Yup.

The devil is in the details. Maybe the best multi-party system is better than the best single-party system. I don’t know for sure, though I suspect the best possible single-party system might be better than the best two-party system or the best N-party system. But how often do we get the best?

It depends on the details.

Look at Moveon.org, DailyKos, Swift Boat Veterans, or any of the thousands of PACs, 527s, “Citizens for whatever” groups. That’s how democratic process in conducted in the US.

This is incorrect. Parties have national structures (i.e. the Democratic and Republican National Committees). And national parties have to register with the Federal Election Commission.

It is true that the presidential election consists of formally separate state systems of selecting electors.

People seem to be forgetting that this can cut in very different ways. The coalition system was used from the 1930s through the 1960s as a very, very effective mechanism for setting up the US social welfare network (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.)

Would anyone who claims that multi-party systems are intrinsically better care to defend the pathological Israeli system, for example?

This is a dynamic I recall regularly occuring when I lived in Texas, back in the day when the elected officials were mostly Democrats (in the 1980s.)

1. Don’t forget the presidential system. Heads of federal executive departments serve at the pleasure of the President, not of the legislature. Same with states and governors. If you don’t control the executive, you are shut out of power. That means the whole game is to get a President elected, and if you can’t be one of the two big presidential parties you might as well not play. A third party can’t even in theory use a small block of supporters in Congress to make a deal to sustain a government in return for getting some of its policies enacted, because a President as we are seeing now can govern effectively even with a hostile Congress.

2. As others have pointed out, the Democratic and Republican parties function more as arms of the US and state government than as political parties the way people in other countries understand the term. You become affiliated with them through the voter registration process, there are no memberships their funds come entirely or almost entirely through corporate contributions their candidate selection process is a matter of state law, they usually have guaranteed ballot access while other organizations are shut out.

3. Also in a strict legal sense, parties only exist at the state level, and elections are held only at the state level -the presidential election is really a series of state elections, for slates of electors. Its hard to work out what exactly the impact of this it, but it has one.

4. There is no US equivalent of the BBC or the CBC, and TV news consists to a large degree of propeganda. Its hard for political alternatives to flourish in this environment.

Latin American countries have similar systems to the US, in some cases deliberately modeled after the US. However most Latin American countries have introduced proportional representation and made some efforts recently to clean up their political process. The U.S. political system is now arguably less democratic than the systems in Argentina and Brazil.

There ought to be wider public participation in choosing the leadership of the Labour party. As it stands there are 200 000 members (compared to the 400 000 before the anointment of His Holiness Tony Pious) and they are not at all representative of the Labour voters or of the people of this country.

I’m not defending the American system, just pointing out for the record that the British system is also abysmal.

The larger point is that the Democratic and Republican Parties arguably began to be semi-official entities more than a century ago, but the primary system as we know it today is a lot more recent. It’s an important part of the two-party system today, but it did not bring that system about.

What has become quite clear in this discussion is that the Americans commenting have, quite understandably, a basic understanding and acceptance of the status quo of primaries that the questioning of it seems genuinely strange, perhaps because of the lack of internal discussion of other systems. Please don’t take that as a criticism – after all, it often seems as if the rest of the world is obsessed with the US political and electoral system to the exclusion of all else. I’m pretty sure most people in the UK know a great deal more about the US system than, say, the French.