Comment by bell-cot
2 days ago
Disagree. If the society is essentially "broken", with little sense of everyone working together to build and secure a positive future, then two-party systems can degenerate into "but they're even worse!" races to the bottom.
But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
(Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly remain.)
> But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
No, there isn't, and comparative study of democracies has shown that there is a pretty direct relationship between effective degree of proportionality and a wide range of positive democratic outcome measures, as well as producing a richer national dialogue.
A two-party system doesn't just break down into an us-v-them negative dialogue in bad conditions (it pretty much gets permanently stuck there because it works in a two-party system, and it is consistently easier than deepe discussion of issues), it also narrows the space of of potential solution sets that are even available for discussion to an approximation of a one-dimensional space. Multiparty proportional systems leader to a search space with greater dimensionality, as well as making “well, they are worse” politicking generally ineffective.
I would say that what you wrote in the first two paragraphs is all equally true of a system with proportional representation. But you’d avoid a lot of problems:
- people in ”safe” constituencies being permanently represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no recourse except for moving
- policies that constantly pander to voters in ”swing” constituencies
- the two major parties constantly triangulating their policies around the center, rather than voters moving their votes to the party representing their opinions, which ensures that government is always centrist or near-centrist
Etc — these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK systems, I know there are more.
Plus, I think it’s good if a system is more robust against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue that in the UK, society hasn’t yet been broken, but looking at the US, don’t you think it’s better not to have that vulnerability?