[Tuna-Fish]

> Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature.

What? No they are not.

This is 100% created by the FPTP voting system. It is the single cause that leads to this, everywhere where it's used. FPTP means that if your party cannot hoover up a base that gets 50%+1 of the votes, you change your platform until it can. The stable equilibrium is two parties at very nearly 50% split. Then both parties have to cater to their 50%, can ignore the other 50%, and do not benefit from co-operation across party lines.

This equilibrium is not visible in democratic countries that use some kind of proportional representation. In such systems, parties tend to be smaller, and necessarily have to co-operate to form government.

[foobarian]

Moreover, I'm thinking that modern information tools (Internet, polls, tracking, etc). have lead to better and more accurate forecasting, which in turn allowed the parties to apply ever narrower targeting at hyper-focused groups and minimize wasted effort past getting the majority needed to win elections. Basically as there is less and less noise the battles get closer and closer to the theoretical equilibrium point.

And this is bad because it causes huge shifts based on the whims of what, fractions of a percent of the population?

[LeifCarrotson]

The mechanisms are economic in nature if you assume the context of a first past the post electoral system.

It's worth repeating that FPTP maximizes the number of those who are discontented: Parties lose all incentives to appeal to more than 50%+1, so the remaining 49.9% are left high and dry. This implies that a proportional representation system will be more stable, because a higher percentage of the voters will be represented.

[chrisweekly]

Yes, this, exactly. I was going to write the same thing. FPTP produces this result.

In the US, the combination of FPTP voting and campaign finance rules lead to congress being fundamentally broken.