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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.
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