So . . . it's week two of the Canadian federal campaign, and the two major parties have started promising billions of dollars that we will never, ever see. I'm sure the minor parties have also been promising a lot, but come on, let's be honest - they will never be in power so their promises are even less meaningful than those of the Liberals and Conservatives. And though I, like most Canadians, already know who I will be voting for; like most Canadians, I will be voting for the same party as last time (if you know me personally you can probably guess which party). But Canadian politics has a party problem (not like that of Miley Cyrus - I don't think that Harper or Ignatieff have tried salvia), and that's what I'm discussing today.
I tried out CBC's party-selection tool (found here) and discovered that my views do not neatly fit into those subscribed to by Canada's national political parties (and that the questions are obtusely written that you could easily respond to get the result that you want). Shocker, I know. More interesting than that, though was the way the parties were aligned on the "vote compass". They set it up as a two by two matrix, but the Conservatives were alone in one quadrant, and the other parties were all crammed together in another. So what this tool really shows is that there are many Canadians for whom there is no good alternative.
There's two ways a country can go with political parties: the bare minimum (for real democracies, the US is the gold standard at 2; one party is hardly democratic) and the something-for-everyone (most of continental Europe). Neither is perfect. In the US you usually get fairly decisive results (exception!) but a lack of options, and in Europe you get severly fractured parliaments but everyone feels represented. There are practical implications of multiple parties as well. As the Liberals are very slowly learning, being on the left in Canada (which is fractured into 4 easily recognized parties) is no fun, whereas being alone on the right works out pretty okay for the Conservatives. Of course, ten years ago the situations were reversed, with the right fairly evenly split between two, the left split between 1-3 parties and the Liberals sitting pretty in the middle.
This all reminds me of spaghetti sauce, particularly part of an article on consumer tastes by Malcolm Gladwell (the part I'm referencing begins at point 2, but the whole article is interesting and I use it in my classes). If you treat all consumers like they have the same tastes and limit their options (as in US politics) you aren't maximizing the market. If you have lots and lots of options, you risk turning people off. But if you can be comprehensive and parsimonious (like a cheap encyclopedia), you can get most people interested by giving them a choice they at least like. If you only make one kind of spaghetti sauce, no one is going to love it and most won't buy. If you have regular, spicy, and extra-chunky, you'll get more people and make more of them happy.
Canadian politics currently lacks this, and not from too few national (or nationalistic) parties, but rather from a lack of diversity between them. And don't tell Michael Ignatieff, but this presents a huge opportunity for him to steal this election. No, not from emulating everyone from Harper (ie attack ads) to Rob Ford (appealing to the worst in Torontonians) but rather by emulating successful (yet reprehensible) Liberal leaders of the past - by sitting in the middle. Don't try to out-left the NDP while distancing yourselves from the Conservatives. Sit on the fence. Be the middle option. And just like another classic marketing-class example, when given a choice of a small, medium or large (e.g. soda), people will usually choose the medium.
So I guess what I'm saying is I'll vote for whichever party is most like a medium-sized jar of extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. Unless it's the Greens, 'cause there's no way I'm wasting my vote on them.
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