Why is a two-party system considered democratic?

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨scheep@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

You’re only able to choose two options, how is that democracy? I thought democracy was about being able to choose anyone you think is suitable to be a leader, not one of two pre-selected people. At that point, it’s not much different to a one-party system, just with two people rather than only one person.

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masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
That’s not what democracy is.

Democracy is simply a system of government where leaders are voted on instead of inheriting their title or gaining it through physical force and coercion.

The original form of democracy had slavery, and excluded women and non-land owners, the word simply distinguishes which mechanism brings someone to power, it doesn’t inherently imply fairness or free choice.

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- scheep@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I would say that’s a good definition
  
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  - jimmy90@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    that’s why in many european states we’ve evolved to variants of multi party, transferable votes systems
    
    it still has inherent flaws and it still seems to have 2 sides (one side kinda sorta has to be the majority “in power”, and the others in opposition) but it feels and maybe is more representative of the vote we cast
    
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palebluethought@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s not like the two party system is deliberately chosen or enshrined in law. The field naturally winnows down to two parties because that is basically guaranteed to outcompete every other possibility under a first-past-the-post voting system. You want to fix the two party system, you need to fix our voting system.

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- My_IFAKs___gone@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Derek from Veritasium also made a great video about the various voting systems and which one seems to be the most democratic: youtu.be/qf7ws2DF-zk
  
  I hope to someday see a Rated Choice ballot.
  
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  - scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    This. This. This.
    
    Everyone should watch this. Even people who know about rank choice voting.
    
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  - vvilld@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Ranked choice is fine, but it’s never going to end the two party system on its own. We can already see in some states (Alaska and Maine) and in some smaller municipalities in the US, and in countries outside the US, which have switched to RCV after having a 2-parety system that it doesn’t end the 2-party system. At best, it makes campaigning a little less negative.
    
    People tend to simplify the concept of 3rd parties when thinking about RCV. They get it in their head that everyone who dislikes the 2 major parties would all vote for the same 3rd party as a first choice under RCV. In practice, that’s not how it works. Most people still vote for one of the major parties as their top choice. Among those who don’t, they are extremely divided in which 3rd party they pick. People who traditionally vote Republican but don’t really like them may be willing to vote Libertarian, but their never going to vote Green. Likewise, someone who doesn’t really like the Democrats but typically votes for them might prefer the Green Party or DSA or something, but they’re not voting Libertarian or Freedom Party.
    
    When RCV is implemented in a 2-party system, what almost always happens is that the first choice 3rd party vote gets split among a number of different 3rd parties, giving none of them enough votes to win. When those get dropped in the first round of instant run-offs and those votes switch to the 2nd choice, one of the 2 major parties almost always wins.
    
    If you want to get rid of the 2-party system, you need to get rid of single-member congressional districts. Switch to multi-member districts with proportional representation. Say a state gets 5 Representatives to the House. Each party (including 3rd party) puts forth up to 5 candidates all running in the same race. Everyone votes for either their preferred candidate or preferred party (you can even implement RCV here to rank candidates if you want). Then seats are allocated to each party based on which proportion of the vote they get. If the Green party gets 20% of the vote, they get 1 seat. If Republicans get 40%, they get 2 seats, etc, etc. The specific candidate(s) who wins from each party would be whoever got the most votes within that party.
    
    This almost eliminates strategic voting. You don’t have to worry that your party is small with nowhere close to a majority support because you don’t need a majority to win a seat. Nearly everyone gets the representation they want.
    
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- solrize@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yes for some theory about this, see:
  
  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
  
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- masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - palebluethought@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That’s… More or less in agreement with what I said, though? The electoral college certainly doesn’t help matters, but the same principle still holds without it, the EC just adds a second hierarchical level of fptp
    
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- kmartburrito@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I also love this YouTube video, which covers this extremely well - youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
  
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- scheep@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  fair enough
  
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HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There is nothing limiting it to two parties. honestly its first past the post that is more of an issue.

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- starlinguk@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  German is heading this way. Part of the vote is already FPTP and parties also have to have more than 4% of the vote to get a seat. In Brandenburg none of the small parties made it, and despite the SPD being the biggest party, the right wing is in charge, because all the other parties that got seats (BSW, CDU, AFD) are right wing and the SPD doesn’t have a majority.
  
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  - Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    What are you talking about? There are now six (6) parties in the Bundestag, that’s a long way from 2. If anything, it might be a bit much.
    
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  - ECB@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Germany is actually trending the other way. Modern Parlaments have more parties than they did in the past.
    
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NewDark@lemmings.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The United States is a one party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them

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SplashJackson@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s only so to those whom have been conditioned to believe so

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bananoidandroid@feddit.nu ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Its formally considered a flawed democracy. I do the same thing with my kids. If i want them to clean their room i’ll just ask them “do you want to clean your room, or you want to do the dishes and take out the trash?” and they’ll always go for cleaning their room because it feels like they are getting something out of the deal, it’s less “nasty” and they have a sense of choice but realistically i win in both scenarios.

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Apepollo11@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
That’s exactly why so many countries around the world roll their eyes when America bangs on so much about democracy.

It’s a marketing thing. Look around the world. Find any country with the word “Democratic” in the name, and odds are you’ll find a poor excuse for a democracy.

The actual democracies in the world don’t feel compelled to keep repeating the fact.

The reality is that America is only really a democracy in the loosest sense of the world. All you need to do is look at how often the wealthiest candidate wins to see that it’s true. Or how often the person with the most votes loses. Or how unregulated lobbying actually is. Or the insane amount of power the President actually has. The power doesn’t lie with the people - it lies with the super-rich.

Sorry if that came off as really negative! America has a lot of good stuff going for it, but its implementation of democracy is not one.

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- scheep@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  that makes sense. Honestly, I don’t think it’s really possible to get a perfectly fair system of democracy as everyone has different opinions, making it really difficult to make everyone happy. Nothing is perfect and humans are greedy, unfortunately
  
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sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Many democracies form coalitions between smaller parties to create a majority voting block - the US just does it before the election.

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- jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  As I’ve always said… do the coalitions for a party or do the parties for a coalition?
  
  End of the day, what’s the difference?
  
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  - ValiantDust@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I think it does make a difference. When the parties are voted for before forming the coalition, you know exactly how many people supported them and their policies. Then the coalition is negotiated based on that. If you form the coalition first, then only the majorities inside the coalition matter for who has the most say, you have no way of knowing what’s important to the voters.
    
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  - bent@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    It makes a ton of difference actually. I can speak for Norway, currently we have 9* parties in Parliament, 3 on the left, 3 on the right and 3 in the middle that could align themselves with either side, and they do flip from time to time.
    
    If the coalitions formed beforehand we would very likely put the Communist Party in with the left, but Labour actually prefers to work with the Conservatives (their main rival) over the Communists most of the time.
    
    More parties also gives way more nuanced choices, we have 3 parties that have environment and climate change as a top priority, one on the left, one on the right and one in the middle meaning that if climate change is your biggest concern we actually have real alternatives. To continue on the climate rail; the power realtion between the Liberal Party (right/green) and the Progress Party (hard right) will matter a lot if the Conservative party get form a government after the elections.
    
    We see a lot of deals going across the traditional left/right line which makes the political process and campaigning a lot less toxic, and if some big issue is not raised by the big players some a smaller party can campaign on that or we can even start new parties.
    
    *There’s also a non-party representative that in essence got elected to save a local hospital. Kinda wild that the locals got so pissed that enough of them “threw away” there votes to get her elected on a single issue.
    
    That said, there are obviously problems with too many parties, but I think around 6-10 is probably good.
    
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StinkySocialist@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Short answer is capitalist propaganda. The illusion of freedom is important to maintain control and curb resistance.

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Coreidan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Because someone with a lot of money released a ton of propaganda to make people believe this was ever a democracy.

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sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Honestly, democracy is incomplete without economic democracy. You could have a million political parties but it wouldn’t matter because all of them would still support the supremacy of the bourgeosie. Those with actual power, the business owners who control all of our material resources, would not allow them to exist otherwise. We never had democracy but this is only just now becoming apparent to the general populace.

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thawed_caveman@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I have a passing familiarity with the politics of a couple countries, and they all fit this pattern: their constitutions say nothing of a two-party system, they don’t even say anything about parties at all. People just choose to create political parties, and then those parties coalesce into two major parties.

The reason that this happens is because people, from voters to every level of politician, look at the rules of the game and make tactical decisions; their tactical decisions cause a two-party system to emerge.

The USA is a really extreme case of this; in Europe there are more parties, and they even very occasionally come to power. Current french president Macron broke a decades-long streak of two-party governance in his country.

Further viewing material:

What is tactical voting

Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting

The Alternative Vote Explained

My takeaway from this is that there are things that can be done to improve the voting system, as suggested in these videos; but i don’t even like representative democracy at all, i think there’s better solutions in direct democracy (referendums and such). Representative democracy was designed to put elites in charge, voting was initially reserved for land-owning nobility. Extending voting rights to more people doesn’t change what the system is designed to do.

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- scheep@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  yeah, voting on the actual policies and laws rather than the people in charge might be more fair.
  
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randon31415@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
A top-two runoff system is considered democracy. A system where the two parties are just the same thing, like in North Korea, is not.

Americans consider their two parties as very flexible about what they stand for. If there is a big enough group not represent by the incumbent, the other parties’ primary will be biased towards this group.

What we saw this time around, though, was two incumbents running against each other with no room for the non-represented group to be reflected. Thus, to that group at least, it felt like there was no difference (at least in the represtation).

Those that believed that there was no difference are now finding out how much of a difference it was - and they are now yearning for another vote to fix things.

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small44@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You aren’t forced to vote for those two parties.

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marcos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
If this is about the US, notice that they used to have intra-party elections as a strong cultural requirement before going into the main election. They only stopped requiring that very recently.

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- Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Primary elections never stopped being a thing
  
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  - Kirk@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    The American system is far from ideal but I’m convinced 90% of social media posts decrying a “lack of choice” or “monoparty” are cynical actors trying to make pro-democracy voters feel hopeless. I remember in 2019 all of the “The DNC installed Biden” language was all over Reddit.
    
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gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Because the monied interests in charge of the two-party system want you to think it is

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udon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
A two-party system is not necessarily worse than a multy-party system. They both have their flaws. Just as one example, party programs in multi-party systems such as in Germany are not worth the paper they are written on, because after the election the parties will go into negotiations and come up with an entirely different program. With two parties, at least you know what you vote for.

This is a great lecture on the topic with much more depth to it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3-VlQu3iRM

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