Re:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conserva...
by dragonwriter on Monday May 09, 2016 @07:24PM
(#11664078)
> I would describe myself as liberal, even by the already relatively liberal standards of coastal California, but I'm not sure incoherence and hypocrisy are things only the Republican party is guilty of.
An electoral system that can naturally support only two substantially competitive parties guarantees that parties that cannot maintain incoherence will also not be major parties. While the electoral system empirically does reduce the significant axes of variation of political vies in the population [1], it doesn't reduce it so far as to actually fit on the one-dimensional axis implied by a two-party system. So the major parties must be incoherent to be competitive.
[1] See, Arendt Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy for research on this.
An electoral system that can naturally support only two substantially competitive parties guarantees that parties that cannot maintain incoherence will also not be major parties. While the electoral system empirically does reduce the significant axes of variation of political vies in the population [1], it doesn't reduce it so far as to actually fit on the one-dimensional axis implied by a two-party system. So the major parties must be incoherent to be competitive.
[1] See, Arendt Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy for research on this.