In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues:
- Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism - Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism, again
Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity, environmentalism, racism).
I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative did. But I hope I’m about to be proven wrong on the first point.
As background, this party was founded about 8 months before the election in 1991, almost like a fluke. It was not a grass roots movement, but by charismatic founders that quickly had to build an organisation around some hollow ideas about less bureaucracy and lower taxes.
Maybe 8 parties narrows the lesser evil down a bit.. But they all end up in coalition anyway so I'm pretty sure i get the same amount of evil as in a 2-party system.
Admittedly there is a bureaucratic logjam in the UK that hampers any progress but I don't see that going with fptp, I'd anticipate it getting much, much worse under prop-rep.
I find these changes in tides between parties interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific takes issues not parties.
I suppose when choosing between electoral systems, the choice is indeed a matter of the lesser of two evils!
But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
(Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly remain.)
No, there isn't, and comparative study of democracies has shown that there is a pretty direct relationship between effective degree of proportionality and a wide range of positive democratic outcome measures, as well as producing a richer national dialogue.
A two-party system doesn't just break down into an us-v-them negative dialogue in bad conditions (it pretty much gets permanently stuck there because it works in a two-party system, and it is consistently easier than deepe discussion of issues), it also narrows the space of of potential solution sets that are even available for discussion to an approximation of a one-dimensional space. Multiparty proportional systems leader to a search space with greater dimensionality, as well as making “well, they are worse” politicking generally ineffective.
- people in ”safe” constituencies being permanently represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no recourse except for moving
- policies that constantly pander to voters in ”swing” constituencies
- the two major parties constantly triangulating their policies around the center, rather than voters moving their votes to the party representing their opinions, which ensures that government is always centrist or near-centrist
Etc — these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK systems, I know there are more.
Plus, I think it’s good if a system is more robust against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue that in the UK, society hasn’t yet been broken, but looking at the US, don’t you think it’s better not to have that vulnerability?
