[EM] Challenge: two-party methods

[Juho Laatu]

On 9.7.2011, at 19.59, James Gilmour wrote:

> Juho
> I regret to have to say that I find your approach confused and confusing, and basically anti-democratic  -  which is a surprise and
> a disappointment.

I agree that democracy as defined by this challenge sets some strict limits to how democracy works. The intention is however just to redo what two-party systems do today (two parties rule, minor parties allowed but not in a major role), but aiming at some better implementation.

> 
> There is nothing at all wrong with a "two party system" if that is what the voters really want.  But it is something else altogether
> to devise or manipulate a voting system so that it will produce a two party result when that is not the wish of the voters.  There
> is nothing inherently good or bad about a two party system, provided it does fairly reflect the wishes of the voters.  Of course,
> such a system would be bad if it did not fairly reflect the wishes of the voters.

Agreed. I'm not trying to say that political systems should be two-party systems. The challenge is just to provide better tools for those societies / voters that seriously want to have a very traditional two-party system.

> 
> If we are discussing voting systems for use within a "representative democracy" to elect a parliament or assembly, I cannot see how
> there can be any escape from the requirement for "democracy" in the voting system.  A voting system may have one effect or another,
> and its effects may be tolerated by the electors, but that is quite different from deliberately devising a system to crush the
> smaller parties.  That can only be anti-democratic.

The methods of this challenge are no good if the target s to have a _proportional_ "representative democracy".

The intention is not to crush the small parties but to treat them better (=allowing them to grow) than current two-party systems do (but not as favourably as e.g. using Condorcet in single-seat districts).

> 
> All political parties are coalitions, some broad, some narrow.  So there is a very simple solution to the spoiler problem where
> single-party majority government is required, especially with the "55% seats" rule for the largest minority.  If the potentially
> largest party finds itself second, all it has to do is broaden its internal coalition to take in the supporters of the most
> acceptable of the spoiler parties so that it will secure first place.  The attraction for the spoiler party is that it will become
> part of the government.

A multi-party system with the 55% rule and single-party governments almost meets the criteria of the challenge. It allows also small parties to live, although a merger to the big ones might be tempting as you say. It is possible that this method would lead to alternating two parties, but it is also possible that there could be three or more alternating parties. (It would btw be an interesting new challenge to identify also also methods that lead to single-party governments but with no restrictions on the number of parties.)

I'm not sure that smaller parties would be willing to merge with the larger ones. Often small parties have strong leaders that want to build their own future and they tend to fight on even if they were spoilers. The "55% system" could however soften this problem a bit since the temptation to buy one's way to the government must be quite strong.

> 
> One could argue that plurality in single-member districts, as in the UK and the USA, is a voting system designed for a two party
> political system (ignoring its other defects).  Conservative and Labour in the UK and Republicans and Democrats in the USA no doubt
> see this system as a mechanism for entrenching and reinforcing the two party system.  It is thus interesting, that in England there
> is a three party system and in Scotland a four party system, and these emerged under plurality in SMDs.  What happened in these two
> countries, for different reasons, was that the two main parties were not able to broaden their coalitions and successfully reach out
> to the third and fourth parties and the supporters of the third and fourth parties.  It is my view that in England, at least, the
> political landscape could have been quite different if the UK had used STV-PR to elect the Westminster Parliament since 1945.

STV-PR is essentially a multi-party scheme (or a corresponding proportional scheme with weaker ties to parties than list based systems have, if you want), so it would certainly lead to a somewhat different outcome. (The first limitations in STV-PR on the number of parties may come from the number of seats per district.)

I don't know the party evolution history of England and Scotland to give educated comments on that. Single-member / single-seat districts could evolve so that in some districts the strongest parties are A and B but in some others e.g. A and C. It depends on the rules at national level how well this kind of three-party system can survive in time. It could evolve e.g. so that parties A and B are about the same size and party C never rules. Or party C could co-operate with party B. But as said, I don't know the situation well enough to comment anything more than that in theory single-seat districts may allow also more parties although there is some tendency to reduce the number of major parties to two.

What I would like to see is clear understanding in each country on what people really want. And once they know, they can also make their system respect that wish. Unfortunately the main rule is that the current political situation is a result of decades of political history and fixed positions, and unwillingness to change anything due to various interests of all the parties and politicians. I mean that political systems are very complex and already in a stable state. But good discussions may help. And that is one reason why I created this challenge. I have an interest to see what the two-party countries really want - to be strictly two-party systems, or to take steps towards allowing also smaller parties to have some say, or to take steps towards proportional representation.

> 
> On a smaller point, I find your use of "single winner" undesirably confusing.  Surely "single-winner" should refer only to
> "single-seat elections"?  The term has to mean something very different if you try to apply it to multi-seat elections for a
> representative assembly.  In a single-seat election the best you can do is guarantee representation to the majority of those
> participating in the vote  -  and you deny any representation to all the minorities.  But in a multi-seat election the situation can
> be, and should be, completely different, in that you can guarantee representation to all significant points of view.  So I think we
> should always reserve "single-winner" for "single-seat" elections and use "single-party majority" for multi-seat elections.  The
> concepts are quite different.

My intention was to use term single-winner to refer to _methods_ that pick one alternative only (possibly a person) as the winner. I used term single-seat to refer to the number of elected persons per district. The challenge was about having two parties (using whatever method, although single-seat districts and single-winner methods are a typical approach). My intention was to include also presidential elections in the challenge since at least in the U.S. they are an essential part of the two-party system.

I agree that we should have clear and exact definitions of the terms that we use. There surely is space for improvements.

My aim (or actually not mine but the aim of the challenge) was to deny independent representation of minorities in most cases. I thus assumed that hard core two-party systems would want the representation to be mainly from two parties (that take also minorities into account, to some extent at least). I left it open if some districts could have different two parties than some others (if we use single-seat districts) since I didn't define if one should use single-seat districts or something else. The example method that I presented allows voters to change the leading two parties in their (single-seat) district as they wish without any spoiler problems. That example method thus allows also smaller parties to live and party structure to change but it does not support proportional representation. At least in the U.S. style system where the presidential election forms also the government it does not allow small parties to rule.


It is possible to divide the political systems roughly in two categories, two-party systems and and proportional multi-party systems. (Let's ignore single-party systems, dictatorships etc.) Most systems are not pure bred examples of either end. I guess no two political systems are quite similar. I'm more familiar with the multi-party tradition but I wanted to present this challenge in order to have discussion also on the possibilities in the two-party end of the scale. The most common two-party related discussions on this list deal with the "terrible problems" of the current implementations of two-party systems, and the "need to allow third parties to win". The purpose of this challenge is to open that discussion a bit to see what the real intentions are - to get rid of the two-party philosophy or to take it as a requirement and target of the society. The challenge separates two lines of discussion, one where we want also third parties to win, and another one where third parties must grow first in order to win. The intention is not to say that one of those approaches would be better than the other, or to say something about two-party systems vs. proportional multi-party systems, but just to preset a technical challenge and open wider discussion on this topic.

I note once more that my intention is not to crush small parties. In the challenge the intention was to improve the system to allow them to grow. Another approach in a "two-party" system would be to allow them to rule (together with others or alone) already without growing. And also in proportional multi-part systems that is an interesting question (actually there I have actively promoted the idea that they should be allowed to have their proportional share of representation, without the limits set by thresholds, district sizes and related mechanisms).

Juho





> 
> James
> 
> 
> 
> Juho Laatu  > Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2011 2:53 PM
>> 
>>> 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
> 
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