this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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The US used to have between 4 and 6 parties, depending on how you counted. That gradually worked it's way down to 2. The election of 1860 had one Republican running against 4 different Democrats, all with their own little micro party. What Republican and Democrat mean in this context doesn't mean what it means today, and that's really not the point. What the point is is, that was the last time.
That election saw the Republican take more than 50 percent. We had some "issues" for a few years, and so elections prior to 1877 won't really have much to draw a comparison here, and the election of 1880 we had two parties and no more. No little factions trying to gain power, no off shoots quarreling and splitting the vote. Two massive parties of people that mostly agreed with each other.
Prior to that we had a number of elections which were arguably two party, more than one where out of spite everyone ran under the same party regardless. But none since have had a reasonable showing of any significant third party. With two major exceptions, so major they each get their own blurb in the text books as unique elections. When Theodore Roosevelt decided he didn't like who replaced him, lost the nomination and started his own party knowing full well it would give the office to the Democrats, and 1992, when Ross Perot decided he didn't like Bush that much and ran against him as an independent, splitting off just enough votes to give the office to the Democrats and causing both parties to literally change the rules on who could conceivably run without their blessing.
You don't have two parties now.
What you have is a coalition, effectively a party, and I'm response, because apart they lost, another coalition.
This is how you get two parties.
Europe is not homogenous in political landscapes, and "coalition government" means very different things depending on where you are.
There are countries like France where most elections are first past the post, with a very strong culture of "a single party must have an absolute majority in order to govern" and a system that leads to 2-3 heavily dominant parties. Coalitions like NFP are therefore devised before the elections, so they basically function as a single party with diverging internal ideologies.
There are also a lot of counties where most elections are some kind of proportional representation, where a single party almost never gets an absolute majority. Coalitions are negotiated after the elections, often made of parties with widely diverging ideologies but still trying to work together. I believe that it's a more democratic system as there is better representation, governing parties keep each other in check and consensus culture helps taming the most radical elements despite its inherent instability.
As we are, we are in a Northern European situation with no majority despite ou electoral system, but we would need a massive shift in political culture in order to get there. Our tankies (LFI mostly) and neolibs (Ens) spent so much time in the last years shitting on each other that they refuse to work together despite it being the only way to get an absolute majority and actually get shit done and make the fascists irrelevant.
Coalitions are literally the primary way the rest of the world avoids devolving into the US’s corrupt two-party system. It’s proven quite effective.
If that could be combined with RCV in more countries (or US states), then it could far more strongly prevent the consolidation of political parties and return more power to the people themselves.