The budget stalemate in the US Congress was caused entirely by blocks of voters and representatives that coalesced around strong sets of opinions that few people would have come up with on their own, and by political party leaders forcing representatives in their parties to toe the party line. Politics isn't the mind killer. Political parties are the mind-killer.
Parties are also notorious for obliterating information in elections, as well as for encouraging voters to vote sans information. If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you'd heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise. Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.
For discussion:
What other disadvantages are provided by the existence of political parties?
Do political parties provide us with any advantages at all?
If so, do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?
How might we go about disenfranchising political parties?
We want the freedom to form groups that promote political concerns. But it would be possible to keep these groups at a greater distance from elected representatives. Candidates for office could be forbidden from endorsing a particular party. The Congress could be forbidden from basing any procedural rules on party affiliation. Political parties could be forbidden from making large donations to election campaigns, or sponsoring advertising. That's not so different from what we do today with religious groups, which are not much different from political parties.
Political parties are currently officially part of Congress' operation, even though they're not in the constitution. There are all sorts of Congressional rules specifying how the parties interact, who gets to choose committee members, who runs the House and Senate floors, etc. A party leader can punish a representative who doesn't toe the line with many incentives and disincentives.
Make that illegal. Make persecuting a representative for party-based reasons have the same legal standing as persecuting a representative for religious reasons.
I will ignore comments saying "you're an intellectual dreamer", for the usual reasons.
In Australia we have a preferential ordering system (if your most preferred party does terribly on first preferences, they are eliminated and your vote goes to your second-most preferred and so on) and a truly inspired suggestion from a friend was to create a Poe's Law Party.
This party would campaign on obviously wrong economic policy platforms, have extremely inconsistent social policies that they regularly backflip on, and bombard the populace with content-less advertisments. They would flub every debate and speech, resort to incoherent or irrelevant talking points on every single interview question, and so on. They would just be terrible. And the idea was, when the ballots are counted, any ballot that doesn't have the Poe's Law Party last doesn't get counted.
Ideally we would have a computer doing a Bayesian calculation taking "placement of PLP first", "placement of PLP second" (and so on) as evidence of bad voting skills, and have their vote's value diminished by an appropriate amount. But likely saying "your vote will be devalued by an arcane computation that determines exactly how stupid you are with respect to voting" will enrage many people.
0The Dao of Bayes
Calling the US voting system "modern" is a bit of a stretch - it's been around for a few centuries now. Given that quite a few other countries use voting systems that help alleviate the US "two party" problem, it's not like there aren't more up-to-date already-tested alternatives out there, too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system#Causes is a decent starter; I've spent a few years avoiding politics so I'd just be parroting others if I recommended anything specific :))
The budget stalemate in the US Congress was caused entirely by blocks of voters and representatives that coalesced around strong sets of opinions that few people would have come up with on their own, and by political party leaders forcing representatives in their parties to toe the party line. Politics isn't the mind killer. Political parties are the mind-killer.
Parties are also notorious for obliterating information in elections, as well as for encouraging voters to vote sans information. If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you'd heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise. Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.
For discussion:
We want the freedom to form groups that promote political concerns. But it would be possible to keep these groups at a greater distance from elected representatives. Candidates for office could be forbidden from endorsing a particular party. The Congress could be forbidden from basing any procedural rules on party affiliation. Political parties could be forbidden from making large donations to election campaigns, or sponsoring advertising. That's not so different from what we do today with religious groups, which are not much different from political parties.
Political parties are currently officially part of Congress' operation, even though they're not in the constitution. There are all sorts of Congressional rules specifying how the parties interact, who gets to choose committee members, who runs the House and Senate floors, etc. A party leader can punish a representative who doesn't toe the line with many incentives and disincentives.
Make that illegal. Make persecuting a representative for party-based reasons have the same legal standing as persecuting a representative for religious reasons.
I will ignore comments saying "you're an intellectual dreamer", for the usual reasons.