In the current political system in the US, everything is based on voting for a representative. It's useless to vote for someone with no chance of winning, so you always end up with two parties that give their candidates.
If you allow people to vote for parties, and give congress representatives in proportion to the number of votes, you still end up with parties, but you can have many more of them, so they don't have to be as powerful. I know there are countries that do this, but I don't know which ones. Can someone from such a country tell about this?
One possibility that occurred to me a while back is to just make congress a random sample of the population. Nobody outside of congress will vote, so they won't form any sort of political party until their chosen. There will still be some party effects. For example, if congress has to appoint someone, and they vote on it, it will go back to the first case.
Parties will still be caused by normal human biases. If you get a hundred people together, they will form groups. It can at least be improved from the US system, which forces the adoption of parties.
Parties will still be caused by normal human biases. If you get a hundred people together, they will form groups. It can at least be improved from the US system, which forces the adoption of parties.
Did you even read the post?
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.