[EM] language/framing quibble

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Stéphane Rouillon wrote:
> Hello Fred,
> 
> if I understand well you promote concurrency between political parties 
> because we would benefit
> from it as much we benefit from concurrency between companies. A copy 
> from the capitalist dynamics from the marketplace toward the ideological 
> ring? The more choice we have, the more power the customer or the voter 
> has. Nice analogy.
> 
> But I was already a fan of proportional representation. You should try 
> to sell your stuff to mecreants. ;-)


While it's not a perfect fit, let's see what an economic point of view 
would say:

Election imperfections like Duverger's law take on the aspect of a 
barrier to entry. In economics, when there are barriers to entry, 
competition suffers, and oligopolies appear if the barriers are high enough.

We all know this; the relative obscurity of third parties in the United 
States is proof enough.

One difference between the world of companies and that of politics is 
that the nature of what companies do (production) very often implies 
economies of scale. This grants companies natural power, and when they 
get large enough, the approximation of perfect competiton breaks down. I 
don't think that this is the case for the world of politics. While it 
may be easier to think of coherent policy if the party is large, there's 
no obvious (that I can see, at least) economy of scale.

This means that adopting party neutral PR methods would cause a greater 
number of small parties than one would expect by equating parties and 
companies, though there would be limits here; I don't think there would 
be as many independents as there are independent merchants or sole 
proprietors, simply because the assembly isn't large enough to 
accomodate all, whereas there's no such explicit limit in a market.