Hi all, As I've mentioned before, there was a very interesting hypothesis made in Dr. William Riker's article regarding Duverger's law [1]. In it, he asks what effects the election system has on the behavior of the candidates, rather than on the voters.
Does anyone know whether anyone has studied this, and has figured out any way to quantify this? Without the data, here's my unsubstantiated hunch. If I were to place election methods on a two dimensional spectrum, here's what I suspect candidates would aim: + FG/IRV C/B FG/IRV Strong | FP FP Leader | | | | | | | App | Compromising | Weasel | +-------------------+-------------------+ Left Centrist Right Wing Wing Key: C/B=Condorcet or Borda App=Approval FG=First-past-the-post/General election IRV=Instant Runoff FP=First-past-the-post/Primary My hypothesis is that most voting systems at least give canidates pretty good incentives to be strong leaders, rather than compromising weasels. You'll note that I make a distinction between "FG" and "FP", as I think that first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems lead candidates to have different behavior between the primary and the general election. However, Approval voting, it seems to me, leads to centrist weasels. Basically, it's the "don't offend anyone" voting method, because that's how I think candidates will win elections. It seems that when talking about electing leaders, anyone who actually gets things done is more susceptable to criticism than a do-nothing. That's why I'm worried about the support for Approval on this list from Condorcet advocates. It seems that Approval has been deemed "almost as good", based on mathematical properties having everything to do with voter behavior, and nothing to do with candidate behavior. Perhaps looking at it another way, it can be spun as purely a voter behavior problem. Approval is almost as good at finding the center of the spectrum if the spectrum is one dimensional, but I worry that it fails the two dimension test. At any rate, this is all based on a lot of intuition, and I'll be the first to admit that there's probably something I'm not thinking of. However, I'm really having a hard time agreeing that Approval is a good substitute for Condorcet. Rob [1] William H. Riker, The Two-party System and Duverger's Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science American Political Science Review, 76 (December, 1982), pp. 753-766. http://www.jstor.org/cgi-bin/jstor/printpage/00030554/di961007/96p0002q/0.pdf (This link is only accessible on universities with JSTOR access) ---- Rob Lanphier [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.eskimo.com/~robla