Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Part of it is just the election system. The first-past-the-post election system leads to a two-party system, because having more than two candidates favors the most dissimilar candidate. Consider e.g. the 1992 American presidential election. Bill Clinton got 43% of the vote, Bush got 38% and Ross Perot got 19%. The majority of the population voted for a right-winger, but a left-winger was elected, because the right-wing vote was split between two candidates. To prevent that, people with somewhat similar political stances all have to get together to back one candidate, if they want someone they can live with. Thus you end up with only two parties.
If the population were to shift, the parties would just shift along. For example, if the American populace became much more left-wing as a whole, at first the Democrats would win. But the radicals in the Democratic Party would be empowered, pulling the party further left; meanwhile the relatively more conservative people in the Democrats would get pushed out and join the Republicans, pulling that party to the left as well. Soon enough a new equilibrium would be reached. Even if an entire party does collapse, a new one will take its place.
In European parliamentary systems you get a different dynamic, because the parties are assigned seats proportionally to their national votes, and they have to form a working majority only afterwards once the election is over. So you can vote for a small radical party if you feel like it without wasting your vote. They'll get a few seats anyway, and depending on how the rest of the election went, they may pull the resulting coalition into the direction you want. The result of that is that you get a lot of different parties instead of just two.
Unless you're in Germany, where the 5% minimum vote share means that voting for fringe parties is indeed about as good as throwing your election letter (yes we get our election-specific voter ID per mail) into the trash unopened.
Thanks to this, fringe parties never make it off the ground here. They either cannibalize the structures, personnel and voters of older parties (this is what the far left and far right usually do), or they're a brief blip on the public radar that nobody takes seriously because you either vote big or you don't vote at all. Hence the mainstream establishment dominates, forever. The only upset to this was maybe the emergence of the Greens, but that was before my time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link