[EM] Down with party poopers and primary poopers

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2023-12-18 08:12, Rob Lanphier wrote:

> Brands have value, even if all of the big brands in a particular market 
> category kinda suck.  Personally, I don't LOVE the Democratic Party, but 
> I'd generally rather have their chosen candidate for most offices in 
> power than the Republican Party's chosen candidate.  I'm sure that most 
> folks that currently vote for Republicans feel the same way about the 
> Democratic Party's vetting process.
> 
> I bring up this point because some election methods proposed here (and 
> elsewhere) try to tout the benefits of eliminating primaries.  
> Personally, I'd prefer it if we could somehow eliminate (or streamline) 
> the signature gathering process needed for ballot access.  I wouldn't 
> particularly mind being presented with 100 candidates for the county 
> coroner's office if I didn't ALSO have to seek out activists on the 
> sidewalk with clipboards that are gathering signatures for alternatives 
> to the two big parties here in the United States in order to ensure 
> "third party" candidates make it on the ballot.

A perspective from someone living in a country with more than two viable 
parties:

One way I tend to think of it is that in a two-party system, the two 
parties contain factions that, in a multiparty system, would be separate 
parties. Thus, in a two-party system, first the factions negotiate and 
then people vote; whereas in a multiparty system, the people vote and 
then the factions negotiate.

It seems to me that if there is a possibility for the relative strengths 
of factions to be decided by the people rather than by party insiders, 
we should take it.

Now, this has to be balanced against the burden of being familiar with 
more parties. If there were a thousand parties, there would be a big 
problem because nobody would care to read a thousand party programs.

But at least in this country, the voters don't seem to have a problem 
dealing with eight parties.[1] While brand recognition is important, 
there doesn't seem to be a significant penalty to having eight rather 
than two.

There are definitely caveats worth mentioning: it's harder to have a 
negotiation phase if the president is directly elected, since there's no 
parliament where this discussion can happen. And we don't vote on minor 
positions like city coroner, either. But it's still possible for 
presidential systems to be multi-party, and to my knowledge, these do 
not have primaries.

-km

[1] 8.36 parties by 
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Effective_number_of_parties#Entropy_measure 
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Norwegian_parliamentary_election.