http://wired.com/
"According to USA Today, roughly 53 percent of the industry's overall donations went to the Democratic Party or its candidates in the last election.
But figures vary widely within specific companies. At Microsoft, for example, 60 percent of the donations went to the Democrats."
"98 percent of political contributions coming out of [Google] went to the Dems."
http://www.buyblue.org/ has a database of companies and how "blue" they are. Personally, though, I'm not going to base every single purchase I make on things like this. Apple is rated as "99% blue," but their products are too good for me to buy anything else, regardless of that.
Here's another one -- did you know News Corp (Fox) is actually a "blue" company?
http://www.choosetheblue.com/main.php
Thank God I don't have to live in a country with a two-party voting system..
And what country would that be?
The US, of course. If anyone wants to argue that there can be any number of parties in the US, please look at how it actually works on the "federal" level. The kind of "winner-takes-it-all" voting system that is used in USA (and, for instance, UK) strongly favours two big parties.
No, d00d, I meant which country do you live in that doesn't have a two-party system?
(I was >>5... curse my un-cookie'd parents' computer)
Finland. Our voting system is actually weighted a bit in favour of small parties, which I think is great.
Do you mean weighted so that smaller parties get a relatively greater representation in the parliament than the size of their voting bloc? If so, I would disagree with you about that being great... But if it's one of those situations where each party gets representation equal to the relative size of their bloc, I think that's fair and possibly a better system than the system we have here in the US.
Well, I think our system is actually "biased" in a way that helps small parties, but that's beside the point: we don't have the "winner-takes-it-all" kind of systems which make two big parties always win in the end - if I know my voting systems correctly, it's a lot rarer for a cast vote to be "wasted" here.
This would all be simpler to express if I knew the correct names of the voting systems in English, of course. I should probably look them up at some point.
I don't know much about non-US politics, but from what I've seen those voting systems just lead back to two-party rule via the formation of massive, unwieldy coalitions. How does Finland avoid that?
Finland is probably not the best example, since we have a tradition of "konsensus", which for the purposes of this discussion translates into "coalition including anyone". This comes from our special position during the cold war, when we were basically a democracy, but couldn't do anything that would anger the Soviet Union too much. As a consequence, deals were often struck about uniting around certain opinions, so our politics would look strong and Soviet-friendly outward. We have no real reason to still have this system, but since all the same people are still in the political system, it has only died partially so far.
In any case, the Finnish system frequently has what is referred to as "Rainbow Governments". These can contain anything. We have three big parties at around 20%, and two of them generally team up after every parliament election and form a government, sometimes together with some smaller parties. (one is leftist and two conservative by Finnish standards, but that hasn't really mattered at all post-1990, all parties tend to be the same these days - it's is hard to predict which two will form government after any given election).
So, while we do have large coalitions, which tend to form governments with majority support in parliament, they are in no way permanent. I guess you could argue that the resulting government-opposition setup is kind of like a two-party system, but elections still have lots of influence, since the coalitions can change in a lot of ways after elections. Also, the small parties involved on both sides do have influence, even if it is naturally limited.
I'd love to hear from someone who knows something about other countries with "many-party election systems". I realize I don't know enough about this stuff.
I have a question about the Finnish party system.
Where do the small parties tend to be, politically?
In the US, we have a big center-left party and a big center-right party, so close together that there is less real difference between them than is commonly perceived. In the US, the small splinter parties are almost without exception extremist, either far-right or far-left.
I never understand people who say there's little difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. They're the polar opposite on almost issue you could name; if anything, they usually don't agree enough. What rationale do you have for saying they're "close together?"
As in most western democracies, things have settled down into a status quo where the major parties largely agree, and quibble over details instead of larger issues. Nobody has radical political opinions any more, and thus - in my personal opinion, of course - people lose interest in the political process.
So your parties are polar opposites, sure, but only inside a very narrow range of political subjects.
Polar opposites? "We must increase Medicare funding by 18% this year!" "No, no, only 17.4%, we're already four hundred billion dollars in the red!" "That's EXTREMIST! You want old people to starve and die!" That's the only "polarization" in American politics today.
It's played up and hyped by the establishment newsmedia, but really, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. The results of elections have no bearing on the laws that get made. Remember Bismarck's dictum about laws and sausages?
>Nobody has radical political opinions any more
What about privatizing the failing Social Security system? What about the Fair Tax initiatives? What about banning gay marriage -- or legalizing it? What about that term that refers to giving privileges to people of minority ethnicity (I can't recall what it is right now)? What about drilling for oil in Alaska? What about the entire freakin' war we're in now? What about instating a public health care system? I could go on, but there are definitely polarizing issues out there.
Out of those, I'd agree that gay marriage is a pretty radical issue (not that I personally think it it is, but to a lot of people it is). However, how many politicians have actual opinions on that one, and don't just advocate the status quo?
The Social Security system smells a lot like a made-up issue blown out of proportion to make it look like politicians are making bold moves. Drilling for oil in Alaska is hardly revolutionary politics either. I don't think either party would have gone to war if it hadn't been for the president himself, and their views on how to handle it differ only in the smaller details (as it must, because it's not like you could just pull out at this point). The other issues I do not know much about.
Finally, I return to /politics.
Since someone actually asked about the Finnish parties, I'll give a list of support and general policy (statistics from 11.2.2005):
Colourless, big parties (minute but existing differences):
Social Democrats: 26%
Leftist but not socialist any more, more or less.
"Center Party"(old agrarian party): 25,2 %
Conservative, but not much so. Still a bit agrarian, but has to be quite urban to get significant support in modern Finland.
National Coalition(conservatives): 18,9%
Conservative, but not much either. The most business-oriented low-tax party of them all.
Smaller, more interesting parties:
Leftist Union: 9,1%
Remnants of old communist left. No real communism in party policy, but clearly a leftist party. Watered down policy, but not as much as the big three.
Greens: 8,7%
Quite normal greens. Opposed to nuclear power and similar stuff. Quite socially aware and leftist: not exactly pro-big-business, but quite moderate. Favourite of urban (young) people.
Christian Democrats: 5,1%
In no way fundamentalist christians, but clearly opposed to gay marriage, for instance. A bit confused after their popular party leader left.
Swedish People's Party: 4,1%
Party mostly for the minority of Swedish-speaking Finnish citizens (=people with Finnish identity, just Swedish as language). In principle a conservative party, it is probably the most eccentric of them all: a leftist high-tax person like me votes for them, for instance.
Perussuomalaiset: 1,8%
Populist and a bit nationalist party. Profile unclear, in part because a huge part of their support comes from a person called Tony Halme.
The Finnish parties are not as diverse as they could be, but there are definitely quite many opinions, and the smaller parties definitely add diversity.
The "Leftist union" (I don't really know most of the names in English) is probably the party with real support that is furthest to the left (we do have "real" communists too, but so does anyone..they just have close to no support). They are socialist enough to still strongly dislike nato.
The most economically rightist and neo-con would a bit surprisingly be the large National Coalition party.
The most populist and anti-immigration party would be Perussuomalaiset - their opinions aren't that strong though, and Finland hasn't had any real extreme right since the thirties (the extreme right was banned 1945-1992 because of Soviet influence, hasn't gathered momentum since 1992 either). This is probably partially due to the small amount of immigrants received, and because of mild anti-immigration policies in the largest parties.
The most "value-conservative" party is of course the Chrisitan Democratic one. They are the only one which has a real problem with gay marriage/partnership for instance (the Agrarian party having a bit of a problem). I don't actually know their stance on abortion or similar stuff, but I think they would shut up in any case, no one is banning abortion here.
The most liberal party is a hard one to decide. That could be the Leftist Union, the Swedish People's Party or the greens, depending on whom you ask. Of course, this is meaningless for an outside observer, since everything from partnership rules to criminal penalties is so liberal here..it's not like Sweden where I hear people in the christian party are coming out of the closet, but close.
I hope this is of any help. I sure used the reply field again. ; )