[CrossVR]

> That's how two party systems work

Fixed that for you.

There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.

[jfengel]

It comes at the cost of locality, but that's far less important today than it had been in the past. Nobody knows their congressman anyway.

I'd really like to give PR systems a try, if for no other reason than to do a reset on the current coalitions. I fear that they will eventually settle down into a pair of coalitions very similar to the current parties, but that leaves us no worse off.

[dragonwriter]

> It comes at the cost of locality,

It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.

You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.

MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.

[int_19h]

It's not an either-or. In mixed-member proportional system, you still get a representative specifically for your district who can thus argue for its interests. But you also get some people elected on party lists so that the representation as a whole remains proportional to party vote. New Zealand is a good example of the system in practical use.