The Pakistani Spectator

I want to begin by congratulating all of you in Pakistan on your recent elections, which appear to have peacefully moved your nation in a positive direction chosen by the people of Pakistan, in spite of fears that undemocratic forces would prevent such a move. I fervently hope that our own upcoming US elections can accomplish such a positive change, as well.

Today I would like to discuss political parties, and how various systems of different numbers of parties affect people’s ability to exercise democratic control. To begin, let’s think about why political parties even exist. When the USA gained independence, over 200 years ago, the first US president, George Washington, belonged to no political party, and he argued that such parties would only harm American democracy.

Imagine a “thought experiment” where we have a group of 9 elected representatives running the country, each elected as an individual, not as a member of a party. Would parties tend to form spontaneously? Imagine that you are one of those 9 representatives, and you found yourself most often on the winning side of the most important votes, often with the same 4 other representatives forming a majority of 5. For the time being, your views on the most important issues are winning the battle, but you still might hope to win still more control, to win even more of the decisions. There’s a simple strategy to take still more power. If you strike an agreement with the other 4 who find themselves usually voting on the same side, you could agree to form an alliance; before every vote, the 5 members of the alliance take their own vote, and they agree then to vote as a block according to the majority will of the alliance, at least on the more important issues. Now, by joining the alliance, the alliance members can control every important decision just by convincing 2 other members of the alliance to join their side – 3 representatives in the majority party can “carry the day,” and impose their will, magnifying the power of each member of the alliance, effectively freezing the 4 non-aligned representatives out of power. For now, the 4 non-aligned representatives are in a terrible position, but if they are not fools, they will likely realize that their only hope of eventually taking back some power would be to form their own “opposition” alliance, working together to someday gain the upper hand currently held by the majority alliance. If the same part (perhaps an alliance within the alliance!) of the majority alliance usually won the votes within the alliance, against the wishes of 1 or 2 of the alliance members, the opposition alliance might win over that losing member or members of the majority alliance, forming a new majority alliance, taking power from the old majority alliance, for example.

I believe that such pragmatic alliances, designed to magnify power in a democratic system, are the inevitable root of party systems. Simple self-interest in magnifying the power of each representative makes alliances inevitable, and we call these alliances parties (and coalitions of parties, when there are more than two parties). As it happens, parties are also convenient for individual voters. Party membership becomes a quick way to guess how an individual will vote – for example, members of a hypothetical “blue” party might generally vote for whatever is best for farmers, so the voters don’t need to spend too long getting to know the individual candidates, and they can expect that a candidate who doesn’t generally follow the party viewpoints probably would not choose that alliance, since belonging to that alliance would force him or her to vote against his or her wishes much too often. Parties also tend to be “self-policing,” discouraging candidates whose views differ too widely from the party mainstream viewpoints, denying them financial and other assistance in getting elected or reelected if they don’t vote with the party block on the issues most important to the party, or if they bring embarrassment or disrepute to the party, or otherwise fail to help the party achieve its consensus goals.

In light of this power-maximizing-alliance view of how and why parties form, let’s consider governments with single parties, with two dominant parties, and with multiple parties.

Single-party systems, in my view, are impossible, in the long run, in a real democracy, for the very same reason that George Washington failed to see his dream of a party-free system. In a true democracy, members of a single party would be free to form alliances within that party, just as the party-less members of my hypothetical 9-member government formed alliances. Once one of the alliances gained control from within the single party, it would effectively become a party within the party, and the rest of the party would be frozen out of power, at least until the frozen-out members formed their own organized opposition. Thus, in any true democracy, any party that finds itself without any organized opposition would automatically tend to split into two or more sub-parts, which would inevitably become full-blown, formal political parties. The only way a single party can avoid this is to ruthlessly suppress the democratic process within itself, and to ruthlessly prevent frozen-out members from forming their own external party. Of course, if the single party is preventing the free formation of these alliances within itself or outside of itself, the nation can hardly call itself a democracy, whether or not it conducts some travesty of an election with a single choice offered. Rather than being a democracy, such a government is really rule by elite, where the elite is the leadership of the single so-called party – see my earlier article concerning pros and cons of rule by an elite.

As an American, I am most familiar with a two-party system, and I’ll describe the American system as the prototypical two-party system, since I know it best. In America, for many decades, I believe that the most important political issue, by far, has been the competing interests of the rich and the poor, and government’s role in assisting these competing interests. For example, high-quality schools paid for with public funds (requiring no tuition from the parents) are the best hope of poor people to see their children live better lives than they did, with better-paying jobs, but rich people may reason that they surely pay more for education through their taxes (since the taxes of the rich must subsidize the education of the poor, if the poor are to receive a better education than they could afford out of their own pockets) than they would pay if government stayed out of education, and privately-run schools were funded directly by the parents, with tuition. Thus, the rich (when thinking only of their immediate, short-term self-interest) would tend to favor less spending on public education, especially public education in poorer areas, while the poor should tend to favor equal and relatively high spending on public education in all areas, funded by taxes collected mainly from the rich. The poor would tend to favor government “safety-net” programs, such as publicly provided medical care, unemployment insurance, and government payments to the old and disabled, while the rich reason that they are safer relying on their own wealth and privately purchased insurance, which they can easily afford, than they will be relying on government safety nets paid for disproportionately by taxation of the rich. The rich will also tend to favor minimal government regulation of business, since business-ownership and profit is usually where the rich are getting their money, while the poor are more likely to pay the price of business excesses, such as unsafe working conditions. The rich will naturally favor lower taxation rates on the rich, with lots of loopholes (special laws) allowing the rich (and businesses) to escape taxes, while the poor will naturally favor highly “progressive” taxes, where the rich pay a much higher percentage of their income than the poor.

There is a spectrum, therefore, where people strictly voting their own economic best-interests should find themselves, a spectrum defined by family income, adjusted for family size. Families on the higher half of the spectrum, assuming they vote only according to their own financial interests, should naturally ally themselves with the rest of the families in the upper half of the spectrum, while poorer families in the lower half of the spectrum would naturally ally themselves with the rest of the families in the lower half. I believe that the key difference between the two American parties lies in this spectrum, with the Democratic Party driven by the interests of poorer families, and with the Republican Party driven by the interests of the rich. This is only a very rough approximation, though, for several reasons:

• People are not always so smart about figuring out what is in their own best interests. I think many of the policies favored by the Republican Party (such as reducing publicly funded support of schools in poor areas) hurt rich and poor, in the long run, and (I admit, as a lifelong Democrat) the Democratic party, too, sometimes favors policies (such as protectionist trade policies) that also hurt both poor and rich, in the end. Given that it is not so clear what policies are best for the rich or for the poor, there are rich people who genuinely think that Democratic policy on the whole would help the rich (as well as the poor) more in the end than Republican policy (and they may be right!), and there are poor people who think that Republican policy is best for the poor (as well as for the rich), in the end (and they may be right, too, though I doubt it!).
• Americans, I believe, tend to be somewhat silly in estimating what lies in their own economic future, sometimes holding favorable views of reduced taxation of the rich based on absurdly optimistic ideas of how rich they are likely to become in a few years, even while they are relatively poor, today. Largely for this reason, I believe, Republican policy tends really to favor the richest fifth (or less!) of the population, not the richest half, and yet Republicans manage to get about half the votes, with middle-income and even rather poor people sometimes voting against their own current best interests because they imagine that they are going to be much wealthier in a few years.
• People can vote against their personal selfish best interests, if they think this does others much more good than harm. A substantial number of rich people vote for Democrats as a conscious decision to help the poorer half of the population at some cost to themselves and their rich friends.
• The richer party can market its ideas more effectively, through advertising, sometimes persuading the more gullible voters to vote against their own interests, winning elections without truly representing the interests of a majority. Since the party representing the interests of the rich will generally command more money (donations to campaign funds), all else being equal, this makes it possible for the Republican Party to do a better job of selling people on voting against their own interests than the Democratic Party can manage. Ironically, the current Republican candidate for president, John McCain, is viewed as a traitor to his party, according to large numbers of Republicans, mainly because he was honest enough to deplore the influence-buying power of money in politics, and to push forward a law to restrict large contributions to the parties, in spite of the fact that these large contributions (coming from the rich) mainly benefited the Republicans. (Of course those Republicans opposing this law do not describe their opposition in these terms – they argue that it was a bad law because it restricted the freedom of individuals to spend their own money freely to express their political views through this spending. It just happened that this spending mainly helps the Republicans (and the rich, who happen to have far more money available to “express themselves” in this way!), but of course this has nothing to do with their opposition!)
• The “spectrum” of political viewpoints is not one-dimensional – it does not just boil down to what is good for the rich versus what is good for the poor. Apart from the dimension of policy favoring rich versus poor, there are dimensions for favoring agricultural interests versus industrial interests, interests in maximum protection of the environment versus maximum freedom from environmental controls, interests in government promotion of old-fashioned “family values,” versus keeping government out of family life, interests in government promotion of religion and religiously based values, versus interests in keeping government and religion thoroughly separated, interests in high spending on the military, versus lower spending on the military, and so forth. For every area of widespread disagreement, the two parties generally take a position at least slightly removed on the spectrum, compared to the other party. (The difference is only a slight difference, though, on issues where Americans mainly agree, so both parties, for example, heavily favor long prison sentences for lawbreakers, having no wish to alienate voters as a result of views far from the mainstream.)

By a completely arbitrary convention, we call the view taken by the Republican Party on all of these dimensions “Conservative,” or “to the right,” and the view taken by the Democratic Party “Moderate” (or “Liberal,” if the view held is farther from the Republican view), or “to the left.” It is as if a viewpoint held on the question of one spectrum automatically implies “matching” views on the supposed “right versus left” positions on every spectrum! This is nonsense, though – a person could easily agree more with Republican viewpoints on several questions, while agreeing more with Democratic viewpoints on others, and finding both to be highly disagreeable on still others. As long as everyone agrees that a single political question (such as rich interests versus poor interests) entirely dominates the important political issues, and that other questions (such as the degree the environment should be protected, or government’s role in family or religious life) are secondary, a two-party system works pretty well, with each party staking out a point on that most-important spectrum. On the other hand, if the voter finds that several of these dimensions are important, then a two-party system forces the voter to accept a “package deal” – if you want the “socially conservative” ideas of the Republicans, for example, you have to accept their “economically conservative” policies, too, even though those policies might be against your own interests, if you are not so rich. (Republicans make a lot of noise about promoting “socially conservative” “family values” – basically an effort to return to a more old-fashioned sort of family life in America, and they appear to get a surprising number of votes from people who like this position, people who would otherwise be better off under Democratic policies (in my opinion). For about 26 years, now, Republican strategists have made a major effort to win these votes with this strategy, a very cynical effort to buy votes with empty words, in my opinion, since I believe these strategists are well aware that government has extremely little opportunity to give the “social conservatives” what they want, anyway – this must come from the culture and the families, themselves, if it is to happen at all, not from the government.)

As it happens, voters do tend to actually like most of the package deal offered by one party or another – that is, they usually will say that they favor the “Republican” view over the “Democratic” view on almost every question, or they consistently favor almost every Democratic view over the “Republican” views. This is largely just intellectual laziness, though, in my view – there is no reason why a thinking person should choose the same position toward the “right” or “left” on every question, when “right” or “left” are just artificially-applied names for one end or the other of truly separate questions. Self-image is a powerful thing, though, and a person who thinks of himself or herself as a “liberal” or a “conservative” finds it easier to automatically take all the positions that the press and the political parties label in these ways, instead of thinking carefully about every issue and deciding to be “liberal” on 3 questions, “moderate” (in the middle) on 5 others, and “conservative” on 2 more.

During our current nightmare under George W Bush, Bush’s top advisor, Karl Rove, was popularly known as “Bush’s brain” – the ruthless brain behind the power-grab by the astonishingly average-brained Bush. Rove and his cronies liked to speak of building a “permanent majority” – a coalition of groups staunchly loyal to the Republican Party that would hold a voting majority for decades, completely freezing the Democratic Party from power. They did indeed hold the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most of the Judiciary (by appointment) for several years, and this did largely remove the Democrats from any meaningful role in Federal government for those years. The result was predictable, however; with no need to compromise with the Democrats, the Republican positions grew steadily more extreme. With no formal oversight from the Democrats, the Republican exercise of power and sometimes corruption grew steadily more arrogant. Meanwhile, hungry for some power, even if it required moving somewhat to the “right” in their positions, Democrats moved further toward the Republican end of the “spectrum.” More-moderate Republicans and “independents,” both among the voters and among the politicians, were driven to favor the steadily more middle-of-the-road Democrats, and driven away from the steadily more extreme Republicans, until the “permanent majority” ended with the 2006 Congressional elections, just a few years after it had supposedly begun, and now the pendulum looks ready to swing far to the other side, with a Democratic president and Democratic control of both houses of Congress likely in the coming elections. (The courts, with their lifetime appointments, will take longer to swing away from the conservative end of the spectrum.)

As much as I hate to say it, something similar would likely tend to happen if the Democrats took too much control for too long – Democrats would move further “left,” while the Republicans would move closer to the middle, and Democrats would tend to do a poor job of checking the tendency toward arrogance and corruption that tends to come with unchecked power, until power would tend to swing back to the Republicans. Notice that the desire to hold power, as opposed to just exercising it without control for some short time, tends to keep both parties more honest, and less arrogant, and tends to push them toward the “middle-of-the-road,” the sort of compromise viewpoint that pleases the most American voters. There is a saying (really two sayings, which are mirror-images of each other) in American presidential politics. The version for Republican Presidential candidates says: “Run to the right, during the primaries (when you just need to win votes within your own party, especially those who are passionate about the party, who tend to be more extreme on the right), then run to the middle during the general election. If there really is one important spectrum at play, this makes perfect sense, since the candidate, Republican or Democrat, who is exactly in the middle, among the voter positions on the spectrum, should get every voter on one half of the spectrum, and some of the voters who lie between that middle-holding candidate and the opposing candidate, who is toward one end or the other. Of course, the voters have to actually believe that the candidate is close to the middle, which is tricky when the candidate had to claim extreme positions to please his or her party during the party primary elections, so a party which is on the whole fairly middle-of-the-road, according to average American views, enjoys some advantage in the end, and that is just exactly how it should be in a democracy – the whole point of the democracy is make the leaders decide things mainly in the ways most of the people would choose for themselves.

Now we come finally to multi-party systems, about which I’ll say relatively little, since I know them mainly only second-hand. America has lots of parties, but all except the Republican and Democratic parties are almost powerless, because all voting contests are one single area (state or congressional district) at a time, and almost no area is so different from average that a third party can win a majority in that region. It is especially hard to break the “duopoly” of power between the two main parties because voters hate to waste their votes on a candidate they expect has no chance, so even if a majority might prefer a third party in some area, voters will likely not realize that they could elect that third party, instead choosing not to “waste” their vote, and automatically voting for one of the major parties. The role of these “minor” parties is not quite so powerless as it appears, though. When a minor party shows any tendency to “steal” even a modest fraction of votes that a major party thinks it should “own,” the major party tends to adopt the more moderate views of that minor party, which tends to keep the minor party out of direct power, but also gives power to the minor party, indirectly, through its influence on the closer major party! Many commonplace political positions today, such as social security pensions for the old, and 40-hour work weeks for most workers, began as extreme positions favored by minor parties, but were eventually adopted into the mainstream as those positions attracted support.

For more than two strong parties to develop, it seems, there are two paths:

1. Different areas of the country may be so different in their political views that they prefer multiple “package deals” represented by multiple parties, rather than just agreeing on a single key “right-versus-left”-type breakdown where one party “owns” one end of the spectrum and the other party “owns” the other end. Each area may be dominated by the two strongest parties in that area, but the two strongest parties might be different in one area than in another.
2. The country can assign proportional representation according to a national vote, where a party can have representatives in parliament at least partially according to its fraction of the national vote, even if that party cannot win a majority in any single area of the country.

Regardless of the number of parties holding power, though, it seems that coalitions of parties (“super-parties,” in a way) automatically form, at least temporarily, placing majority power (temporarily) in a single majority coalition, with an opposition coalition more or less unified to take control away. In a practical sense, this is almost like having a two-party system, except that the parts of the majority coalition, being separately run parties, are relatively free to re-align with the opposition, taking majority control with them, if they feel that the coalition is ignoring their most important wishes, and an opposition coalition offers a better deal.

When countries can manage multiple parties with significant power, the biggest advantage, I think, is the chance to formulate new and better “package deals” that aren’t available in a two-party system. To take an American example (not one I would vote for, though), the Libertarian Party takes a position that is Republican (but more extreme) on taxes, Democratic (but more extreme) on minimal government control of our personal lives, and unmatched to either party on government spending (much less spending than either party favors, especially on defense). Today, almost no one bothers voting for any party representing any novel new package like this, knowing that the vote won’t change the outcome of any one local election, but if we had national parliamentary elections with proportional representation, so minority parties could win at least a few seats, far more might choose alternatives like this. The downside of proportional voting, though, is that while you might know the party position that you choose, you would likely not know (or have any say in choosing) the actual individuals who would serve for that party if it won some number of national seats in the parliament or congress. Strictly local elections have the advantage that you don’t just vote for a party, but for an individual with strengths that might be more important than party membership, strengths that might even be more important than their positions on specific issues.

Another novel way proposed to get better representation for additional parties would be introduce preference-list voting. In this system, voters wouldn’t just choose a single candidate, but they would list their preference-order for all the candidates. Thus, a person could choose, for example, to prefer the Libertarian candidate, with the Democrat as second-choice, the Republican as third choice, and the Communist as last. This individual might suspect that the Libertarian had no chance, but in this system, the vote is not wasted, because the votes for all except the top-two candidates (whoever those turn out to be) are set aside and replaced by the next-highest preference (so, likely, the Democrat would get the vote in the case I just described. If this system had been used in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would probably have defeated George W. Bush in that election, because just a thousand or so votes that went to the liberal third-party candidate Ralph Nader (from voters who likely would have listed Gore as second-choice) would have been enough for Gore to win Florida, and winning Florida would have given Gore the election. The beauty of this system (besides preventing Bush’s election), though, is that voters might sometimes be surprised by the outcome – if they weren’t afraid of “wasting” their votes, they really might mostly prefer a third party! Unfortunately, with the two major parties running the US government, they have little incentive to reform the system in a direction that would help third parties, however much that would make a better democracy! On this issue, both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party can agree!

As an American, I have employed some built-in assumptions in my description of the way parties define themselves, and the way people choose their parties. I have gathered from comments on The Pakistani Spectator that at least one of my assumptions doesn’t entirely hold true in Pakistani politics, and in the politics of several other younger democracies. Have you spotted this assumption? It boils down to party “identity” and “loyalty.” My assumptions do not hold true if wide numbers of people choose their party simply because of who they are (their tribe or other ethnic identity, their region, their occupation, their primary language, their religion, their class or caste, or some other such fairly fixed part of their identity, not because they find the political positions taken by the party to be better for them or for the country. In my next article, I will examine what happens when parties and party membership are defined by personal identity, not by purely political positions in the continuum of possible positions. The title of this next article will be “A Recipe for Civil War.”

Last 5 posts by Dan Tow

• Safety in “Big Daddy’s” Shadow? - September 8th, 2008
• Coping with Limits to Control in Politics, Life, and Bridge - August 26th, 2008
• The Right to Remain Silent - June 18th, 2008
• Living with Free Speech - June 6th, 2008
• Free Speech on The Pakistani Spectator - May 1st, 2008