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Yes, but why does the US have a structural duopoly. There may be certain features of the system that promote it, but I don't think it is close to provable that

Yes, but why does the US have a structural duopoly. There may be certain features of the system that promote it, but I don't think it is close to provable that the US's system of government innately requires a duopoly. The duopoly exists for historic and cultural reasons. > 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. First of all the US has a two round system in most states (most states are open primaries). So France falls into this category. > Because some of us have actually studied comparative government and the structural incentives and effects of different electoral systems. And some of us have actually lived under the electoral process and politics of other countries (in addition to studying them). > The duopoly problem is 100% institutional No problem is 100% institutional. That is facile. Culture obviously plays a role in some regard (why is the opinion on whether "12 Years a Slave" should have won an Oscar a partisan thing?).

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Yes, but why does the US have a structural duopoly. Because of the electoral system. > I don't think it is close to provable that the US's system of government innately requires a duopoly. The structural incentive to duopoly in FPTP voting is mathematically provable. > First of all the US has a two round system in most states (most states are open primaries). Open partisan primaries, which is what most states with open primaries have, aren't the same as a two-round system in terms of promoting multiparty democracy (in fact, they just further reinforce duopoly, since they give voters not aligned with the major parties a chance to influence major party candidate selection instead of participating in alternative parties, which opportunity has a higher expected value when the general election is by plurality.) That said, France is, nevertheless, the one major example that superficially seems to work. OTOH, despite having multiple parties, it's also the established democracy that has empirically nearly as bad a problem with ineffective representation and dissatisfaction with government as the US (see, Arend Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy), so while it manages to paper over the partisan duopoly symptom, it doesn't actually deal with the representational problem. > And some of us have actually lived under the electoral process and politics of other countries So have lots of people in America, and outside of America, including many of the people who have literally written the books on how the US electoral systems causes the both the narrow dimensionality of political discourse, and the partisan duopoly, and the representational failures of the American system of government.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Yes, but why does the US have a structural duopoly. Because of the electoral system. > I don't think it is close to provable that the US's system of government innately requires a duopoly. The structural incentive to duopoly in FPTP voting is mathematically provable. > First of all the US has a two round system in most states (most states are open primaries). Open partisan primaries, which is what most states with open primaries have, aren't the same as a two-round system in terms of promoting multiparty democracy (in fact, they just further reinforce duopoly, since they give voters not aligned with the major parties a chance to influence major party candidate selection instead of participating in alternative parties, which opportunity has a higher expected value when the general election is by plurality.) That said, France is, nevertheless, the one major example that superficially seems to work. OTOH, despite having multiple parties, it's also the established democracy that has empirically nearly as bad a problem with ineffective representation and dissatisfaction with government as the US (see, Arend Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy), so while it manages to paper over the partisan duopoly symptom, it doesn't actually deal with the representational problem. > And some of us have actually lived under the electoral process and politics of other countries So have lots of people in America, and outside of America, including many of the people who have literally written the books on how the US electoral systems causes the both the narrow dimensionality of political discourse, and the partisan duopoly, and the representational failures of the American system of government.