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| Uploaded on Tuesday 26 July, 2016 to the nexus of power |
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| The stranglehold on political elections |
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People may be forgiven for labeling the democratic processes of the United States of America and the United Kingdom as two duopolistic systems of elective dictatorship with there being no more than two parties dominating the political landscape time after time, which raises questions whether this can be attributed to loyalty by the electorate, to strong electioneering on the hustings, to controlled media, to a comparative advantage of capital resources by the mainstream parties, or, to the ineptitude of the competition.
The statistical analysis depicts an electorate inclined to preserve the habitual status quo rather than alter its traditional centre-left/centre-right political compass. This is not the case in mainland Europe. France, likewise, has two mainstream parties that win on a continual basis—the socialist left and the republican right—but, the far-left and far-right contingents poll considerably higher there than they do in the United Kingdom and the United States. This pattern illustrates to which extent French citizenry is idealistic. The flourishing democracy of the Netherlands has around a dozen different parties that are represented in its parliament, which equates to around the same amount in the Israeli Knesset. The Belgian Federal Parliament has considerably more representation, as does the German Bundestag. Such electoral systems require coalitions to govern. Coalition governments are very rare in the United Kingdom. One such government featured in 2010-2015, when Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats shared the mandate.
The strengths of the two-party system were tested during the American presidential election of 2016, when Hillary Rodham Clinton vied to become the first female president. Donald Trump, a billionaire property developer, stood as her opponent. Neither of these candidates fitted the mould, nor were they particularly popular. In spite of this anomaly, the Republican and Democratic stranglehold was preserved at the ballot box, with voters opting en masse for the 'lesser evil' rather than for an alternative party, or lack thereof. |
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