[EM] Linked issues, 1-dimensional political spectrum

Scott Ritchie scott at open-vote.org
Sat Feb 24 02:10:24 PST 2007


On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 22:49 +0000, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> One thing that I forgot to mention when I posted before about this: In the 
> U.S. at least, the issues are strongly linked. People's opinions on them are 
> strongly correlated. That's because an authoritarian is going to be 
> authoritarian on everything, typically.
> 
> So a 1-dimensional issue-space isn't a bad approximation. With that 
> reasonable approximation, the CW is the SU maximizer.
> 
> Mike Ossipoff

Of course, the political scientist and voting theorist in me says that
politics are largely 1-dimensional exactly because of the voting system
we use.

Oh well,
Scott Ritchie




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