Kontextmaschine

9th November 2022

Post reblogged from Life and Times of a Biology Major and Duran Duran fan with 110 notes

kontextmaschine:
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has there been any progress in democracy in the past 100 years?
apparently Maine is switching to ranked choice voting, something that has been used in Australia since 1919 to allow minor parties to be competitive without risks of splitting the vote.
is that it?
In the United States, party machines and family dynasties have gotten significantly less powerful in the last century. The former seems to have had some unintended consequences but is probably good on net.
In the UK, the House of Lords has gotten significantly less powerful over the last century.
More countries use parliamentary than presidential systems than was the case 100 years ago, which is good.
I think there are improvements one can point to.
Seventeenth amendment in 1913 is only a bit more than 100 years ago, and that’s a pretty big one.
(Women’s suffrage in various countries at various times is also a fairly big one, as is the Voting Rights Act in the US.)
I mean these sound like saying that “democracy as practiced in Australia a hundred years ago is becoming more common worldwide”?
(or more fairly, given the civil rights movement, perhaps there has been little improvement in the past 50 years).
it’s not quite as quick as Moore’s law, is it.
This is harder to quantify and hasn’t “paid off” yet, but informally I feel like the median voter today is much more likely to be aware of the drawbacks of FPTP and two-party systems than the median voter in 1920. Hell, I regularly see people online citing Arrow’s impossibility theorem (even if I think that finding is very often misused). There’s more awareness of potential for improvement than there used to be.
It may be a while before this translates into action, just because unilateral defection from 2P+FPTP is so costly, but we’re in the “consciousness raising” stage and I want to think something will come out of it eventually.
this really is the perfect demonstration of why politics is so difficult: imagine if one country was using 2020 era computers, aeroplanes, and televisions and another country was using 1920 era logarithm tables, zeppelins, and radios, but people were coming around to the idea of modern technology and give it another hundred years and they might think about switching.
Americans do refer to our voting style as the “Australian ballot”, but by that we mean that votes are cast secretly with no way for outside parties to determine how a voter has selected, as compared to the original American style where voters brought their own ballots (or more likely, accepted color-coded “party slate” printed ballots from party representatives outside the polling place) and then deposited them in a box in public view.
jesus fucking christ do you guys still shit outdoors too
wait, how do you do candidate selection? primaries? selected by the constituency party subunit (by who?)
The party selects the candidate to be leader (and overthrows them if they’re not generating the popular appeal they’d hoped). The candidate leads the party, running both for their seat (all of Australia is divided into electorates for which Members of Parliament stand) and for the Prime Ministership in general. Individual MPs might be able to influence the outcome a little bit, but in terms of major parties, most people are clued into the fact that they’re voting for the Prime Minister by voting for a particular party.
We don’t have primaries, that would be ridiculous. Every candidate for like 9 different parties has to be voted in by the people before the election, not including entirely independent candidates?? It would be a logistical nightmare.

“The party” being who, currently elected MPs, the few who’ve paid dues to the local branch UK-style, do you guys even have voters register to vote aligned with a party like we do?

Tagged: straya