[EM] Re et al Chicken and Egg

[David L Wetzell]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet at lavabit.com> wrote:

> I think we're reaching the end of this thread, as I'm not all that
> interested in continuing further. It's relatively clear that changing your
> position will take a lot of work, and to put it simply, "I'm not getting
> paid enough for this" :-) I have recently had other things to focus on, as
> you may have noticed in my lack of posting to EM of late.
>

I've really enjoyed your posts.  You are clearly my better in electoral
analytics and knowledge of worldwide electoral reforms.

My main claim behind my dissent is an intuition for the situation of my
country and the crucial importance of what my academic mentor described as the
Problem of Order<https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=problem+of+order+warrent+samuels#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=%22problem+of+order%22+warren+samuels&psj=1&oq=%22problem+of+order%22+warren+samuels&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=7868l15935l0l16852l3l3l0l0l0l0l91l238l3l3l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=53e6a49898365d40&biw=1490&bih=905>,
or the need for working out both order and equality, continuity and change
in how we govern ourselves, which I believe entails that analytics and
precedents do not *per se* settle the matter in dispute of how to bring
electoral reform to the USA.

>
> You say there is something to American exceptionalism, so it isn't
> unreasonable to put the US on one side and everything else on the other
> side of the PR line.
> There might have been a case for American exceptionalism in 1787, but the
> United States is now hardly unique in having a presidential system, or even
> a strong presidential system. Other nations have been inspired by the
> United States' form of government, and so presidentialism has spread
> (although, to my knowledge, there are still more parliamentary nations than
> there are presidential ones).
>
> Let's look at the Wikipedia list of republics considered to have a
> presidential system of government (https://en.wikipedia.org/**
> wiki/Presidentialism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidentialism>).
> From the beginning, we have "Afghanistan, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan,
> Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican
> Republic, Ecuador", and so on.
>
> Intersecting Wikipedia's list with the PR list of my previous posts gives
> an intersection of Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican
> Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and
> Uruguay. Thus, I don't think you can justify putting the United States on
> one side of your historical specificity line and all the PR nations on the
> other.


> These are not weak presidential republics either. In Colombia, a favored
> approach of past presidents (like Lleras Restropo) was to construct
> autonomous quasi-gove

rnmental organizations, and then give them power. These organizations were
> designed to be accountable to the executive, but not to the legislature. A
> similar approach was used in Brazil. Again, quoting Wikipedia: "In Brazil,
> presidents have accomplished their objectives by creating executive
> agencies over which Congress had no say". So I do not think you can say
> they only have figurehead presidents and so don't count, either.
>
> Where they do differ (whether they're Latin American, like Colombia, or
> not, like Cyprus), is that they don't have two huge parties and a bunch of
> tiny parties looking for scraps at the table. I think that is a point where
> the United States is genuinely different, but I also think that the reason
> they are is because the US has neither PR not a good single-winner method.
>

 I do not contest that it's possible to have a presidential system +PR such
that there'd be different dynamics that 2 major parties, an indefinite
number of minor parties and a lot of LTPs.
Columbia used to have a two party dominated system.  Now, the strength of
the president and the large margin with which he was elected, seems to
imply that they have a contested single party dominated system.  When they
tried to move away from 2 partidism in the early nineties, they saw a
proliferation of parties, most having one or two seats.  This is not unlike
what I wrote about.

It's also noteworthy in Brazil that gov'rs and presidents are elected via a
two-stage election rule that I have argued is a hybrid approach that
supports a proliferation of parties, especially when combined with
federalism.
According to Wikipedia, According to sociologist Marcelo Ridenti, Brazilian
politics is divided between internationalistic
liberals<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism>
 andstatist <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statism> nationalistics. and the
two basic groups cycle in and out of power.   So even if it's not formally
two major parties, it's two major coalitions of parties, neither of which
is able to dominate the other, just as I predict would occur in the US if
we adopted PR.

But, as you acknowledge, the US is genuinely different with its 2 huge
parties.  This means that electoral reformers in the US who are trying to
push PR (and single-winner) reforms that would encourage a multi-party
system will face a lower short-term P.  My arg is that we can and should
push for forms of PR that don't challenge 2 party domination, which in turn
makes the sort of single-winner alternative to FPTP marketed to the US
general public not matter as much.

So I promise not to push for any IRV variant in Brazil, with its
multi-party system...

I will consider the other countries you listed though, so thank you.

>
> To claim that the United States can't use PR or advanced voting methods
> because it has two+tiny parties while the rest of the world does not is to
> confuse cause and effect.


Cause and effect are not so clear-cut here.  It can go both ways in real
life.


> The reason there are two parties is because so few people want to throw
> their vote away in such an important contest as a Presidential one is. That
> is an artifact of the Plurality system. As a consequence, it becomes
> vitally important for parties and candidates to appear to be electable, and
> the way they accomplish this is to spend lots of money on very expensive
> media coverage and on the whole primary and electoral circuit.

 Thus, it takes a lot of money just to overcome the barrier of
he-won't-be-elected-anyway. Any method that goes wrong when third parties
enter the scene would keep this bug (to the extent that it does go wrong
with third parties present), because the candidates still have to spend a
lot of money to signal the strategic voters that they are electable -- that
the strategists should rank at least him honestly.

dlw: Thus, the wisdom of playing political jujitsu by not challenging how
the system is rigged in favor of two major parties, and encouraging LTPs
who can take advantage of the diseconomies of scale in forming community
 to rely much more on volunteer power than $peech to check the influence of
$peech on both major parties who may have to change or die in the face of
nascent minor parties.  This could include increasing intra-party democracy
in both major parties through the use of more party caucuses, as used by
the DFL in MN.

>
> In concluding the above: Presidential, even strongly presidential systems
> with PR do exist. That they don't have extremely expensive primary and
> presidential races should not be used to claim historical specificity,
> because that is specificity of the influence of monied interests - part of
> the what we're trying to change. Instead, it should be used as evidence
> that strongly presidential systems don't need to waste money on a grand
> scale; and that multipartyism helps keep the need for such waste down.
>

dlw: Call it path-dependence then.  Yes, theoretically things could have
developed differently, but that doesn't make a switch from the US's status
quo to a multi-party system a realistic evolutionary path.

>
> =
>
> So, my voters' argument. I'll focus on the people in general and the
> people-as-voters in particular, because it is for the sake of the voters
> that we're doing this. It is the people that benefit when the system elects
> representatives that represent them. It is the people that benefit when a
> single-winner method picks a good winner; and it is the people that
> ultimately benefit from better governance less encumbered by plutocratic
> influence, as well.
>
> I'll argue that multiparty democracy is more in line with what the voters
> actually want. To add strength to my claim that the voters do not prefer
> two-party situations, I'll go in two directions. First, that non-official
> results show that people "vote" (express their opinions) in a way
> significantly less polar when they don't have to compromise to elect the
> lesser of two evils; and second, that where proportional representation
> methods have been used, both nationally in other countries and locally in
> the United States, the result has been a growth of many parties, consistent
> with multipartyism.
>

dlw: Yes, there is significant dissent from the "orthodoxy" of the two
major parties and if encouraged there'd be a supply of multiple parties.
But even if we want multi-parties, we can only have one gov't at a time.
 So it's imperative that that gov't reflect the changing center of our
politics, while being respectful of those dissenters who themselves are
respectful of the center in their attempts to move the center.


> Since IRV does not give multiparty democracy (and you have said as much,
> and that it isn't what you want anyway), and the voters express their
> desires in a way as to support multipartyism, that counts against IRV.
>

dlw: It tends to encourage for there to be two major parties centering
themselves around the moving center.  It gives scope for minor parties to
move that center. This is another form of multi-partyism, one that retains
the hierarchy of there tending to be two major parties.  The preference for
your form of multipartyism vs my form could be a matter of political
culture.  As such, IRV may be more appropriate alternative to FPTP for the
US, while not necessarily the ideal single-winner rule for Norway et al.

>
> KM:Then I'll refer to that the advanced methods don't have the center
> squeeze problem of IRV. I'll go further and state more general conditions
> where the advanced methods do well, so as to support that the advanced
> methods don't act as a patched-up IRV ("IRV 1.1") that just hides the most
> immediate problem of IRV the way IRV acts as a "Plurality 1.1" that hides
> the most immediate problem of Plurality.
>

dlw: If in "real life" the center is always shifting then is the center
squeeze problem germane?  Isn't that a way of describing the dynamic that
tends to make the system's two biggest parties move to surround the moving
center?

>
> Finally, I'll conclude that, based on the above, IRV requires that voters
> twist their votes into an IRV shape merely to get an acceptable result in
> just the setting where third parties are growing large, whereas the
> advanced methods do not; or that third parties have to intentionally decide
> to stay minor to spare the voters of this, whereas that is not the case for
> the advanced methods. Further, I'll point out that IRV can't justify
> demanding this of the voters and parties, because it doesn't produce
> results closer to the multipartyism the voters want than does the advanced
> methods. Therefore, IRV is worse than the advanced methods twice over, and
> so I cannot support it even if the other arguments not detailed here were
> to be invalidated.
>

 In the case of the third party growing, it may theoretically "spoil" an
election.  Yet, the underlying dynamics are to either force the existing
two major parties to move or for the third party to replace one of the two
major parties.  This makes the duopoly contested.  The only ones it doesn't
work for, as with the Republicans in Burlington, are the supporters of the
 major party that refuses to move along with the center.

>
> Without further ado, the meat:
>
> 1.1. According to their preferences, the people prefer multipartyism to
> two-party rule.
>
> This is where my reference to the Orsay exit poll, the other French and
> German studies, as well as the two United States exit polls, all shown on
> Rangevoting, come into play. The Orsay exit poll (but also the other exit
> polls) show that the people of France and Germany vote in a manner
> consistent with multiparty preference, while the United States exit polls
> and studies show that while the United States voters don't vote for third
> parties to the extent that those parties would win, they nevertheless vote
> (or express preference) for third parties and candidates to a much greater
> extent than in the official count.
>
> When I direct your attention to the Approval voting polls (telephone
> polls, etc.) in the United States, my point is not that Anderson came
> second. As you say, you don't get a seat for coming in second. My point
> *is* that the voters vote in such a way as to show that candidates not
> officially blessed also have some popularity. Stripping away the strategic
> distortion caused by Plurality, we see that "no-hopers" have some support.
> What is keeping them down is a catch where they have to be seen as
> electable to win or gain further support, but can't be seen as electable
> unless they have a great chance of winning.
>

dlw: OR, the support for 3rd party candidates as expressed with the use of
better single-winner election rule reveal their dissatisfaction with the
bitter fruits of FPTP, since it permits the two major parties not to have
to locate around the true political center, which then tends to change the
de facto center in a more illiberal direction.  T.

>
> In my other posts, I have quantified this tendency in terms of effective
> number of candidates, at least for the European polls.
>

If IRV(v2) is used then 3, 4 or 5 effective number of candidates would be
comparable to IRV vs Oth with only 3 effective candidates.  IRV is quite
close to other alternatives when there are 3 effective candidates.  It is
only when there's a 3-way competitive election that pathologies can emerge
and that is arguably not a stable situation, even if Approval/Condorcet
method/Whatever were in use.

Your evidence supporting multipartyism does not say they prefer a
competitive 3-way election system.

>
> 1.2. According to the outcomes, the people prefer multipartyism to
> two-party rule.
>
> Internationally, I need only point to the countries that have proportional
> representation. If the people wanted a two-party situation in a PR nation,
> they would only have to vote for the two largest parties to establish that
> situation. That does happen in some places; most notably, in Malta. Malta
> uses STV, yet has only two parties. In Malta, the voters only make use of
> 5-seat STV's capacity for intra-party competition, but not of the capacity
> for inter-party competition. See more at http://aceproject.org/ace-en/**
> topics/es/esy/esy_mt <http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esy/esy_mt> .
>

Or, multi-partyism could also be more supply-side driven.

Generally, two-party systems have often gotten stuck.  This is why we need
to make sure the duopoly is contested with plenty of competitive elections
and with lots of scope for speech from third party dissenters of the Minor
party or LTP varieties.

Part of US "exceptionalism" has been the melting-pot effect.  I think this
could become a "melding-pot", which would make it so we can act together.
 It's not easy for folks who really disagree a lot to work together.
 Things can get heated, as unfortunately our own exchanges have
illustrated.

>
> KM:Even in elections for single seats, this pattern appears to be true.
> When the voters are given a single seat method that can elect candidates
> from multiple parties, the voters make use of that capacity. To avoid
> appearing to construct a tautology or to beg the question, I will specify
> that more clearly: the method is being used in more than ten nations (so
> you can't claim one-nation micronumerosity), and in more than two thirds of
> the nations where it is used, that nation has a multiparty democracy.
> I am, of course, talking about top-two runoff voting. According to
> http://rangevoting.org/**TTRvIRVstats.html<http://rangevoting.org/TTRvIRVstats.html>,
> there are 27 runoff-using nations, and 21 of these are multiparty. (If you
> wish to argue Warren is wrong, go ahead and do so.)
>

I believe that we've already agreed to disagree on the interp of the
evidence here.  The use of the hybrid multi-single winner rule does
increase the number of parties.  This results in there tending to be two
major coalitions of parties, rather than two major parties.   Let's say
there's the big GOP party and the Dems get split into Progs, Greens and
Blue-Dems.  It's pretty clear cut GOP's candidates going to come in first,
but it's a horse race to see which of the 3 minor party candidates comes in
2nd.  Cuz, of course all three party's supporters prefer each other over
the GOP's candidate.  So we end up with more of a multi-party system and
the Prog-Green-Dem coalition will need to hammer out their diffs to get
anything done if they should happen to be in power.

But differences in priorities don't require different parties to be sorted
out.  There can be intra-party forms of democracy that make it so the deals
get sorted out prior to the election, as opposed to after the election.
 This involves giving party-members both more exit-threat to minor parties
or LTPs and more voice within the party through the greater use of a caucus
system.

>
> Within the United States, I point to New York under STV. In New York under
> STV, the voters made use of the capacity of STV to provide for
> multipartyism and voted (and got results) which let multiple parties get on
> the assembly. This significantly weakened the party machines, who
> immediately countered but only got STV repealed after battering down public
> opinion by the card of red-baiting. This is why the New York STV example
> matters more than your proverbial hill of beans, and this is why I am
> surprised you do not look at it when you talk about historical specificity.
> It shows that American voters also avail themselves of the capacity for
> multipartyism when they have the instruments by which to do so.
>
Indeed, the leaders of the New York county Republican party had no illusion
about this as they worked with Tammany Hall against PR, calling PR "a
threat to the two party system" ( http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/**
polit/damy/articles/kolesar.**htm<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/articles/kolesar.htm>).

dlw: PR as used in NYC did subvert the two party system.  But it need not.
 And we'll get PR sooner, due to our historically specific situation in the
US, if we focus on uses of PR(and single-winner reforms) that accept the
existence of a 2 party system and tries to make such work more often for
more people on more issues.

>
> -
>
> 2.1. The advanced methods (most Condorcet methods, as well as MJ,
> Approval, and Range) do not suffer from center squeeze under honest voting.
>
> This is very easy to check. One may simply go to Ka-Ping Yee's
> one-dimensional Gaussian vothing method visualization and push the wings
> closer to the center. In Plurality, the center vanishes quickly. In IRV,
> the center lasts a little longer, but first it splinters nonmonotonically,
> and eventually it fails altogether when the center does not have enough
> first place votes to outlast the wings. That happens even in a completely
> symmetrical situation where the major parties are equally far from the
> center, "clustered around it".
>
> In contrast, both the rated/approval methods and Condorcet methods elect
> the candidate closest to the middle-most voter (in ratings, possibly as
> weighted by strength of preference). This is a reasonably fair standard,
> because one can imagine left-wing voters "canceling out" right-wing voters
> until the centermost remains.
>
> In fact, Condorcet methods will always be impervious to center squeeze in
> a left-right situations like the above. I'll get to that later. Some
> Condorcet methods may behave strangely in higher dimensions (such as a
> contrived "CW if there is one, otherwise the Plurality winner" method), but
> most will degrade gracefully.
>
> The theoretical result can also be empirically verified in two cases.
> First, the Burlington election of 2009: all the Condorcet methods picked
> Montroll, as would Range under certain assumptions (of monotonically
> decreasing ratings). Second, by ranked votes from a French exit poll in
> Faches-Thumesnil and Nord in 2007, Condorcet methods elect Bayrou (as does
> Range and MJ using the Orsay data from another exit poll in the same
> election), whereas IRV sides with
> Plurality and elects Sarkozy. See http://rangevoting.org/**
> French2007studies.html <http://rangevoting.org/French2007studies.html>for more.
>
> I will point out that I am not talking about dynamics. This part of the
> argument is about the voters not needing to learn to vote for the stronger
> wing, or the minor parties not needing to stay out of the way if the voters
> don't learn.
>

 This is where I quote |Xirv-Xoth| << Pirv-Poth.  If a "centrist" party is
getting squeezed then the bigger parties that are squeezing it are not that
far from it and so the pathology is not that great in the scope of things.
 In the next election, the weak CW from the prior election will either be
stronger or have merged with one of its rivals.  A Sarkosy who wins with
IRV, vs FPP or 2-stage, knows his victory is weak and so he'll govern more
from the center.  The same would be true with Burlington.

>
> 2.2. The advanced methods are significantly less impacted by adding or
> removing candidates than is IRV and Plurality.
>

What about IRV(vs 2) that uses Approval voting in its first stage?

>
> For the rated methods of Range and MJ in particular, as well as for
> Approval, this is also simple to see. When the voters are honest and rate
> according to an objective standard, these methods pass a rated-version
> variant of IIA. This means that if you add or remove a candidate X, that
> doesn't alter the winner unless the winner used to be X (in case of
> removal) or X is now the new winner (in case of adding candidates). Thus,
> no amount of extra candidates can make the method misuse honest voters'
> votes to squeeze out the center. I think that this
> particular variant of IIA is stronger for MJ than Range, since MJ suggests
> voters compare the candidates to a common graded standard and gives less
> incentive for voters to deviate from that standard, whereas in Range,
> normalization may be considered honest (and so the IIA variant would fail).
>

I suppose it also matters whether the added candidate is "serious" or not.
 If there are supply-side driven bounds on the no. of effective candidates
then IIA becomes less important of a criterion for the evaluation of
electoral rules.

>
> For the monotonicity-fixed SODA, as it is based on Approval, it passes an
> analogous version of IIA. If a new candidate appears, either the old winner
> will keep winning, that new candidate will win, or a candidate preferred to
> the old winner on the new candidate's delegation order will win.
>
> For Condorcet, the details are more complex. In a left-right scenario, as
> one might expect when third parties are just getting off the ground,
> Black's single-peakedness theorem shows that the Condorcet winner will
> always be the candidate closest to the median as defined above, no matter
> the amount of other candidates and their positions. Since maximum
> likelihood estimation over relatively simple error models imply Condorcet
> while IRV can only be considered an MLE if you make the error model very
> complex indeed, I think voter uncertainty will drag IRV further from this
> in reality than it will drag Condorcet.
>

dlw: But if we effectively reduce the no. of candidates to 3 before using
IRV and grant that they might vote strategically in favor of one of the
more likely winners then this is not so big of a diff.

>
> But perhaps that is not enough. In that case, I refer to James Green
> Armytage's paper on voting strategy, http://www.econ.vt.edu/**
> seminars/seminarpapers/2011/**jamesgreenarmytage10142011.pdf<http://www.econ.vt.edu/seminars/seminarpapers/2011/jamesgreenarmytage10142011.pdf>In it, James proves that when there is a Condorcet winner, Condorcet
> methods are vulnerable to neither exit nor entry (candidates being removed
> or added). Furthermore, his computer simulation results indicate that
> minimax (which is not even cloneproof, but is Condorcet) provides nearly no
> incentive for strategic entry or exit, but IRV's incentive to strategic
> exit increases with the number of candidates, and eventually reaches
> Plurality's in the case of single-candidate exit.


dlw: What if you only let voters rank up to 3 candidates and presume
realistically that many will rank fewer than 3?  Does this model take into
account the bounded rationality of voters and the costs of gathering the
info needed to form meaningful rankings of all of the candidates in the
field?

>
>
> Thus, I reason that the advanced methods are not simply patches to IRV;
> their improvements with regards to candidate exit and entry, and resistance
> to center squeeze, are general (not specific), and don't lose power as the
> number of candidates is increased further.
>

I agree Xcondorcet > Xirv.  My responses have been against the notion that
Xcondorcet>>Xirv in the US, because it seems the fact that
 Xcondorcet > Xirv makes Pcondorcet < Pirv, at least in the short-run (as
opposed to the long-run when we're all dead), in the real-politik of
electoral reform.

>
> -
>
> 3.1. IRV requires that either votes twist their votes into an IRV shape to
> get an acceptable result, or that parties intentionally stay small to avoid
> the conditions where the voters have to do so, or both.
>

dlw: Politics, like life, is a multi-stage game.  With IRV, A third party
that seemingly ruins things by growing too much in one period may get an
outcome it(and most voters) significantly prefers in the next period.  This
presumes of course that the defenders of the status quo don't succeed in a
misinformation campaign to end the use of IRV.

Oh dear, the supporters of the major party that refuses to adapt are being
given incentives to vote strategically....  What will become of all the
angels who lose their wings when so many people vote strategically?

>
> This follows from the center-squeeze vulnerability shown in 2. In order to
> avoid center squeeze, either the third parties can stay far enough away
> that their votes can't make the wrong winner win, or the votes can vote as
> if the third parties were that minor.
>
> Burlington provides an example of what happens when the voters don't and
> the parties don't, either. You've said that it did, but you claim that
> dynamics will fix it. Those dynamics don't counter this point, since the
> dynamics take the shape of voters or parties altering their behavior to
> accomodate IRV in a similar, though somewhat reduced manner, to how voters
> or parties alter their behavior to accomodate Plurality.
>

dlw:  It's called learning.  The 3rd party won because they stood their
ground and when they were treated as a minor party, it led to such an
outcome as to change this wrong perception.  The presence of changing
habits with plurality does not refute the fact that |Xirv-Xoth| is less
than both |Pirv-Poth| and Xoth-Xfptp.  It only reduces somewhat the
advantage that IRV gives over FPTP.


> 3.2. IRV doesn't give multipartyism.
>
> This is not contended by you, and it is a simple consequence of the nature
> of IRV. If IRV breaks to center-squeeze when third parties become too
> large, and the countermeasure is for either the parties to be small enough
> that IRV doesn't fail, or for the voters to act as if the parties were,
> then the parties can never by themselves grow large enough to lead to
> multi-party rule within the area of the IRV election in question.
>

dlw: It doesn't give your preferred type of multipartyism.  And it's not
enuf on its own.

Once more, you're failing to give third parties credit over the
multi-period nature of the game of politics.

>
> KM: Further evidence can be seen, though scarce as it is, by that all the
> nations that use IRV have two-party rule where IRV is used. Australia has
> two-party (or two-and-a-half party, since the NatLib coalition is pretty
> much a party) rule in its IRV body. You have not disputed this, but you
> have argued that this would be countered in the non-IRV bodies that would
> use PR but would not give multipartyism in general. Also, in Fiji before
> the military coup, the system was coalescing to two-party rule despite
> being in the context of a diverse nation, and despite ethnic quotas. See
> http://rangevoting.org/**FijiPol.html<http://rangevoting.org/FijiPol.html>for that data.
>

dlw: And the absence of countries who use alternatives to IRV, apart from
2-stage, makes my contention not refuted yet by the evidence...
For 2-stage is not a pure single-winner election rule.

>
> 3.3. Therefore, IRV fails twice.
>
> By 3.1., IRV imposes demands on voters and/or on parties that the advanced
> methods do not. That counts once against IRV, but it wouldn't by itself be
> so bad IRV could justify that demand by providing better outcomes in
> return. However, it does not.


It affects their strategies.

It makes the 2 biggest parties adapt to the changing political center and
penalizes them when they do not adapt, as shown with Burlington.
It rewards successful third parties who capitalize on the changing center
by giving them a chance to become one of the top two parties or to force
one of the existing two major parties to merge with it, out of fear of it
"spoiling" the outcome.


> By 3.2., IRV fails to give the multiparty outcomes that voters appear to
> want (as established in 1.). Therefore, at the very best, IRV is no better
> than the advanced methods in bringing about multipartyism, and
> realistically (supported by the presence of single-office voting rules that
> actually do give multipartyism), IRV is worse than the advanced methods.
>

 There is a choice C, between an EU-style multipartyism and the deeply
dysfunctional 2-party system of the US that is devolving into a 1-party
system.  2 major parties, minor parties and LTPs constitute another kind of
multiparty system that can give voters what they want.

peace and thank you for your wonderfully researched and written email/post.

dlw
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