Why we should vote a third party

Bandit LOAF said:
In Super Wing Commander it was Armstrong, but it was later changed to Maverick for obvious reasons.
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I chuckled...

As for this thread topic,

Personally I would like to see third parties gain more of a voice or prominence in American politics, but it's something that's just not going to happen, or at least I don't expect to live to see it happen.
 
Personally I think a strong third party would be great in the US political climate. You need at least two parties to have even a halfway decent government. One party to govern and one party as the opposition. They switch off every election or so because the governing party will inevitably make decisions that will alienate a critical mass of factions in the general electorate. However when the two parties reach an accord on a specific issue there is no real recourse for the disenfranchised.

With even a weak third party presence in the US congress, it would give that recourse and act as an anti-corruption measure, because it would be more difficult to make self serving deals. It would also force the two major parties to work to earn votes and mobilize a base instead of just trashing the other party. The down side is that it would make things more difficult to get done in Congress because you would need to have one more faction on your side and that adds to the diversity of opinions you have to not piss off.
 
Sorry, but unless you're just going to throw away your vote on someone who can't actually win, you can only go Federationalist or Populist. Get used to it.
 
Shaggy said:
Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are notable third party candidates. The label could, theoretically, be applied to any write in vote but there is usually one or two other candidates on the actual voting ticket who isn't affiliated with the Republicans or the Democrats.
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Sorry Shaggy I totally failed to make my sarcasm clear enough there, it was supposed to be a subtle stab at American politics but probably had the appearance of dumb ignorance.

In *actual* seriousness, we cannot expect any 3rd party to win unless we restructure our electoral system. Right now, every American election is "first-past-the-post", meaning you get 51% of the vote and you win, there is no consolation prize for second place, leading to the "wasted vote" mentality that we all know and hate. The only way to really cure that is to change the rules to something like a parliamentary system, where you vote not for individual legislators but for a party, and each party gets a certain number of seats, based on the percentage of votes they receive; thus if you are one of 10% of people who voted for the Purple Party, they will receive around 10% of the seats (you are provided with the list of which legislators they will seat in specific order in advance of course). The result is typically 4-6 parties, none of which usually has a majority, forcing parties with similar interests to compromise and form a coalition. I don't think we would need to make any major changes to the presidential race except to completely eliminate the electoral college, which I consider insulting in the first place; the tangible and significant presence of new parties in the legislature should dissolve concerns about voting for them in the executive race.

The changes that would be needed in American government to break the built-in bias against 3rd parties would in most cases require nothing short of a new Constitutional Convention, which of course would have to be initiated by the 2 major parties in power... you can see where this is going. Sorry to be so long-winded, I majored in politics and took a particular interest in the mechanical shortcomings of American democracy.
 
Sandoval said:
Sorry Shaggy I totally failed to make my sarcasm clear enough there, it was supposed to be a subtle stab at American politics but probably had the appearance of dumb ignorance.

In *actual* seriousness, we cannot expect any 3rd party to win unless we restructure our electoral system. Right now, every American election is "first-past-the-post", meaning you get 51% of the vote and you win, there is no consolation prize for second place, leading to the "wasted vote" mentality that we all know and hate. The only way to really cure that is to change the rules to something like a parliamentary system, where you vote not for individual legislators but for a party, and each party gets a certain number of seats, based on the percentage of votes they receive; thus if you are one of 10% of people who voted for the Purple Party, they will receive around 10% of the seats (you are provided with the list of which legislators they will seat in specific order in advance of course). The result is typically 4-6 parties, none of which usually has a majority, forcing parties with similar interests to compromise and form a coalition. I don't think we would need to make any major changes to the presidential race except to completely eliminate the electoral college, which I consider insulting in the first place; the tangible and significant presence of new parties in the legislature should dissolve concerns about voting for them in the executive race.

The changes that would be needed in American government to break the built-in bias against 3rd parties would in most cases require nothing short of a new Constitutional Convention, which of course would have to be initiated by the 2 major parties in power... you can see where this is going. Sorry to be so long-winded, I majored in politics and took a particular interest in the mechanical shortcomings of American democracy.
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Proportional Representation does sound good, but in many cases it leads to too many political parties (in some cases up to 20) which often causes political instability and a collapse in the ruling government. Also it leads to way too many fringe groups entering the actual governing institution. Usually to counter this you have to legislate a minimum electoral percentile for a party to have legislative seats. Of course this puts the power of determining who can sit in government right back into the hands of the 2-3 major parties. So in some cases a PR system starts as a good idea, but then just ends up as a wash....
 
It's worth noting that the Weimar Republic fell and the Nazi Party rose to power and established the Third Reich exactly because they had a proportional system, and the Nazis were able to establish a powerful enough coalition to seize control. So no system is perfect. I suspect (but am not sure) that our two party system would be more resistant to such a takeover, because there is a clear opposition party that always has nearly as much power as the controlling party.
 
I have to agree with both of you that there need to be safeguards in a proportional representation to ensure that destabilizing elements don't gain significant power, a threshold being one of the most practical examples, and I would never suggest any system is without flaw or potential for abuse. I believe that a proper design can mitigate party fracturing and provide the necessary checks and balances against radical groups gaining power quickly; you are definitely right that some resistance to change is essential for stability. I don't necessarily think those systems are better, but I do think it's sad that in a country that tries to hold itself up as a beacon of democracy, there is no place for the democratic socialist, or the libertarian, or even the atheist (gasp!) in government or even in legitimate political debate.
 
Sandoval said:
or even the atheist (gasp!) in government or even in legitimate political debate.
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That's because individual theological belief is irrelevant to governing. I find that whenever any radical theist or radical atheist enters the political stage it always ends badly.

Both extreme sides of the coin are incredibly annoying pieces of degenerate shit that the rest of us have to work around to get anything done.
 
Farbourne said:
I suspect (but am not sure) that our two party system would be more resistant to such a takeover, because there is a clear opposition party that always has nearly as much power as the controlling party.
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Why would that be? I don't see any requirement for there to be two parties with about equal power. It is this way in the USA, but really it could also be 70:30, guaranteeing one of them a quasi dictatorship. If anything I'd say it is easier to make a takeover here. After all I only need the majority, not more then 50% of votes.
 
Gamer8585 said:
Proportional Representation does sound good, but in many cases it leads to too many political parties (in some cases up to 20) which often causes political instability and a collapse in the ruling government.
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Those problems are the reason why in Germany a party has to get more than 5% of the votes to get into the parliament. We learned from the Weimar Republic ;)

But there are other democratic countries that don't have that rule, so... well...
There are the problems, for example in Italy or Israel. They have many parties in parliament so they have to make coalitions of many parties. Thats often a problem because most of those coalitions don't last very long.

As somebody who doesn't live in the USA I'm very interested in this thread, I always wondered what you people think about that system. In Germany there are five or sometimes six parties to vote (governments mostly consist of coalitions of 2 parties) and they often have extremely different opinions.
For me it is even very difficult to see (although I'm very interested in US-politics, it is one of the reasons why I have subscribed to the TIME-Magazine) what's the main difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
Also it seems that in the US the persons who can be elected play a bigger role than in Germany.
It's very interesting, I hope this discussion will go on for a while (if you like), I'm listening. :)
 
Aginor said:
For me it is even very difficult to see (although I'm very interested in US-politics, it is one of the reasons why I have subscribed to the TIME-Magazine) what's the main difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
:)
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It gets even more confusing when you study the history of these parties and trace their origins from the creation of the country. When you get to a certain point, the terms 'republican' and 'democrat' essentially represent the opposite of what they stand for today. I remember a few days in particular in high school trying to figure out what was going on...:)
 
As ELTEE said, it's complicated, but to put it simply, the Democratic party is center-left and the Republican party is Christian center-right.

A hundred and forty years ago, the roles were reversed.
 
As ELTEE said, it's complicated, but to put it simply, the Democratic party is center-left and the Republican party is Christian center-right.
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I don't think that's really correct -- practically speaking the whole country is "Christian". A major Republican base right now is evangelical Christians... but they don't come close to being either the whole of the party or the whole of Christendom.

(Similarly, you wouldn't call the Democrats the *black* party since they play to that base.)
 
It wasn't even a hundred years ago that the Republican and Democratic party lines were reversed. According to my Dad and uncle they were reversed in Kennedy's days.

The point I was kind of pushing here is how unrealistic and sensationalized politics have gotten.

I might vote for McCain, not because I have any sort of trust or respect for him, but because Sarah Palin currently has to deal with her teenage daughter going through an out of wedlock pregnancy, in a party that tends to look down on such a thing. It gives her more of a realistic and average person image than any of the candidates have been able to present. That doesn't necessarily guarantee my vote, though, but at least I have some idea of what she's going through and can sympathize.
 
It's true that this is a mostly Christian country, and that both parties have claimed specific issues which Christians identify with. Democrats champion assisting the poor and preserving the environment, Republicans champion family values and science ethics. However it's also true that Republicans have gone out of their way to court the Christian right at the expense of more traditional Republican values, most notably fiscal responsibility, so if they carry that stigma it's by their own doing. This highlights a great example of the truly limited representation offered in the USA: a true classic conservative opposes most government intervention, both in the economy and in private morality (though not quite to the level of a libertarian); this person had a place in the Republican party until the late 20th century. Now this person will find they have no place; Republicans have spent us into the greatest debt ever and have taken strong stances on private morality issues, and while this person may agree with Democrats' "hands-off" approach to issues of sexuality and abortion, they will probably have difficulty reconciling the Democrats' positions on social welfare. Thus, one of the oldest and strongest political traditions suddenly finds itself almost completely disenfranchised from American politics, for precisely the reason that Republicans have re-branded themselves as a Christian party.
 
Aginor said:
Those problems are the reason why in Germany a party has to get more than 5% of the votes to get into the parliament. We learned from the Weimar Republic ;)

But there are other democratic countries that don't have that rule, so... well...
There are the problems, for example in Italy or Israel. They have many parties in parliament so they have to make coalitions of many parties. Thats often a problem because most of those coalitions don't last very long.

As somebody who doesn't live in the USA I'm very interested in this thread, I always wondered what you people think about that system. In Germany there are five or sometimes six parties to vote (governments mostly consist of coalitions of 2 parties) and they often have extremely different opinions.
For me it is even very difficult to see (although I'm very interested in US-politics, it is one of the reasons why I have subscribed to the TIME-Magazine) what's the main difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
Also it seems that in the US the persons who can be elected play a bigger role than in Germany.
It's very interesting, I hope this discussion will go on for a while (if you like), I'm listening. :)
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Yeah in some countries PR works best and some SMP (Single Member Plurality) works best. They can both work and its really just a matter of preference. I find that the biggest weakness to PR is that it makes it hard to appeal issues to your representative, because with PR there is also a "responsible party" module in effect which makes it incumbent on the politicians to follow the party line. With SMP there is usually a "non-resposnible party" model. Politicians are more concerned with pandering to their electorate which is great for their districts, but can create confusion about what party platforms are.

The difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that the Democarats want to tax the hell out of you to support government welfare programs and the Republicans want to eliminate all taxes and social safety net programs and tell you what you can do in bed. Oh and Democrats are blue donkeys, and republicans are red elephants. (essentially Democrats are left-center and Republicans are right-center [although they've courted the religious vote and now want to tell you how to live your life]).
 
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