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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1963 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How is it that America can be so evenly divided between just two political parties organically and this division persists over decades and decades?

I’ve asked this question a ton of different places to different people at different times and usually no one understands what I’m asking and no one’s ever given me a satisfactory answer so let me over explain what I am trying to ask:

I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.) The Pareto principle is always extremely visible in sales results. My top selling item will always outsell the next best selling item, usually by a factor of 2:1 or greater. This also persists over time. Occasionally I come up with a new item that overtakes the previous leader but if it is an evergreen item it will eventually sell so much that it also reaches the 2:1 ratio or better. Basically the most popular item will always win out over time.

I can imagine a business like a coffee shop, where they have like 10 different drinks. The coffee is the most popular item and then matcha and chai are the second and third most popular. The coffee shop could manipulate demand for the chai and matcha seasonally to nudge one more popular than the other. I can imagine being able to change the popularity of secondary tier items that way, but that’s a product of seller manipulation rather than organic customer demand.

Anyway the way party politics work seems like it would be even more difficult to nudge people from one party to the other. And parties are not just two different flavor drinks, they represent actual underlying philosophical choices and plans/theories of actions. How is it that the Pareto principle doesn’t take over and suddenly the majority of Americans agree that one of the parties is correct and now like 70 percent of Americans in all areas only vote for that party and the 30 percent that’s left only vote for the other one and the 70 percent are just left to rule forever? Aren’t there other democracies where things operate in this manner?

I am not insinuating manipulation or conspiracy but my mental model can imagine the even split over decades of a two party system upheld through manipulation but I can’t conceive of it as an organic process. If anyone can explain I’d love to hear it

@marinuso provides the classic election theory answer, which is supported by both game theory and observational evidence (most FPTP systems become two-party systems in real world).

Why Pareto principle does not apply? I can't explain it properly, but here is something interesting. Pareto distribution over things is not a physical or social "law", Pareto distribution is observed when frequency of things is produced by a phenomenon which is described by a power law. Many mathematical processes can be constructed that generate power laws, and lots of ink spilled to argue some of those processes describe one social behavior or other. See Newman 2006 Section 4 for a review. It's a long list, and the length of the list is the reason I think it's tricky to explain. When things are exponentially, normally, or log-normally distributed, it is easy to say why it is so (things occur at constant rate; things occur as sum of random variates; or things occur as multiplication of random variates, respectively.) Which is why I am a fan of the explanation given on page 23: most things that appear Pareto are not really Pareto, just log-normal distributed in a way that looks like a Pareto distribution.

It's not that difficult to think a hypothesis why popularity of consumer products in a coffeeshop would be log-normal. Suppose potential customer-events for each product depends on word of mouth. Word of mouth is a multiplicative process. First guy to introduce coffee to European peoples introduced it to U(0, Dunbar Number) of people. Each of whom can introduce it to U(0, Dunbar Number) of people. Continue this for generations. Due to some reasons that are essentially random, it turned out to be possible to cultivate Arabica in colonial plantations --> random multiplicative high rolls. Due to reasons that can be thought as random for the purpose of this hypothesis, Japan was closed off until commander Perry arrived (another random event), each of which had multiplicative effect close to 0, hindering the global popularity of matcha. Naturally this is just a just-so story, but it is reasonable to assume lots of social phenomena is multiplicative. And multiplication of random variates yields log-normal distributions.

In elections, the election system induces a need for strategic behavior which is more important than random individual voter preferences. However, in case it helps, I think it likely that popularity of individual politicians is roughly Pareto-like. Competition between the parties encourages them to put forward politicians so that they stay competitive in elections.

I would say it's because politics is by definition polarizing. If 70% of people agreed on something it isn't really a matter for the political sphere. Politics is for deciding on issues that may only barely have majority backing.

Part of it is just the election system. The first-past-the-post election system leads to a two-party system, because having more than two candidates favors the most dissimilar candidate. Consider e.g. the 1992 American presidential election. Bill Clinton got 43% of the vote, Bush got 38% and Ross Perot got 19%. The majority of the population voted for a right-winger, but a left-winger was elected, because the right-wing vote was split between two candidates. To prevent that, people with somewhat similar political stances all have to get together to back one candidate, if they want someone they can live with. Thus you end up with only two parties.

If the population were to shift, the parties would just shift along. For example, if the American populace became much more left-wing as a whole, at first the Democrats would win. But the radicals in the Democratic Party would be empowered, pulling the party further left; meanwhile the relatively more conservative people in the Democrats would get pushed out and join the Republicans, pulling that party to the left as well. Soon enough a new equilibrium would be reached. Even if an entire party does collapse, a new one will take its place.

In European parliamentary systems you get a different dynamic, because the parties are assigned seats proportionally to their national votes, and they have to form a working majority only afterwards once the election is over. So you can vote for a small radical party if you feel like it without wasting your vote. They'll get a few seats anyway, and depending on how the rest of the election went, they may pull the resulting coalition into the direction you want. The result of that is that you get a lot of different parties instead of just two.

So you can vote for a small radical party if you feel like it without wasting your vote.

Unless you're in Germany, where the 5% minimum vote share means that voting for fringe parties is indeed about as good as throwing your election letter (yes we get our election-specific voter ID per mail) into the trash unopened.

Thanks to this, fringe parties never make it off the ground here. They either cannibalize the structures, personnel and voters of older parties (this is what the far left and far right usually do), or they're a brief blip on the public radar that nobody takes seriously because you either vote big or you don't vote at all. Hence the mainstream establishment dominates, forever. The only upset to this was maybe the emergence of the Greens, but that was before my time.

Because neither party actually solves national problems, and so each cycle one party comes into power promising to fix problems, doesn't fix them, and the public turns against the party in power. ((This is both people changing their vote and members of either party being more energized to turn out or demoralized and staying home))

Every winning presidential candidate this century has run promising a more restrained foreign policy and every one of them has started wars or foreign entanglement abroad. With the exception of Dubya's reelection in 2004 during the Iraq war, which sort of goes to the point.

2008 Obama runs on getting us out of Iraq, and wrapping up Afghanistan by the end of his term we're still in both and add Libya and Syria, Trump runs on no more forever wars but doesn't pull back anywhere, Biden finally gets us out of Afghanistan but drags us into entanglements in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump II we are back in a fresh middle eastern war.

High cost of healthcare, big corporate malfeasance, immigration etc. Every president comes in promising to fix the issue and doesn't fix it.

We might see a dominant party if one party could deliver actual results.

The biggest frustration I had with Biden was his inability to put out a policy that didn't have just enough lefty bullshit in it to be controversial. The infrastructure bill was a prime example, with the initial draft taking such and expansive view of infrastructure that it was easy for Republicans to oppose. If it were limited to normal things they'd just end up bitching about passenger rail subsidies or something like that and it wouldn't have had as much bite. The argument at the time was that the Republicans are going to find something wrong with it anyway so let's give them some obvious bait so we can keep the stuff we want, but I hate that way of negotiating. I'd rather they submit an uncontroversial bill and dare the opposition to vote against it.

High cost of healthcare, big corporate malfeasance, immigration etc. Every president comes in promising to fix the issue and doesn't fix it.

These problems won’t be fixed because fixing them would require stepping on the toes of powerful industries or interest groups who have skilled lobbyists. The current situation pleases enough of the middle class+ that even appeals to the power of the voters won’t work to create change. And any movement on them will be easily weaponized into a deadly political attack: “government death panels,” “big government interference,” “socialism,” “ICE hates brown people.”

Trump actually ran appealing to his personal wealth as a form of independence from lobbyists and party machines, but governed in his first term as a fairly standard Republican allied with industries like steel and coal.

We’re in the situation because it’s a stable equilibrium since the 80s. Some kind of massive shock would be required to change anything, something bigger than dot-com, bigger than the recession, bigger than Obama, bigger than Trump. In other words, if things changed to the point that major political reform were possible, we’d have bigger problems than healthcare costs.

These problems won’t be fixed because fixing them would require stepping on the toes of powerful industries or interest groups who have skilled lobbyists. The current situation pleases enough of the middle class+ that even appeals to the power of the voters won’t work to create change...

We’re in the situation because it’s a stable equilibrium since the 80s.

Yes one explanation is that we have an 80% party and it's the corporate uniparty.

Alternatively, there's the corporate/deep state capture explanation, that as soon as a president seeking to change foreign policy gets into office, he's subject to deep state efforts to undermine him. Obama spoke of clashing with "the generals" when he tried to change course in the Middle East, while generals directly lied to Trump when he tried to pull out of Syria.

If you're cynical enough, the purpose of organized politics is pork barrel spending. Thus, the optimal amounts of votes to get is 50% plus the tiniest epsilon - it allows you to control the flow of money, with the smallest possible clientele to spend it on. Anything more, and you're spreading the profits thinner.

Part of the answer is that the division over the last decade is a little more even than it often was historically. Looking at the margin of victory in presidential elections, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-election-mandates, the most recent popular vote margins are all less than five in absolute value. But scroll up and you'll see many in the 15-25 range (a 20% margin is like 60-40). I think it's correct to notice that the gas station thing isn't quite enough to explain a consistent <5% margins

I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.)

In my ongoing attempt to turn the Motte into the Wall Street Journal for TurboAutists, I implore you to write an effort post on;

a) what you do and your perspective on your industry b) AI's effect on it, if any.

Standard bartering package; if you do an effortpost, I'll match it with either something I know about personally or b) a 3 hour research block plus post on something you choose

Ok, I'll write that essay.

Can I ask you why you're asking, btw? So that I can somewhat tailor my response to be relevant to anything specific you want to know. And where should I post the effort post? Here, the culture war thread, somewhere else?

Can you give me some topics you'd say you're knowledgable enough about that I might want to ask you about for your exchange? These could be as broad or specific as needed, just as an idea.

Great!

I'm asking because I am somewhat of a business nerd. I've asked a few other commenters about their line of employ when they've shown they have some real insight into it. Lawyers, for one, endlessly fascinate me (not in the legaleese or arguments, but in the day in the life of the job. There's a AAQC somewhere in the archives about the reality of being a DUI lawyer that was phenomenal).

I look at people who understand their businesses well as very applied, high value systems thinkers. An "academic" style systems thinker might be able to talk a good game, but an actual practitioner has insights that are completely missed by those academic approaches. The classic Back To School business seminar scene is this, canonically.

Mostly, I'd say I am interested in how e-commerce actually works outside of scammy YouTube influencer takes on it. Your comment about the pareto law of your products hints at this. I'd love to understand how you go about designing a new product, testing for demand etc. Perhaps also what the elements of success in ecomm are and what "pros" do versus what "chumps" do. I think this is enough of a framework to get started?

Trade topics:

I can tell you a lot about:

  • Ivy League (and other selective school) admissions
  • Real deal data science in both FAANG settings and research lab settings
  • Strippers, bars, hookers, nightlife industry in general
  • "HickHop" or the blended sludge of traditional Redneck culture smashing into Hip Hop / urban / black culture.

And again, if there's simply a topic you've had on your mind that isn't in my list, I'll put in some real effort to research and write it up - zero AI, all human.

The Civil war.

No, seriously, the Civil War. Historically, the last time we had what amounted to a multi-party election was the one involving Lincoln - there were four presidential canidates on the ballet, each a different party, each of whom received a sizable chunk of the electorate vote.

That entire instance kind of soured the notion of anything above and beyond two-party voting.

I appreciate your engagement but I don't see how this answers my question and is also the sort of response I usually get when I ask it. I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer. Why at some point one party doesn't just happen to take an objectively superior or more functional viewpoint, and becomes the dominant political theory that benefits everyone better, and proceeds to rule forever.

There have been times where one party or the other sweeps the election, but the response is for the opposite party to adjust it's positions. Each party has the incentive to adapt their positions to the electorate, and because they are both doing this at the same time naturally it falls to around a 50/50 split. It's actually more like a 33% split because there's also a third of people who feel cut out of the process, are too apathetic or too adverse to both parties, and don't vote.

Given that we have more real-time feedback with internet sentiment and good polls, the parties adjust much faster now and it is unlikely there will be a sweep again.

That said, the real mystery is why the two parties are so different from each other. Or are they?

This happened before- both major parties have done this, the other one just adapted.

I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer.

What makes you think that there aren't (fewer)?

Why are gas stations so often located next to each other?

Oh wow, this explanation does make a lot of sense but has some pretty grim implications for politics if true. The hot dog stand metaphor works when they're selling identical or fungible items, with identical signage/operation and so on. But if there is any difference, people will begin to prefer the slightly better one or the one that fits their needs slightly better. But the major thing that always got me the most confused about the resiliency of the two party situation is that political ideas and policies are not completely identical, or even really fungible, so at some point the underlying ideas and policies of the better team should win out. But since we've seen decades of this not the case it leads me to consider that, like @cjet79 implies below, there are fewer differences between the political parties than we're led to believe.

Lot of research has been done on this. There is a whole study in economics called "Public Choice" which studies these sorts of things. You are correct to notice that this is strange and doesn't make sense compared to other markets and products.

The main explanation is "first past the fence voting". Any system with a majority wins and takes all is one where only two parties tend to persist. One to win and one to chase the other. The chasing party will occasionally catch up and overtake the winning party. In European parliamentary democracies they often have representative voting, so as a party you only need to get a small portion of the vote to be part of the government.

What is also relevant is something called the "median voter theory". Since the US has first past the fence voting, the winning candidate will always appeal to the median voter. This tends to moderate candidates. As someone who is not a republican or democrat (im a libertarian), my perception of the two main parties is that they are mostly the same and tend to govern mostly the same. More wars, more government spending, more government intervention, rollbacks on government spending are minimal and ineffective. They tend to perenially disagree on issues that split the american people down the middle, but politicians on either side have little benefit to resolving those disputes.

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