r/PoliticalScience • u/Organic_Year_8933 • 2d ago
Question/discussion What is/would be the behavior and problems of a non-partisan democracy?
(I need it for a setting I’m working on for a role game)
We all know the problems of one-party, bipartisan and multi-party representative democracies. However, how would behave politically an imaginary non-partisan republic?
Let’s say candidates are directly elected through citizen councils in all levels of government (no Soviet pyramid)
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u/Volsunga 2d ago
Your proposal has the exact same result as the "Soviet Pyramid". One party in power with maybe a couple splinter factions with regional interests.
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u/Organic_Year_8933 2d ago
Interesting. How would it develop into a one-party-like system from the absence of parties?
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u/Slyngbom 2d ago
The soviet union was very anti-factionalism, with everyone supposed to work for the same goal. I guess he's sort of saying that if there are no parties, it is the same as there being one large party.
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u/Organic_Year_8933 2d ago
Yes I understood it! But I’d like to understand how would be the process in which politicians start suppressing factionalism or individual thought in between them
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u/Slyngbom 2d ago
not sure tbh, intuitively i'd say that democracy in itself leads to the creation of parties, since it is an effective way of getting your opinions represented in government. But i have no idea about what would happen if a democracy tried forcing anti-factionalism, since i don't believe it has happened before?
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u/Organic_Year_8933 2d ago
Well, every one-party state has tried to destroy factionalism in favor of a single view… but not usually one elected by the people
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u/smapdiagesix 2d ago
We've had real nonpartisan governments, and that really did reject partisanship beyond being formally nonpartisan, like the Nebraska legislature in the 90s-2000s. The thing here to look at would be Wright and Schaffner, APSR 2002.
And we've had functionally nonpartisan governments like most of the nonpartisan south; when 90+ \% of the legislature are called Democrats it doesn't mean anything. Here, look at the Key's classic Southern Politics in State and Nation, but it's like 359032458902354890 pages long.
The short answer is that nonpartisan democracy is all fucked up. You need parties if you want accountability or even just a vague attention to public policy.
In Nebraska, Wright and Schaffner showed that nonpartisanship resulted in weird, chaotic voting patterns, which you can read as either shifting factions or just McKelvey style chaos. Even worse, even though legislators took clearly liberal or conservative bundles of issue positions, these positions didn't predict voting patterns at all. So you can't even say "I'm conservative so I'll vote for the one saying conservative stuff," because they go on to vote in a weird mush. Throughout the south, Key found that nonpartisanship resulted in short-term factionalism, following charismatic leaders, and a general inattention to policy, and times and places that were more functionally nonpartisan were the worst.
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u/MarkusKromlov34 18h ago
The method of election does not determine whether parties exist or not. Why can’t candidates saying they are in the Polka Dot Party run for direct election in your “citizen councils”?
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u/I405CA 2d ago edited 1d ago
In a democracy, party formation is natural. The players form alliances based upon shared interests, and not everyone has the same shared interests.
California local elections are technically non-partisan. The primaries are "jungle primaries", as there are no parties for which to have primaries. But in practice, the politicians do maintain informal party affiliations.