this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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It's unfortunate that the US founding fathers were well educated, but from a time 200 years before Game Theory was understood.
Duverger's Law says that in a first-past-the-post system, you'll eventually end up with 2 political parties. And, 2 political parties is a terrible state for a country.
Also, you're eventually going to get political parties even if you try to ban them. They'll just become "clubs" or something. A group of people agreeing to act together (say a union) is always going to have more power than a bunch of people acting individually.
I would hope that any country thinking of creating a new political system, or making major updates to theirs would hire a lot of game theorists to figure out how the rules could be abused and what the system might look like in 250 years.
Veritasium did a great presentation on the different voting systems and there really isn't a perfect one, but first past the post is definitely not even close to the "best".
Since I don’t like Veritasium, I’ll suggest the CGPGrey videos:
He does great videos as well.
I would assume it's the worst. The only thing it has going for it is that it's easy to understand.
It's no "throwing birdseed at your candidate of choice in order to attract the freedom eagle to them".
Veritasium didn't really give the full picture though. He was only really looking at rated based voting systems, but there are more systems out there than that.
And that’s the thing many people don’t seem to get: the US is not a 2 party system by design – there are actually many parties in the US, including Green, Libertarian, Constitution, Forward, No Labels, Working Families, Alliance, etc, many of which have been on the national ticket. Darrell Castle (Constitution Party) was on the presidential ballot in 2016, for example (I included him in a satirical anti-trump graphic I made in 2016).
The problem isn’t a lack of parties, but that the mathematics of FPTP means they literally can’t gain purchase. If you want 3rd parties to matter, instead of protest* voting or abstaining, start working towards replacing FPTP now for future elections. These conversations only seem to happen in autumn of an election year, which is far too late.
Put your effort into something like FairVote Action so we don’t have to deal with this nonsense forever.
e:*
Yeah, with the current system, the only real hope for a major third party is for one of the major parties to split. Because any small third party just eats up the votes of the major party closest to its position. But, big parties only tend to split when they face major electoral defeats and there's a lot of infighting. That means that not only did they lose, but now due to being split, they're not even an effective opposition, and the other major party wins more easily than ever. (Which tends to lead to complacency and corruption, which tends to lead to eventual electoral defeats, once the other party gets its act together...)
And then there's the problem that the only people who have the possible power to pass electoral reform belong to one of the two major parties, and it's completely against the interest of those major parties to get rid of FPTP, because FPTP locks in their duopoly. That's why, for example, when the Canadian Liberal party promised to get rid of FPTP, they abandoned that promise as soon as they were in power.
Maybe reform is possible because people are human, they don't always optimize for the perfect win in a game. But, game theory says that it's going to be a major uphill battle to pass any kind of reform.
This is generally true, but I’d say there’s a nonzero chance the Dems will be persuaded to support it – mostly because they’ve shown some support so far and because they don’t have a stranglehold on their base. The Republicans will fight it until their last breath, but the Dems are a coalition party held together by hopes and dreams, and they’ve been made to learn lately that they will lose if they don’t acknowledge progressives (this is part of why Walz was chosen – he’s the closest thing to a socialist they’ve chosen in recent memory). Without progressives, they will fail, and ditching FPTP would mean more engagement from a wide swathe of leftists, which would effectively shut out the far right. It’s in the best interest for the moderate left to be campaigning against the far left than the far right, and ditching FPTP would give them that.*.
e: *
By design, the US was supposed to be an actual plutocracy where only wealthy white men were allowed to vote or run for office. The US was designed to be many times worse than it currently is so honestly we are doing Washington a huge kindness by pretending like he wasn't a a racist, sexist, elitist piece of shit that made it illegal for women, people of color, and the working poor (renters) to vote.
How could you not have a FPTP system in America? Your voting for a president, person with most votes wins, I know electoral college is involved but they should get rid of that.
It should be pointed out Duverger's law really only applies to the US because the electoral college system make it fragile to third parties. Many countries with FPTP still have large 3rd parties (such as Canada)
The "law" says that 2 main parties tend to emerge. In Canada only once has the prime minister ever come from a party other than the Liberals or the Conservatives. That was in 1917 when the main issue was conscription, and the pro-conscription "Union" party won over the anti-conscription Liberals. It's pretty clear that in Canadian politics there are 2 main parties, and a few other parties that cling to survival.
Occasionally one of the parties ends up imploding, but Duverger's Law is so strong that normally it's only a short time before the duopoly is re-established. In Canada, Brian Mulroney and his party were so unpopular that it caused the Reform Party to form from disaffected conservatives. That meant that in the 1993 election the "Progressive Conservative" party managed only 2 seats in the federal election. But, 10 years later, the rift was healed and once again the Conservative party was the main opposition. Then the Liberals self-destructed and very briefly the NDP was the official opposition, but a few years later Justin Trudeau took the Liberals to a huge victory.
Sure, it's better to have a third party with a few seats than it is to have no third party at all. But, I'd hardly say that events in Canada disprove Duverger's law. In fact, they tend to support it. In more than 150 years, despite everything, the two main parties are essentially the two main parties from 150 years ago.
Canada disproves Duverger's outright. The law doesn't say 'there will only be two parties that negotiate a PM position'. The 3 parties of canada all have regional strongholds and a variety of powerful positions.
The only powerful position in a parliamentary system is to be in the party in power. No third party has ever been in power. At best, they've been a part of a minority coalition, and even those are relatively rare. Canada definitely supports Duverger's law.
duverger is undisprovable.
The only powerful position the NDP had was since the last election when they had to form a minority government. Other then they even the opposition has no power.
I would argue the premier of BC is a fairly powerful position. Especially since, regionally, the NDP or Liberal party have been in contention for BC since the early 90s- over 30 years.
I would say that duverger's is "true-ish" but it doesn't capture the correct mechanism and fails on a predictive level enough that it at least should not be called a "law".
Its almost certainly suggests what's going on has more to do with voters gamifying their elections rather than any tendency of the elections or parties themselves as canada shows you have people voting liberal for country level government and NDP for regional seats.
A true successor to Duverger's Law would state that ftpt has a tendency to cause voters to vote strategically among the two most dominant parties in any fptp election. This would be more in line with what we actually see.
It's the combination of FPTP voting and the presidential government structure.
In a parliamentary system third parties are more viable because they can act as "king maker" to one of the two larger parties.
Of course a proportional voting system like STV is even better for party diversity.
duvergers law is no law at all, though. it's an undisprovable tautology
One reason we'll never get electoral reform in this country. As soon as you start asking people to show their work, they get angry and downvote you.
The dirty truth of elections is that the type of voting system matters much less than the size of the districts and the degree of enfranchisement in the population. If you want a multi-party system, you need districts small enough that minority parties can find a local majority. If you've got 400 Ds, 400 Rs, and 200 Is, you're going to produce more 3rd party candidates with districts of 100 people than 500.
That is why states like the UK, Spain, and France can produce all these small regional parties. The average electorate per constituency in the UK is around 70k. In the US, it's closer to 700k.
Do Approval Voting. Do STV. Do Star Voting. It won't save you, so long as you've got districts so large that only a minor celebrity can compete in them.