You use the example of merchants, coalowners, manufacturers and barristers to rubbish the idea of aristocratic dominance in 1890s Britain. Well, up to a point. Those professions are not titled landowners, but still represent the top 5% of the population! The whole point of the British system post-1640 is that it was not wholly dominated by aristocrats, but that they were forced to share power with the other wealthy and powerful sections of the population, including financiers, merchants and manufacturers. Thus still highly oligarchical. The presence of lawyers in government also proves little. For obvious reasons they have been ubiquitous in high office under practically all regimes and forms of government.

Well, I must admit, this sounds vaguely convincing. In the sense: it’s so bad now, how could it get any worse?

When I mentioned Lebanon, I didn’t mean their paramilitary entities; I meant their political system, where all kinds of political and bureaucratic government posts (including, as far as I know, low level public servants) are allocated proportionally to every ethnic and sectarian group. I suspect this might be something many American liberals would like too, in one form or another.

0) In a sub-optimally democratic systems, the balance between democratic resources (e.g. voters) and non-democratic resources (e.g. money) shifts to corrupting side and in general money is much more fluid than voters (which is one reason federalism in problematic in democracy, that said devolution is always a fall back to for dealing with regional concerns).
0.5) Regionalism is a complicated and I am not sure there is one “regional” problem. Do New York suburbanites really see the world differently than LA suburbanites? To the extent that they do now, is not that reality an artifact of a political system where legislators parcel out political goods on a state-by-state basis?

On top of that, disproportionality creates a regional problem larger than it has to be,
i.e., rural population get disproport. representation in Congress (especially the Senate) and to a lesser extent when they are allocated House districts where they can become the “swing”. And if history is any guide, the rural Congressional delegation has been colonized by a variety of monied interests. To the extent that regional issues reflect a rural v. urban division, it is hard to imagine worse alternatives than this.

Legislators beholden to the platform of a national party prescribing a national policy have a completely different set of incentives. And when national policy is determining economic rights or goods as a matter of law then equalizing the outcome (e.g., between constituents in different states) becomes a matter of administration and conflicts between regions become legal perhaps but not political (in the legislative sense).

1) In general I think proportional multi-party systems are much better at making compromises or effecting complicated deals than the alternative (such as the US). This is done through coalition government. Unlike the sort of backroom dealings among political insiders here, in negotiations between parties (to form a government) the ideological connection establishes the parties as “relaible clients” so the deals have qualitatively more democratic legitimacy that in non-competitive systems.

In general, the ability to innovate or strike creative deals should increase with the number of parties, i.e., the number of possible coalitions should increase with more parties. But there is the rub, there is some evidence too many parties (which is equivalent to saying too many small parties) seem to result in dysfunctional patterns possibly related to the disproportionate power small parties can wield and possbily to the degree that too much “noise” can fill the political-cultural space). So comments about whether p.m.p.d can come up with workable solutions to challenges posed by regionalism or identity politics has to take in a account a possible ceiling in terms of too many parties. And indeed, perhaps there is a limit on how large/diverse a country can be and still managed with a PR system, but giving up on large countries seems preferable to giving up on democracy.

[I would argue Barrington Moore's conundrum about how political elites allowed the Civil War to happen is to argue that the American system is not really all that good, as it believes itself to be, in creating compromise because ultimately one cannot maintain a strategy of compromise with intransigent political minorities - which the system does produce, well certainly in the case of slavery it is practically enshrined in the Constitution].

3) Without competitive and ideological politics, you can’t really slice and dice political constituencies and reassemble into legitimating majorities without some form of coercion (or false promises). This applies to regional and “identity” interests. One can at least entertain the New Yorkers and Californians, or Hispanics and Blacks might respond to appeal built on their common interests (e.g. class or economic interests). But there is no likeliehood of this happening is constrained when all ideological appeals are suspect as are most political actors (i.e., when there is no solution to client-agent problem). And it is hard to imagine unifying appeals to class in a political system where ideological accountability is marginal at best and where the system is a product of an electorate largely not working class and highly compromised by money (from you-know-who).

I don’t have much of a clue what the political dynamics of a PR America regarding “divisive” issues would be like, but it is hard to imagine they would be much worse than now. Politics elites employ extreme ideological appeals in the current system for a variety of reasons and in general the truncated (2 party) political system is too narrow to accomodate all the ideological positions a complex society generates.

One of the reasons is that simply to obtain a better bargaining position against other elites (or to in some other way disrupt them – racialist appeals may not be so much aimed at mobilizing the Klan as it is to destabilize coalitions between urban blue collar whites and people of color). And there is an asymmetry here, the system gives conservatives and in-built advantage, they do not have to build majorities to create obstructionist coalitions in Congress.

4) One of the reason, perhaps, for the rise of identity politics is what I mention in a previous post is that, for whatever reason, reforms around formal equality in the US are much more successful than those wanting the redistribution of wealth.

Last point, any wealthy country (without the presence paramilitary entities, with rule of law, etc) is unlikely to become Lebanon, political elites (and most everybody else) are not likely to see the up-side in it. (Or at least that’s my hope.)

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/dublin/poverty_health.html

Yes, I am trolling you. Kind of..

You are, as always, lucid, eloquent and often well-informed. But when you write that Britain “throughout the 19th century [was] not rich, by the standards of the 20th or 21st centuries, perhaps, but it was a country, where the concentration of wealth was extreme, and the feverish accumulation of capital into the hands of the few combined with the conquest of empire, to leave very little benefit to servants or factory workers, and even less to Irish peasants” I cannot see much congruence between your views and reality; at least, _throughout_ the nineteenth century. Are you really arguing that servants and factory workers were not very much better off at the end of the nineteenth century than at the beginning – or indeed, Irish peasants? Or that the concentration of wealth was extreme in Britain by nineteenth century standards? Was it really that much better than in the US in the Gilded Age, allowing for the enormous acreage of free land available in the US?

As for the long and delicious quotation from Barbara Tuchmann: I admire her rhetoric and have a few doubts about her command of facts. One would not realise, judging from her description of Salisbury’s first cabinet – which I freely admit was the highwatermark of late aristocratic Conservatism- that it included WH Smith, the newsagent and bookseller, or that later reorganisations brought in Joseph Chamberlain the Birmingham businessman, Charles Ritchie from a family of jutespinners in Dundee,George Goschen from an Anglo-German merchant family (and champion of the University Extension movement), Henry Matthews, a Catholic lawyer, born in Ceylon and educated in Paris, Akers-Douglas, son of a Kentish parson, or Robert Hanbury, a Staffordshire coalowner.

Competent, many of them were. Well off, mostly (but compare US politicians of the same vintage). Aristocratic, come off it.

And Tuchmann was tilting the balance somewhat. Look at the cabinet before Salisbury’s: HH Asquith, son of a Yorkshire wool merchant, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a Glasgow wholesale and retail draper, AJ Mundella, a Nottingham hosier, son of an Italian refugee, Arnold Morley, an Nottingham manufacturer and publisher, Henry Fowler, a Wolverhampton solicitor, James Bryce, son of a Belfast lawyer, George Shaw-Lefebvre, son of a London barrister, John Morley, a Lancashire journalist.

Not, I think, aristocratic rulers keeping the lower classes penned in Dickensian squalor. Was there, indeed, any Dickensian squalor in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century?

And that’s not ever the worst case scenario; the US political system and the media are routinely employing much more pernicious ‘identity politics’ shit, like “appeal to hispanic voters”, for example. I’m afraid in a multi-party PR system this kind of shit is likely to explode… And in that case, you’re not getting your “political manifestation of Socialism”, you’re getting something completely different. Lebanon?

Going back to this for a minute. If you read the report in the New York Times it doesn’t really lead you to think Obama’s Syria policy would be significantly different than McCain’s:

“But senior American officials have said that the White House was worried about the risks of becoming more deeply involved in the Syria crisis, including the possibility that weapons could fall into the wrong hands. And with Mr. Obama in the middle of a re-election campaign….

.. Some administration officials expected the issue to be revisited after the election. But when Mr. Petraeus resigned because of an extramarital affair and Mrs. Clinton suffered a concussion, missing weeks of work, the issue was shelved.”

I don’t doubt that McCain would have been more involved in Syria, and have had a somewhat different approach to the Arab uprisings, but I don’t see how those differences would have led to a significantly different outcome than we have today. He probably wouldn’t have been able to implement a no fly zone early on in the conflict, wouldn’t have used ground troops and although he might have directly armed the rebels earlier, this is probably going to happen anyway, and more than likely wouldn’t have made a difference to the conflict.

On keeping a presence in Iraq, and going to war with Iran, neither of these seem overly realistic outcomes from a McCain presidency. There has been a good bit written about Obama’s approach to Iran, and the difficulty he has had in substantially changing US policy. Even if really he wanted to (for example)

http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/Pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=258

So sure in some respects, primarily domestically, the Presidency might matter, but you’re overstating the case if you extend that to FP, especially in the Middle East. (And particularly in this case)

My argument (and I think it is nothing fancy or so original, just a fairly straightforward interpretation of the transnational data and fairly commonplace arguments in the
poli sci lit) is that the following are interrelated (and mutually reinforcing) :

low participation of working class/poor voters
~ dis-proportionality (i.e. the opposite of PR)
~ lack of (competitive multiparty) party system
(the most salient aspect of which is no ideologically coherent, disciplined parties)
~ undeveloped welfare state and general slow pace of legislated reform (i.e. we are decades behind all the other a.i.d)

Supporting all of this (and especially the slow pace of reform) are structural features of an anti-majoritarian legislative system “architect-ed” mostly in the Constitution which make the legislative process a machine uniquely well designed for stalling popular reforms. (I.e., low participation rate has an symbolic component – no parties with an ideological connection to working class voters – and material one – the slow rate at which the legislative process allows social reform to be enacted – people lose interest in politics because it doesn’t “deliver the goods”).

Why do I say the American parties are not ideological? They have ideologies but they are diffuse at the best of times and usually fractured and self-contradictory. More importantly, whatever the ideological “face” a party represents, they are not electorally disciplined enough to enact their programs. US parties undergo ups and downs in terms of the ideological “spread” but the need for super-majorities to pass laws through the committee systems, the incredibly disproportional Senate with its filibuster rules and the Presidential veto mean there is a second layer of institutional pressure (beyond the pre-existing tendency in the s.m.d elections themselves) to move center despite a party’s own ideological center-of-gravity in order to just get legislation passed. (Note that if you are an anti-reform party – you have a distinct advantage). Also because the legislative process is so slow it means that voters have to turn out for multiple elections (sometimes in off years) if there is a hope to push through a particular reform.

As also as a party grows to transition from the minority to majority position, the “compromise over ideology” tendency becomes stronger because there is no legal or organizational mechanism that compels US legislators to vote in accordance the platform of their own party (or put another way, US parties are more likely to grow by “broadening” their tent which necessarily means diffusing of it existing ideological mix).

So one answer to a venerated conundrum of political science as to why is there no political manifestation of Socialism in US politics is that the “party” system doesn’t support ideology. Really it is a two part process. First part, the Debsian Socialist Party got over 10% of the vote for Debs in 1912 but disproportionalality meant it only ever won 3 Congressional seats (and its candidates were never seated in two of those) instead of 10 or 20.

Even if it had (second part – the role of ideology and super-majority requirements), a SP in the US Congress would have had to produce higher levels of political mobilization (compared to other Western democracies) just to get its legislation passed. This would have reproduced the aforementioned tension between ideological coherence and “delivering the goods” to the party’s constituents. And once a minor (i.e., “third”) party’s constituents started to believe that one of the major (ideologically promiscuous) parties might have a better chance of passing social reforms of interest, a minor party’s days as going electoral concern are numbered (especially given how expensive elections are). This is just a restatement of the poli sci rule of thumb that 3rd parties quickly have to become one of the Big Two or die in the US Congress.

The Democratic Party was able to deliver the goods (sort of) in the 30′s when the Depression resulted in election wins on the order of 70% (I don’t know how much of this came from a bump in turnout but presumably most of it did) but the labor movement and the welfare state have been fighting a rearguard action ever since as the “normal” turnout rates having given the conservatives (outside the DP and not) enough traction in Congress to endlessly forestall labor law reform, national health care (well at least for 70 years, keep your fingers crossed) etc.

Jame @143, I agree Gerrymandering is a problem but it is an outgrowth of a complicated structures mentioned above (i.e, the Lunatics are running the Asylum) and though a good thing for democracy (for the reasons you cite) but probably is nowhere near enough (e.g., the super-majority requirements remain in Congress until such time as the Constitution is amended or abandoned). Also, single member districts, even when not Gerrymandered result in fewer parties (a la the UK), give swing voters disproportional influence, etc. The problem with any specific change in the process is that politicians (who were elected under the “old rules” have very little interest in change) and process-oriented reform rarely has a wide constituency.

The one thing I don’t often hear in process-oriented critiques of American politics is how much legislative structural obstacles contribute to political de-mobilization and disenfranchisement. People participate in social movements for material and moral reasons, the American system frustrates in both those dimensions (materially because of the aforementioned obstacles – in addition, prior to 1940 the courts played a central – though perhaps redundant- role in beating back social reform). In America, for many decades before similar trends in Europe became apparent (for much different reasons I would argue), limited participation, often legally enforced but also encouraged through the artifact of truncated, conservatively-biased debate paired with a grossly inefficient/slow legislative process. Low participation and a logic of disenfranchisement have always been an institutional part of the American system, not some exogenous “culture” variable.