> I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?
Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.
It's 100% the money. Tests "would you vote the same as you favorite politician/party" routinely show parties to be way less aligned than the electorate tends to believe. The several few "high steaks" issues get amplified to exhaustion on captured media while the rest of politics go undisturbed.
News channels are generally more subtle about it, but are still quite egregious. Look at e.g. debates. The questions are carefully framed to make certain positions appear positive or for the debater to go into tangents with context and get shut down for supposed demagogy. Look at some high profile TV hosts. They may appear somewhat reasonable-ish on camera, but then their facebook feed mirrors the topic discussed and takes an extremely biased route. They argue it's private vs official comms, but in reality the line is blurry on purpose and this confusion is used to persuade.
If you go into any country, state and ususally city subreddits (fb groups, discord channels), they are controlled by some PR agency. Discussion is carefully curated to fit the narrative. Bot nets are useful, but zealots are crucial. If previously the young recruits were important to distribute flyers around, these days they are crucial in shaping the public opinion on social media.
> Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.
It's not hard, or a new problem. For example in the UK paid for political campaigning on radio and TV has been banned pretty much since the dawn of those mediums. In terms of print, you can have media pluracy rules, to stop the concentration of power.
Any kind of election spending, at the local and national level, is regulated and capped.
Now people have been using less visible targetted online ads using dark money to try and get around this - in my view this is an extremely serious offence and people should go to prison.
You could go further and make it illegal to spend money on online ads for any kind of political campaign whether it's aligned to a party or not ( ie single issue ) - with penalities for the companies hosting those ad campaigns as well as the people running them.
You could include astroturf botnets as part of this definition.
Sure these things can be worked around - but the point is the risk of being caught breaking the rules, and the political damage as a result, will make people think twice.
One of the problems at the moment is people are getting away with a slap on the wrist - in my view undermining democracy is a serious offence - and it's about creating a culture where that's the prevailing view.
If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?
Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.