European DUers: How does the multiple party system work for you?

[old mark]

I know most countries are not stuck with only 2 parties, and I am wondering how they work out in practice. It seems possible to me that we may be headed toward multiple parties in the US, both on the left and the right...

mark

[snot]

1. Excellent question. Thanks; K&R'd.

[pnwmom]

2. They have parliaments that are not set up like our Congress. We would have to

have a constitutional amendment and I don't see that happening.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. No amendment is *needed*, but the current method of voting *encourages* domination by 2 parties

It'd be possible for a 3rd party to start winning (at various levels in the political system), but it's just unlikely to happen. The influence of money and political advertising is a major obstacle; and so, I think, is the primary system - that means the 2 big parties will, on the whole, have candidates that are currently fairly popular for their district. That means it's very rare for someone to be able to say "neither the Dem nor the Rep is what this district really wants - it's time for a 3rd party". You get someone "just about acceptable" instead - who then may piss off a lot of the people who voted for them when Stupak puts up an idiotic amendment to a bill, for instance.

[pnwmom]

6. It would be needed in order to have a parliamentary system, which allows

for coalitions between different parties. Our system doesn't. So all a third party would do is increase the likelihood of minority rule.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. But there's nothing in the constitution about parties, coalitions or minority rule

About the closest to that you get is "The House of Representatives shall choose their speaker and other officers". Nothing about whether it has to come from a majority party and so on.

Indeed, many of the men who wrote it disliked the idea of political parties, and hoped they'd get independent congressmen. The laws that regulate Congress are changeable by Congress without needing a constitutional amendment. They have to keep the relative representation of states in the House proportional to population; so they couldn't have a country-wide proportional representation system for Congress, it's true. But most countries divide themselves up into areas for electing a parliament anyway; Congress could say "each state must use a Single Transferable Vote system to elect its representatives" if it wanted.

There's stuff about needing a majority in the electoral college for president, but that's different.

[Darth_Kitten]

3. Why not ask some Canadians as well?

:shrug:

[old mark]

8. I meant to include Canadians as well, of course.....nt

[eppur_se_muova]

9. If Canadia's not in Europe, why do you have to cross the ocean to get to it?

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. In the UK, not very well, because we have 'first past the post' like the US

In other words, the legislature is elected with one seat per constituency, one vote per voter, and whoever gets the most votes in the constituency wins, even if that's not a majority of the votes cast.

How does this work in practice? Well, at the 2005 general election:
Labour got 35.3% of the votes, and 55.2% of the seats
Conservatives got 32.3% of the votes, and 30.7% of the seats
Lib Dems got 22.1% of the votes, and 9.6% of the seats

In 2005, out of 650 seats, about 220 were won by a candidate with more than 50% of the vote, about 210 with between 45 and 50%, 160 between 40 and 45%, and 60 with less than 40% of the vote in their constituency.

Now, there are complicating factors - Northern Ireland has an entirely different set of parties standing, there are significant nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales that turn those nations into a 4 way race (ie all 4 parties have a realistic chance of winning at least one seat somewhere in the nation), and it's difficult to tell how much voters will not bother voting if they feel sure their prefered party is bound to win their seat.

What the FPTP system does encourage, in a situation with 3 or more viable parties, is tactical voting - if you have a prefered party, but think they can't win your seat, and much prefer one of the other parties to a third one, then you vote for your second choice, to make sure the real bastard doesn't get in. Labour has suddenly started talking about introducing the Alternative Vote system (known as Instant Runoff in the US) recently - either as a sop to the Lib Dems (who would benefit from it) or because they've worked out it'd hurt the Tories more than it'd hurt Labour.

Anyway, the effect of FPTP is for the more popular parties to get a disproportinate share of the seats. Many in Britain actually like this, because they fear coalition government, and some have a fetish for 'strong government'. At the moment, the distribution of seats and/or the likelihood of voting in safe seats appears to mean that the Tories will have to win about 5% more of the national vote than Labour to end up with the same number of MPs (eg Tories tend to win rural seats by a larger margin than Labour wins urban ones). Which may be a desirable effect, subjectively, but it's not exactly a perfect democracy.