>>On the contrary, popular celebrity candidates are the only kind
>>that can get elected in the US.
>
>Ken Livingstone = Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Not exactly. Livingstone came out of the ranks of the UK Labor Party. That's how he gained his public recognition. This is something that is difficult to do in a country which doesn't have political parties as we know them. So its far less likely that celebrity politicians, that is to say politicians who are elected entirely on the basis of a personal following, rather than a party political background that people can make a judgement on, will have a strictly political history.
Though, technically speaking, Schwarzenegger is a Republican. Its revealing that you correctly classify him as an independent. The point I'm trying to get across is that all US politicians are really independents, by world standards.
Of course there will always be a small number of successful politicians in any system, whose electoral support is entirely personal, rather than being linked to any political party platform. But fewer than you might think, Australian politicians often try to break away from their parties and stand as independents, or form new parties. Few succeed.
Even the exceptions, like the recently retired Senator Brian Harradine from Tasmania (the most successful independent politician in decades) usually come out of the ranks of a political party. Like Livingstone.
Harradine was a right-wing catholic, a relic of the Labour split of the 50's, who was expelled from the Labor party in the 60's in a blaze of publicity and who leveraged that notoriety into a Senate seat. Then was so skillful at building electoral popularity that it was simply inconceivable that he could ever be defeated. His vote was enormous.
But here's the thing. He couldn't translate that into electoral support for like-minded candidates. He tried to start an electoral grouping, endorsing other candidates who would join him in parliament as a voting bloc representing right-wing Catholic philosophy. But though huge numbers loyally voted for him, they stubbornly refused to vote for other people he nominated. So when he retired, that was simply the end of the Harradine electoral phenomenon.
Only a pitiful few politicians elected on a party platform are ever successful in breaking away from their party and taking their vote with them. People are actually voting for the platform of the party, not the individual, for the good reason that individuals are less consistent. Of the few who do manage to get re-elected without their party endorsement, even fewer manage to build up an electoral grouping that will continue their legacy. Its statistically more doable to start a new political party from scratch.
This demonstrates that electoral systems based on political parties are actually more attractive to the voters in the modern world. For the reasons I suggested earlier, it is a system that offers a greater degree of consistency and reliability than the US-style system of usually unreliable and self-interested independent candidates.
Except in the US.
The US system, which only has political parties as window dressing, effectively has a hodge-podge of fickle independent politicians. But the very fact that the system finds it necessary to maintain a facade of political party politics suggests that Americans would probably prefer the more reliable and consistent party politics of advanced democracies if they were allowed a choice. The main reason they don't demand a choice, given that Americans practically fetishise democracy, seems to be that Americans don't don't seem to realise that it is even missing from their system, the facade is so elaborate.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas