serious centrist candidate Re: [EM] my letter to CVD

[James Green-Armytage]

This is James Green-Armytage replying to Ernest Prabhakar

>It seems to me that it is more or less an article of faith among 
>Condorcet/Approval supporters that "if we build it, they will come."  

	Haha. Yes, that's a good way of putting it.
>
>That is, as long as we have an election method that allows for finding 
>and electing the median voter, such candidates will inevitably arise 
>and run for office.
>
>But is that true?  More precisely, do we have any evidence that such 
>will be the case?  I fervently hope so, but I am concerned that such 
>candidates may not naturally arise in our existing system.  I'd love to 
>see data/arguments/evidence suggesting that a Condorcet-efficient 
>method will naturally lead to better candidates.  Both to help me sleep 
>at night, but also to understand if there's specific things we can/need 
>to do in order to encourage such candidates.

	Well, we won't have empirical evidence until Condorcet is implemented for
an election that was previously defined in terms of right and left. I
don't know if that has happened yet. The rational argument does seem
especially convincing to me, though. I'm not saying that it would
necessarily happen directly after the advent of the method, but the
tendency seems unmistakable. Of course we wouldn't expect for the winning
candidate to sit on the *exact* median, since elections are never so
precise. It's just that if the only two strong candidates in an election
are both very far from the median, there is a very well-defined space for
the launching of a centrist campaign. Of course, the centrist candidate,
or at least one of the centrist candidates if there are more than one (and
there should be), has to be a strong candidate in other ways: to seem
trustworthy, charismatic, intelligent, and so on and so forth. Also the
campaign needs to get decently funded, which is something that should
happen once people realize how viable a centrist alternative is in the
given system. The funding could come from anywhere. One source might be
people who feel that their preferred wing candidate is likely to lose, and
who want to back up a compromise so that things don't slide all the way to
the other extreme.
	If the centrist / median candidate manages to run a good campaign, and
create enough space such that neither of the other candidates has a
majority, it will be a simple matter of whether enough supporters of one
or the other of the wing candidates is willing to rank the centrist
candidate second. Using winning votes Condorcet, only one such wing group
has to do this in full measure; truncation by adherents to the strongest
of the two wing candidates will create a cycle, but a cycle in which the
weaker wing candidate's defeat of the center is weaker than the center's
defeat of the stronger wing, since it doesn't involve a full majority.
With margin-based Condorcet things might get a little trickier.

>The main data point that causes me concern is that all the various 
>minor parties I see in California actually seem more extreme and less 
>centrist than the duopoly.  As long as we have primaries -- and all the 
>organized parties are non-centrist ideologically driven -- the fear is 
>that sensible centrist candidates will place party loyalty above public 
>interest (sorry, I don't consider Ralph Nader centrist), and not run 
>even without fear of the spoiler effect.   The one time we had a 
>non-primaried open election and elected a centrist (Arnold) it was 
>largely on his own money rather than party support.
>
>I guess the real question is whether we can truly have centrist 
>candidates without centrist parties, and whether there *are* such 
>parties.  I suspect that is the implicit claim of the IRVers - centrist 
>*by definition* means uninspiring, and thus would never create 'core 
>support' (i.e., a party).
>
>Any evidence they're wrong?

	Well, I think so. I'm no expert at all on international politics, but I'm
under the impression that lots and lots of countries have parties that can
be fairly defined as centrist, and who actually have seats in the
legislature. For example, you can go to http://www.electionworld.org and
browse around to see how many parties are either defined as centrist or
seem centrist when you visit their web pages. Any examples which I give of
centrist parties are likely to be sort of halfassed, since again I'm a
dummy on international politics, but at least I'm pretty sure that they
exist. Isn't the liberal democratic party in Britain considered to be
somewhat centrist? The Union pour la Dèmocratie Française in France? I
really don't know, sorry : )
	One ironic thing is that CVD's chairman is John Anderson, an
ex-Republican now-Independent whose centrist 1980 presidential campaign
would have stood an infinitely better chance with Condorcet than with IRV.
Reagan actually won by a majority, but it's possible that there were some
Reagan voters who preferred Anderson but didn't bother voting for him
(because he didn't have a chance in the plurality system, yadda yadda
yadda) and they wanted to make sure that Carter didn't get re-elected. If
this is in fact the case, then Anderson might actually have been president
if we had had Condorcet at that time, and the Reagan years never would
have happened.
>

James