Political Stability: Why do people vote for dominant parties in dominant party systems?

How old is your government?

In the United States, we take political stability for granted. We act as if the government and all of its public services and apparatuses are some sort of natural thing that inherently exists and democracy is entirely about voting for which party runs the machine that just always exists. Even though our country is relatively young as a "nation," the current iteration of our government has been relatively stable and unchanging for about 150 years. There have been changes in things like who gets to vote, for whom, and for how long, but the fundamental structure has not radically changed. It's been "the United States of America" with the same base constitution for longer than any of us or our grandparents can remember.

Control of the government changes hands, but in our language, the government remains the same government. After an election, it's the same congress, the same office, just different people occupying them. There is a new cabinet, a new administration of the government, but it's the same government.

This is actually pretty uncommon globally.

Not gonna keep going in order but other notables (due to GDP) are Canada becoming an independent country in 1982 (Australia in 1986), Luxembourg in 1945 (wealthiest nation in the world), Ireland in 1948, Switzerland in 1848, Norway in 1905, Singapore in 1965, Iceland in 1944, Qatar in 1971, Denmark in 1849, The Netherlands in 1815 or 1954, Austria in 1955, and Sweden in 1974.

The pattern here is that most countries experienced major political upheaval due to World War II, either gaining independence from an empire or an empire reshaping itself after losing all of its colonies. Many continued to have upheaval over and over. The only exceptions here are the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway. The United Kingdom is... complicated to date. These 5 countries survived World War II still looking like themselves. The Netherlands... maybe counts but they were pretty destroyed by WWII even if their political system didn't change... and the UK was in ruins and much of what we associate with the modern UK took shape after WWII even if their parliamentary system didn't radically change until devolution.

The Global US Hegemony we see today is very much because WWII did not happen on the continental US. All of the combat was overseas. The most the US got invaded was island territories that most Americans rarely think about, don't know exist, or which only became US territories because of WWII. While other countries had to rebuild basic infrastructure from rubble, the US had the post-war boom. Americans take this for granted. While other countries were forming new national identities or losing their empires, the US was adding stars to its flag. Americans take this for granted.

In the US, we've seen minor changes here and there to our system. The Senate is now an elected body. Every citizen over the age of 18 is now, on paper, allowed to vote regardless of other demographics (unless they're in prison or a whole number of other things). We now associate Red and Blue with the two-party system (quite young actually! Only for like, 20 years have we done that!). "Massive upheavals" often just mean, for us, that the other party won the election when it wasn't expected. January 6th 2021 was absolutely shocking, but stuff like that is not that uncommon in other countries.

For the rest of the world, "upheavals" often mean that public services come to a halt or radically change. The economy halts or changes. The government ceases to function for a bit. Day to day life becomes radically different. The name of the country might change, or the flag. The money probably changes. For some counties, like Thailand, the national identity might even change and your own ethnic identity might be encouraged to change by government project, Even if the National Identity of France is far older than the Fifth Republic, the Fifth Republic is very much not how the French Government has always looked. The difference between "having a stable government" and "not having a stable government" is a felt experience for much of the rest of the world.

The "Natural Ruling Party"

There are many places where everyone always votes for the same political party every time. These are sometimes called "dominant party systems" or "one party systems" depending on whether they're a US ally or not depending on whether the status of the dominant party is explicitly enshrined in the country's constitution or not. Another term I like is the "Natural Ruling Party." It encapsulates that, in this country, there is a sense that the party that rules just kind of is.

Here is a sample of countries that have or until recently had a dominant party.

Mind you, I haven't extensively read the history of all of these countries, but I am an autistic person with a geography special interest whose favorite activity is picking random places on a map and reading about their history. I've read histories of a lot of countries, including some of these ones.

And, mind you, a lot of these countries truly did not or do not allow any other party on the ballot, while others did or do nominally allow other parties, and some even did legitimately allow other parties and then eventually lost to them. I am not claiming that one-party states necessarily had or have the consensus to govern by the people just because they exist or were voted for in elections. Just because an election was held, doesn't mean that the results were free or fair or that the results reported were even real at all. Those of us in the United States are certainly familiar with how easy it is to design an electoral system that is "free and fair" on paper yet yields heavily distorted and unfair results.

The question is, when people knew that the dominant party was going to win no matter what, why did they take the time to go vote for the dominant party anyway?

Maybe they didn't want to?

Some countries have compulsory voting. Singapore has a 95% voter turnout, but you also get a $37 fine for not voting. Mexico mandates voting in its constitution, but it's not enforced and their voter turnout is like, 55%. Italy used to informally punish people who don't vote by social means, still didn't get more than 90% voter turnout. None of the other countries mentioned have the highest or lowest turnout in the world. It's average! Relatively typical! They don't mandate it and some people choose to vote and some people don't. Russia gets better turnout than the US in presidential elections that most people see as rather pointless since United Russia always wins and they aren't even running different candidates, but the turnout isn't so high that it's suspicious. It fluctuates and is rather middling on the international scale. While it's doubtful that Russia is having "free and fair elections" and dubious to say that any other party has a chance at winning, it's still logical by observation to conclude that most people are taking the time to go vote in every election even though they don't have to, and that a very large number are voting for United Russia. If I were Russian, I'd be voting Left Front. But most people aren't doing that in Russia.

Singapore has 95% voter turnout rate, and voting is mandatory, but voting for the PAP is not. Singapore's elections are generally considered to be as "free and fair" as the United States–which is to say it's rife with gerrymandering and vote-splitting and other subtle design "flaws" which lead to the PAP being far more likely to win a majority than not. Still, the Workers' Party does consistently get seats in parliament, even occasionally unseating PAP incumbent seats, and their share has been rising. Singapore's rampant gerrymandering means that with only 61% of the vote, the PAP was awarded 89% of seats in parliament. This system isn't resulting in elections that accurately reflect the popular vote, just like in the United States, but there has never been outright voter fraud reported. If the PAP has always won every single election in the history of Singapore, and it's obvious that they're responsible for making it harder for other parties to win, why do 61% of people still vote for them? Wouldn't you want to vote for someone else? The PAP is responsible for some terrible things, so what's the deal? If I was Singaporean, I'd be voting for the Workers Party. But most people in Singapore don't do that.

In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party is lead by the same aristocratic families who governed prior to US occupation. Their parents and grandparents got Japan in a horrible war that wrecked the country, they lost said war horribly, and we also know that these people had done horrible atrocities that have ruined Japan's relationships with its neighbors. Everyone in East Asia fucking hates Japan because of the families who run the LDP. Also, the LDP now rules in coalition with a cult who everyone is afraid to criticize. One of the LDP's figureheads got assassinated for his involvement with the fucking Moonies. Still, the LDP has lost elections, twice, in 1993 and 2009, for very brief moments of not ruling the government. There is plenty of evidence that, for some reason, people in Japan are consistently turning out to vote for the LDP over and over again. Why? If I were Japanese, I'd be voting for the Communist Party, obviously. Why in the world would anyone vote for the LDP given their history?

Speculating about why people vote for dominant parties

Imagine that you, or your mother, or grandmother, remembers living through a time of political instability, and now one singular political party has been in power for quite a long time and they seem to be doing an OK job. You don't love them, but they seem to be able to not collapse every twenty years and they keep public services functional continuously and even build new infrastructure that they keep well maintained. There hasn't been a civil war in years even! They rebuilt the country from rubble after a horrible war you lived through. Day to day, you are no longer worried about being able to get basic supplies like toilet paper, fuel, soap, or rice. Hell, maybe you didn't even have a toilet, and now you have a flush toilet connected to public sewers. That's a pretty nice upgrade.

The reason you might continue to vote for that party, is not because of a party platform like "More funding for schools" or "Better health care." You vote for them because the entire existence of the government is that party to you. That party has been capable of running the government and providing stable, reliable, public services—and a semblance of a stable economy and associated supply chain. They may do a bunch of stuff you dislike, but you don't know if the opposition is even capable of governing. After all, who else has ever even done it?

Mexico was ruled by a dictator prior to the Mexican Revolution, a civil war lasting ten years. The PRI overturned a military dictatorship and then ruled Mexico for eighty years. It did many awful things, especially to the indigenous communities of Mexico, but it was also synonymous with contemporary Mexican national identity. There were allegations of election fraud, and gerrymandering, and all those things, but they still were the government. The modern Mexican government, which brought many people a sense of stability and distinctiveness from the Spanish empire, which built public water utilities and public transportation, it was all the PRI. I would not be voting for them, but to someone who is not particularly politically involved, well, who else is there to vote for? Who else has experience governing? It took 80 years for PRI to lose their dominance, and even more time since then for MORENA and President AMLO to fully take over and change the status quo. It took time for the government itself and the PRI to become two distinct entities in the public consciousness.

Japan has been ruled by more or less the same people since the Meiji restoration overthrew the Shogunate. There have been brief moments where Japan was ruled via US military occupation, and those two aforementioned elections that the LDP lost and then subsequently won back. Even when the entire structure of the government and the role of the monarchy changed, the same people ended up in power (though not until after an initial election of a socialist government that was squashed by the US occupation forces.). Everything about modern Japan can be attributed to the LDP. It's a country where many people alive today still remember living in a predominantly agrarian economy without steam engines or electricity being a common sight. The Japanese "Economic Miracle" was the LDP. Everything good and bad was all the LDP. People are still going out and voting for the LDP because the LDP is the state of affairs.

Singapore is the only country in the world to have become independent against its own will. Until it became a country, it had always identified as being a part of Malaysia. Being ejected from the Malaysian Federation after the end of British Colonial Rule was devastating. It wasn't set up to be an independent country! Right before and after Singapore's forced independence were devastating periods of race riots and economic chaos. These riots have become a major part of the country's national mythos, and are used to justify a lot of the more internationally unusual parts of how Singapore is structured (like how ethnic enclaves are illegal).

The PAP built up the entirety of Singapore's government, economy, national identity, public housing system, and lasting peace. The PAP has done everything in Singapore, good and bad. Why do people vote for PAP? Because 1969 wasn't very long ago. People are voting for the stability of the status quo because they remember, and the PAP has enshrined it into national memory, that before the PAP there was chaos. Living through instability and chaos is traumatic. Most people are not willing to live through interesting times for the sake of their faith in something better. Most people just want to live their lives in peace. Before, people lived in Kampungs and there wasn't enough housing. Now, they live in high-rise towers with electricity, schools, toilets, tap water, and air conditioning. Americans never think about a vote for one party or another being a vote for plumbing.

Azerbaijan and the other former soviet states lived through the collapse of the soviet union quite recently. I shouldn't need to tell you how chaotic and dysfunctional that was for the economy. Their national parties that get voted for again and again are the parties that built up an independent country with an independent economy after the collapse of everything.

Russia especially had it bad with the collapse of the soviet union. It is now ruled by a despicable oligarchy. Still, it is a stable country now with a stable government. Are you noticing a pattern?

China had a long and bloody civil war and feudalism prior to the Communist Party. People alive today remember paying rent to warlords. The Communist Party brought—to even the most outlying areas—electricity, public drinking water, trains, universal education, and everything that Americans take for granted, and it did it all in only 70 years. When young people in China tried to get "too involved" in politics, it led to the Cultural Revolution, which despite American misconceptions was actually not a project of the government. The government was the entity that ended the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Why do people still bother to vote for their local communist party members? Why do they support them? The Communist Party is stable government. Nobody else in China has ever done it! It's the world's largest most populous country. Who else are you going to vote for? The Qing Dynasty? The Kuomintang, who were responsible for the White Terror? The Communists are the best it has ever been in China. It's not like you can say "Emperor Qing Puyi never would have censored Weibo!"

Cuba was ruled by a military dictatorship before the communist revolution. There were plantations! The communist party has brought healthcare to everyone, even in the most rural areas. The party is so synonymous with the free nation that some argue it's less of a one-party system and more of a no-party system.

South Africa didn't even allow most people to vote until the African National Congress. It's kind of absurd to call South Africa a "democracy" under Apartheid. White people voting for the National Party were voting for the system of Apartheid which was incredibly profitable for them. The ANC was the party of universal suffrage and equality. They're the party of revolutionaries who ended apartheid. Sure, they ended up losing their way a bit, but apartheid was only thirty years ago. It took a long time for people to move on from the ANC having been responsible for national liberation. It's hard to challenge the credibility of the people of who are responsible for there even being a legitimate election.

Italy and East Germany were destroyed by WWII and ruled by fascists. Their "natural ruling parties" rebuilt the country from rubble and instituted systems of welfare. They enabled people to feel good about their country again. The DDR didn't need to rig its own elections, they had the popular support for a reason.

Algeria, Vietnam, and Laos were colonies of the French Empire who suffered from invasion and colonization from multiple empires. Vietnam experienced the horrors of napalm and agent orange. Their "natural ruling parties" are the parties of independence and self-determination. The parties of their own welfare over the profit of colonizers.

While some of these parties maybe do rig elections or set up unfair systems, it's also not hard to imagine why people would have supported them even in a free and fair election. People who have suffered through the trauma of their entire world collapsing will obviously want to support a party that represents stability and being able to live through your daily life without fear. For some of these countries, the people do eventually move on from their "natural ruling party" as memory of their collapse and chaos recedes into the past. Still, what all of these countries have in common was a period of national chaos and collapse. None of these parties were simply elected in a normal election and then re-elected over and over again. All of these parties were the first party elected in their country after some sort of disaster or war completely reshaped what it meant and looked like to live in said country.

Living Through Instability is Traumatic

Millions of people dying of disease was not the only thing traumatic about 2020. Obviously, people are traumatized by losing loved ones and fear of death, but the disruption to daily living was also a major factor. In a way unfamiliar to most Americans, things were no longer consistent. Whether you were at the bottom rungs of society or the top, you still generally could have known that the world tomorrow will work roughly the same way as the world today. Whether or not you can afford toilet paper, there would be toilet paper. The chaos of everything shutting down and rebooting led to total disarray in everything. You would go to the store and half of your list wouldn't be in stock for months arbitrarily because of supply chain issues. You would have some sort of thing you needed to do and you wouldn't know how to do it because the systems for doing it had completely broken down. Sometimes you wouldn't know if you were going to work the next week because of riots or fascists storming governing buildings. Sometimes there was a curfew, or the national guard patrolling your neighborhood.

There was a moment where it felt like the country was going to balkanize and Andrew Cuomo was going to claim legitimacy as political leader of the Northeastern states and break us off from the federal government. I can't find the map that had been going around but remember all those regional COVID coordination councils acting independently of the federal government? People saw them briefly as a dual power challenge to the federation. It sounds crazy to suggest now but people were so unsure of things that it felt possible. When the elections happened, there were citizen-led demonstrations demanding that the votes be counted at all, fears of violence at polling stations at the hands of fascist paramilitary groups, and the conservatives still claim the election didn't count. Jan 6 2021 happened. Things just were not stable and everyone was terrified.

To be clear, I support all of the anti-police rallies and riots that happened in the Summer of 2020, but I also think it's pretty evident that this huge change in public opinion supporting the police and "tough on crime" politicians even in predominantly POC liberal-leaning areas like Philly is clearly a backlash in response to those demonstrations. The Philly mayoral race had a candidate who was campaigning on police reform, and a candidate campaigning on establishing a brutal police state. I voted for the former, and expected my neighbors would too. Didn't we all live through the police tear gassing the whole neighborhood and shooting people with rubber bullets? Didn't we all live through the national guard holding us under curfew? Obviously, I thought, everyone would vote for the candidate who condemned those actions. Yet the "tough on crime" candidate won by a landslide. I was shocked! But even though it felt like the whole city was banding together, it was not the whole city. The average normal person doesn't like it when things are on fire. Generally, people want stability.

When Parker won the primary, I was so disgusted by her stance on police and Kensington that I just couldn't bring myself to vote for her "just in case" not doing so would lead to the Republican mayor winning. I knew he wouldn't win. The Democrats always win in Philly. It's a dominant-party city. The real election had already happened. Parker won and has been doing exactly what I feared in Kensington. For a time, it felt like the government would collapse, and now it just feels inevitable that the Democrats will rule the city. Most people would choose the latter over the former, because the former was traumatic. The latter is not utopian, it is not exciting, it leaves no hope for serious radical change. Most people, apparently, choose it anyway. They like the consistency. They like the stability. They like knowing that tomorrow will be mostly the same as today. The idea of slow gradual improvement has incredible mass appeal to those who have been through a mass traumatic event, whether or not it is realistic.

Dominant-Party Systems within the United States

A lot of Americans have more experience living under a one-party state than they think. Swing states are so small in number that we have a term for them and they become the focus of the whole country every federal election. We know that, if you live in Massachusetts or Washington, your vote doesn't matter on the federal level. Only states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will affect the outcome.

In Philadelphia, the Democrats dominate the government so severely that our city charter was modified to reserve two city council seats for minority parties. One seat is a republican and one is a Working Families Party member. People run as Democrats who, in other places, would arguably be more likely to run as the Republican candidate. This is because the Democratic primary is the real election, and everyone knows it.

In Massachusetts, it's not uncommon for most of your ballot in the general election to be uncontested Democrats. In fact, 70% of races in America are uncontested.

What happened when the Democrats regained control of the federal government in 2021? They imposed a sense of stability and normalcy. All of the "weirdness" of the Trump era seemed to dissolve away or fall into the background, and things went "back to normal." Until this presidential election season got heated up, we had a period of time where we did not feel like the country was on the verge of collapse.

This is the strength of the Democrats. They imposed stability and calm even when it is false and cruel. The way they forced the COVID-19 pandemic to "end" before it was truly over has made my life as a disabled person profoundly lonely. At the same time, my life is still better than when I was enforcing mask mandates in 2020.

The Democrats are not fixing problems in radical ways, nor are they a neutral force. They continue to support the genocide in Gaza and deport undocumented immigrants.

Although, they do quietly make improvements in the background that often go uncelebrated. They kickstart the slow process of hiring more civil servants to fix short staffed public services. Things do get better under Democrats, just not in exciting ways. They rebuild the things that were destroyed. They know how to run the government. I'm not a fan of their ideologies and hate a lot of what they do, but they do stabilize things and restore vital public services.

And so, living in places like Massachusetts or Philadelphia where the Democrats always win. Places where they often are not even contested. I still, more often than not, go out and vote for them. I have my problems with them, but it is a vote for the continued functioning of society. It is a vote for stability.

In Republican dominated parts of the country, it is much the same. They have always lived under one party, and they fear change. Many people are disenfranchised, and would vote against the Republicans if the election were not rigged. Yet still, they have popular support. It is a vote for tomorrow being more or less the same as today. Sure, things could get better under another party, but they could also get worse. The incumbent party is the safe vote.

The Global Supply Chain is Very Complicated and the Collapse of the United States Would be Internationally Devastating

The United States of America is an evil empire with global hegemonic dominance. This is not something I will attempt to deny because it is objectively true. It holds this great power and because of this, a lot systems in a lot of countries depend upon the United States in some manner. The global economy is intertwined with America.

We saw in 2020 what happens when things destabilize. Shipping containers became backed up. Basic necessities became unavailable. People died in hospitals because hospitals depend on an incredible amount of very specific supplies that can only be produced by our complex global supply chain and modern industrial engineering. Our present-day standard of living even in the poorest parts of the world depends upon an incomprehensibly complicated global economy.

There is no piece of land in the world that has every natural resource in sufficient abundance to be economically independent. Every human settlement depends on trade to survive. The Roman Empire conquered vast swaths of land to acquire access to things like nickel and copper, and still depended on trade with neighboring nations and distant empires.

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, it sunk Europe and parts of North Africa into a dark age. The Arab Renaissance was possible because the Eastern Roman Empire remained stable. The Roman Empire was still an empire. Neither the western nor eastern empire was an egalitarian society. But the negative consequences of the collapse lasted for centuries. People in the former Roman Empire did not live better lives after it fell for centuries. People in neighboring nations which traded with Rome were affected too. The Roman Empire never reached parts of Northern Europe and yet they too suffered from its collapse.

Now think about the present day economy. The world is far more globally interconnected than during classical antiquity, and we take many things for granted that are only possible due to international trade. We do not just lose modern computer and modern medicine, but also our textiles, and our kitchenware. Do you know how expensive salt used to be? Do you know how complicated urban tap water systems are? Do you know how to acquire safe drinking water in your wealthy American city, without using tap water?

The United States is "too big to fail." Global economic hegemony means the entire world exists in the Roman Empire and its shadow. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the economies of every nation that traded with it sunk into deep depressions and suffered severe famines. Far more nations today depend on trade with the United States than did the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Another thing is different today than in classical antiquity: climate change. We do not have centuries to recover from a new global dark age. It is too late to prevent the extreme weather and ecological chaos that the Industrial Revolution has wrought. Even if our new dark age resulted in absolutely zero carbon emissions immediately, which is highly unlikely, we would still have to endure hurricanes, flooding, heat waves, and more.

But with the disruptions to the global economy and supply chain, will we have the resources we need to weather the weather? Extreme heat waves without air conditioning. Hurricanes without advance warning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. How will we get hurricane relief to Puerto Rico without large cargo vessels? How will we survive the next pandemic without the supply chain necessary to make vaccines?

China and Russia will fill in the gaps where they can. I would rather trust the Chinese Communist Party than United Russia on their motivations and ability to alleviate global suffering, but the Chinese economy is still deeply intertwined with America. China will also be going through some rough economic depression. Neither United Russia nor the CCP are very friendly to queer people and neither are particularly more upstanding and egalitarian than the Democrats.

Our sustainable energy solutions depend on modern computing and the global supply chain. We will be falling back on coal and charcoal. Carbon emissions will not reset to zero.

With resource scarcity and chaos comes war. War is very bad for the environment and for humans.

The United States is evil, and perhaps after a new dark age there is the potential for something better and less evil. Never in the history of human society has that actually happened, except perhaps for the Chinese Revolution, which resulted in a lot death and famine and then eventually something stable that is certainly better than the Qing Dynasty but hardly an unproblematic liberated society. Was Medieval Europe an improvement on the Roman Empire? Was the Bronze Age Collapse beneficial for humanity? Was the centuries of European colonialism that followed the medieval era better for the planet? Did we ever see the return of the peaceful Indus Valley Civilization?

Did the total reorganization of global society after World War I improve things? Or did it traumatize everyone and give us World War II? Did World War II improve the Soviet Union?

I do not have clear answers. Throughout human history there has always been tragedy co-occurring with glory. There have always been pockets of kindness and improvement co-occurring with cruelty and destruction. There does not appear to be any event in history that provides evidence for optimism in light of a collapse as substantial as a hypothetical collapse of the United States. Such a substantial collapse may have never occurred before. Despited my jaded attitude towards Marxism-Leninism these days, I do still believe in studying history through a materialist lens to try and derive evidence-based predictions. Economic prosperity is usually when people are better to one another and we see improvements in civil rights and living conditions for the down-trodden.

American global dominance is not good for the world. It is destroying the world, in fact. Yet I do not believe we have evidence that Accelerationism would be better. Allowing Trump to destabilize the global economy and sink us into a new dark age would not be better for the world.

I live in a swing state and I am going to vote for Kamala Harris and hate every second of it. But they are the party that can keep the government stable. Public services will continue. Climate change will be slowly mitigated to some degree. Perhaps we can continue to organize and push for the changes we need.

I don't have a solution to the problem of American global hegemony. Perhaps it needs to be gradually eroded and replaced by a multi-polar world. Perhaps not. I am not a genius economist or political philosopher.

What I am saying is this: Why do people vote for the PAP in Singapore? Why do people vote for the problematic dominant party? The same reasons I will be voting for Kamala Harris.

Political stability. I do not want to go back to how it was before. I do not want to live through political instability and mass death. If I lived in Massachusetts, I probably would not vote at all. But I cannot justify allowing Trump to do his worst. The Democrats are not our socialist people's party. They are our PAP. Our PRI. Our LDP. And despite how horrible they are, they will get my vote.

After the election, I hope we can organize to create a better option than that. There is no choice on Tuesday that is not depressing. That is where we are this year. I hope there can be hope for something else than this.