Reply #34: Of Course!! Because small fringe groups [View All]

[Nazgul35]

don't have enough power in our system!

As a person who actually studies parties and electoral laws, I am always amazed at those who would seek to introduce a multi party system in an extremely heterogeneous society....

What we really need is the Michigan militia party getting four seats in Congress....or the KKK Party gaining 40 seats from the south....

Yes!!! Open up the system!!!! Things are not hard enough to get through Congress with two parties....let's multiply the problems!!!

Imagine a House with 40 parties, a Senate with 20 and a President elected from a run-off election from the two candidates who got 20% and 17% of the vote.....perfect!!!

Don't forget that parties will be come more important than the candidates, so constituency service goes right out the window...

The expansion of parties would weaken whatever power the House would have as it would become unstable, very similar to the Italian Parliament, while the Senate would not change much and the Presidency would be further strengthened...as the victor would be able to claim a mandate that the others could not...

Don't even go into what would happen at the state level!

Another thing to consider....in almost ever country that has a PR system, the left is more fractured than the right is....so guess what happens in those countries?! How many governments has the Communist Party in France participated in? And what happened in the last Presidential election?

You want to change the way parties work...than get involved in the two parties that already exist!

The UK has the same type of system that we do, yet they have a multi-party system...and we don't! Perhaps the voices of the alternative is not as important in the US as many here would believe...

Two things you need to understand:

1) Strategic voting: Duverger's Law says that the number of seats (M) + 1 will be the number of Parties that can compete in a given district...hence the reason we have a two party system...

2) The Number of Cleavages: each country has a certain number of cleavages (soci-economic, racial, ethnic, wealth, etc.) and that just because M + 1 = 48, doesn't mean that 48 parties will exist....the more heterogeneous a society is, the more parties are likely to emerge.....large countries that are diverse tend to have federal systems with plurality elections...

I would recommend that everyone here take a look at Gary Cox's Making Votes Count, Maurice Duverger's Party Politics, Joseph Schlesinger's Political Parties and the Winning of Office and any article found in the political science journal Party Politics...