primary.
- scj 6y ago
  I'd suggest that any new voting system in Canada would lead to very different results given time. Parties that aren't in contention for a given riding will be replaced by parties that are (think evolutionary niches).
dragonwriter 6y ago
> I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans think they can only have a viable 3rd party with ranked choice voting. You don't need IRV (sometimes, annoyingly, called Ranked Choice Voting), you just need any of a wide range of electoral systems that aren't the ones usually used in the US for federal and state legislative and executive elections. > The response I hear all the time is "We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. All politics is zero-sum, including in every other country. First, this is wrong on its face. Except in a structural duopoly, politics very often is not zero-sum, and, in any case, “winner take all” is not the same thing as zero sum, it's both zero sum and all or nothing. Even zero-sum political systems need not be all-or-nothing. But, more important, you are entirely misunderstanding the meaning of the response. It's not about the overall system being “winner take all” (which, even in the US, it is not) or zero-sum (which is arguably a consequence of what is being discussed, but not the direct issue.) “Winner-take-all” is a term for either Plurality or Majority/runoff election systems, which structurally make (more strongly in the first case) the expected value of voting for a candidate other than the most favored of the top two negative, creating a structural incentive for at least local duopoly when used for legislative districts or regional executive seats, and for national duopoly when used for national office. While the national duopoly is frequently commented on, it's actually historical weaker than local duopoly in the US. You can find cases where locally (even for a while at the state level, most notably the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party before they merged with the Democrats) one of the two parties in the duopoly isn't a major national party, for instance. > Other countries have viable 3rd parties and when no one has a majority you build a coalition. Name one country that does so with a strong, separately elected (not by the legislature) executive who is elected (directly or indirectly) by a method which doesn't involve ranked choices and uses single-member national legislative districts with majority/runoff or plurality elections. The UK manages it with plurality legislative constituencies, largely because of regional differences (much like the US has sometimes had regionally differing duopoly, but with much more significance nationally because it's a parliamentary system so parties that aren't nationally top-two that get seats can still have a role in choosing and participating in the national executive other than by endorsing a major party candidate in advance and surrendering power to them.) > I really fail to see why Americans insist they can't have a viable 3rd party other than sheer historical prejudice, ignorance, and inertia. Because some of us have actually studied comparative government and the structural incentives and effects of different electoral systems. > My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US. It probably won't; it's the alternative electoral system that does the absolute least to resolve the strucural impediments created by the systems currently in use (it's basically a small step less strong on those problems than majority/runoff), and unless it existed at both stages of the Presidential election (or that was reduced to a single-stage popular vote using RCV/IRV), it wouldn't address one of the biggest reinforcers of national duopoly. > The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional. The duopoly problem is 100% institutional and 0% cultural, in that it is entirely an effect of the legal and structural design of the institutions of government, especially the electoral systems in use, and not at all a separate product of culture.
hooande 6y ago
It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system. The executive doesn't necessarily represent the majority party in the legislature, which means that the office has a lot of political importance. It doesn't make sense to vote 3rd party when coalitions have such limited power. This isn't about culture or arrogance. There are solid and well researched reasons that the US and similar political systems tend to be dominated by two parties. You can read more about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system. Sure it does, that's how you understand the effect of political systems. What doesn't make sense is ignoring the differences in the electoral structures and pretending that because something works with a radically different electoral structure in one country, the reason it can't happen in the US must not be because of the US electoral system.
  - hooande 6y ago
    There are tradeoffs to every system. We chose first past the post and our executive structure for historical reasons. It's largely working for us (in a broad historical sense) and we're not going to expend the effort to change it without good reason
poulsbohemian 6y ago
>"We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. But they really don't compared to the US. If I vote Green in the US, in most locales (discounting Seattle and Portland here..) that person isn't going to get elected. If I vote Green in Germany (for example), there's a very real possibility that Greens will end up in a coalition government. >My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US, Agreed! >The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional. Yes. Money talks. If someone said "I'm forming a Progressive Party" or "I'm forming an Eisenhower Republicans Party", they would have enough philosophical supporters to make it happen, but they would need name-brand donors and name-brand candidates to have a meaningful impact. So far, that hasn't happened.
gusgordon 6y ago
The primary goal of RCV in the US is to address the hostile partisan divide. Making more parties viable is secondary. When you have a ranked choice system (even if it's only in a fraction of states), it incentivizes the candidates to not disparage each other. If candidate A attacks B, it means the B supporters will rank A lower. RCV draws candidates closer together.
okennedy 6y ago
The key difference is that in (most) European electoral systems, voters vote for MPs, who then in turn vote among themselves to decide on a leader for the country. This creates a (limited) incentive for cooperation when no single party holds a majority, since a coalition government is required. Simultaneously, voting for an MP has multiple impacts. Even if the MP isn't part of the coalition, they still have a say in how the government legislates, they can participate in debates, write bills, and take advantage of the resources of a government office to help their constituents. Finally, voting for an MP is a local affair. The barrier to entry at this scale is high, but tractable. Alternative parties can offer credible competitions at the town or county level (e.g., the US congress has had at least some "independent" representation as far back as I can remember). These three factors create a substantial difference in incentives in the US presidential election. There are no shades of victory: Even if your elector votes for a 3rd party, there is no long-term benefit. After they cast their vote, they're done. This makes voting for a 3rd party extremely high risk: you're gambling that everyone else feels the same way you do. Even if you don't like either of the main two candidates, you're faced with what amounts to a prisoner's dilemma where the other 300 million players have repeatedly shown a policy of 'always betray'.
ip26 6y ago
I must be missing something, how does splitting your ticket counter the spoiler effect? (Which impacts all US elections, not just the Presidential race) As far as I understand it, a strong & viable 3rd party is nearly impossible for the simple & single reason of the spoiler effect.

jaredklewis 6y ago

> Yeah, so does everyone else. But they don’t. For example, Norway, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, none of which use the first past the post voting system (winner takes all) that most of the US does. As a result, those countries all have a healthy number of parties for voters to choose from.

hacknat 6y ago
Ranked choice voting doesn't eliminate the winner-take-all, zero-sum nature of politics. That's entirely my point. All political power is zero-sum (the more I have the less you have), it doesn't matter what voting system you implement. So my broader point is that, given that plenty of other countries don't have ranked voting of any kind and plenty of viable 3rd parties, Americans really have no valid policy argument to make as to why they don't have viable 3rd parties. The only arguments that hold any water are cultural.
- jaredklewis 6y ago
  First of all, the countries that use FPTP voting systems and do have more than two parties (like the UK) have the highest measured levels of misrepresentation error in the world, so I don't think it is a goal we should strive for. Further, I disagree that politics is inherently winner takes all. For example, ranked choice voting allows that I can be represented by a moderate candidate. If I can't get my first choice (a liberal candidate), I would prefer a moderate candidate to a right wing extremist. In this case, compromise (the opposite of winner takes all) is possible. Another example is proportional representation, which allows for views with less than 51% of the vote to get representation. So for example, say a Green Party gets 30% of the vote, so they will get 30% of the representation. These minority parties are still often able to implement their agenda by making deals with the other parties. If Green is willing to compromise with either the Labor party or the Conservative party on their union stance in exchange for environmental votes, they can achieve their goals with less than a majority.
  - hacknat 6y ago
    I'd be genuinely interested in a paper, citation, article, or whatever for your misrepresentation claim. I've never heard that before (not saying you're wrong).
    - Kliment 6y ago
      Looking at any recent election will show you the discrepancy quite clearly - the difference they are referring to is the difference between popular vote percentages (nationwide) and number of MPs for a given party (FPTP split by constituency). Parties with high popular vote percentages often get very few to no representatives because they were never the top candidate in any constituency.
    - jaredklewis 6y ago
      Can't bring to mind a good book or paper that compares all the countries side by side, but still fairly sure UK would top the list. For a good introduction to the sad state of UK elections: > The electoral process is "rigged". In 2005, if you total all the votes cast for the main parties, it took an average 26,906 votes to elect a Labour MP, 44,373 to elect a Tory MP and 96,539 votes to elect a Lib Dem MP. Not since the rotten boroughs of the 18th century have elections been so corrupt. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/democracy-first-past-the-post https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/democr... > All votes should be worth the same, right? With First Past the Post votes are not equal. In the last election it took 26,000 votes for the SNP to win a seat compared with over 800,000 for the Green Party. https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/first-past-the-post https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/first-past-the-post

vkou 6y ago

Parliamentary democracies are more winner take all when you only vote for one chamber (as in Canada), because that one chamber has more power than any one chamber in the US. However, in parliamentary democracies, especially if they use proportionate representation of some form, coalitions are typical, which produces much better governance than perpetual two-party rule, where the two parties agree on ~70% of issues, and one of the two is absolutely insane on the other ~30%. Hell, Canada uses FPTP, which results in some very weird election results, but even so, it has multiple parties - because coalitions are possible, and a minority party actually has some political power. There's criticism that proportional representation results in fringe, whacky parties getting into parliament, but I am no longer swayed by that argument - because over the past ~twelve years, one of the two parties in the US has become a fringe, whacky party, and it routinely wins elections.

hacknat 6y ago
There is no reason coalitions could not be possible in the US legislative branch. You could argue that they existed here in the 1950s and 1960s, to some extent, when the parties were so race-scrambled that there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats (i.e. there were effectively 4 parties in the US at the time).

DougWebb 6y ago

CGP Grey has excellent videos on this. Here's one that discusses the problems with the system the US uses now (in most states): https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo

hacknat 6y ago
Plenty of other governments have first past the post voting and viable 3rd parties. The only argument where this holds water is with executive elections (president, governor).
- DFHippie 6y ago
  > The only argument where this holds water is with executive elections (president, governor) If you concede this point then I don't think there's much more to argue about. Nobody argues about the many third parties in the US that just endorse some major party candidate for the chief executive positions. When they run their own candidates for these positions is when they become spoilers.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Executives are pretty much what we're talking about with RCV, yes. We may be paying too much attention to those, but that's a bit of a different problem.

jopsen 6y ago

In scandinavian countries each party typically belongs to either the red block or blue block. Some of them do flirt with the idea of switching sides. But it's typically always the red or the blue block that forms a coalition (or minority government with supporting parties from same block). So you effectively have two sides. And parties are pressured by the media to declare which block they support before each election. And they rarely switch sides. Which party within a block you vote on, does matter.. because it gives those parties more influence on the government. But you could also say that what you vote for during the primaries on US elections does matter.. however, at each stage on use election a group that only makes up 30% of the population gets no representation.

hacknat 6y ago
Still not a valid argument for why the US couldn't have a valid 3rd party. The same would be true here. No one who votes Green is going to vote for Libertarians or Constitutionalists.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  It doesn't work here because we don't have a parliamentary system of government. That is, our executive is chosen separately from the legislature, so in that contest, the presidential contest, third parties act as spoilers. There's no sense in which Nader could have said he was in the "Democratic block" and thereby given the power of his voters to Gore.
  - hacknat 6y ago
    France is in a similar position. Granted France is 2-round, but arguably the US is too.
  - jopsen 6y ago
    Well, even in the legislative branches, your party could get 10% of votes in 3 states and still not get any representation. As I understand it, all of your votes must be concentrated in a single district to get any representation. Hence, you end up with two choices.

huevosabio 6y ago

A lot of the other countries that do not have RCV also have one or more of the following features that help keep a healthy number of parties (not an exhaustive list at all): - parliamentary system - proportional representation [0] (e.g. party list systems, mixed member proportional representation [1]) - two-round voting [2] (like France) RCV is not the only way, but it is _a_ way to foster viable 3rd parties. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#PR_electoral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#PR... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

hacknat 6y ago
Yes, but there are still first-past-the-post governments with viable 3rd parties.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

I actually think ranked choice voting would destroy our relatively successful third party here in Canada (the NDP). Essentially when you survey voters you'd find that there's three voting blocs: a) First choice Conservative, Second choice Liberal b) First choice Liberal, Second choice NDP c) First choice NDP, Second choice Liberal Given this, ranked voting would probably just produce permanent majorities for the Liberals, and wipe out the NDP almost entirely. The Liberals are the first or second choice for most voters. I'm not sure why 'progressive' voters here in Canada often seem to prefer this voting methodology when advocating reform. Experience in Australia should show them what happens, where both major parties are now pretty close to the right and left wing options are basically off the table. I'm not the only person who thinks this. When the Liberal gov't tried to push ranked ballots through a few years ago analysts in the NDP clearly saw this as a threat, and did everything they could to stop it (along with the Conservatives), seeing it as a nakedly cynical attempt to ensure nearly permanent Liberal majorities. I would far, far prefer a mixed-member-proportional system like in Germany. And so, yeah, I agree I don't think in the US it would do anything. The same forces of conformity towards the right would still happen. Effectively the US already has a kind of ranking choice through its primary system. The two parties shift and "become" representative of whatever plurality can capture and win the primary.

scj 6y ago
I'd suggest that any new voting system in Canada would lead to very different results given time. Parties that aren't in contention for a given riding will be replaced by parties that are (think evolutionary niches).

dragonwriter 6y ago

> I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans think they can only have a viable 3rd party with ranked choice voting. You don't need IRV (sometimes, annoyingly, called Ranked Choice Voting), you just need any of a wide range of electoral systems that aren't the ones usually used in the US for federal and state legislative and executive elections. > The response I hear all the time is "We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. All politics is zero-sum, including in every other country. First, this is wrong on its face. Except in a structural duopoly, politics very often is not zero-sum, and, in any case, “winner take all” is not the same thing as zero sum, it's both zero sum and all or nothing. Even zero-sum political systems need not be all-or-nothing. But, more important, you are entirely misunderstanding the meaning of the response. It's not about the overall system being “winner take all” (which, even in the US, it is not) or zero-sum (which is arguably a consequence of what is being discussed, but not the direct issue.) “Winner-take-all” is a term for either Plurality or Majority/runoff election systems, which structurally make (more strongly in the first case) the expected value of voting for a candidate other than the most favored of the top two negative, creating a structural incentive for at least local duopoly when used for legislative districts or regional executive seats, and for national duopoly when used for national office. While the national duopoly is frequently commented on, it's actually historical weaker than local duopoly in the US. You can find cases where locally (even for a while at the state level, most notably the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party before they merged with the Democrats) one of the two parties in the duopoly isn't a major national party, for instance. > Other countries have viable 3rd parties and when no one has a majority you build a coalition. Name one country that does so with a strong, separately elected (not by the legislature) executive who is elected (directly or indirectly) by a method which doesn't involve ranked choices and uses single-member national legislative districts with majority/runoff or plurality elections. The UK manages it with plurality legislative constituencies, largely because of regional differences (much like the US has sometimes had regionally differing duopoly, but with much more significance nationally because it's a parliamentary system so parties that aren't nationally top-two that get seats can still have a role in choosing and participating in the national executive other than by endorsing a major party candidate in advance and surrendering power to them.) > I really fail to see why Americans insist they can't have a viable 3rd party other than sheer historical prejudice, ignorance, and inertia. Because some of us have actually studied comparative government and the structural incentives and effects of different electoral systems. > My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US. It probably won't; it's the alternative electoral system that does the absolute least to resolve the strucural impediments created by the systems currently in use (it's basically a small step less strong on those problems than majority/runoff), and unless it existed at both stages of the Presidential election (or that was reduced to a single-stage popular vote using RCV/IRV), it wouldn't address one of the biggest reinforcers of national duopoly. > The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional. The duopoly problem is 100% institutional and 0% cultural, in that it is entirely an effect of the legal and structural design of the institutions of government, especially the electoral systems in use, and not at all a separate product of culture.

hooande 6y ago

It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system. The executive doesn't necessarily represent the majority party in the legislature, which means that the office has a lot of political importance. It doesn't make sense to vote 3rd party when coalitions have such limited power. This isn't about culture or arrogance. There are solid and well researched reasons that the US and similar political systems tend to be dominated by two parties. You can read more about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

dragonwriter 6y ago
> It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system. Sure it does, that's how you understand the effect of political systems. What doesn't make sense is ignoring the differences in the electoral structures and pretending that because something works with a radically different electoral structure in one country, the reason it can't happen in the US must not be because of the US electoral system.
- hooande 6y ago
  There are tradeoffs to every system. We chose first past the post and our executive structure for historical reasons. It's largely working for us (in a broad historical sense) and we're not going to expend the effort to change it without good reason

poulsbohemian 6y ago

>"We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. But they really don't compared to the US. If I vote Green in the US, in most locales (discounting Seattle and Portland here..) that person isn't going to get elected. If I vote Green in Germany (for example), there's a very real possibility that Greens will end up in a coalition government. >My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US, Agreed! >The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional. Yes. Money talks. If someone said "I'm forming a Progressive Party" or "I'm forming an Eisenhower Republicans Party", they would have enough philosophical supporters to make it happen, but they would need name-brand donors and name-brand candidates to have a meaningful impact. So far, that hasn't happened.

gusgordon 6y ago

The primary goal of RCV in the US is to address the hostile partisan divide. Making more parties viable is secondary. When you have a ranked choice system (even if it's only in a fraction of states), it incentivizes the candidates to not disparage each other. If candidate A attacks B, it means the B supporters will rank A lower. RCV draws candidates closer together.

okennedy 6y ago

The key difference is that in (most) European electoral systems, voters vote for MPs, who then in turn vote among themselves to decide on a leader for the country. This creates a (limited) incentive for cooperation when no single party holds a majority, since a coalition government is required. Simultaneously, voting for an MP has multiple impacts. Even if the MP isn't part of the coalition, they still have a say in how the government legislates, they can participate in debates, write bills, and take advantage of the resources of a government office to help their constituents. Finally, voting for an MP is a local affair. The barrier to entry at this scale is high, but tractable. Alternative parties can offer credible competitions at the town or county level (e.g., the US congress has had at least some "independent" representation as far back as I can remember). These three factors create a substantial difference in incentives in the US presidential election. There are no shades of victory: Even if your elector votes for a 3rd party, there is no long-term benefit. After they cast their vote, they're done. This makes voting for a 3rd party extremely high risk: you're gambling that everyone else feels the same way you do. Even if you don't like either of the main two candidates, you're faced with what amounts to a prisoner's dilemma where the other 300 million players have repeatedly shown a policy of 'always betray'.

ip26 6y ago

I must be missing something, how does splitting your ticket counter the spoiler effect? (Which impacts all US elections, not just the Presidential race) As far as I understand it, a strong & viable 3rd party is nearly impossible for the simple & single reason of the spoiler effect.