Patterns of democracy

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1. dragonwriterDec 2015
   > Can you explain in what sense American government is not representative?

   Because it produces outcomes where the distribution of power in government does not follow the distribution in the preferences of the electorate (even the distribution as expressed in voting, which is already distorted by tactical accommodation to the known features of the electoral system.)

   This is problem stemming largely from the use of single-member winner-take-all elections by majority/runoff or plurality rules, as is the case for most legislative (and many other) elections, and which is compounded, at the federal level, by distribution of representation disproportionately to population (obviously in the Senate, but granularity results in significant variance in district size for House seats, as well.)

   Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy provides pretty good coverage of both the degree to which various modern democracies have representative government, the structural features that are associated with effective representation, and the effects that those variations in effectiveness of representation have.

   > People freely choosing to vote for people that you don't consider to be in their best interests does not make a government unrepresentative.

   True, but America, nevertheless, among modern democracies has a notably poorly representative government.

   > There are a few factors that impact representativeness - gerrymandering and the ineligibility of felons and illegal immigrants, for instance, but all-in-all that impact is pretty minor.

   Gerrymandering actually has a lot less impact on representativeness than it gets credit for (but it having any significant effect is a product of single-member, winner-take-all districts, which have a very large effect on representativeness, even outside of gerrymandering.)

   > In particular, of course, at a local and state level, those impacts are reduced along with the scale.

   No, the scale might be reduced, but the effects of gerrymandering and disenfranchisement, such as they are, are not reduced at local scale (and may actually be exacerbated, depending on the locale -- there are locales above and below the national average for distortion from any of those sources.)

   Additionally, there are systems used at local scale (such as multiseat elections on a Vote for N system, with N winners) that are frequently used in local elections that are more hostile to effective representation than single-member, winner-take-all districts.

   OTOH, the effects of unequal allocation (at least for legislative districts) are reduced at the state level.

   > If Americans have a divisive, gridlocked federal government that produces results nobody likes, that's the natural consequence of a divisive, gridlocked populace that doesn't know what it wants (lower taxes! more social security! balance the budget!), not un-representative government.

   Well, no, its a product of a combination of unrepresentative government and a Constitutional system deliberately made to have many veto points, which means if the distortions that effect different institutions work in different directions, the result is gridlock.

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2. dragonwriterDec 2015
   Compared with other established democracies. It may not be easy to see superficially, again, if refer you to Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
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3. dragonwriterNov 2013
   No place is "exactly a utopia", but the issue was the media being blamed as the root cause of the partisan duopoly in the US, which is pretty clearly not the case.

   OTOH, systems with greater proportionality in representation also tend to have higher public opinion of how well the local government works, which is probably not coincidental; for a good general survey, see Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

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4. dragonwriterMay 2022
   > The real issue is actually partisan primaries that push both sides further to the edge.

   No, it's not. California has eliminated primaries in the usual sense (what is called a “primary”, outside of Presidential nominations, in California is the first round of a two-round majority-runoff general election where you aren't allowed to win outright on the first ballot even with a clear majority), and yet here we are talking about the effect in California, so partisan primaries can not be the issue. We’ve ruled that out by not having them.

   The issue is FPTP single-member district legislative elections, which supports partisan duopoly and narrows the meaningful space of political debate toward a single high-salience axis and issues where splits align well with that axis, marginalizing all other issues. This has been somewhat extensively studied in comparative study of modern representative democratic systems, see, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.

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5. dragonwriterOct 2020
   > Yes, but why does the US have a structural duopoly.

   Because of the electoral system.

   > I don't think it is close to provable that the US's system of government innately requires a duopoly.

   The structural incentive to duopoly in FPTP voting is mathematically provable.

   > First of all the US has a two round system in most states (most states are open primaries).

   Open partisan primaries, which is what most states with open primaries have, aren't the same as a two-round system in terms of promoting multiparty democracy (in fact, they just further reinforce duopoly, since they give voters not aligned with the major parties a chance to influence major party candidate selection instead of participating in alternative parties, which opportunity has a higher expected value when the general election is by plurality.)

   That said, France is, nevertheless, the one major example that superficially seems to work.

   OTOH, despite having multiple parties, it's also the established democracy that has empirically nearly as bad a problem with ineffective representation and dissatisfaction with government as the US (see, Arend Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy), so while it manages to paper over the partisan duopoly symptom, it doesn't actually deal with the representational problem.

   > And some of us have actually lived under the electoral process and politics of other countries

   So have lots of people in America, and outside of America, including many of the people who have literally written the books on how the US electoral systems causes the both the narrow dimensionality of political discourse, and the partisan duopoly, and the representational failures of the American system of government.

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6. dragonwriterJun 2020
   > the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views.

   It's not really in the US, where it's been studied and the main dimensions of political variability were a strong economic left-right axis and a weaker racial policy axis (Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy), and since that study it's pretty clear that divisions on the race axis have aligned more tightly with those on the economic axis, making the US political spectrum even closer to a unidimensional one.

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