BIG structural changes to political parties happen only once in a generation. Academics reckon that in 219 years America has seen just six different party systems, each attracting a distinct coalition of voters. Donald Trump’s idea of turning the Republican Party, long the ally of big business, into a “workers’ party” may yet force a seventh. To track the trend, The Economist has melted down the American electorate into their policy choices and priorities alone, freeing them from party labels to see what kind of winning policy platforms might emerge in future.
First-past-the-post voting like America’s tends inevitably to yield two-party systems, which usually require awkward coalitions. What determines which interest groups coalesce? In 1929 Harold Hotelling, an economist, wrote that a rational voter would choose a candidate whose views showed most “proximity” to his own. In turn, a political party serious about winning should take the positions most likely to convince the voter in the electorate’s ideological middle. Since both parties needed to attract most votes from a broad electorate, this “median-voter theorem” would push them both towards the centre. Hotelling observed that American candidates tended to “pussyfoot” for just that reason, giving ambiguous answers to policy questions for “fear of losing...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2aMQ0oG
EmoticonEmoticon