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This is not accurate. Yes, many election systems result in more parties than FPTP. But left and right still have salience within those. In fact, you can look
by scarmig 7y ago
This is not accurate.
Yes, many election systems result in more parties than FPTP. But left and right still have salience within those.
In fact, you can look at how each politician votes (without explicitly coding votes as left or right). This itself forms a space equal to the number of votes taken. But that vote space can be projected into a much lower dimensional space that captures most of the information about the vote space. If you go so far as to collapse it into a one dimensional space, that corresponds to the traditional left/right axis, and this holds through both history and internationally. The second issue is a bit more varied, but most of the time the left/right axis dominates whatever that second dimension is. Look up DW-NOMINATE for more info.
- CameronNemo 7y agoDW-NOMINATE was developed by US political scientists to study the US House and Senate. Higher dimensionality is present internationally, and I believe that attempting to reduce those dynamics to a left/right spectrum limits our understanding of politics. >Poole and Rosenthal note in Chapter 11 of Ideology and Congress that most of these analyses produce the finding that roll call voting is organized by only few dimensions (usually two): "These findings suggest that the need to form parliamentary majorities limits dimensionality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29 Static parliamentary majorities are not necessary in a presidential system.
- redisman 7y agoI think this 2D representation is definitely better. The two axes are Social (Authoritarian -> Libertarian) and Economic (Left -> Right) https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2 https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
- mntmoss 7y agoThis can also be predicted in terms of realpolitik. If the power of nations tends to consolidate along predictable lines, then the political question at any moment is reduced to a left-right "rate of reform" along each axis, with the furthest right positions being near-zero rates of change, but all viable positions serving the purpose of ensuring power for the stakeholders. This makes the right tend to automatically converge onto a mythologized moment in the past where their power is greatest - rights of kings, supremacy myths, and so on, while the left goes in a spectrum of directions but must ultimately form a singular coalition in order to gain power. Thus the prevailing tendency of left-right politics is also one of leaps forward from the left and gradual slides back from the right as the coalition breaks down. The new consensus is different from the old, but it's also typically not the most ideologically left one, since it emerges to compromise with the present realities, and the more radical you go, the more it resembles blood-in-the-streets revolution, which is a huge roll of the dice. The developed world as a whole seems to be approaching one of those "great leap" moments today as more and more issues have fallen into partisan extremism, motivating the search for a new consensus.
- robbrown451 7y agoSure there may still be a right left axis, but it wouldn't be condensed into the "main" axis, and people and candidates would form a nice bell curve rather than one with two humps.