Comment by bubblewand
15 hours ago
> Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. Vote better next time.
Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.
The US constitution has a really bad early adopter syndrome where it was so good at the time that it's hard to move away from. Nearly every country with a constitution modelled on ours has failed at some point.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
There is no system that is immune to takeover from a demagogue. There's not even any hard evidence that any system is more resilient to it than the US is. It's all just tradeoffs.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
Germany only became a democracy under duress in 1919, and it never really settled into a stable democracy.
Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933.
I don't think this teaches us much about the US
Germany was a constitutional monarchy with a written constitution, and a representative legislature 50 years before 1919. The Kaiser in many ways was more limited in power than the President of the United States.
Nearly every democracy to dictatorship is preceded by disasters.
How about we try keeping big money out of politics and using ranked preference voting before we declare democracy obsolete? People have been studying that stuff.
FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...
Not to be cynical, but what does it look like when most candidates aren't acceptable to a majority of people?
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I think they're talking about the flaws in presidential democracies. Not democracy itself. Parliamentary democracies are supposed to be a better design.
If you ask most voters they'll say big money in politics is bad but if they know that why aren't they voting the issue?
What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome?
They all think it's big money on the other side. Everything they learn themselves isn't the result of a big money campaign, it's honest truthful information that they were smart enough to find on their own.
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How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation.
What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
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What is considered the best* system of government? Which country comes closest to the ideal model?
*best is funny to define
I guess the answer has to depend on demographics. But if we are spitballing, it probably wouldn't be all bad for every country to have a Lee Kuan Yew.
Can you provide examples that support your assertion, that the US system was already generally seen as obsolete in 1926?
Smells like BS.
"Obsolete" is pretty strong, clearly it's still limping along and hasn't quite yet succumbed to Benjamin's Franklin's expectation that it would fall to Despots if not vigoriously maintained.
But it was absolutely seen as "a good first effort" that could be improved upon in the 1890s.
Evidence of that is the new Australian Federation used the UK Westminster system and the system straight of Washington as inspiration to create what was considered "better" .. a Washminster system of government.
The current degeneration of a system founded by people opposed to Party Politics into a Hotelling's law quagmire of two parties, neither particularly broadly representative of general population, should be sound evidence that something went wrong along the way.
That's the emergant behaviour of discrete iterations of the US electoral system as was and as is for you.
Still, absolutely thumbs up for effort and intent those bold founders.
Shame it didn't scale well and got captured by corporations.