I have a question for you: why does the US have a two-party system? What actually causes that to be the case?
For a long time I either didn't think about this at all (it felt like asking "why do we breathe air"), or I thought that was "just how democracy works".
But then I encountered the idea of Approval Voting, and the general cause of Voting Reform, and had my mind blown. It turns out we have a "two-party system" because of an accident of lazy systems design rather than anyone making a real choice.
The evils of Plurality Voting
In the United States (and most other democratic countries) we use something called Plurality Voting. Plurality Voting is the very simple method where each voter only gets to vote for one candidate.
It turns out that Plurality Voting is awful. It's simple, and for some cursed reason it's very intuitive, but it's absolutely one of the worst ways for a group of people to choose an option that will actually make them all happy (many researchers are convinced the only voting method that is both as simple and worse is random chance).
Why does Plurality Voting lead to the two-party system? Because of something called the spoiler effect. If a Plurality election has more than two candidates, then it's incredibly likely some of the candidates will "split" each other, making it so that a candidate that is generally less liked becomes the winner.
This is a toxic and irrational way to conduct elections! Since elections determine how all democratic decisions are made, a toxic and irrational voting method will tend to produce a toxic and irrational country.
- If the spoiler effect is allowed by the voting method then people will be afraid to throw their votes away, and so will drift towards whichever two parties are most likely to win.
- Political parties are incentivized to somehow enforce a two-party system, otherwise elections are always vulnerable to threats by third parties to jump in and confuse everything.
- If there are only two parties they need to be very different from each other in order to have a place in the political "market". So they drift to more extreme opposing views and polarize every issue.
- For-profit media companies have to appeal to an audience somehow, so they align with political parties and participate in and exacerbate extremism and polarization.
- Voters can only have a relevant political voice if they somehow "get on board" with one of the polarized parties, so they have a reason to lie to themselves and polarize their own beliefs.
- Polarized voters tend to further polarize parties and media, and the cycle starts all over again....
If we're trying to create a functional and prosperous democracy where the outcomes of elections are generally aligned with the goals and wishes of the voters, we're using the wrong tools for the job.
Systems are designed, and they can be designed differently
More and more often lately I hear people saying things like "democracy just doesn't work". I think this is a profoundly foolish and incorrect belief, because democracy isn't one way of doing things, it's a potentially infinite way of doing things.
Democracy isn't a specific system, it's just a principle: if the people who live in a society are the ones who decide the rules of that society, it's a democracy. That could describe anything from representative democracy to anarco-syndicalist communes, depending on how the people actually decide the rules.
So what rules should we choose?
In the political sphere, where the stakes are extremely high and we can't mess around, we ought to move to a simple rational system like Approval Voting as soon as we can. Doing so would be extremely safe and easy, and would completely remove the spoiler effect and its attendent pathologies.
And away from politics where we have more latitude to try new things, we should experiment with even more adaptive and accountable methods for democratic decision making, like the ones we're making at Unbreaking Lab.
For us these ideas are only the beginning, and as we validate our ideas in real organizations we'll continue to refine them and invent new ones as necessary.
We hope you'll join us on our mission!