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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
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.
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.
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