[EM] Down with party poopers and primary poopers

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi Kristofer,

Good to hear some non-American perspective.  The United States' two-party
democracy leads us to think that fixing the "duopoly" will fix everything.
There is a certain comfort in the stability with our Coke/Pepsi duopoly in
the United States.  You're clearly correct that voters can handle more than
two parties (given the multitude of parties in Norway as an example), and I
think that it sucks that the top two here in the United States are so
safe.  It bothers me that we actually DO have more choices than Coke and
Pepsi, and that so many people almost immediately understand that metaphor
for "duopoly".  I wish that our collective IQ could be applied to more than
beverage shopping (and more generally, that alternatives to "Republican"
and "Democrat" in the United States had greater brand recognition than
"Coke" or "Pepsi")

More inline...

On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 6:34 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
wrote:

> 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.
>

That sounds nice.  I'd be surprised if there weren't intraparty factions as
well, though.  I have to believe the eight (or so) major parties in your
country have at least a little semi-structured infighting.  Intraparty
factions almost certainly still have to be a thing, even when there are
more choices when one leaves a particular party.

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.
>

I also think that this is a problem for historians and for the electorate
being able to learn from history.  Having such a swirling soup of parties
makes it difficult for newcomers and outsiders to understand how local
politics work.  I suppose it's not any worse than trying to understand what
happened to the Rockerfeller Republicans in the United States, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Republican

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.
>
[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.
>

It's interesting to me that you chose "eight" as the number of parties in
Norway when you used the 2021 Norwegian parliamentary election as a
reference.  By my count, there were ten parties that received seats in the
"Storting" (a.k.a. "the supreme legislature of Norway" according to
Wikipedia) in 2021.  It would seem based on a cursory glance at the 2021
results that the parties can be classified large/medium/small:

   - The  "Labour", "Conservative", "Centre", and "Progress" parties --
   these are the four big parties in Norway, and an overwhelming majority of
   Norwegians at least partially align with one of these parties.  It would
   seem impossible to really understand the 2021 election without
   understanding these four.
   - The "Socialist Left", "Red", and "Liberal" parties are the
   medium-sized parties that earn a modest number of seats.  I'm guessing that
   each of them must really rely on alliances with at least one of the larger
   parties to get anything done.
   - The "Green", "Christian Democratic", and "Patient Focus" parties are
   the boutique parties that appeal to a very narrow slice of the population.

As I look back over the past 40 years of elections, my taxonomy above
breaks down, since it's based on a single election.  Labour, Progress,
Conservative, Socialist Left, Centre, Christian Democratic, and Liberal
seem to be the only seven that have a substantial history.  Green, Red, and
Patient Focus seem like weird little newcomers, but I guess the Red party
is seemingly on the rise, no?  Also, does the modern Liberal party have
anything in common with Mowinckel's Liberal party of the 1930s (arguably
the Liberal party's heyday)?

Interestingly, the "Christian Democratic" seems to have fallen
precipitously from its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s (under Bondevik's
leadership).  This Wikipedia article seems to confirm my speculation about
intraparty infighting being a thing, even with a lot of parties:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Democratic_Party_(Norway)

That would also be true of the Liberal party:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_(Norway)

...though I suppose the answer to intraparty strife is to FORM A NEW PARTY
(or two)!!!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_People%27s_Party_(Norway,_1972)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_People%27s_Party_(Norway)

I'm not entirely clear how you arrived at "8.36 parties", which seems
awfully precise given the fluctuation of seat-earning parties in Norway.


> 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.
>

I suspect voters in the United States are way too fond of micromanaging
their leadership to allow for taking away voting for city coroner or to
vote for a party, and let the party leaders negotiate who gets to be
president or prime minister or grand poobah or whatever.  I didn't fully
realize just how recent primary elections were anywhere in the world until
the 20th century, and that the first time primary elections mattered for
the U.S. presidency as in 1912:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_Republican_National_Convention

While I'll concede that there are multi-party democracies that haven't
found a need for primaries, and I'll concede that the brief history of
primary elections here in the United States and elsewhere has been messy, I
still think it's a good idea for high-stakes elections.  For high-stakes
positions, it seems wise (to me) to allow the general public two big stages
of consideration: the primary process and the general election process.
Though many aspects of the current mechanisms we use are awful, I think
having  two elections rather than one gives us enough time to collectively
think through the decisions we make.  For high-stakes elections, this seems
worth it.

Rob
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