Have you ever read George Washington's farewell address?

https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/arti...

"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

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. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."

Being against parties was a cliché of 18th century thought. Edmund Burke first pointed out that parties could be more than just conspiracies against the public interest:

Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.... It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore every honourable connexion will avow it as their first purpose, to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the State.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/796#Burke_0005-01_348

Slightly offtopic: it's unfortunate when people, perhaps technically brilliant people, come up with naïve solutions to political problems, showing little awareness that there are long and sophisticated traditions of thinking about these issues.

"showing little awareness that there are long and sophisticated traditions of thinking about these issues."

I assume "Political Science" is the area of study? Never gave it even a passing glance.

That's... incredible. That last paragraph especially. Beautifully written speech too.

Perhaps a simpler move would be to stop party affiliation being published in the ballot paper.

Then if you wanted to vote for your local Tory / Republican / whatever you have to look them up, find out their name - and even compare policies.

This is not banning parties (Parties do at least have value as stability mechanism) but it discourages blind partisanship at least

Edit : it is also testable - one could randomly do this on ballots across nations and watch the outcome. I doubt the null hypothesis is same results as ballots with party affiliation.

I'm embarrassed that I haven't thought of this much before. Imagine everyone running as independents and Congress being all independents. It could work.

It's how municipal governments in Ontario work, and the focus in the media really is on the individuals and their actions. Obviously, sometimes it's obvious which party a candidate would belong to if there were parties[1], but that doesn't really matter.

Since there are no parties, there can be a larger variety of candidates with different viewpoints that can overlap, rather than just two extremes. And of course, councillors vote individually, which means the mayor has much less power than a party leader (each councillor is free to vote against the mayor at any time).

I really like this system, and am curious how it would work on a larger scale.

[1]: For example, Toronto mayor John Tory was leader of the Progressive Conservative party in the Ontario legislature from 2005-2007, so it's obvious he'd be a Tory.

But they end up voting in left or right blocks. Since the amount of has been reduced by half you see it more often. John Tory appoints people to positions with higher status and perks (like head of the ttc). To get these positions you agree to support Tory's plan. The few who cross him will get no plum roles if any.

It doesn't work, because parties offer an advantage, and you can't truly ban them without banning freedom of association. At best, you can ban overt expression of affiliation, so all candidates are nominally independent - but it'll still be obvious who's who.

The idea is not to ban any alliances of any sort (which is what happens when independents team up) but rather to strongly avoid groupthink and the not-people-beneficial-but-default actions that a stronger bloc always takes.

When independents team up for long enough, because they have enough in common, you get a party as well, with all the attendant features. Groupthink doesn't stem from formal affiliation - after all, most people in US who fall into it are not formally members of either party.

It sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it's mathematically unstable and doesn't form any sort of equilibrium (Nash or otherwise). Any participant can gain an advantage by grouping up with one other participant. Once everyone has grouped up into pairs, they will then group up again and again, ultimately creating a two party system.

I think that's a silly notion. Many countries have political systems with many political parties, e.g. Germany has 14 and Denmark has 11. Certainly these parties often pair up to form government in (reasonably) established political blocks, but it still allows for intra-block disagreements and even parties from different blocks working together on issues they care particularly much about.

We have far more than 14 active political parties. Most of them are founded for very narrow and specific issues (Tierschutzpartei -- "party for animal welfare", Die Violetten -- "party for mysticism/esotericism"). Some operate only on a regional level, like the SSV -- the party of the danish minority in Schleswig-Holstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Schleswig_Voters%27_Asso...). On the municipal level it is not uncommon to have candidates without party affiliation -- some of them organize in "loose parties" that are more a coalition of individuals than a real party (Freie Wähler).

I think the tendency to form coalitions and compromises than hyperpartisan confrontations has its roots in the voting system. We have a system of proportional representational voting -- not first past the post voting. This allows for more flexibility on the stance of single members on some issues. It is not unheard of to have 2 or more blocks in the same party that have very different opinions on specific issues. While this might be true for any representational system, first-past-the-post voting tends to focus on one issue that becomes the core of identification for some.

From what I've seen, once parties are dropped from the ballot (it's common to have positions where party isn't listed) people seem to stop caring about them. I've seen hyperpartisan areas where people will never vote for party B over party A when party affiliation is listed on the ballot, but when it's not listed they end up happily vote for someone from party B over A. Removing parties from voting would make it less likely that so many issues break down among strict partisan lines, and would make compromise much more likely because not every piece of policy would be tied to a political identity. Factions would still exist, but they would be much more fluid and adaptable.

The voting system does determine how many and what types of parties you end up with.

FPTP as in the US will always yield a two party system in the long run as thats the only way you can “win” in it.

More elaborate systems would get you an equilibrium of multiple parties, with much better overlap of what people want to their representatives.

Grouping would indeed always happen, but you wouldn’t need to go to 50% of society to get what you want, so the wants and political speech can be much more varied and relevant.

The best explanations of how it all works I’ve seen were from CGP Grey’s videos https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo

> FPTP as in the US will always yield a two party system in the long run as thats the only way you can “win” in it.

I don't think that's true. If you simply removed the de facto state endorsement of parties - if you only listed candidates by name on the ballot and moved to a California type open primary instead of having partisan primaries - you probably wouldn't end up with two parties like we see today.

Party primaries are a good example of this. They're also FPTP, but that hasn't lead to the emergence of two subfactions because such a thing is hard when it's not entrenched in the ballot. Instead primaries have much more loose coalitions of groups and endorsements that shift around in every election. Even in a particular election there are often more than two.

I think personalities would probably be a more dangerous thing to attach votes to than parties.

Well there are of course always tweaks, but FPTP just has those incentives and you inevitably trend towards those bad outcomes and problems.

I mean the video explains it way better than I ever could, and there are a bunch of other political systems and the maths behind them explained ELI5 style.

This is one of the more famous results in political science: Duverger's Law. It's normally phrased as "in a first past the post system, the number of effective parties tends towards two".

It's... a useful model. It turns out not to work in practice everywhere, though, as there are complicating features with geography and ideology that tend to add parties. Canada, for example, has 2 and a half effective parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP) in general, and more in Québec. The UK also has two and a half (Con, Lab, Lib Dem) plus powerful Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, plus an entirely different party system in Northern Ireland. So 'tends towards' is going a lot of work.

I think we start seeing that in the U.S. with younger congress members not being satisfied with lumping them all together with more traditional politicians. Who knows, maybe we will get that here too.

EDIT: Also, if the system tries to equalize at two parties, why we do not see a similar process inside parties themselves?

If the parties have stable factions and their internal elections are FPTP, then sure. The two right-wing factions of the British Labour party just rolled over the party's left-wing by running a joint slate of candidates while the left slates split the vote.

Having said that, electoral politics within parties doesn't tend to be as important as other things: bureaucratic control of the party machinery, for example.

Why even allow grouping (politically) into pairs? The town could just ban non-politicians from expressing political speech entirely (as a social norm, not a law.)

Politicians could still speak politically in the form of campaigning; but they'd not be allowed to make reference to other politicians' positions on things; only to speak about their own beliefs on how things should be/how things should work.

For anyone who isn't an actively-campaigning politician, the only political speech you'd be allowed would be (private-ballot) voting. Anything else would get you shunned by the community.

(Yes, I realize how ridiculous this sounds.)

Yet, here you are, a non-politician according to your HN profile, engaging in political speech. To be fair, you're not breaking the law or even a social norm... but it's not consistent with your position.

All of the sorts of reasons that motivated you to have an opinion enough to post here are reasons why this wouldn't work. Moreover, where do you draw the line between "layperson" and politician? How does one make the transition?

I understand the desire, and appreciate that you see the unreality of the idea... all I can really say in conclusion is... well... nice try.

>The town could just ban non-politicians from expressing political speech entirely (as a social norm, not a law.)

And who enforces that ban? Who picks the person that enforces it? How are they held accountable? Who are they held accountable to?

You see everything is politics, whether we like it or not.

It’s a social norm—everyone enforces it, and everyone also punishes those who don’t enforce it. Compare/contrast: being punished for using a cellphone in an Amish community.

If you disallow grouping openly, people will group surreptitiously and the impact will be much the same. Some form of power structure always develops in any grouping of people, whether it is open or hidden and this has been widely documented in anthropology.

I think the most famous one was a write-up about power structures in women power movements in the 70s (I forget the author's name) another one more recently examining Valve software.

Practical limits can be placed on the advantage from 'grouping up'.

Can you please give us a reference to this model?

Yeah but if the community comes together and decides to ban another group, aren't they now politicians?

And if they then come together and actively drive out a criminal element, aren't they then the police?

Yes, IMO - the minimum possible number of parties is 1.

Political parties can be great for stability and continuity that survive changes in the political personal.

Political parties are needed and if you want to enable politicians that aren’t rich and can pay a campaign out of pocket.

Show me a country with drama-free, stable governance and i show you a country with strong political parties.