@georgetakei So instead of firmly founding a third, middle d#DemocraticSocialism party, just increase the accelerating destabilization of the overextended #duopoly
No thanks.
Post
Replies:
13
the #USA is an #FPTP #voting system
meaning there can only be 2 parties
it's not corruption, it's just math (not saying corruption doesn't exist, but even if all corruption magically disappeared, we'd still have only 2 parties)
a 3rd party on the left would divide the left vote and #MAGA would win
i want 3rd parties
to get that we need #rankedChoiceVoting
to get ranked choice voting, we have to elect #Democrats who support it
@benroyce @numodular @georgetakei
the #USA is an #FPTP #voting system
meaning there can only be 2 parties
I’ve written a lot about this in other posts, so I’m not going to repeat it all here, but Duverger's Law is absolute nonsense. Anyone with a basic understanding of game theory can see that it describes an unstable equilibrium state. Anyone who has paid attention to political history of the last century can point to a large number of examples of this equilibrium collapsing. It was pretty indefensible as an idea when Duverger published it, it’s been repeatedly shown to be false since then.
@david_chisnall @benroyce The game is sometimes described as two ice cream sellers on a beach boardwalk. The rule is that beachgoers will walk along the boardwalk towards the nearest creammonger and buy from their cart. In this simplification, the game equilibrium is that both sellers are shoulders-touching adjacent at the exact midpoint, one serving all the left beach and the other serving all the right beach.
@david_chisnall @numodular @georgetakei
if you have 100 people
45 vote for red, 55 vote for blue: blue wins
if instead
45 vote red, 40 blue, and 15 green: red wins
in FPTP
this seems rather cut and dry to me
could you show me where this situation does not support duverger's law?
@benroyce @numodular @georgetakei
You're talking about a single round of elections. The claim is about repeated rounds.
Let's play through your example:
After losing to red, what does the blue team do? They can move their policies to be more red or more green. Duverger predicts that all of the parties will move to some centre point, and people will abandon the green team because the red and blue teams are close to some average.
The problem with this is that it leaves an increasing number of people disenfranchised. So it's easy for voters on the bluer or redder end to look at the blues and reds and not be able to tell the difference between them. At this point, a green party can start peeling off a lot of votes from either the red or blue party, depending on what policies it goes after.
The big thing that Duverger's Law misses is that the red team isn't just competing against the blue team, they're competing against apathy. If the red team moves to some arbitrary middle and the blue team doesn't, the red team may have more support, but the blue team will have more enthusiastic support. You don't win an election because people like your platform, you win an election because people think your platform is worth bothering to turn up and vote for (compulsory voting changes this slightly).
That green party from your example isn't taking voters from the red or blue party, they're picking up people who don't like the red or blue team enough to bother to vote for them.
The red and blue team can pick up some apathetic voters by scaring them: vote for us or the other team wins. But that works only in the short term if the reds and blues are moving together. After a while, voters don't care.
Once you have 30% of the voters in the apathy box, you're in a very unstable situation: a third party that can pick up a lot of those voters can start winning.
The reason this rarely happens in the USA is that third parties keep aiming at the highest-risk races first. A third party with no track record stands almost no chance of winning the US Presidential election, but that's not where you start. You start in local elections. Then you get a track record in city councils and so on. Then you go for state senates and legislatures. Then state governorships. Then for the US house and senate. Then you aim for President. And that takes a long time, and will be slower in a country the size of the USA.
@david_chisnall @numodular @georgetakei
"At this point, a green party can start peeling off a lot of votes from either the red or blue party, depending on what policies it goes after"
and in many more mature democracies, this is fine, as 3rd parties are viable and stable and can form coalitions, etc
in the USA, what happens is this green party winds up dividing the left leaning vote, and the green party helps MAGA win
you're making an argument here in defiance of the straightforward math
@david_chisnall @numodular @georgetakei
i want 3rd party in the USA
we have to get ranked choice voting to do that, which is creeping in in places
in RCV your vote can flow to your second choice, rather than flowing to MAGA in FPTP
that's the problem
i don't have any argument with the dynamics you are describing
they are accurate and i agree with them
but, at least in the USA, it's a nonstarter because of the winner take all primitive voting structure the USA has
@benroyce @numodular @georgetakei
The things I'm describing are happening in the UK, right now, for the second time in the last hundred years. We're having an election tomorrow where the polls predict a wipeout for the two major parties.
But that's because the two insurgent parties (and the existing third party) have spent decades losing elections and winning small numbers of candidates in local elections.
But third parties in the USA keep trying to rush through. They don't put in the effort of trying to win the smaller lower-stakes elections and building a track record.
How many US State Senates have a third-party majority? Last time I checked: Zero. One you've got one of those, you can start looking at the national level, but third parties in the US keep not putting in the work to do steps 1-9, and then complaining that they're failing step 10. And that has nothing to do with FPTP and everything to do with strategy.
@david_chisnall @numodular @georgetakei
i think this is the real source of our disagreement
i can get behind everything you say. for the UK
parliamentary systems where parties can form coalitions lends stability to 3rd parties in the UK, even though you're also FPTP, in ways it can't happen in the USA. the USA pure winner-take-all
@benroyce @numodular @georgetakei
I don't know why you think the US and UK systems are so different. The UK draws the executive from the legislature, but both elect their legislatures in almost identical ways: candidates stand in geographical constituencies where they are elected in FPTP. In both cases, coalitions are extremely rare and most of the time one party wins an outright majority.
The difference is in scale and therefore the time taken to win credibility. And the fact that none of the US attempts at third parties are putting in this effort.
In the 2024 election, the largest third party was the Libertarians (Greens a distant fourth). How many state Senators and Representatives did they have going into the election? How many town mayors did they get elected? How many people who had the option to vote for a Libertarian or Green Representative for the US House was already represented by any Libertarian or Green politicians at local or state levels?
@david_chisnall @benroyce @numodular @georgetakei Did you miss Ben’s use of the word “coalition”? That cannot happen in the US system.
@pmonks @benroyce @numodular @georgetakei
I did not. Coalitions are also incredibly rare in the UK and completely irrelevant. Coalitions happen after you get candidates elected. The discussion is about getting the candidates elected.
And, for the record, I studied Politics at A Level in the UK with one year devoted to the UK and one year devoted to the US system, so I suspect I understand your political system a lot better than most of your country mates.
@david_chisnall @pmonks @numodular @georgetakei
that's all well and good but i find it even harder then to understand then why you don't see that 3rd party, in the current US system, divides the right, or the left, and guarantees the opposite side wins
you can't beat that with the sort of aspirational ground game you describe. you need to change the voting system, like to RCV. then everyone can vote 3rd party to their heart's content and 3rd parties will thrive
but not before that
