Not clear to me why our "lesser of two evils" problem is improved by simply announcing a new party which then gives its imprimatur to the l.o.t.e. Voters still have the same choice to make. Perhaps the centrist party could put out info explaining *why* one candidate is the l.o.t.e., but I suspect that this just gets lumped in with his/her own campaign in the voters' minds, and the centrists regarded as a disguised wing of that party. As your last couple of paragraphs well illustrates.
To get out of the one-dimensional bind we need to reform the election system that put us into it. Systems such as Ranked Choice voting and Proportional Representation give voters the chance to actually vote for and elect candidates who represent their multi-variant interests.
Agreed 110% that politics is actually multidimensional and gets squashed into a false one-dimensional line by our two party system. This is a big problem that causes closed minds and ever-increasing polarization.
Some papers:
Kousser 2016 - Reform and Representation: A New Method Applied to Recent Electoral Changes (Elected representatives are polarized while voters are not. Changing to top-two runoff voting does not fix it.)
Klar 2014 - A Multidimensional Study of Ideological Preferences and Priorities among the American Public
C. Alós-Ferrer (Carlos) and G.D. Granić (Georg Dura) 2015 - Political Space Representations with Approval Data, Electoral Studies , Volume 39 p. 56- 71 (German politics is at least 4-dimensional)
"It’s also something we would see if we re-legalized fusion voting widely."
I don't see how. My jurisdiction has fusion voting and it has little to no effect on the two-party system. I try to always vote on a third party line when I can, but pretty much no one else does, and the third parties are either invisible rubber stamps for the two main parties or they refuse to participate in fusion at all and continue to act as spoilers.
The fundamental cause of the one-dimensional two-party system is voting systems that only count first-choice preferences: Plurality voting, Open Primaries with top-two runoffs, Supplementary Vote, Ranked Choice Voting, and hybrids like Top Four or Final Five, etc.
All these systems have the same flaw of only allowing you to express support for one candidate at any given point in the counting process, which means they suffer from vote-splitting, center squeeze, and spoiler effect. We work around vote-splitting by holding party primaries, but those result in nominees who only represent part of the population, rather than the whole. We work around the spoiler effect by making it hard for third parties to get on the ballot, excluding them from debates, and discouraging honest voting, and this perpetuates a two-party system.
The real solution to these problems is to adopt better voting systems that consider all voter preferences when choosing the winner, and thus tend to elect a consensus candidate that best represents the entire electorate. (STAR Voting, Condorcet systems, Approval-based systems, etc.)
Then, when the electorate is freed from the rigid polarized one-dimensional two-party system, they are more able to listen to other points of view, change their minds, and move around in the true multidimensional ideological space, and these good voting systems will follow them, and continue to elect the candidate who best represents their new position.
Not clear to me why our "lesser of two evils" problem is improved by simply announcing a new party which then gives its imprimatur to the l.o.t.e. Voters still have the same choice to make. Perhaps the centrist party could put out info explaining *why* one candidate is the l.o.t.e., but I suspect that this just gets lumped in with his/her own campaign in the voters' minds, and the centrists regarded as a disguised wing of that party. As your last couple of paragraphs well illustrates.
To get out of the one-dimensional bind we need to reform the election system that put us into it. Systems such as Ranked Choice voting and Proportional Representation give voters the chance to actually vote for and elect candidates who represent their multi-variant interests.
Agreed 110% that politics is actually multidimensional and gets squashed into a false one-dimensional line by our two party system. This is a big problem that causes closed minds and ever-increasing polarization.
Some papers:
Kousser 2016 - Reform and Representation: A New Method Applied to Recent Electoral Changes (Elected representatives are polarized while voters are not. Changing to top-two runoff voting does not fix it.)
Klar 2014 - A Multidimensional Study of Ideological Preferences and Priorities among the American Public
C. Alós-Ferrer (Carlos) and G.D. Granić (Georg Dura) 2015 - Political Space Representations with Approval Data, Electoral Studies , Volume 39 p. 56- 71 (German politics is at least 4-dimensional)
"It’s also something we would see if we re-legalized fusion voting widely."
I don't see how. My jurisdiction has fusion voting and it has little to no effect on the two-party system. I try to always vote on a third party line when I can, but pretty much no one else does, and the third parties are either invisible rubber stamps for the two main parties or they refuse to participate in fusion at all and continue to act as spoilers.
The fundamental cause of the one-dimensional two-party system is voting systems that only count first-choice preferences: Plurality voting, Open Primaries with top-two runoffs, Supplementary Vote, Ranked Choice Voting, and hybrids like Top Four or Final Five, etc.
All these systems have the same flaw of only allowing you to express support for one candidate at any given point in the counting process, which means they suffer from vote-splitting, center squeeze, and spoiler effect. We work around vote-splitting by holding party primaries, but those result in nominees who only represent part of the population, rather than the whole. We work around the spoiler effect by making it hard for third parties to get on the ballot, excluding them from debates, and discouraging honest voting, and this perpetuates a two-party system.
The real solution to these problems is to adopt better voting systems that consider all voter preferences when choosing the winner, and thus tend to elect a consensus candidate that best represents the entire electorate. (STAR Voting, Condorcet systems, Approval-based systems, etc.)
Then, when the electorate is freed from the rigid polarized one-dimensional two-party system, they are more able to listen to other points of view, change their minds, and move around in the true multidimensional ideological space, and these good voting systems will follow them, and continue to elect the candidate who best represents their new position.