Two Party Politics

Critical Section has a bit of a write-up bemoaning the two party system and suggest proportional representation. He later points out there may be some problems with this approach. I am not a fan of proportional representation, which I believe swings government away from a democratic republic to a more democratic-mob rule. I see this as problematic because it gives too much power to the fringes of political view and is to easily swayed by the issue of the day rather than a longer term strategy. I don't think a direct democracy would be a better system.

However, there is another way to be able to get third party views more air time, it's called Condercet voting. This would allow people rank their candidates as Nader, Gore, Bush, without them worrying that ranking Nader as their number one choice they would give the election to Bush. Another example of a ranking would be Perot, Bush Sr. (the first), Clinton. In this case the election in 1992 would have likely gone to Bush Sr. This kind of system would allow for a third party candidate to be successful enough to really install a third party into American politics. The system today encourages people to not "throw away their votes" almost enforces a two-party system.

One of the more interesting ideas I came across was in the trilogy, "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars". There lower house was composed of people drafted from fairly small districts. You were drafted by random lottery and it was civic duty much like jury duty. Being just like jury duty it was an honor people tried to avoid. Now you might say this is lunacy to let people chosen at random govern. Well, in many states people chosen at random sit in judgement in capital criminal cases. If they can choose who lives and dies they certainly could passs a few laws. Perhaps our laws would be more readable.