= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
dlthomas comments on The Two-Party Swindle - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (67)
I'm not sure if it is necessarily the case that they are competing for my vote. Listening to some of the debates from the Republican Presidential candidates, it is rather clear that they would rather appeal to their base than cater to "the enemy". But yes, I intend to vote third party, since my vote is pretty much a throwaway in this state anyway. Split the Republican vote between a write-in and the official candidate, and they still get more than the next guy.
That seems unlikely. They get their base to vote for them no matter what. They have to worry about the edge cases. I suppose it's possible that they're trying to get their base to vote, as opposed to not voting.
I don't pay that much to politics, but I would suspect that, if the circumstances point to a Democrat winning, for instance, the Republicans will try to move more towards the middle ground so they still have a chance.
It's not really catering to the enemy. It's just the middle ground. And that's only if you're talking about the effect of voting for one of the main parties. I very much doubt that Republicans would call Libertarians the enemy, for example.
This. With low voter turnout, rallying the base is a far more effective strategy than competing for marginal voters.
That's intuitively plausible, and in fact I think it's likely to be true, but as it happens it's also a testable proposition. Voter turnout varies quite a bit among modern democracies: for some voting is mandatory, for others it's optional, and levels of enforcement vary among polities with mandatory voting. Do the dominant parties within high-turnout polities tend to be more moderate relative to the polity's baseline?
Unfortunately you also need to control for architecture -- first-past-the-post election systems, for example, are often thought to have polarizing effects. That makes testing a lot harder than it'd otherwise be, and scopes it out of my relatively modest familiarity with different political systems. But it should be feasible in principle.
Agreed.