[SEQ RERUN] Stop Voting For Nincompoops

MinibearRex

Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many people try to vote "strategically", by considering which candidate is more "electable". One of the most important factors in whether someone is "electable" is whether they have received attention from the media and the support of one of the two major parties. Naturally, those organizations put considerable thought into who is electable in making their decision. Ultimately, all arguments for "strategic voting" tend to fall apart. The voters themselves get so little say in why the next president is that the best we can do is just to not vote for nincompoops.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The American System and Misleading Labels, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many people try to vote "strategically", by considering which candidate is more "electable". One of the most important factors in whether someone is "electable" is whether they have received attention from the media and the support of one of the two major parties. Naturally, those organizations put considerable thought into who is electable in making their decision. Ultimately, all arguments for "strategic voting" tend to fall apart. The voters themselves get so little say in why the next president is that the best we can do is just to not vote for nincompoops.

In France we have a run-off system too, and I think some complaints about American politics I hear would disappear if they adopted that - though others might appear, for example regional parties like there are in Canada.

Unlike what you describe in Brazil, it's not that rare for candidates that are not part of the two "main" parties to get to the second turn (Le Pen did in 2002), or even to get elected (The centrist Giscard in 1974). The "main" parties are also more likely to split up / reorganize themselves than the US ones.

The Czech Senate (upper chamber of the parliament) uses top-two runoff too and a lizard-lizard competition in the second round happened in 14 out of 27 districts, which is only slightly more than half (lizard defined as a candidate of one of the two strongest parties). Remarkably, there was no lizard-free second round, at least one lizard succeeded everywhere. In the second round, 20 lizards won. It means that out of 13 lizard vs. non-lizard competitions, 6 were won by lizards. It seems to indicate that lizard victories aren't largely due to "strategi... (read more)

0Gust15y

Actually the current polarization is recent, I think. In 1989 some guy from an obscure party got elected. But brazilian democracy itself is young: we've only had 6 direct presidential elections since the demilitarization in 1985, and in the last 5 the second turn, when it happened, was between the Worker's and Social Democratic parties. So the polarization is recent, but there's not much data before it.