>The effect of a system based on plurality voting is that the larger parties, and parties with more geographically concentrated support, gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties with more evenly distributed support are left with a disproportionately small share.
In the absence of first past the post voting (and its tendency to force people into parties to avoid losing to people who do [1], and for those parties to coalesce into two dominant, equally balance parties), there is still a polarity of, say, liberal and conservative. At least in the original meanings of the terms, which has to do with whether you go toward new things or prefer traditions.
But under FPTP, right vs left encompasses a lot more than that.
And more importantly, FPTP doesn't allow for middle ground. If you are in the middle, you can't get elected, because neither party would nominate you.
If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different. Yes there would be people on the extremes, but most people -- those elected, as well as regular citizens -- would tend be "accidental moderates."
Median voter theorem claims a mathematical proof of the opposite, that FPTP has both camps having a dominant strategy of appeal to the median voter. Both your assertion and median voter theorem fail in practice; the latter because it ignores issues of salience, distribution of views (unimodal vs. multimodal), turnout and mobilization effects, etc., and yours because, well, it ignores much of the same things, but assumes different generalities about them consistently hold.
> If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different.
Actually, the vast majority of US voters, even those that self-identity as independents, are highly partisan — the median voter is probably a reasonably strong partisan of whatever party has the current turnout advantage, which is essentially what FPTP elects.
California has FPTP voting and is completely dominated by Democrats who have a super majority in the legislature and the Governorship, and can pass any legislation they want without a single Republican vote or amendment. That's been the case (with a brief stint by Arnold) for multiple decades.
Tell me again how FPTP voting necessarily results in two equally balanced parties? I'm not seeing it.
That's a fairly recent phenomenon (California was a Republican stronghold in Presodential elections until 1992, and longer for state executive elections.) And the tendency toward balance that is asserted for FPTP is national; subordinate jurisdictions aren't expected to follow it even by people who adhere to the theory.
> who have a super majority in the legislature and the Governorship, and can pass any legislation they want without a single Republican vote or amendment. That's been the case (with a brief stint by Arnold) for multiple decades.
No, it hasn't; Democrats have only had supermajorities since 2012, and Gray Davis (1999-2003) was the only Democratic governor between Jerry Brown (term ended in 1983) and Jerry Brown (term starting in 2011.)
Universal healthcare can't work on a state level because of the free rider problem: people from red states could go to California for free healthcare anytime, while never paying taxes into the system. Californians would end up paying for healthcare for the entire US, which is unsustainable.
It works in Canada because Canada doesn't let sick Americans immigrate. But as a US state, California has no power to keep out sick red staters.
How does Massachusetts manage it then? They don't have the power to keep out those "sick red staters", and yet the entire state has healthcare (by law).
Sounds like special-pleading to me. If a wealthy Blue state like Massachusetts can do it, then California can do it. I expect more from my representatives, not "sick Republicans in other states are stopping us!"
California is 2.6x higher at 7.8% [1], is not improving, and is a much bigger state numerically, so we're talking about ~3 million uninsured people. Prior to Obamacare, California was at a dismal 16%. And note: CA had Dem supermajority rule for years prior to Obamacare's implementation, and can easily pass the healthcare legislation it's constituents want and deserve. They, unlike Massachusetts, have chosen not to.
Massachusetts has less uninsured because they go beyond the bare minimum provided by Obamacare. California Democrats can, and should, do more.
[0] https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2019/08/20/uninsured-rates...
[1] https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/articl...
Remember Massachusetts' median income is around 30% higher than California, so it's possible even with identical governance the state with higher median income would have better outcomes.
I'm not sure that's true, at least in the UK, when one of the established two parties moves to the centre ground they tend to win. Moving away from the centre ground is how they lose.
Most European countries have proportional voting systems, yet can anyway fairly well be characterized by the left-right political axis.
Overall their adherence to the left-right dichotomy is less rigid than in the U.S.
Yes, many election systems result in more parties than FPTP. But left and right still have salience within those.
In fact, you can look at how each politician votes (without explicitly coding votes as left or right). This itself forms a space equal to the number of votes taken. But that vote space can be projected into a much lower dimensional space that captures most of the information about the vote space. If you go so far as to collapse it into a one dimensional space, that corresponds to the traditional left/right axis, and this holds through both history and internationally. The second issue is a bit more varied, but most of the time the left/right axis dominates whatever that second dimension is. Look up DW-NOMINATE for more info.
>Poole and Rosenthal note in Chapter 11 of Ideology and Congress that most of these analyses produce the finding that roll call voting is organized by only few dimensions (usually two): "These findings suggest that the need to form parliamentary majorities limits dimensionality."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29
Static parliamentary majorities are not necessary in a presidential system.
The developed world as a whole seems to be approaching one of those "great leap" moments today as more and more issues have fallen into partisan extremism, motivating the search for a new consensus.
Diverse, yes. Meaningful, maybe. Look at Israel right now. 17 parties with seats in the Knesset, none with over 30%, and, after two elections, still no agreement on Prime Minister. Third election coming up.
Parlamentary systems without the option to call re-elections is an attractive alternative. The politicians just can't keep asking people's opinion until they get the answer they want.
Then there will have to be compromises, and even the smaller parties can get some of their important causes through.
Or, as in the current situation, there is simply no agreement, and they go months without a government. It's not clear that an inability to call re-elections would improve Israel's situation; they could be stuck for years with no government.
Have an elected parliament sit for at least two years, maybe four, will go some way in making them work out their differences.
Also I would argue Netanyahu failing to form a government two times is a good sign for Israel. That man is divisive and harmful.