Comment by chrisseaton
5 years ago
Other countries with first-past-the-post have many parties. So FPTP does not cause two-parties - that's clearly nonsense.
5 years ago
Other countries with first-past-the-post have many parties. So FPTP does not cause two-parties - that's clearly nonsense.
Mathematically it makes sense for a two-party system to emerge, after the smaller parties are weeded out after some years of running unsuccessfully. Most people will accept compromise of their ideals to "fight some greater evil".
Hey Chris,
Maybe tone doesn't come across well in written communication, but dismissing this as "clearly nonsense" without bothering to engage with the merit of the claim or, seemingly, even read the link seems disrespectful, to say the least.
Do you want to rephrase? :)
Because there’s sooo many counter-examples. People see the word ‘law’ and they think it’s like physics but it isn’t like that.
I wonder if you read the linked Wikipedia entry, which includes:
> In political science, Duverger's law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system.... In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle.
(Emphasis, of course, added.)
The article goes on to note counterexamples, to drive home the point that this is not, as you say, like a law of physics.
Perhaps a more constructive phrasing you could have tried would be something like,
"As noted in the linked article, there are many counterexamples, so while as you say first-past-the-post may encourage two-party systems, it doesn't preclude more parties from existing."
This would have been a more polite phrasing, one that shows you read and comprehended both my comment and the article I linked to, and one that would not exhibit the logical fallacies your original comment does (to argue that the existence of counterexamples precludes any causal relationship between first-past-the-post and two-party systems).
Hope that helps. Have a nice rest of the weekend.
Aside from the UK (which does have two major parties) and Canada (which has only had one of two parties in power for almost all of its history), what other examples are you thinking of? There are very few countries that still use FPTP, the vast majority use some kind of preferential or proportional representation system.
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> Other countries with first-past-the-post have many parties
Which ones do you have in mind? The one's I'm thinking of have two main parties, and then strictly regional parties which displace them entirely in their regions.
> So FPTP does not cause two-parties - that's clearly nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
For example the UK. A few elections ago a minor but national party was in government.
The UK has two major parties. The fact that the LibDems were in a coalition government once due to a hung parliament (and the last hung parliament was in 1974) isn't really evidence that the UK has more than two major parties. A major party actually has a chance to have a plurality. I also hasten to point out that the LibDems currently have 11 seats (the SNP has four times as many).
Many European countries with non-FPTP systems have coalition governments all the time and there really are several viable major parties.
To be fair, preferential voting isn't a panacea (and arguably should be paired with multiple-representative electorates). Here in Australia we have instant run-off voting and there are still two major parties with even less crossbenchers than the UK parliament -- though our Senate does have a fair few independent and third-party candidates, likely because Senate seats aren't winner-takes-all (like electorate seats are for the House of Representatives). I think voter education is also partially to blame -- many Australians seem to not be aware of how preferential voting works.
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The counterexample of other countries is not sufficient to rule it out as a causal factor, that's just faulty logic.