What are your views on demorcracies with political parties?

As opposed to…?

I’ld strongly recommend an old BBC documentary The Century of the Self it answers this question and a lot more…I have a copy I can distribute cause I’m nice like that lol…people are irrational in groups hey we change our mind all the time and were relatively smart people, now what about the mass of idiots or people that don’t take an interest…who do they vote for, the person that looks the best, its all Alpha male not real underlying policies, partly because we know many things will never materialise. No vote on a war in Iraq War, I mean what the hell?!

Its all clever tricks, media, and ‘pretty’ faces because political parties don’t want whats best for the people, they want to get in power because its best for THEM.

@Vincentt
Just voting for individuals, of course our whole system will have to change.

This is what I’d like to see happen:

You go to vote and are presented with a ballot. No names or party affiliations are on the ballot. The only information for your consideration is what each candidate’s stance is on each of the major issues people really care about (war, abortion, economy, etc.). That way, people would be forced to vote for policies rather than parties or personalities.

I sort of agree with @augustlan. I think there should be either 0 parties, or everyone can be free to establish his own identity via different parties resulting in many many parties. But, having no label such as a party takes away so many problems. Just having the 2 like we do now (c’mon, we all know that nobody would win an election as a registered Green Party) isn’t good enough for me. It’s like, yay, one more party than North Korea…

@Myndecho – OK, I didn’t get we were talking about an “us”. But anyway, why wouldn’t individuals try to make other individuals look bad? (Also, in my country, I consider the mud throwing not to be that much of an issue, in that it doesn’t happen that often.)

Anyway, @augustlan, election turn-up would be a lot lower than without this system. Though you could argue that not to be a bad thing, if the only people turning up would be people really considering their votes. Still, I don’t think I’d be in favour of such a system, for more reasons than the one I just named.

I’d prefer to see a system where you could rank political parties (e.g. the three you like best), so votes would be less tactical and more about who you really agree with. It also allows you to specify who you’d like a party to form a coalition with (or perhaps you should be able to explicitly state this). If you have a system of coalitions, of course.