Excellent, Matt.
In that light, I'd like to add that parties are different animals in District Voting and in Proportional Voting.
In District Voting there are two different kinds of parties.
* The Two Winning Parties
They have very specific party dynamics; they are empowered parties and their goal is not only to express their political positions accurately and maintain touch with their base, but they also have the other party as the only form of competition. The win can end up being more important than the political position itself, meaning, the truth is at times less important than the power. The other party can be seen as the 'enemy party'.
* All Other 'Losing' Parties
These parties, like the Green and Libertarian parties, cannot overcome the voting system, except in very limited manners (a city council seat here and there). They will likely be organized well in very limited manners, and not at a national level where they are of no importance.
As you can understand the internal structure of parties in a winner-take-all system is either extremely empowered or extremely anemic in light of empowerment. In an analogy, I would call these parties dogs&cats, with the two dog parties being able to have their group line up for the chase and for the win without many questions asked. The cat parties may have good attempts to line themselves up every now and then to catch a bird, but they can quickly fall apart, not able to maintain momentum for any larger win.
Power is essential for the dog parties, truth is more important for the cat parties. Truth is under pressure in the dog parties. Power is out of sight for the cat parties.
The cats may try to infiltrate in the dog parties, but will be successful only in the margin (Trump may be the biggest political cat, so exceptions may occur).
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In nations with more parties, the internal dynamics of parties will be completely different. If there are seven parties, for instance, then some parties may show the dog structure, others the cat structure, but the giraffe and the elephant structures may also be used by some parties when they deliver specific truths/powers that are important to segments in these societies.
None of the parties will think about 'full control' because that is not how governments are formed in nations with Proportional Voting. The only parties that receive 'enemy status' are the extreme and obnoxious parties. We see some right-wing parties in Europe that none of the other parties touch, not even with a stick. All other parties, however, are potential coalition parties, so the stance will -particularly- be about one’s own truth.
The voters do not compete with other voters for the win. It is the parties that compete fully with parties to collect as many votes from the public as possible. As such, the internal power structure in a party is less important than what voters in the nation desire. In this case, the truth always wins, and since there are more than two parties, the presented truth is not just red or blue, but also purple, orange, green, yellow and pink. A red party will have to remain a red party, otherwise the voters will find themselves a party that is sticking to the red color. As such, parties do die out, are gone forever.
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The example I often use is the car and the bike.
In a two-party system, the car will be embraced by both parties because there is large agreement in society that if folks had to pick a single means of transportation, then the car is that single choice.
The bike will receive anemic treatment, unless a very vocal or political grassroots movement occurs, such as Critical Mass. Critical Mass was not a political party, and not associated with a party. Rather, it was a grassroots movement that expressed the need for bicycle infrastructure in a city. Basically, they were annoying the shit out of the ones in power until they got the desired attention. This approach is sometimes successful, but not always. It shows that the voters can make a fist, but also extremely sad from a political point of view. To be heard, voters need to be like annoying children until the parent(s) decide to give their kid a toy or candy.
In Proportional Voting, there will be a pro-bike party, and when biking is considered important to many then several out of the seven parties in the previous example will have bicycle needs on their agenda. The car will remain the most important means of transportation, but no party will pick one form of transportation as the single form that must be given all attention at all times. Transit and bike&ped will get their fair share, simply because they represent voters and parties have to cast their nets wide and far (i.e. listen carefully to the voters).
The parties may have their own internal mechanisms, but all will try to gain as much attention from voters as they can.
Last, therefore an example of the Netherlands in which out-of-the-blue an unknown party got 4 percent of the voters. That is a mini-landslide, and particularly of interest since it was not expected. The party was the Party of the Elderly. The population had been graying, and the main political parties had not paid attention to the fact that voters older than 65 had become a larger group. With no one paying them the desired attention, they started their own party and got 6 out of 150 seats.
Six seats can make the difference when parties need to get to 76 seats to form a coalition majority. The biggest party can demand more in negotiations than a smaller party. Every seat counts.
The point of this example is that in the next election the Party of the Elderly was gone. What happened was that the other parties started to pay more attention to the elderly, addressed some of their needs, and the reason the Party for the Elderly got started disappeared.
Then, and this is the present, the elderly were still not completely satisfied and there is now a new party for the elderly, 50Plus. They do not have six seats, but none in the House and two in the Senate. This shows that the elderly are not complaining as much as before, so some issues were indeed addressed -- by the other parties.
That's my view, Matt. I hope this helped you see that we need to be careful using a concept we know from one reality and see it as the same concept in another reality. The word party means something different in different systems.
