Political Parties Aren't Set In Stone
In New York? Come hear me talk about the weirdly unfamous cure for hiccups this Saturday at Nerd Nite NYC.
Here is a thing that repeatedly bothers me: people will claim that a given political system is biased against a particular political party.
This is not true, because it takes for granted something (the composition of the political coalitions) that is made by man and not by heaven, and which can and will be re-made in future.
It's extremely possible for a political system to be biased for or against a particular population distribution – for example, it can give more representation per-capita to low-population areas than to high-population ones.
That can certainly create a bias towards or against certain types of settlement, e.g. more representation for rural areas than urban ones.
Given history and path-dependency, that can also mean more representation for some regions than others, and given even more history and even more path-dependency that can mean more representation for certain ethnicities or age groups or any other form of social cleavage.
What it can't actually do is bias against any political party, specifically, because political parties are not fixed objects composed inevitably of particular demographics, but flexible coalitions that can (and have) been built and rebuilt over time.
This is weird for us to acknowledge because, at any given time, the parties develop very strong brands. I can feel some of you bristling through the screen, because it really does feel like each political party represents a certain set of coherent beliefs, and we often care passionately about those beliefs. So to claim that our party could just change its policies and attract a different set of voters feels as sacrilegious as saying that a religion could change its core tenents and then appeal to new adherents.
But a political party is not like a religion: it's more like a sports team, which at any given time is composed of a certain set of players, and which in future can trade those players for other players, in order to win.
Again, your particular beliefs or philosophies or priorities can be valid and important, and the beliefs you oppose can be objectionable and bad, and the political system can become de facto biased for or against the kinds of people who share your beliefs or priorities. There just isn't some unbreakable connection between those beliefs and the parties that currently represent them.
I think it's pretty psychologically interesting that at any given time there is an illusion of "naturalness" to the parties: our brains are pattern-matching machines, so they pattern-match each coalition together, finding the commonalities and ignoring the differences until it feels like of course (say) the religious people and businesspeople and the working class are in a party together, so if the electoral system is biased for/against religious people then it is necessarily biased for/against The Party Of Religious People And Businesspeople And The Working Class.
But this is not how things work. Those coalitions have shifted in the past and will shift again in future. If a sports team keeps losing matches it will eventually be taken over by a new manager who changes the team to a different one that can actually win. Similarly, if a political party keeps losing elections, eventually it will be taken over by a political entrepreneur who will reshape it to appeal to a new coalition and win elections again.
And it may still be true that the composition of the new coalition is shaped by the over/underrepresentation of certain geographic or demographic groups, because of bias in the electoral system. And you may still think that's bad, and want to change it. But that bias will now favour a different political party than it did before, because the bias never actually favoured a party, but rather favoured one or more components of the coalition that the party was appealing to.