The two parties don't have an incentive to represent the entire populace, they simply have to represent half the voter base as best as possible. A two-party system is a zero sum where shooting down the opposing party advances you just as much as making meaningful positive contributions.
Also, a two-party system means that views that overlap both of the two extremes on different issues aren't represented.
Approval voting could potentially fix these problems, without any additional complexity at the ballot box (it's really simple! the only difference is you're allowed to vote for more than one candidate), but sadly has seen almost zero traction. Adopting approval voting more broadly could go a long way towards fixing the somewhat broken political system we have in the United States, for example.
I'm not a political scientist so take my opinion with a few grains of salt :)
[1] Approval Voting on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
Approval voting actually allows candidates that break the mould of existing parties, because voters can support a candidate with unorthodox views without compromising the campaign of their party's primary candidate.
Plurality voting is a lot better than not having a democracy; imho at least the worst candidate will be excluded. My understanding is also that democracies of any form (including republics) tend to get much better military results than dictatorships, but I don't have any actual evidence to cite :(.
But most countries don't have one-member sized voting districts in their parliament elections, rather they choose 10 to 30 members per voting district.
The Continental European system with proportional voting and multiple political parties with changing support seems more agile. New parties can form, gain and lose support, not quite as quickly as in one 4-year election cycle, but in about 3 or 4 election cycles the political landscape of a country can change.
But then again, the American democratic system has already had a pretty good run for over 200 years, so can we know if present-day problems are indicative of actual problems in the system, or something that will pass?
No, they aren't. Studies have repeatedly shown that US voters have very high party voting consistency, and that those that identify as independents are almost as consistent as those that identify with a party.
Turnout and change in composition of the electorate decides elections, more than anything.
Yes, it reveals that empirically, it produces a narrower political dialogue, poor participation, and low satisfaction with government compared to systems that produce better proportionality. See Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
I am very skeptical of studies purporting to run statistical analysis on such small data sets as the recent history of countries, let alone the recent history of democracies. It seems that in the quest to produce quantitative political science research, people forgot all the statistical lessons about sample size, confounding factors, and so forth.
United States (2016): 56%
India (2014): 65%
Germany (2017): 76%
Denmark (2015): 86%The long version is, well, Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
Proportional voting also has higher turnout rates and especially the list-based system seems to have a higher number of women in politics.
FPTP countries tend to have the highest inequality, too, likely because there is that lack of competition, which tends to allow powerful people to have a bigger influence on the two parties over time.
Coalition of parties is better than the alternative of one party dominating the whole government, because then parties are forced to work with each other and compromise on their most extreme views. That's usually a good thing. Plus, you don't get totally opposite platforms every 4 years. Like say if Democrats were to dominate once, raise taxes for everyone to 40%. Then Republicans came. Lowered them to 10%. Then Dems came again, raised them to 30%, and so on.
RCV is a little harder to understand. But so is the caucus system, and the electoral college system, and other quirks the current American political system has.
RCV has some real advantages, like optimizing for positivism in elections rather than negativity (because you may need your opponent's voters). That's usually a good thing.
I don't believe people have a hard time choosing parties. If anything, what happens in most countries, even PR countries, is that people say that they don't have a good option.
Ultimately, FPTP is also undemocratic, because it allows parties to dominate the government when they have less than 50%, sometimes even less than 40% of the voters' support (at it has happened in Canada, and sometimes in mid-terms in the US). I don't know why anyone would support FPTP when that is the case. Why would a party dominate the government with less than 40% support in election day?
For example, say a country is 49% Republicans and 51% Democrats. In addition, a Socialist candidate is running. 30% of the Democrats actually prefer the Socialist candidate, but under a plurality system they would vote for the Democrat candidate because the Democrat has broader appeal.
If those 30% chose to rank the Socialist as their #1 choice, then the Republican will win the election, because the Democrat will be eliminated in the first round. So the Democrats are incentivized to not vote their actual preference.
Look at the various Condorcet methods [1], and also check out Approval Voting [2] for a system that produces fairer outcomes without the complexity of RCV/Condorcet.
Proportional voting also solves the problem in a similar way, except that the politicians representing each faction, rather than the faction at-large, do the work of forming coalitions with other factions.
Of course the distinction between the two is a little more blurry, since broad-coalition parties also exist in proportional systems, and politicians do play a large role in the at-large coalition-forming in plurality systems. But nonetheless, they clearly lead to different outcomes.
As for ranked and approval-type voting systems, I’m not really a fan since I think they don’t have any hope of representing coherent thought about politics. People have a hard enough time making a principled choice of one party to vote for; asking people to rank them seems likely to produce even less principled choices.