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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4462 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

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.

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It's a perennial topic that tracks the election cycle, can't say I've noticed it getting particularly more air time this go around. While there have been a few higher-profile instances of election swinging against dems seemingly contingent on certain third party candidates, I don't think it would broadly advantage one party over another in any enduring sense. As long as gun rights and tax are highly salient and polarised (and as weed becomes less salient), I'd imagine most libertarians would preference the GOP even as Green party voters would preference the dems. The net result would likely be a wash, and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery.

So I don't think the partisan appeal of RCV/IRV tracks strategic advantage necessarily and is mostly just borne by cultural affinities where lib educated types are more interested in theorycrafting on the government as an institution and happier to knock over fences doing so.

The fact that it's largely an affectation of educated wonk types rather than strategically advantaging dems qua dems means that it's actually one of those issues that may be easier to implement obliquely/non-politically in a cross-partisan way, to the extent that wonkish types are relatively more present in the republican electeds than their base.

and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery

This is probably a good explainer for the partisan split- extreme views hurt democrats and they’d like to get away from them, but republicans have no way of doing that.

Yeah I don't really have a coherent opposition to RCV per se, but nevertheless am weakly opposed, just because it's the loud people who tend to love terrible, expensive ideas who seem most excited about it. If all these obnoxious college kids like it, my stupid monkey brain tells me there must be something wrong with it. Like the Radiohead of public policy.

I have a non-monkeybrained reason to oppose it - I know that my species, including myself, are a bunch of monkeybrains, so we react angrily when we don't understand something and think we're getting tricked. In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power, making people feel as though they at least have a say in what goes on. To that end, having the absolute simplest system that everyone can understand is immensely beneficial. As a result, I am broadly against anything that seems convoluted or that people could plausibly interpret as unfair. Even if RCV is actually a good idea for some reason, very few people can model it effectively and people absolutely will feel like their opponents just devised a system to cheat the first time that someone gets the most first-place votes and loses anyway.

Even if RCV is actually a good idea for some reason, very few people can model it effectively and people absolutely will feel like their opponents just devised a system to cheat the first time that someone gets the most first-place votes and loses anyway.

In some ways, you could even say that the purpose of all these complicated systems is to ensure that the guy with the most votes loses.

In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power

Big reason I'm a fan of compulsory voting (though I think it does moderate politics as well)

More zero information extremely lazy people voting? Not sure how it would solve any of the problems.

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