The answer might be different in the internet age
Over the past few years, I have talked a lot about various conditions that are good or bad for freedom, and I have always stressed that polarization and tribalism are very bad for freedom. Today, I want to examine whether the implementation of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) could solve, or at least lessen, the polarization and tribalism we have in the Western political landscape right now. I will not go into what RCV is here, you can look it up if you need to. Basically, it is a method of voting that allows you to choose from multiple options, by ranking the options from, say, 1 to 8, instead of just choosing one option. The theory is that RCV would lessen the polarization because people wouldn't be forced to choose from one of the two big parties anymore.
In the past, I used to think that RCV would not lead to meaningful change in terms of tribalism and polarization. This is because there actually is a country that already uses RCV in both state and federal elections, and has been using RCV for about a century. It's called Australia. However, Australia has a de-facto two-party system, and that has been the case throughout most of Australia's history. Indeed, Australia is arguably more of a two-party country than most other Western countries except America. Up until 2022, all but a handful of the 151 seats in the Australian House of Representatives belonged to either one of the two major parties. There was therefore less space for third parties in Australia than in the UK, Canada and basically every Western European country. It seems that the function of RCV in Australia is to allow people to vote for minor parties without 'wasting their vote', because it would still eventually be channeled into one of the major parties. In fact, the way Australian polls are reported tend to focus on what's called 'two-party preferred', where all the minor party votes are allocated to the major parties, and a final figure where the two major parties add up to 100% is reported. It's kind of like how some American polls only ask about the Democratic and Republican candidates, and force the respondent to choose one of them. If anything, the Australian experience convinced me that RCV reinforces the duopoly, rather than breaking it down.
However, things seem to have changed recently. The 2022 Australian election saw a record number of independents and candidates from minor parties elected. This has been able to happen precisely because people weren't afraid of throwing away their vote by voting for a minor party in the first place, thus RCV was finally functioning in the way we want it to. After that election, multiple analyses also showed that the share of voters not voting for the two major parties has been continually rising for some time. The question here is, given that Australia has had a century of RCV, why is this only happening now? I guess the answer is that we have the internet now. In the past, voters generally got their news from mainstream media only, and would not have been familiar with minor parties in most cases. This was why, even with RCV, a two-party system prevailed. Nowadays, voters could get informed about all their options, which might lead some to vote for a minor party. This is why minor parties, importantly including those that are not clearly aligned with the left or the right, have a good chance of winning something in an RCV system today.
On the other hand, RCV might actually even be necessary to keep the two major parties reasonably moderate, in the age of the internet. A major difference between Australian politics and American politics is that Australia's two major parties, while ideologically similar to their American counterparts, tend to be much more moderate. This is because the Australian parties haven't gradually moved to the extremes like the American parties have in the past 30 years. I think RCV might have had a role in this. In America and other 'first past the post' systems, both major parties have had to move to accommodate elements of their base that have gotten more extreme in the age of the internet. In Australia, however, such elements have generally moved to vote for minor parties instead, while the major parties have largely stood their ground. The major parties aren't too worried about these people moving to minor parties, because their votes actually get returned to the major parties via preferences. This way, the major parties would not have to move to accommodate more extreme policy preferences just to get enough people to be motivated to vote for them.
In conclusion, I think there is very clear evidence that RCV can help reduce the polarization and resulting tribalism that is plaguing politics around the Western world right now. Firstly, RCV allows people to vote for minor parties without fearing that they would 'waste their vote', and this could facilitate the rise of political forces that aren't clearly aligned with the left or the right. Secondly, RCV allows more extreme voters to vote for minor parties that suit their preferences, while not depriving the major parties of their votes. This means that the major parties would not need to move to the extremes just to retain these votes. Together, these two things could go a long way to address the problem of perpetually increasing polarization.
