Trumpled (Alternative Leading)

[Mav]

Interesting article about how irrational voting can be, examples being that Woodrow Wilson's vote plunged in beachfront towns affected by the "Jaws" shark attacks of 1916 and incumbent Presidential candidates get a bump in states where the NFL team wins: This is the best book to help you understand the wild 2016 campaign, Vox, 14/10.

It also suggests that the mostly direct election of the President increases the chances of a fool or knave winning when compared to a parliamentary system:

Most successful democracies have parliamentary governments — often backed by proportional electoral systems — leading to a politics that reenforces this tendency and avoids tipping points. In the American system, small shifts in public sentiment can lead to drastic changes — either Bush or Gore, either Clinton or Trump — whereas the Dutch or German electoral systems ensure that a small change in voting behavior leads to a small change in the composition of parliament. Any given party could put a fool or a knave forward as leader, and he might still win votes. But to exercise meaningful power he would need to negotiate with other coalition partners, which is hard to do if you’re a fool.

The American system has no such safeguard. If a fool or a knave secures the nomination of one of the major political parties, he has a pretty good chance of becoming president, at which point all bets are off.

When the office was originally designed by the framers of the Constitution, they meant for it to be an indirectly elected office whose holder would be selected by a collaborative meeting of Electoral College members, thus insulating it from popular whims. Strong democratic norms led rather swiftly to a system that more closely resembles direct election. But at various points in time, the process for nominating candidates served the role of structuring the public’s choices.

As E.E. Schattschneider wrote in his 1940s classic Party Government, “Democracy is not found in the parties but between the parties.”

But things change over time. The boss-led party system of Schattschneider’s day was replaced by a more open one in the 1970s, which, in turn, seems to have evolved back in a more elite-driven direction in the 1980s and ’90s. Today, however, in part thanks to technology-driven shifts in the media, the party system is opening up again, and party elites are losing control.