drkitten wrote:
kerberos wrote:
I agree with kerberos on this, but I think the reasons the Libertarian party doesn't attract more people also goes to the nature of our political system which tends to promote a two party system. The basic idea is that political systems that have regional representation as opposed to at large representation tend towards two party systems.
It's not the national vs. regional issue, but the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post voting system that is largely to blame. Under the current system, a vote for a (distant) third party is basically throwing a vote away, because there's no practical benefit to a candidate of drawing 48% of the vote in a riding as opposed to drawing 4.8% or even 0.00048%.
Other systems, most notably Condorcet voting and Single-Transferrable-Vote, to both of which I refer you, have different attributes. In particular, under STV, a vote foran unpopular third party eventually transfers to a vote for a preferred larger party. Under this system, I could vote
against Bush, for example, by placing him last in my preference list, reflecting a statement that I would vote for someone -- anyone -- in preference to him.
Another way to avoid the issue is by holding elections for slates of candidates -- if there are fifty seats in the national assembly, and the top fifty vote-getters are selected, then there is a still a definite advantage to getting 48% (which will essentially guarantee you one of the seats). This remains true even if the seats themselves are regional. In the United States, this could easily be done by making all Congressmen stand "at large" for their states (and similarly, Senators would stand "at large" as pairs), with the top N (for Senators, N=2) winning seats. This would still preserve the state-level regionalism, but would give third-parties a better choice.
The most egregious example of this, of course, is in the election of the Presidential Electoral College. As the US Constitution is structured, each state appoints a certain number of electors who cast ballots for the actual presidential candidates. Every state (or every state but one, I think Maine may be unusual) explicitly allocates all electors to the party that wins the state, so a large state (California, say, or Texas) more or less effectively disenfranchises the voters who are not part of the plurality party. If 51% of Texas votes Republican, 100% of Texas' electoral votes go to the Republican presidential candidate. This basically destroys any chance of having a third party president under normal circumstances (and indeed, there has not been one in a hundred and fifty years).
I think that if the US had a system whereby more than two parties could yield power the Libertarian party would morph into a more moderate organization that would attract fiscal conservative, social liberal individuals. As it is now the Libertarian party is like all other small political parties in the US in that it is narrowly focused and attracts only people with non-mainstream views.
Possibly. As you may have gathered, though, I personally disbelieve whether there are enough "fiscal conservative, social liberal" individuals to justify a description of that philosophical position as "mainstream." "Fiscal conservatism" more often seems to be a label one uses to justify not spending money on a project with which one disagrees. Even the most ardent "fiscal conservatives" seem happy enough to get government funding by the trainload for projects they consider to be beneficial in the long-term.
As an aside, I have never been sure whether Shanek gets this or not.
Oh, be sure. He doesn't.
