this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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The evidence is all of the first past the post systems that trend toward two dominant parties. There are 1000s of example elections, and the elections which don't conform to this are just as bad, because the winner will win with even FEWER votes than 50%. If you have 5 candidates and people are voting fairly evenly between them, you can win with just over 20% of the vote. I hope you can believe that, that's just the mathematical reality (that I'm really hoping we don't have to debate over, it's a fairly simple mathematical problem).
The myth is that what you have can actually provide voters with a meaningful choice. That's the media narrative, that first past the post is meaningful and gives the president a mandate because people voted for them, but it most certainly doesn't.
ask yourself: what test can we make that would disprove the theory?
maybe i'm just not smart enough to come up with one, but i can't conceive of one. an untestable, that is, an undisprovable hypothesis, is an empty tautology. or, at least modern epistemologists and critical rationalists have treated them this way.
maybe disprovability isn't a necessary facet of sound scientific theories. i tend to agree with popper, though.
Okay, the test would be that we have first past the post (single winner elections, like for president, or local electorates with single candidates elected, not proportional voting, which is better), produce elections with a spread of votes across many candidates, and don't consistently trend towards two.
This is definitely testable and disprovable, it's just that the outcome is overwhelmingly the case I have described, the spoiler effect leading to two dominant parties. There may be outliers and times where a third candidate does win, but these are the overwhelmingly rare exceptions.
we need to define terms like "consistently" and "trend". but even once you do that we still have the problem that you're already explaining away exceptions. this theory is not disprovable because there is no outcome that you would say actually disproves it. you would say we just need more data.
I'm not explaining away exceptions, they're called outliers. In any set of data there will be deviations. When I want to plot some viscosity data and get a few random points on my chart that don't line up with the rest of the curve, I'm still very confident that my curve is close to being accurate, as long as I have enough data points.
We have enough data points on first past the post elections.
For it to be disproven you would show first past the post elections don't have to two party systems in the vast majority of cases (which isn't the reality).
Now, you can try and handwave this away by saying, "oh but that's what people were TOLD TO BELIEVE, so you can't prove it". That's why we have not just the correlation to rely on, we have maths.
And you can't (I hope you don't) really disagree that you either have many candidates, who then win with less than a majority, or two parties, which then necessarily means the third smaller candidates can't win, and so people then vote for one of the larger parties so their vote counts. That's the binary state of affairs, there are no other options, the reality of maths doesn't allow for anything else, the votes add up to 100% ¯_(ツ)_/¯
being confident doesn't make a natural law.
this is a strawman. you're not dealing with what I actually said.
I'm not saying we need more data though, we have the data, plurality voting overwhelming results in two party systems. This is disprovable and I'm totally happy to change my mind based on the evidence and data.
I'm not straw-manning, you said before with regards to looking up the spoiler effect "I have. it's not a natural phenomenon, it's a story that the media tells."
Apologies if I misunderstood what you were saying there.
in that context, the fact that the media says it and academics say it is a reason some people might believe it. i'm saying even if you do believe it, it's an undisprovable claim. it has little explanatory power, and ultimately, yes, is a myth.
it seems that you are already trying to explain away exceptions rather than accepting that this myth lacks predictive power and may not, in fact, accurately explain any past elections at all.
Lets just focus on this particular election then.
Do you think anyone other than Biden or Trump will win? If you do, then your choice is clear, and as much as you question the existence of the spoiler effect (which is not being spread much by the media in the US, it's being spread by detractors of the current voting system), it doesn't really matter. People will vote towards those two candidates (hope we can agree that this is the likely outcome).
If that's the case, voting for a third candidate is as good as not voting because if your candidate doesn't win, and you COULD have voted for your next choice (why ranked voting is so much better, and it's the voting system letting you down), then the candidate you most don't want (assuming 3 candidates) has a better chance of winning (since you didn't vote for your second choice).
You say this isn't provable because it's about people's beliefs and it can't be tested, but sorry, elections are about human choices, beliefs are at play. I don't think it's a coincidence that democracies with ranked choice voting have more first preference votes to smaller parties, and that it's overwhelmingly so.
You can't really escape the fact that even if people just voted for their favourite candidate in first past the post, people would win with less than 50% of the vote (unless you're saying that the votes don't add up to 100% then I dunno what to say)
you're missing the crux of why it's not provable: there is no test for it. it's not that it's "about beliefs" is that you can't conduct an experiment to determine the validity