Of the two big parties, yes, without a doubt. There’s plenty to criticise Starmer’s Labour for but they’re a hell of a lot better than what we had before this election. Starmer is certainly not an inspiring candidate and has given a lot of ground to the Conservatives on policy positions, but we can probably at least look forward to a lot less random lashing out at whichever vulnerable group looks like a useful target this week
Makes sense. Thanks
The fuck happened in Leicester East that it’s the sole Con gain in the country?
Does it need to be any quicker? It’s not really important to get the results in by 4am instead of 7am, surely?
They’re not as bad as the Republicans, but given how they have been acting in recent years in particular it is definitely not an entirely unfair comparison. They’re ludicrously, dangerously angry at asylum seekers and trans people.
It is also worth noting that more Conservative MPs voted against same-sex marriage than for it, despite it being one of their own MPs that introduced it
yes, if I could do maths
strings are in base two, got it
It used to be common! Over a century ago, sure, but it was
Yes, he is. It’s that you can usually expect FPTP elections to produce a winner from one of the two dominant parties. Since your vote does not count for anything if your candidate didn’t win in UK elections, you can use this information to instead pick your favourite of the two candidates that are likely to win and maximise your chances of seeing your preferred of the two win, as opposed to voting third party and achieving nothing. You don’t need to know how quickly a two party system entrenches itself for this to be useful. You just need to know if it already has and which parties are the dominant ones in your constituency.
It almost certainly does, but we still mustn’t be complacent. Instead we should aim for that stretch goal of knocking them below the Lib Dems. If nothing else it’d be really funny
Ahh, I hadn’t interpreted the comment that way. I thought that Jackthelad was suggesting Farage was being unfairly maligned by the article. My apologies if I got that wrong
Maybe read the article and find out
I don’t know, though I would be interested to read. Taagepera and Grofman’s 1985 work examined the elections of western Europe, the Anglosphere, and a couple of others across 1945-1980. They found that of the seven single-winner sytems, only France had a reliable third party (and of course, France does not use regular FPTP), and of the 15 multi-winner systems only Austria and Ireland did not have at least three. That is, of course, only correlation, and the authors have some other interesting points about major political issues within a country, but they do come down in favour of Duverger’s approach.
Some of the papers I’ve read on it have mentioned that particularly young democracies (such as Nigeria after re-establishing democracy in the late 90s, and I think the paper using that example was from the 2010s) do not appear to have settled into this pattern. On the other hand, in an older system like the UK, we see examples like the 1922 general election. The Liberals performed very badly in the prior election, Labour outperformed them in 1922, and the Liberals have never risen above third place since.
If Duverger’s law is completely off base, why do you think that the UK has such a strong two party donination? No party outside the top two has won a general election for a century, and prior to that it was the same story with one of the top two swapped out.
Since there is a finite number of FPTP electoral systems, we can indeed test to disprove it by seeing how many of them are dominated by two parties. However woolly the wording “tend to” may be, if no FPTP systems were dominated by two parties then it’d be untrue. So that just leaves the question of what proportion should count for “tends to”. In my opinion, that’d be more than half at a minimum, but there will be different positions on that
Nobody, including Duverger, thinks that it’s an ironclad thing. That’s actually discussed in the link. It does appear to be a pretty accurate predictor of the behaviour of British elections though. The fact that there’s even an outside possibility that the Conservatives might not be one of the two biggest parties after this election is noteworthy.
I’m not sure I understand why you’re calling it a tautology. It doesn’t seem to fit any of the definitions I know of that word. It doesn’t fit the formal logic one since there are clearly imaginable scenarios in which it isn’t true (a parliamentary system in which more than two parties consistently emerge as the largest), and it doesn’t fit the literary one because it’s not a repeat of the same thing twice. Could you explain what you mean here?
Literally half of their goddamn comment is about doing other stuff. You’re all over this thread getting mad at people for voting because you’ve just made up that that’s the only thing they do.
Lesser evilism is a trap and you are better off organizing more direct action.
It is not and never has been a case of only one or the other.
Look, I know you’re very anti-Biden and everything, but we’re currently on year 14 of our Trump equivalents being in power. They’re lashing out harder and harder at vulnerable groups. Some harm reduction would be fucking great right now. On top of that, there is a real risk of an even worse party doing well in this election. We do not have the luxury of fucking about on principle this year.
What we do have is an opportunity to absolutely bury the party that has been in power and driving so much of the bullshit here, and we’d be damned fools not to take it. It is looking genuinely possible that this election actually displaces one of the two big parties in the UK. Let’s not replace it with the even worse lot, eh?
Stupidity can and often does, also result in poor grammar.
https://feddit.uk/comment/10214313
You’re missing a comma. See how petty this is?
6th largest, with only five seats out of the Commons’ total 650 compared to the SNP’s nine and Sinn Féin’s seven. I suppose you could argue that they are 5th largest since SF don’t take their seats. They did get the third-highest vote share though, just got absolutely fucked by FPTP. And hey, if anyone had to get fucked by FPTP, I’m glad it was them. But the number of votes they got is pretty alarming.