Contemporary Political Reforms in a Multi Party Democracy

State governments hold a lot of the political power in the American political system. It's a principle that most Americans hold dear, and not without reason. You just try to create a system that will give most people the decision they want for 330 million people. Not so simple. It's a lot easier to do this with a couple million people, sometimes with a couple tens of millions but even California is only 12.5% of the population of the US and decentralizes a lot of the power to their counties. But state governments aren't that great at being politically inclusive systems. Most of them are under a trifecta giving one party or another majorities in the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. Most have very poorly contested elections, thousands of the legislative positions go uncontested every year, some state executive positions like auditor do too. Judgeships, particularly in the South and Appalachian areas like Pennsylvania are openly partisan elections, d...

In America right now, the two near certain frontrunners for the presidential election in November are Donald Trump and Joseph Biden. Joe Biden came out of a very contested Democratic primary with a huge host of candidates, Donald Trump came out of a hotly contested primary in 2016 (where hilariously he also didn't get an absolute majority of the votes, he did get a plurality of them though). Many of you are likely not enthusiastic about those candidates. Donald Trump had a bunch of people seriously accusing him of sexual abuse of varying forms in 2016's election, and an audiotape of him with Billy Bush; Biden has Tara Reade accusing him as well. Biden is exactly the kind of candidate you associate with the status quo of American establishment politics and connections with the status quo. Donald Trump isn't really a status quo guy but he is representative of the idea of wealth and power, connections to business, in government. The veracity of things like Tara Reade's...

In any kind of free society, some people must be independent of others. For thousands of years, humanity has had judges. Many were kings, or some other official appointed by the king, like the satraps of the Achaemenid Empire. A person who believes or is familiar with Abrahamic faiths probably knows of King Solomon, famed for wisdom and creative child custody case solutions. The Roman Republic is best known for the consuls and the Senate, sometimes some dictators and generals, before the imperial period, but one thing they considered a sacred liberty of theirs was to be judged by an elected praetor, not a king, and this praetor also was assisted in the determination of the guilt by a jury. The Athenian democracy is known for the direct participation in the assembly by the people, sometimes people know of the Boule, but trials, both civil and criminal, were heard by juries and presided over by magistrates randomly chosen from among the citizens for a one year term. Both systems use ju...

The United States' administration is defined by the president at the head, but who else is there? Of course the millions of people in the executive branch. They are meant to be apart from the direct meddling of congress, and instead the congress must prescribe rules that will last as law beyond the will of any individual congressperson or senator, and has no ability to change the decision of any specific action. Same with the funding.  The executive however cannot amend the law at all, and has no ability to withdraw from the treasury without authority of law. There is no way for a president to bypass congress this way.  That makes the two powers sharply divided, and this has it's uses. It can force legislators to put their cards on the table and specify with words and not hidden intents, or create rules that are not tailored to actually cause what you intend to happen. It means that the executive, normally the most dangerous branch in any government, cannot rewrite th...

In a multi party system as I've defined before, likely tailored to the needs of the US in particular, the nature of the president and executive government tends to come up.  Most countries you probably associate with proportional electoral systems are parliamentary systems, and so the PM is always responsible to the legislature. In a presidential system, that's not the case.  But the US does have an additional weirdness factor that their president is dependent on: The electoral college.  The obvious thought about the electoral college is about how a person with a mere plurality of the votes gets all of the state's votes (with a couple of exceptions being Maine and Nebraska which award two for the statewide winner, and one elector for each congressional district you get a plurality in), and that you need a majority to win. In a two party system, the idea that someone will have a majority is obvious, and so if the minority gets 45% of the vote, the majority has...

In a presidential republic, the president, and other executives, are strictly apart from the legislature, and the American president is particularly weak in their ability to force Congress to do anything compared to many presidents of even presidential republics in the world. This leaves the task of trying to manage Congress up to the legislative leaders, who occupy a much bigger role in American politics than most give them credit for and who wield a lot more power than most similar roles such as the parliamentary leader of the Canadian House of Commons for instance, presently Pablo Rodriguez.  In the last part, I described how in a multi party system, in this type of imagination for an American version of a multi party system, all political elections would be held by secret ballot by Single Transferable Vote, the voters having a secret ballot, any uncontested votes have a secret yes or no vote on that one candidate. That would apply in the legislature too. All of the...

A multi party system can happen without a proportional representation system, but it is hard to do it and tends to still create single party majorities at any particular time in space. So, to make this imagination a reality, let's look at proportional electoral systems.  CPGGrey has made a series on this, so watch that first to get an understanding of the idea, link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&list=PLNCHVwtpeBY4mybPkHEnRxSOb7FQ2vF9c . Grey does have a few things he doesn't cover though, such as the possibility of open lists or list-free MMP systems and doesn't explain what a party list system is without any local districts, be they open list or closed list. He also doesn't explain the methods of which you can use to transfer votes in Single Transferable Votes when you have a surplus, and while he has a good reason for doing so in the name of time, it did generate a lot of comments. It is also possible in a mixed member proportional system ...

In the English Speaking World, there are some multi party democracies, but with few exceptions, they are parliamentary systems. Jamaica is two party and is parliamentary, and English Speaking, as are the Bahamas, but it's pretty rare that you hear about them in the context of political discussion unless you have personal ties with them. In contrast, the most well known presidential republic, the United States, is strongly two party, and while a couple of places which also speak English predominantly also have presidential republics like Zimbabwe (not that democracy is really a value of Zimbabwean politics), it's a lot less often used as an example of where most people genuinely expect a thorough political system to survive longer than any one individual and where politicians are interchangeable for many people. But a presidential republic doesn't have to be two party only. Brazil has several dozen parties in their Congress, and each state has a diversity of parties...