Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (234789)	5/27/2005 3:44:16 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1577915

"The FF did not like the European model of multi parties and intentionally constructed a political structure that was designed for a two party system." No quite true. The original model had no parties at all. When that didn't work, the Federalists grew up, to be countered by the anti-Federalists. Which flamed out in such a manner that it is the source of the common knowledge that in politics you have to be for something and just not against something. In the vacuum of that collapse, the Democratic-Republicans formed, and they later became the Democratic party. Since then, there have been a number of 3rd parties come and go... Actually, that's not quite true either. The FF said publicly they did not like parties....again because they did not like the way parties operated in Europe. And in fact, established the Electoral College as a weak attempt to bypass the need for political parties. However, while they were publicly trashing parties they were secretly developing them, and by the 1790s, political parties like the Federalist party above were in full operation, a scant 15 years after the Revolutionary War. But there isn't anything special about the two party system. It is just what we trend towards. I had thought it was the way the FF had set up the EC that pretty much guaranteed the two party system. However, below is another explanation for why the two party system developed in the US. "Why did this country end up with only two political parties? Most officials in America are elected from single-member districts and win office by beating out their opponents in a system for determining winners called "first-past-the-post" — the one who gets the most votes wins, and there is no proportional accounting. This encourages the creation of a duopoly: one party in power, the other out. If those who are "out" band together, they have a better chance of beating those who are "in." Occasionally third parties do come along and receive some share of the votes, for a while at least. The most successful third party in recent years has been H. Ross Perot's Reform Party, which had some success in the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996. Jesse Ventura became the first Reform Party candidate to win statewide office when he was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. Third parties have a hard time surviving, though, because one or both of the major parties often adopt their most popular issues, and thus their voters. "In America the same political labels — Democratic and Republican — cover virtually all public officeholders, and therefore most voters are everywhere mobilized in the name of these two parties," says Nelson W. Polsby, professor of political science, in the book New Federalist Papers: Essays in Defense of the Constitution. "Yet Democrats and Republicans are not everywhere the same. Variations — sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant — in the 50 political cultures of the states yield considerable differences overall in what it means to be, or to vote, Democratic or Republican. These differences suggest that one may be justified in referring to the American two-party system as masking something more like a hundred-party system."" countrystudies.us