[EM] Challenge: two-party methods

[Juho Laatu]

On 9.7.2011, at 16.14, James Gilmour wrote:

> Juho Laatu  > Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2011 10:35 AM
>> After some recent discussions and thoughts around two-party 
>> systems I thought it would be interesting to discuss 
>> two-party systems also in a more positive spirit. The 
>> assumption is thus that we want the system to be two-party 
>> oriented. We want to have two strong parties, and one of them 
>> should rule. We want to allow only well established parties 
>> with wide support to rule. The first obvious approach is to 
>> ban all other parties than the two leading parties. But maybe 
>> we don't want  to be so brutal. Let's not ban the possibly 
>> already existing, much liked and hopeful third parties. It is 
>> also good to have some competition in the system. Let's not 
>> allow the two leading parties think that they don't have to 
>> care about the voters and they can do whatever they want, and 
>> stay in power forever.
> 
> This is a very strange proposal, all the more so because your principal objective is not clear.  Is your objective to manipulate the
> voting system so that all the smaller parties are more or less crushed out of the political system, leaving only two?

The idea is not to manipulate a working system but to provide an ideal two-party system. The rules and ideals of a two-party system may be different from other systems, so the method may seem strange if seen as a proposal for some other kind of elections (e.g. for multi-party countries). There may thus be different elections with different kind of requirements. Here the requirement is to allow the strongest parties to rule (except that it must be possible also for the small parties to become large parties one day). Small parties are thus not crushed out of the political system. They are not allowed to win yet, but they are well nursed in the hope that one day they will become large parties.

>  Or is your
> objective to ensure single-party majority government where the government comes directly from the national elections?

The target is to have a single-party government. Majority of voters should prefer it over the second largest party (in my example method at least) but there is no requirement of having an absolute majority of first preferences (in my example the votes were rankings, so the winner may be ranked e.g. second in many ballots).

> 
> The first of these is not, to my mind, compatible with any definition of democracy.

Ok, I think I escaped that criterion although the intention is not to let the small parties rule tis time.

> 
> If single-party majority government is the objective, that is very easy to implement.  If no party (in fairly representative
> elections) wins more than half of the seats, allocate 55% of the seats to the party with most votes nationally and divide the
> remaining seats proportionately among the remaining parties.  This has already been done in national public elections, e.g. in Italy
> in the 1920s, when the 'premium' was two-thirds not 55%.

One of the targets was to avoid the spoiler problem. I think in this method a small party could reduce the votes of the otherwise largest party so that it loses its "55% position".

> 
> Assuming you are suggesting this in the context of electing an assembly (national or regional parliament) and not a single-winner
> election (state governor or president)

I talked about single winners in the sense that one party will rule. This could mean electing one single president, electing the only representative of a single-winner district, or electing an assembly so that it would clearly delegate power to one of the large parties (as in the 55% rule).

> , it is very interesting to note what happened in Malta after STV-PR was introduced some 80
> years ago.  Before STV-PR was introduced AND for the first 40 years of its use, candidates from three, four or five parties were
> elected to the Parliament at each election, but for the past 40 years only two parties have been represented in the Parliament.  If
> you believe at all in representative democracy I think it is much the best to leave that aspect of party dynamics to the voters.

I do believe in representative democracy where each section of the voters if properly represented in the system. The voters might be split in two or more sections, or i no clear sections at all (if e.g. the representation is strongly individual based, not party based).

On the other hand a two-party system could be considered a valid form of democracy too. In the challenge I tried to seek new approaches to implementing two-aprty systems. One could characterize two-party systems so that the intention is that the dividing line between the two parties represents the median voter. The two parties are expected to change their opinions in time so that the median point can be found (otherwise the opposition party will remain in opposition for a long time). The most common methods, plurality with single-winner districts and plurality to elect a single winner (e.g. a president) tend to have some problems like the spoiler problem. The question is then if one could improve the current two-party systems so that they would work better as intended.

In my definition I took the position that in a two-party system we don't allow small parties to rule until they have grown bigger. An alternative approach would be to allow also small compromise candidates to win. That would be ok as well, but this time I wanted to focus on very pure two-party systems where the target is strictly to allow only two parties to rule (with the exception that they may lose their large party status one day). One philosophical argument behind this approach is that if we have single-party governments it is good that those parties represent a large section of the population instead of being just less bad than the candidate of the competing party. The society is intended to reach its balance by alternating those two leading parties, so compromise candidates are not necessarily needed to achieve the balance.

I must say that I personally lean more in the direction of multi-party systems. But one need not see two-party systems just as failed attempts to implement multi-party systems, or as otherwise failed attempts to implement democracy. One can see them as well as intentionally chosen forms of democracy where the alternating two parties have been chosen as the preferred way to rule the society. If that is the case, all we need to do is to eliminate the current problems from the election methods (and the whole system), and the system works better than ever.

We may decide that this better working society will or will not allow also third parties to rule. Maybe we would need also another challenge to find best approaches to improve two-party systems so that they would allow also third parties to rule, but still not become multi-party systems.)

Juho


> 
> James
> 
> 
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