Allegedly serious people still cite Duverger's law as if it's a real thing.
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@david_chisnall these people also think the Overton window isn't a thing, and that it hasn't been slid to the right of Hitler.
@david_chisnall perhaps it's something to do with the (former?) two main parties becoming indistinguishable from each other? Fingers crossed people are finally waking up to the nonsense of the current system, though.
@srtcd424 See my other post in this thread, but that's a symptom of using Duverger's law to define electoral strategy.
I'm not familiar with Duverger's law; what's your issue with it?
It claims that two parties in a FPTP system will move towards the centre. And that tends to be a vote winner in the short term, but it's also an unstable equilibrium. The more they move towards the same point, the more they suffer from two issues:
- Voters can't see a difference between them so become disengaged.
- Voters on either edge feel that neither party represents them.
The first leads to a large number of people not voting. The second gives an advantage to the party that moves away from the centre. They'll pick up votes from people who were not going to vote. It's quite common in FPTP elections to win with under 30% of the eligible electorate, so picking up 10-20% from the 'not voting' pile can be a vote winner.
But if one party moves towards their edge and you follow them, you do much worse because you lose people who voted for you because you were less in that direction than the other party and you also don't pick up votes from people who lean in that direction.
And there have been a bunch of examples that show that this is what happens. Duverger's law has never really been shown to be an accurate predictor if you look at periods longer than a handful of electoral cycles. But it keeps being used to set strategy.
As long as you keep treating Duverger's law as a real thing, you keep doing what the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK are doing and wonder why your popularity is so low.