For no good reason, I was going through the list of logical fallacies and, given that the US Presidential Election is coming up, the False Dilemma stood out:

A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many. (Wikipedia, accessed 22 March 2024).

This has been one of the things that has confused me for some time with regard to democracy, amongst other things. In the context of democracy, it seems that the two party system has become dominant – the binary system. I don’t know why this is. It can’t be a simple reason.

I did what we do these days. I asked ChatGPT why democracies devolve into two party systems. You can see it’s response through the image, and it made me look up the bullet points of First-Past-The-Post, Winner-Takes-All Effect (in the context of voting), Duverger’s Law, etc.

Most interesting is the last paragraph:

…While these factors explain the prevalence of two-party systems in certain democracies, it’s important to note that not all democracies follow this pattern. Some countries have proportional representation or mixed electoral systems that encourage the presence and success of multiple political parties, leading to multi-party systems that reflect a wider range of political perspectives.

This got me curious. Which countries are these? The answer is (in alphabetical order): Brazil, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden.

That’s 8 countries. There are a total of 74 democracies in the world as of 2024, with 50 of them considered ‘flawed democracies’ according to WorldPopulationReview, which references the 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.

I filled out the form to get the 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, and wondered why I needed to fill out a form.

There are 195 countries in the world. Less than half are democracies (74/195) according to that information, but according to other information there is more democracy:

That’s a bit confusing. 47.14% of 195 countries being non-democracies is 91.923 countries, and while I love precision, countries are not decimals. 52.86% of the world being electoral democracies means that 103.077 countries are electoral democracies. It’s just math.

We’ll have to accept that there is some error in what constitutes a democracy or not. Let’s work with the original 74 democracies.

Of the 74 democracies, only 24 are not considered flawed. How many of those countries that are not 2-party systems considered not flawed? According to this data, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden are not flawed, but Brazil, India and Italy are.

5/8ths of democracies that are not 2 party systems are considered democracies, 3/8ths are considered flawed democracies.

When I started writing this, I had hoped that countries with more than 2 political parties would be considered more democratic, and on the scoring it’s not very clean cut. In fact, Brazil, India and Italy being flawed democracies demonstrates that a system not made up of 2 parties isn’t a silver bullet.

Is it that false dilemma’s can have more than 2 options? It’s possible.

A false dilemma is also an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available, and maybe that’s the real problem: It’s not the number of options, it’s access to better options.

Any adult knows that being stuck with options we don’t agree with is unfortunately common. Yet a democracy is supposed to allow for better options. Why aren’t we seeing that?