Yeah, he says it’s worse than not voting because it’s soaking up votes that in absence of the third party would have gone to the “least worse” of the two actually viable parties. I was being generous and assuming OP wasn’t going to vote for that party anyway.
It is fact, actually. This is a result of basic game theory. First-past-the-post electoral systems inexorably develop into two-party systems because of the mechanism that he describes, in the same way that gas inexorably diffuses or water flows downhill.
Insisting that it won’t happen because you feel like it shouldn’t happen just causes you to fall into the traps CPG Grey described.
game theory assumes that we have rational actors acting in their own best interests. That’s not what people do. game theory doesn’t predict what people will do.
Yeah, he says it’s worse than not voting because it’s soaking up votes that in absence of the third party would have gone to the “least worse” of the two actually viable parties. I was being generous and assuming OP wasn’t going to vote for that party anyway.
his charcterization isn’t scientific fact. it is opinion.
It is fact, actually. This is a result of basic game theory. First-past-the-post electoral systems inexorably develop into two-party systems because of the mechanism that he describes, in the same way that gas inexorably diffuses or water flows downhill.
Insisting that it won’t happen because you feel like it shouldn’t happen just causes you to fall into the traps CPG Grey described.
no, those can be calculated and predicted. the same isn’t true for the rate at which political parties are created or dissolved.
this is the crux of duverger’s “law” which is not a law at all but actually a tautology.
game theory assumes that we have rational actors acting in their own best interests. That’s not what people do. game theory doesn’t predict what people will do.
that didn’t happen here.