Comments on: The Limits of Politics

By: Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey

Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 23:00:03 +0000

I think the most recent Canadian election empirically demonstrates Duverger’s Law. A number of acquaintances of mine were getting urgent appeals to vote for the Liberals rather than the NDP, out of fear that Harper’s fundamentalists could get in. The Canadian reportage seems to concur that a lot of NDP voters switched to the Grits for fear of a Tory victory. In an IRV system, this would have been a non-issue; likewise for a PR system.

By: Hogan

Hogan — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 15:11:34 +0000

Didn’t that happen mostly through a reduction in the military? And through outsourcing, yes. But the policy of “reinventing” and “streamlining” government did get a good deal of fanfare, which was an important part of Clinton’s ability to neutralize the deficit reduction issue against a party that many people still identify with fiscal conservatism and smaller government.

By: Chris Lawrence

Chris Lawrence — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 05:20:02 +0000

FWIW, I think the institutional weakness of American political parties (no control of the party label due to primary elections, byzantine financial restrictions) coupled with their grandfathered institutional advantages (ballot access, name recognition) virtually ensures that a nationally-competitive third party will not emerge; it is far easier to hijack an existing major party than build a new one from scratch. Ca. 1970, Christian conservatives and political libertarians both started movements to gain meaningful political power through the party system. Which group was successful? The group that went off and established its own impotent political party, or the one that pushed out the “Rockefellerites” from the GOP? So, if the Greens want to take over America, my advice would be to hijack the Dems. It wouldn’t be hard; all you need is to find a candidate, funnel him some cash, dupe several thousand Green-leaning Iowans into going to a caucus in February 2008, and ride the momentum to November.

By: Randolph Fritz

Randolph Fritz — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 03:17:19 +0000

About half a year ago I wrote a short note which touched on this; perhaps some of the thoughts here are relevant. “The US two-party system, with consensus built by closed processes within the parties, is near-to unnavigable for most citizens. Am I an environmentalist? Which party might I join that will address my concerns? The Democrats, these days, are more environmentalist, but they are not consistently so. Power in the parties depends on the geography of their membership and the geography of their membership depends on their politics. When the South was Democratic, the Democrats were the party of racism; when the Democrats started to shift, the South became Republican. Most citizens have long since decided, correctly, that they cannot count on either party to represent their views.”

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 23:30:56 +0000

“Reducing the size of the federal government—specifically, reducing the federal workforce.” Didn’t that happen mostly through a reduction in the military? (Not a snarky question. I really thought that was how he did it)

By: Hogan

Hogan — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:56:30 +0000

What policy, different from Bush I, did Clinton persue that ‘accomplished’ deficit reduction? Reducing the size of the federal government—specifically, reducing the federal workforce. For one thing. Walter Schneider (I think it was) said that in the US, third parties are like bees—they sting and they die. Success for them is managing to get their issues taken up and implemented by one of the major parties. The Populist, Progressive, and Socialist parties accomplished this, and then they withered away. There’s a good argument that the Reform Party did the same with deficit reduction, at least until GWB was elected. The Greens haven’t delivered their sting yet. If they hope to, one of the things they’ll need to do is decide which issues they care most about.

By: Jane Galt

Jane Galt — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 20:51:28 +0000

Henry, the fact that I don’t think that political science has either the precision or the predictive validity of, say, chemistry, doesn’t mean that I think we should just roll it up and never try to figure anything out about the way politics works. My father and my aunt both taught polisci before going into government, and if nothing else, they gave me a healthy respect for the discipline. That post was widely interpreted as saying “social sciences are crap”, rather than “social sciences are imprecise”, which was what I intended by it. I was a lit major in undergrad; the fact that I can’t make an elegant equation to describe Dante’s Inferno doesn’t make it any less valuable, although I’ve known certain hard sciences and engineering types who might argue that way. I assume that there are iron laws out there about how politics works; I just assume that we’ll never really know exactly what they are, given the complexity of the system, and the illegality of, say, sticking a million people in a controlled experiment to see how they vote. My prediction is falsifiable—if we get a national third party, it will have been—but it’s not testable, since the fact that we haven’t got a third party may, or may not, indicate that we can’t have one. So I would argue that my prediction in some way violates a basic tenet of science the way I understand it: it will hold until it doesn’t, at which point, it’s too damn bad for the people who relied on it, isn’t it? This is not the sort of scientific precision I would want if I were, for example, trying to calculate whether the new material I had just invented was strong enough to build a bridge out of. Indeed, if that were the standard for talking about such things, I wouldn’t want to build a bridge. Human institutions, on the other hand, will happen whether we study them or not, so a lower level of precision is acceptable. I hope I didn’t imply that I believed my post was definitive—that’s why I opened with “I think”. That’s all it was: my thoughts on why we won’t have a three, four, or more party system. I could be wrong. I am open to having it demonstrated to me why I am wrong—either because there is some system out there sufficiently similar to ours to be comparable that features many parties (though I shudder to think of how many criteria one would have to specify to decide this) or because there’s something even more critical I’m leaving out—one commenter suggests we’ve got two parties because the Republocrats have colluded to make it very, very difficult for new parties to register, an argument I find interesting but ultimately uncompelling. It’s more than possible that someone has already convincingly refuted my thesis—when I wrote the post, I wanted to put in a caveat that I believed I was probably treading over well-trodden political science territory, but I forgot, and am now paying a just price for my laziness. I write posts like that in the hope of attracting learned commentary from people such as yourself. Finally, I agree with you that we can’t assume that just because our institutions are one way they have to be that way, or that they can’t change. But I do think that I’ve identified something important in the high premium our system places on a coherent opposition, particularly in terms of the pork barrel; I’d be interested in hearing why you think this is wrong, or if you agree, how you think it is to be overcome.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:15:38 +0000

“What was Clinton’s primary policy accomplishment? Deficit reduction.” What policy, different from Bush I, did Clinton persue that ‘accomplished’ deficit reduction?

By: JRoth

JRoth — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 17:53:21 +0000

I have to disagree with the argument that 3Ps consistently fail to influence things in the direction they would prefer. And I don’t feel that I need to go back any further than one of Sebastian’s 2 examples – the Reform Party. What was the #1 issue of the Reformers? The deficit. What was Clinton’s primary policy accomplishment? Deficit reduction. A reduction that Bush almost certainly would not have pursued as far, and one that would likely not have occurred to the extent it did without the push from Perot. Although conventional wisdom has long held that the majority of Reformers preferred Bush to Clinton, the evidence is weak and inconsistent – it’s more useful, perhaps, to say that Reformers who would have voted in a 2 man race would have broken, somewhat, for Bush. But of course if Bush was actually the man they wanted, they would have voted for him anyway. More than Perot, more than Bush, more than Clinton, Reformers wanted deficit reduction, and they got it (somehow, the Republicans read this movement as evidence of a groundswell in favor of pointless investigations and personal attacks on the presidency. Odd, that) On a separate note, same election, I think it’s pretty clear that in 1992 a strong plurality, if not majority, of Americans was in favor of massive health care reform, approaching if not achieving universal coverage. The fact that corporate interests succeeded in sabotaging a policy that had been one of Clinton’s central planks doesn’t provide any evidence for Megan’s argument that the issue is a political non-starter.

By: Seth Gordon

Seth Gordon — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 17:33:20 +0000

A few years back, Israel switched from a pure parlimentary system, where the Prime Minister was elected by the Knesset, to having direct elections for the PM. The people who drafted this change hoped that by moving Israel closer to a presidential system, the power of small parties would be diluted. Instead, the reverse happened: since voters were free to split their ticket, small parties picked up even more seats in the legislature, and the PM had to work even harder to pander to them in order to get anything done. Israel is now back to a pure parlimentary system.

By: Daniel Geffen

Daniel Geffen — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 17:18:03 +0000

As someone who should have a PhD some time in the very near future, I thought I should probably wade in to this debate. I’ve posted my thoughts (including an argument that systems with succesful third parties are MORE subject to special interest nastiness) here.

By: Henry

Henry — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:00:32 +0000

Megan – I’ve no problems with someone posting who doesn’t have a Ph.D. – but you have to admit that there is a bit of a disjuncture between making political-science type confident assertions about what is or is not possible in politics, and saying that political science isn’t at the stage where one can make falsifiable predictions. You may well have changed your mind in the meantime – I would be interested to hear if you have – but you did advocate quite a strong position on this last year, which, I think, was simply wrong on the face of it. Isn’t Duverger’s Law precisely the kind of lawlike generalization that you were asking for? That’s the point I was making – not that you’re unqualified to comment on these issues – but that your current ‘epistemological stance’ to use some jargon, is rather at odds with one that you have previously taken. I’m glad to hear that you’re not making the strong version of the ‘system never crowds out public opinion’ argument, and the detailed justification for why universal healthcare is not on the agenda is exactly what I would have liked to have seen in the original post. I still disagree with the empirics of your argument – and again, I refer you to Cass Sunstein’s work, which makes, I think, a pretty good case that universalization of many of these rights is within the realm of political possibility. Note, however, that I’m not making a value-judgement here that these changes are possible because they are what I would like to see. I’m equally convinced that other reforms that I would hate to see (including perhaps, the privatization of Medicare) are within the boundaries of political possibility. It seems to me that there’s a consistent tendency among most of us to take the institutions that we live among for granted. To some extent that’s justified – both economists and political scientists have done good work on how path dependence makes institutions ‘sticky’ and difficult to change. But a proper acquaintance with history suggests both that many of these institutional choices which now seem set in stone were the result of temporary, almost arbitrary compromises that took on a life of their own, and that these broad institutional matrices can and do change, albeit with great difficulty and slow grinding of gears. It’s not utopian to hope for real, substantial change in the basis of politics, and to try to achieve it – it’s difficult, certainly, unlikely of success, yet very arguably worth the effort. And third parties have historically played an important role in reforms that were both historically justified (emancipation) and unjustified (prohibition). They’re not the only path to change – but they are one, and sometimes an appropriate one.

By: Nick Simmonds

Nick Simmonds — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 15:39:20 +0000

A) While I agree that a third-party is a good idea for leftists who want to bring the discourse in their direction, Nader has recently made it clear that he’s not the right choice. Not only is he not in a party, he’s not really a leftist, just an anti-corporatist and anti-semite. B) Pepsi Clear was delicious.

By: Jane Galt

Jane Galt — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 14:26:01 +0000

Not, btw, that this means that I think we’ll never have national health care, etc.—if I could predict the future, I’d be too busy making money to blog. But I think that if we do get them, it will be because they’re popular, not because of third party pressure.

By: Richard Bellamy

Richard Bellamy — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 14:09:07 +0000

One wonders if there is not a difference between “Extreme” third parties (Socialists, Constitution Party, etc.) and “Moderate” third parties that try to place themselves between the two main parties (John Anderson, Ross Perot, a hypothetical John McCain candidacy, etc.) The “Moderates” generally run as third parties because, even though they are very popular, they can’t get a plurality of either half of the electorate in order to get a a nomination. (Ross Perot was leading Clinton and Bush until he went psycho and dropped out temporarily). The “Extremes” can only make a difference if there really is a large percentage of people who feel disenfranchised by the two major parties because they both seemed to favor the war (Nader) or oppose lynching (Strom).