Here in Norway we have multiple parties. What has happened in the last few decades is that none of the big parties have enough votes to get majority on their own, so they have to work together with smaller parties. This creates an inversion of power, where the smaller parties gain significantly more influence than the number of seats would indicate.
The smaller parties have little to lose playing "my way or the highway" during negotiations, so end up getting at least some top items from their program pushed through. This has led to some rather poor laws and regulations in recent times.
That said, while I've thought about this vs the US two-party model a bit, I think I prefer what we got over here.
Crucially Norway doesn't use "winner take all" voting and people are able to express more nuance in their preferences, otherwise Norway would also have 2 parties. When most Americans hear "multi-party system" they tend to assume voting works the same way as in the US, but that somehow other countries reach a different equilibrium with the same inital conditions.
Canada has a parliamentary system with winner-takes-all for each seat. We have three major national parties and a regional party which regularly has a significant minority. The system is not fundamentally different from the one used to select representatives in the US. Many other countries have similar systems, but not all of them have two party rule like the US.
Odd -- Germany has a similar system and smaller parties kinda feel forced to take responsibility and thus take part in a coalition. Might be media influence, but also because "Opposition ist Mist" - "[being in the] oppoisition is garbage" (Franz Müntefering).
> What has happened in the last few decades is that none of the big parties have enough votes to get majority on their own, so they have to work together with smaller parties. This creates an inversion of power, where the smaller parties gain significantly more influence than the number of seats would indicate.
The US also has that, the different is that its less visible, and the minor factions have more power because:
(1) the minor factions are esconced within major parties, so there is no public discussions about coalitions, and
(2) because of #1, and because such arrangements are stickier, the major factions have less choice as to which minor faction to make a majority with, making them more at the mercy of the minor and extreme factions theybare bound to.
I seem to have lost a sentence in my editing. The electoral threshold reference was there to indicate they try to avoid too many small parties, but I'm not convinced it's working very well at the current level.
The smaller parties have little to lose playing "my way or the highway" during negotiations, so end up getting at least some top items from their program pushed through. This has led to some rather poor laws and regulations in recent times.
That said, while I've thought about this vs the US two-party model a bit, I think I prefer what we got over here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_threshold