Why do Americans have only two parlament in their Congress?

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If that were put into force then the house of Reps would have six thousand members! Fifty thousand goes into 300 million plus Americans six thousand plus times. You would need 12 percent of a typical sports stadium for the House of Reps to meet and conduct business.

Maybe the US really is too big, if the system can't accommodate actual representation of its citizens. Perhaps the states should be divided into "super regions" consisting of a group of adjacent states.

I am not actually advocating this. But I wonder sometimes based on the differences between different areas of the country.

America once had a four party system but only the Republicans and the Democrats won any significant gains and only those parties survived.Why it happened that way here and multi party systems work elsewhere,I can't answer.

Not to mention the cost to pay them all and build offices and staff them

Having more parties wouldn't have to increase numbers in congress,3 or 4 parties would be distributed amongst the already existing congressional seats.

This is a different topic- not about the number of political parties. The above folks are off on a tangent. The tangent is the question "should we enforce that archaic rule in the Constitution that stipulates that there has to be one rep for every fifty thousand people in the population?"

So that would give my state 120 representatives,I think,it currently has 9.I don't have a problem with 9.That rule came from a time when the population was a lot lower,I don't see a need for more people in congress.

We would have about 380 representatives lol

Exactly. It aint 1790 anymore, when the whole nation only had four million population. The average US state today has over six million people by itself.

SNP are the 3rd biggest party in the UK, although their focus is Scotland. Libdem votes go up and down like a rollercoaster depending on the hot topic of the day. In 2010 they were very high for them to the extent they formed a Govt with the Tories, right now it's very low.

Quite a few countries in Europe operate an election system that supports the idea of many parties having representation in their parliament. It's something I would love to have in the UK but it would be at the detriment of the 2 large parties so would never be put in place.

Where the constituency based FPTP system fails in the UK is in both smaller parties who have a large following spread thinly across the country having little to no representation, and also, like the U.S, we operate a system where the party to get the most votes can end up coming 2nd.

In 2015 UKIP received 3.8M votes and ended up with 1 member of Parliament. At the same election the SNP received 1.4M votes and won seats for 56 Members Of Parliament and the Lib Dems got 2.4M votes and were given 8 seats for their MP's

in 2017 The Conservatives won 42.4% of the total votes. this was deemed an unimaginable disaster for them and they couldn't even form a Govt on their own, and subsequently the minority Govt fell and we ran the election again 18 months later. In the 2019 election The Conservatives won 43.6% of the total votes, an increase of just 1.2%, and this is presented as a gigantic win, a landslide of epic proportions, and in turn has given them an 80 seat majority in the HoC meaning they can push through pretty much any legislation they so desire.

Democracy eh!

In reference to your earlier post,the OP's original question was why don't we have more political parties.I'm not sure where the thread veered off to number of representatives.As far as the 17th amendment,I don't see a problem with direct representation,what difference does it really make.In the end it's really the quality of people your electing that is the biggest issue,electing more people is just electing more crooks,if America doesn't change the way it votes.

Exactly

But yes...it is a nice ideal- to get as close to direct democracy as you can. In ancient Athens every free male citizen gathered in the city square and debated the issues, and then voted. Direct democracy. No need of a House of Reps when you could represent yourself. The Iroquis Indians did much the same (the Founding Fathers took almost as many ideas from the American Indians as they did from the Greeks and Romans). But you just cant do things that way in a modern nation state that is bigger than Iron Age Athens or a First Nations tribe.

Aspie Utah wants us to use modern high tech, and have most of these hypothetical six thousand reps in the House to stay away from Washington and to do Congress via Skype, or like that. Great! Six thousand people debating, and one percent of them (like 60) launching into ten hour filibusters via skype! Lets all just go to Hell in a high tech basket why don't we?

While we also have several registered political parties, only two of them attract enough interest to be viable.

Unfortunately, one of them wants a return to white male supremacy, imperialism by conquest, and no reproductive rights for women; while the other wants to raise taxes, socialize businesses, and punish wealthy white men for being wealthy white men.

The Republic of the Philippines is looking progressively better with each passing day...

Actually -since circa 1930 the US has actually had three major political parties. But they pretend to be two parties. So we are actually more like European countries (with their changing alliances of many splinter parties) than it looks.

Our three parties are: Democrats, Dixiecrats, and Republicans. One progressive party, and two conservative parties (but with slightly differing types of conservatism). And arguably we have recently spawned a forth, European style Socialist party, as well.

The old Democratic party was an uneasy coalition between Democrats and Dixiecrats. Today the GOP is a coalition between the old GOP and Dixiecrats. The modern Dem party is without Dixiecrats but has a new generation of socialists that has sprung up in the 21st Century. So now the Dems are an uneasy coalition between the middle left (traditional Dems) and the far left (actual Socialists)- in opposition to the GOP which is a coalition between the two kinds of the conservatism (not always a happy marriage either).

Except that under Trump both the traditional GOP, and the Southern Bible Belt one time Dixiecrats-but now Republicans, have had to sacrifice their values to keep Trump in office- sell their souls to the Devil -to keep in power.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 03 Jun 2020, 2:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Both major parties have factions within them,within the Democrats are the Progressive socialist Bernie Sanders types that have a strong following but aren't strong enough at this point to branch out and be a viable third party.

The Republicans have the Alt-Right skinhead types that have now replaced the Strom Thurmund,Jesse Helms Dixiecrat types as a racist nationalist party,that also is not strong enough to branch out and win on there own.