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Multi-party democracy makes representatives accountable to their constituents.
Electoral impact. Nothing matters more when it comes to ensuring that representatives are accountable to their constituents. Competitive elections are the single most important factor in ensuring that representatives care about their constituency.
If election outcomes depend on political performance, elected officials have to listen to the voices of the voters. With our two parties that feel separated by an ideological chasm, we'd rather vote for a bad team member than a member of the other team.
Think about your vote: how badly would your party's candidate have to behave in order to vote for the other team's candidate? If we're dissatisfied with the performance of our team's candidate, many of us would rather throw away our voice with a meaningless third-party protest vote than help the other team win. In this environment in a supermajority district, representatives only have to worry about being primaried (taken off their party's ballot by the generally highly partisan primary voters), and they behave accordingly.
With ranked choice voting and multiparty democracy, voters can express their preferences for a better candidate without feeling like they're voting for the opposite candidate. This means that you can rank your favorite candidate first, but still express an opinion for who you'd prefer next.
Multi-party democracy gives voters meaningful choices
The best path to get elected is through a rigid party pipeline. Most representatives come from personal relationships with party county chairs or other local leaders (1), who are always on the lookout for candidates to add to the roster. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: having long-standing party members informally cultivate the recruitment process helps to stabilize party ideology and maintain professionalism and coherent party brands.
However, it is a problem when it silences competing ideas. Imagine that you have a great idea for improving public policy: would you be able to campaign on that idea and have a chance to make a difference? Historically speaking, the likelihood of being elected outside of an existing party structure is extremely low, which forces passionate Americans to try and primary inside one of the two parties (or, typically, inside the party that we already know will be elected in that area).
This means that the single supermajority party has complete control over the ideas that originate in their territory. The strength of American capitalism is in competing ideas, and our government is being throttled by the monopolistic control of the two parties.
By contrast, if there were multiple competitive parties in your area, you could campaign with whichever of them is the best fit for your idea. With ranked choice voting, you could impress enough local people to put you high on their rankings: even if their party loyalty prevented them from putting you first on their list, your party could win better representation on a novel, positive idea. This viable route to relevance allows the competitiveness of the marketplace to help us implement real solutions to the problems we face.
Multi-party democracy makes campaigning more responsible
The American political system is extremely easy to influence with campaign donations. There are effectively no limits on campaign contributions (through Political Action Committees), advertising dollars are nearly the only way to reliably improve your odds of elections, and there are only two relevant recipients of campaign dollars: Republicans and Democrats.
Although there is public enthusiasm for responsible reform of campaign finance laws, the first and most necessary step is to create a market that is harder to purchase. Spreading the political voice among four to six parties would make purchasing influence much less of a guaranteed investment. Furthermore, breaking the stranglehold that the two parties have on power would allow some hope for real campaign finance reform that could get money out of politics: right now, neither side is incentivized to make any real change, because they at least enjoy a duopoly, and would prefer not to surrender any of that power.
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