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?
Oh ok, this is just my rough understanding, but
there’s like, a process to register as a political party, and then a process for establishing membership for that party. Then once you have the membership, those members can stand for election.
For example, Anthony is a member of the Australian Labor Party. The party has mechanisms to decide of what use Anthony will be as a member of the party. Anthony was born in an inner city suburb in Sydney, Australia, so the party decides (somehow?) that he will stand for election for them in the Sydney electorate of Grayndler, an electorate in the inner west of Sydney which doesn’t quite cover the actual suburb where he was born, but it’s close enough that he can plausibly claim to be a local.
Short summary: all currently elected MPs are members of a political party, but not all members of a political party are currently elected somewhere.
Anthony does well enough in Grayndler to become the Federal representative for that electorate in the Lower House/House of Representatives (don’t ask me about the Upper House/Senate, it’s 1am and I don’t have the brainpower). There are uhhhh…. 151 federal electorates in the whole of Australia, meaning that Anthony gets to cast 1 vote, almost always along party lines, out of 151, on each piece of policy that goes through the house. He would generally like at least 75 other MPs to agree with him. However, the leader of the Labor Party is an uncharismatic piece of wet cardboard, and as a result of his unconvincing political campaigning on behalf of the party, Anthony doesn’t have quite enough allies who agree with him in the Lower House. Poor opinion polls have convinced the membership (note: not necessarily just the ones who are elected as MPs?) that the leader doesn’t have enough political sway to hold the party together and/or win an election. So they simply hold a vote. Anthony, and perhaps several others, decide to challenge the Wet Cardboard for leadership of the party - I believe they to be an actual Member of Parliament to stand for leadership, but the entire party membership votes - and in our scenario, Anthony wins! He is now the party leader, and because his party isn’t in government right now, he also becomes Leader Of The Opposition. The process I’ve just described is called a Leadership Spill, and it happens so, so much in Australia. That’s pretty much all I know about how being a political party member works.
To answer the other part of your question, no, we do not have voter party alignment, and the very thought of it terrifies me. People in Aus just… vote how they want to. Sometimes they deliberately vote illegitimately, the electoral equivalent of a middle finger. And it’s preferential voting, ranked choice, so my favoured strategy is to vote for anywhere between 2 and 5 of the smaller parties, depending on who’s on the ballot, before I vote for Labor. The vote is probably still going to count towards Labor in the end, because I still preferred them higher than the other large parties, but giving the smaller parties a little boost doesn’t hurt. (You get like, a campaigning stipend from the federal budget if your party got past some threshold of the vote percentage)
Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention. The smaller parties don’t necessarily have enough of a membership that they can put members up for all 151 federal seats across Australia, and that’s okay, they don’t have to. It’s about individual seats more than it is about national vote count. Like, there’s tons of smaller parties out there, most of whom try their luck in the Senate, but you still get the occasional Federal candidate for the Australian Sex Party (they’re called something different now but I’ve forgotten what) or the Christian Democrats or whoever. It depends what electorate you’re in. Sadly, if you live in a place where there is no Sex Party candidate standing for election, you don’t get to vote a Sex Party Candidate into the Lower House. And there’s no write in ballots either.
So how exactly does voter registration work in the US? My impression is that people are strictly not allowed to vote in some states if they aren’t registered to a party?? Are they allowed to change their vote if they’re registered? How can minor parties be expected to exist ever when party registration exists?
In America when you register with your state as a voter you’re asked to identify with a party, each state will have as options the big 2, some third parties with national reach (Green, Libertarian, Reform) and some more oddball ones, or you can register as independent.
The significance is you’ll then be eligible to vote in that party’s primary elections, which are the mechanism of candidate selection.
Prior to each general election, primaries are held, where any voter registered with a party (poss. meeting certain criteria to establish a floor of seriousness, like nominating signatures from a certain number of party members) can run to become the party’s official nominee for a particular office in the general election.
At lower levels this is sort of cliquish, at higher levels primary candidates will often map to various factions, support bases, and tendencies. Primaries have significantly lower turnout than generals (voting is not mandatory in America) and well-organized groups can use this to exert significant influence. Teachers’ and other public employees’ unions will typically be major players in Democratic primaries, for example, which means that candidates winning their favor will be more likely to win primaries (which candidates know and thus court them), with the result that Democratic officials in office will tend to be solicitous of their interests. (These unions will also devote much effort to getting out the [non-mandatory!] vote for Democrats in general elections.)
Much of the Republican Party’s harder rightward turn since the 1980s comes from conservative interest groups and media organizing around primary campaigns to nominate fiercely conservative candidates to the general election. The risk is of nominating candidates too conservative to be viable in their electorate, it is believed this was behind much of Republicans’ underwhelming performance in this recent 2022 election.
Official party structures do exist, formed in ways that are usually some mild legitimizing process layered atop cliqueishness, but for the most part they don’t directly choose candidates. They historically have, but that was largely superseded in attempts to break self-sustaining dynamics like urban machines and the southern Democratic Party as the mechanism of white rule. As recently as 1968 presidential candidates were still selected by nominating convention delegates (themselves selected at state party conventions by delegates selected by county parties), but when after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and amidst activist uprising the Democratic Party chose the establishmentarian compromise candidacy of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had not been actively seeking nomination before, the legitimacy of this system was called into question and it was teplaced.
Official party structures can and do deploy resources towards favored candidates in ways that greatly raise their chance of primary success, however, and in some cases may be involved in the selection of replacements in offices which become vacant through death or resignation
There are additional historical quirks: because of the poor reputation of urban party machines, many (particularly western) cities in the Progressive Era established nonpartisan local elections; candidates are not nominated by parties but rather all candidates meeting requirements are entered into a primary and the top two vote-getters face off in the general. Democratic-dominated California recently established “jungle primaries” statewide on a similar basis, before the state was so overwhelmingly Democratic that the Dem primary – lower-turnout and excluding non-Democrats – was effectively the decisive contest.
It is theoretically possible but quite difficult to enter a general election as an independent candidate without winning party nomination; elections are conducted according to laws established by members of the two major parties and are optimized for them, and for parties more broadly, the Reform Party was essentially established as a support structure for Ross Perot’s second presidential run.