Political Parties
Political parties arise when a number of political players pool their efforts to create synergy. While political parties can arise even within non-voting governments, they are nearly inevitable in any governing body that features a large number of elected positions and voting.
To understand why political parties are an inevitability, let’s imagine a newly created university student government. In this government, 30 students are elected to positions of power and a few hundred students campaign for these positions. Realistically, almost no student voter is going to have time to become educated on all of the candidates and open positions and will likely hear from only a handful of the students running.
Suppose one of the students running puts a letter in front of their name and tells voters that once they had gotten comfortable with that candidate’s positions, they could reliably get the same sorts of positions by voting for anyone else with that letter in front of their name. If we operate under the assumption that said voter has about a 30% chance of having no opinion on that particular race, a candidate without a letter in front of their name will win something like 0.2 votes for every other candidate with a letter in front of their name. If even two candidates placed a letter in front of their names, they would have an enormous advantage in that election. That advantage would be compounded by each additional candidate on their team. Naturally, over time, individuals using this strategy would come to represent a larger and larger share of the political system in that student government.
In the above example, benefits like collective fundraising, flier design, speeches and rallies, and efforts to get on ballots are not even mentioned as a factor—though obviously they grant an additional boost to candidates.
To understand how much parties help with getting candidates on the ballot, assume you need 10,000 signatures to get on a ballot. Imagine you have a person collecting those signatures for multiple candidates at once. The marginal effort this person would need to exert for each additional candidate would be trivial compared to collecting the signatures from scratch.
Why did we not mention these things in the above example? Even if these elements are banned, parties will still eventually form a “winning” strategy so long as:
- Candidates are able to signal that their positions have some parity to the positions held by candidates running for other positions.
- There are too many candidates running for the average voter to know all their positions.
First-past-the-poll, winner-take-all elections naturally gravitate to two-party systems due to Duverger’s law: Larger parties are almost always more powerful, causing them to coalesce, like an asteroid field slowly forming into a planet as the gravitational pull of the largest asteroid causing it to become iteratively larger.
When those third parties gain power, their candidates begin to act as “spoilers” for the candidates of whichever dominant party is more similar to them. If the Green party in the U.S. were to gain power, the most likely outcome would not be more green policies but fewer Democratic victories. This is why in systems like the U.S., the only viable third parties are those which are holistically different from both the Democrats and the Republicans and not an Alt or more extreme version of one of them.
First-past-the-poll, winner-take-all voting is not the only protocol that consistently produces two-party systems. Consider Malta, which uses a single transferable vote system and has had a stable, two-party system. Other systems are even more likely to lead to a two-party system, like the partial vote block system used in Gibraltar.
Proportional voting systems, in which a government is constructed proportionally based on voters’ chosen parties, present one means of producing not two, but rather a vast array of political parties.
Whether or not frequently maligned two-party systems are beneficial to a nation is a matter of some debate. We suspect that around 60% of Americans and 71% of millennials wish for additional political parties either because they want the option to vote for a party that more closely represents their viewpoints (even if those viewpoints are unlikely to be accepted on a national stage), or because they are disgusted with the existing parties.
Anyone who has lived in a two-party system has spent most of their lives being told by 50% of the nation’s political apparatus that the other 50% is stupid and evil. It should come as no surprise that most Americans think both the Democratic and Republican party are stupid and evil. However, history has shown that smaller political parties are not particularly less incompetent than large ones. As the saying goes, “the grass is always greener on the other side.”
One particularly nasty outcome of multi-party governance systems is that they can yield dramatically more political power to the third most popular party—and in some ways the first. This happens when a coalition is needed to choose a ruling party. Germany’s Free Democratic Party which, from 1949 to 1988, was the third-largest party in the country despite never receiving more than 12.8 percent of the vote, decided which of the two largest parties would govern (choosing three times to put the less popular of the two into power). This dynamic can make it very difficult to get rid of incompetent governments that are hated by the populace so long as said incompetence benefits the leader of the third most popular party. Heck, if a politician is popular with other politicians, the public’s perspective of them is next to irrelevant in these systems.
Which voting models produce more extremist governments? Obviously, the most extremist voter type is a Majority Bonus System, which goes out of its way to artificially make governance more extremist. As to other types of voting structures: Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki created a model that highlights the voting types most likely to lead to extremism as:
- Plurality, at 100% (one vote per person, most votes wins)
- Runoff voting, at 98% (ranked voting)
- Approval voting, at 94%
On the flip side, Balinski and Laraki demonstrated that majority judgment voting (a form of what we call score voting) had a middling probability of electing an extremist—at 56%.
Finally, they showed the voting models least likely to elect an extremist were:
- Borda voting—at 13% (a type of ranked voting)
- Range voting at 6% (another form of what we call score voting)
- Approval voting with a lower approval threshold elected, at 6%.
“Ok—but it’s not just that we have been brainwashed by years of political fighting; our two-party system seems uniquely bad right now,” many Americans might say. “And didn’t our nation’s founders warn against parties?”
Let’s see:
- George Washington: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
- John Adams: “A division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”
Here, we must concede. The U.S. is currently in a state of hyperpartisanship that will likely get worse. We would however argue that hyperpartisanship is not specifically tied to the presence of only two viable political parties. Hyperpartisanship can emerge from multi-party systems as well; consider the Weimar Republic’s election of the Nazi party.
Downsian theory even argues that two-party systems were actually more moderate than multi-party systems due to convergence to the mean (during elections, the two parties fight over undecided moderates and converge on more moderate positions).
Why is hyperpartisanship so bad in the USA right now? The classic argument is the rise of nationalized politics, which correlated with the rise of national news. This led to closer elections and thus the need for top-down leadership within parties to enforce party discipline and destroy cross-partisan dealmaking.
The decline of bipartisan collaboration led to congressional stonewalling, which in turn pressured presidents to achieve more using executive authority. As executive authority increased, so did the stakes in presidential elections, leading to yet more partisanship. In addition, legislative gridlock increases the importance of the Supreme Court, making new nominations to the court even higher-stakes … but we think one additional factor may be at play.
The Heritability of Political Affiliation
It is very rare for individuals to switch political affiliation, with only about 9% of party members doing so over a half-decade period.[[5]](#_ftn5)
Why might this be the case? How do people choose their political affiliation? Some studies have shown that things like fear and other deep subconscious tendencies may nudge people to favor one party over another,[[6]](#_ftn6) but where do these subconscious tendencies come from?
There is one potential contributor to the hyperpolarization of American politics that is seldom discussed. Twin studies contrast the life paths of identical twins separated at birth and fraternal twins separated at birth and raised by different families. They aim to determine how much of certain aspects of a person’s life path are determined by their genetics. It turns out a person’s political affiliation is highly heritable (between 30-60%).[[7]](#_ftn7)
While political affiliation is obviously not 100% heritable, even if the heritable component were small, it would have a massive impact if one political affiliation had dramatically more children than the other.
Political affiliation is not the only thing that has a heritable component. Factors like religiosity (though not a proclivity for a specific religion), fear of outgroups, and tendencies toward altruism have also been shown to be heritable.
Since birth control has made parenthood optional for most, an ideological objective remains one of the few reasons families might choose to have more than zero to two kids (and thereby forego more comfort, freedom, sleep, money, etc.). This causes ideological extremists to have disproportionately more kids than people open to things like compromise. This trend has been increasing since the 1960s, aligning exactly with the generation that gave birth to hyper partisanship (which were conceived in the 1960s).
One can pretend that genes play no role in these sorts of things, but to do so would require taking a stance against scientific evidence. We don’t have a problem with a person doing this so long as they maintain ideological consistency. If you are going to pretend that science shapes your worldview, it is logically inconsistent to ignore robust scientific evidence.
The data to which we have access suggests the world will continue to trend toward cultural extremism regardless of any changes we make to our political system. We would go so far as to posit that if the heritability of cognitive proclivities is a constant in intelligent species—this trend we are seeing now could also explain the Fermi Paradox.
If this situation is one that interests you, check out Pronatalist.org and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, which was written in part to address this issue.