Weirdly, clever quips on The Internet don’t actually fix problems in your country.
@yorrike that doesn’t fix the problem ... we need to influence policy ... not politics
// @simonwoods
@JohnPhilpin Can you really separate the two cleanly? The politics of, say, a multi-party system would likely lead to vastly different policies in the US. I’m interested to see what happens here in NYC once ranked choice voting goes into effect in 2021. //@yorrike
@Bruce @JohnPhilpin Sorry, mixing my home politics with US Politics. We have 5 political parties in our parliament, elected proportionally. So voting is influencing policy. Two party systems using first past the posy obviously makes that untrue.
@yorrike In the US, I think you could argue that voting in the primaries does something similar. It’s definitely played a role in the Republican Party moving towards the right. Bernie’s run in 2016 made Medicare For All into a mainstream Democratic policy proposal. //@johnphilpin @simonwoods
@Bruce It’s not quite the same. In a proportional government Sanders, Warren and Harris (who’d likely represent different political parties) would all be elected with a proportion and then have to come to an agreement on joint policy in order to form a coalition. And those parties would be present in all three elected bodies of government. And then the president would be elected by popular vote.
@yorrike The physical world, it turns out, both still exists and supercedes bits on a screen. Massively so.
@yorrike but doesn’t need too …
we regularly have politicians complaining that their meetings are being invaded by people OUTSIDE of their constituency - and they are geographically correct
BUT - wrong
Consider this which is dynamically generated.
Example : If you were / are concerned about ethics then Theodore E Deutch, Chair of the Ethics committee is the person to aim at … and everyone else on that committee - now - which one of those are in high risk positions for reelection?
start pulling the two worlds together and suddenly you have a very rich data set that can be used to affect policy.
a friend of mine has done a LOT of work in this area - and if there are people in Micro Blog that would like intros and would like access to what he has let me know - I will connect you.
@JohnPhilpin to be clear the site at the end is NOT all running normally - waiting for its next kick
@yorrike Oddly enough, the Democratic Presidential primaries are the closest we have to a multi-party system. Delegates are awarded proportionally and the various candidates’ delegate hauls roughly translate to their influence on the platform committee that meets before the convention. So Sanders, Warren, Biden, and (maybe?) Buttigieg and Klobuchar will be negotiating over policy proposals.
Though I was mostly thinking of non-presidential primaries. AOC knocking off the 4th ranked Dem in the House has definitely affected the party’s priorities. When a tea party candidate primaried the second-ranked Republican in the House back in 2012(?), the leadership lost control of its caucus (Boehner would have loved to agree to Obama’s “Grand Bargain”, but the crazies in the House prevented him from taking 3/4s of a loaf).
In state politics, knocking out the New York State IDC State Senators let the Dems actually take control of the State Legislature and force Cuomo to sign some progressive legislation that he’d rather not.
Basically both parties contain factions that (as you pointed out) would be in different parties in a proportional system. So the horse trading goes on within the parties and how the primary electorates are voting tends to exert a fairly strong influence. Especially as the leadership can’t “withdraw the whip” and kick anyone out of the party.
@yorrike Then there’s California, which is a one party state, thanks to Pete Wilson and Prop 187 alienating a generation+ of Latinx voters. Thirty years later, the Dems control every state-wide office and have super-majorities in both houses of the legislature. They don’t have to negotiate with Republicans at all—all state-wide politics is basically intra-party.