1 The people have spoken. And what they've said is, "I dunno."

1 This is kind of cool: "every key ‘Westminster model’ country in the world now has a hung Parliament".

2 I think what we're seeing is a demonstration of the Arrow theorem.

3 Interesting.  I don't think I've seen that before.

4 Arrow's theorem has nothing to do with hung parliaments; Arrow's theorem regards how there is no fair system ("fair" define as following a set of 5 particular axioms) which can transform a collection of individual's ranked-preferences into a group's ranked-ordering of preferences.

It's usually colloquially given as "there is no perfect voting system", but it is only applicable to a single election, not the hundreds of elections that go into electing a parliament or legislature; so it's not applicable to STV at all, and is only applicable to FPTP and AV when applied to each election individually (and it's not even applicable to all single-election voting systems, just those that operate on ranked preferences.)

The problem is, parliamentary systems rely on Duverger's Law to suppress the power of 3rd-party candidates, to the benefit of the two largest parties, on the theory that one of the big-two will always be able to form a majority government; but if the two largest parties are very evenly matched, even the reduced power of 3rd parties can be enough to create a hung parliament.

The way to "fix" this is to even further reduce the power of 3rd parties... or to find a way to make hung parliaments be less-damaging.

5 You'd think that a democratic system would trend towards this sort of thing.

Assuming you've got two major parties that correspond to a loose tendency towards the left or right, broadly speaking, centered on whatever country you're talking about (not the same value in Israel as it is in Britain, right?) Both parties are competitive enough that they've got more-than-occasional access to the public purse, and thus don't have any trouble with fund-raising.

To the extent that the parties can avoid caucus-breaking wedge issues, they're going to concentrate their money and re-election resources on the areas which have the greatest marginal chance of resulting in victory. They'll moderate unpopular positions (note how US Republicans haven't pushed the anti-abortion issue lately, nor are the Democrats pushing the anti-gun issue, though it's unlikely either party has seriously changed its mind on the issue). Greater resources are going to be devoted towards the few percent in the middle that are perceived as "on the fence". No point spending money in Berkeley to try to elect people from the GOP, or pouring money into a rural Texas district to try to elect a Dem.

The party that successfully captures a larger share of the split in the middle is the one that gets electoral success, and thus power. The strategy gets noticed (it ain't rocket science exactly) and the other party attempts the same thing. Eventually you get to the point where both parties are relying on fairly large (probably-gerrymandered) "safe districts" and putting all their resources into the 10% or so that's considered "in play".

The better both parties get at scraping a percentage point or two off the center, the closer they get to each other. Their positions start to lose definition as they compromise. They get roughly-equal amounts of donations for roughly-equal amounts of pork, though the particular beneficiaries probably aren't the same.

Eventually you get to the point where neither party can field a solid majority - you've got a strong 40% on one side, a strong 40% on the other, and a mushy middle with some mixed nuts. Israel's parliamentary system has been grappling with this issue for decades (they have a very large collection of nuts, if I can characterize it thus). In a lot of ways, even the US system has the same dynamics, except that instead of small third parties, you get individual moderates with very weak party identification (McCain, Lieberman).

The biggest problem with all of this is that both parties tend to want to increase the size of government. It's not just a matter of rewarding donations with favorable regulation. It's a matter of motivating donations through fear; you're not worried so much about gaining quid pro quo as you are about the other party gaining power and enacting punitive regulations. (Lots of businesses attempt to duck this by donating heavily to both parties, which suits both parties fine...)

Closest I've got to a solution is small government. If the government doesn't have a finger in every pie, they can't compel massive donations, which limits the paid-for media blitz; politicians have to take actual positions to get press and exposure, and debate about those positions is more likely to split the electorate into a majority and minority than the results of finely-calibrated-and-test-grouped dissemination of a manufactured message.

1

Finally. Someone I can vote for.

About f*in time, innit?

1 The vice-presidency doesn't count - per FDR's first VP, it's not worth a bucket of warm euphemism.  Also, the VP's only role is to act as a conditional senator for special tie-breaking and ceremonial purposes.  Thus, I'd classify Coolidge and T.R. as falling into the governors-class of presidents, with Taft being a special case because of his immediate experience as a serial colonial governor.  Truman, Nixon, and Johnson all get pitchforked into the senatorial claque, with Ford being the sole congressman in the list.  Bush the Elder was also a congressman, but he spent far more time as a bureaucratic functionary, and his governance style definitely reflected that mind-set.

That tends to clarify matters somewhat, but the currently favored conventional-wisdom truism that governors' experience prepares for the office while senatorial time-serving ruins a politician for it founders on the rather violent exceptions of Woodrow Wilson on the one hand, and Truman & Kennedy on the other. 

Furthermore, the side-theory that primarily non-governmental experience is worthless for the job is spun sideways by the twin contradictions of Hoover and Eisenhower. Hoover's primarily executive experience as the World's Humanitarian Fixer and Eisenhower's service life & apotheosis as Saviour of Europe produced wildly dissimilar White House careers.

I'm inclined to say that experience matters less than personality.  Wilson was a ferocious, bigoted, narrow-minded thug, and his single term of office as governor of New Jersey had little bearing on his performance as president.   Truman's time in the collegial Senate had little effect on his quietly combative personality and peculiar blend of tenacity and conditional flexibility.  I rather suspect that McCain, if elected, would have ended up a second Truman, but obviously Obama has proven to be no such creature.

2 Thanks Mitch.  I'll do a new version of the table in the morning with the VP column excised.  And always remember that Carter was the Governor of...  Someplace or other.

Truman was an interesting character; I'd like to learn more about him.

3

I don't agree with that. The VP has often been a springboard to national candidacy for the President, for instance Nixon in 1960 and Humphrey in 1968 and Mondale in 1984, not to mention Bush Sr. They generally haven't been very successful at it, but it's widely viewed as a gateway.

Ford, coming out of the House, is a huge exception because he was never elected to the presidency. After Agnew resigned, which wasn't related to Watergate but happened after it, everyone knew that the new VP which would be chosen (through processes of the 25th Amendment) had a damned good chance of becoming President either through Nixon's impeachment or his resignation.

So the leaders of both parties in both chambers went to Nixon and pretty much told him that the only candidate they'd accept was Ford. He was House Minority Leader and was widely respected by both sides.

So he finished Nixon's second term, but when he ran in 1976 he was defeated by Carter, meaning that he and Rockefeller are the only Pres/VP pair in the history of the nation to not have been elected to the offices. And God Willing, it'll never happen again.

4 As you can see, Senators seldom make it to the Presidency.  Most especially long serving Senators.  They have to make too many concessions while in office. Concessions put them at outs with their own party.  And most of them aren't "pretty" enough for the press to ignore what they have or haven't done while in the Senate.  Obama had a huge advantage as he did absolutely nothing while he was in the Senate. (the Illinois State Senate never counted since the press completely ignored the fact that he was ever there).

I always find it amusing when a current serving Senator gets up and starts a speech saying "elect me so I can get things changed"  - because being in the Senate would be the place to effect the most change.  The President only signs what Congress gets to his desk.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way - it would be more instructive to look at the number of Senators who have run for their party nomination and never made it. 

5 Or simply look at the record of the Senate, to test the hypothesis that senators make bad senators.

6 Lately that seems to be damn near a given - no matter who the Senator might be.  LOL. 

1 The GOP is stupid enough to think robo-calling me out of nowhere to play me a recording of Newt Gingrich blovating about something irrelevant is going to make me want to give them money and attention.

Sometimes I despair.

2 Only sometimes? 

3 Nissan Cube looks fabulous.

4 It's a box on wheels.  And the wheels part is debatable.

5 For the life of me, I don't understand what the hell happened to Charles Johnson. Maybe a lot of it is the same burnout that I went through, but I didn't end up completely flipping all my opinions on their head as a result of it. (I just stopped writing.)

6 From comments he made before I stopped bothering to visit LGF, I got the strong impression that he's nursing a grudge over being squeezed out of Pajamas Media, and accepted new sponsorship to pursue it.

-j

7 OK, that would explain a lot. I can believe it.

8 I may be forgetting the sequence of events, but I think a whole bunch of things went into the LGF demise. For me, it was centered on Charles being exposed as liar. Before it, if Charles said it, it was fact (like in case of Dan Rather). After, well... I started noticing it and stopped visiting long before the whole collapse, when attempts to smear Pamela exposed by R.S.McCain.

Now, Steven's question can be interpreted, as what has driven Charles to start lying and spinning? I did not track what was happening with that guy in dorky hat after the debacle of "Open Source News" (I still think Instapundit is crazy to string his horse to the cart with such track record). Maybe it was the reson, may it occured later, I cannot remember. But I think the feud with anti-jihadists occured earlier than Pajamas. That's where being the king and punishing dissenters took precendence reporting the truth. I suspect Pajamas fell out of it. But who knows.

9

Don't know what happened at LGF.  Could be partly burnout (I had it too, but like Steven, just stopped writing.) I still read over there once in a while. Just for old times sake. 

I would, however, like to note that back when I was writing a lot, I got banned from only two blogs. Both of them were (what I would call) far-right.  The lefty blogs where I commented  just happily did their best to insult me, accuse me of being a racist, (odd since I never mentioned race) and the other  usual no-logic responses to things they didn't agree with.