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Your belief makes it real
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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By the sound of things it's more like nobody wanted anything to do with the major-party incumbent. Duverger's law is about how there tend to be two parties. Three and one are equally unstable. When a race becomes a total rout, like a 30-point spread, that dominance can be seen as a power vacuum.
... also, Sri Lanka has ranked ballots. It's not a Plurality voting system. They have an automatic runoff. That's one of the more obvious fixes that allows people to even consider supporting a third party, without playing Russian roulette against their own foot.
Emphasis on the 'tends'. It's a probabilistic observation, not a law of nature. Treating it as the latter leads to people acting against their best interests.
You are right, in theory, but please check how many additional votes the winner (or the runner-up) got as second-prefrence votes. It was around 2% of their totals. This is because in practice, most voyers didn't bother putting second and third preferences.
People acting in their best interests is how it happens. It's an electorate avoiding splits. Given the system you're voting under - you should vote for someone who has a chance of winning. Otherwise you might write-in some special favorite candidate that no other human being cares about, and accomplish literally nothing. Voting for a third party with single-digit support is not much better.
People voting against their own interests would be... not bothering to write in a second preference. It is the same fuckup: someone who cannot imagine their very favorite guy losing.
The problem is that who 'has a chance of winning' is decided by who people vote for.
Uh, that's what the Sri Lankan voters just did? The winner this time had 3% of the vote-share in the last election.
Dude had 3% support despite everyone being able to toss him a vote just-in-case. Anyone who voted for only him, "last election," was a fool. That negligible support is not what made him a viable candidate in the separate election they "just did."
No kidding your choices depend on how other people vote, that's what democracy is. If you can't rally a shitload of people behind your guy... you lose. That part is not the failure of Plurality. Plurality blows because two similar groups can be wildly popular and still get destroyed by a minority of schmucks.
The winner of this election was not decided by everyone seeing through The Matrix or whatever and deciding to defeat a broken electoral system. It sounds like 95% of them are functionally unaware of which electoral system they have.
Or they were the people who made this year's result possible.
Yes, but you show that so-and-so's platform has x amount of support, putting them in a better position next time around.
It's incredible how one can see some piece of evidence that contradicts their pet theory with their own eyes and say, no, the reality is wrong and my theory is right. I mean, it makes sense sometimes - the discovery of Neptune is a famous example - but in general, it is better to adjust theory to fit the facts, rather than the other way around.
If most voters keep picking one guy, these three parties will become two parties, or the two more-similar parties are fucked. That is what Duverger's law is about. It doesn't mean third parties can never win - it means a three-party system cannot last.
If Sri Lankan voters remember how their own goddamn electoral system works, they can have a four-party system, no problem. But as you point out, they're acting like they have America's elections, where this schmuck who got 17% is now a massive liability to the runner-up who got 33%. If those two presumably-liberal blocs got together, they could handily oppose the leftist bloc. But if they're competing for the same exclusive votes then they'll both become irrelevant.
Sri Lanka already fixed the thing that breaks Plurality. Their voters just aren't using it, for some goddamn reason.
Objectively not. Every single person who wanted him, last time, could have listed him... also. They sure didn't. His support was three percent. That's not a viable path to power, that's a punchline.
He's done stuff since then. Right? Campaigned, presumably? Been in the news? Built up the expectation that a meaningful number of people would prefer him over other major candidates? That is what made this result possible. Losing a prior election is not a prerequisite.
It would be useful if you tried to understand Sri Lanka's political system before you made such comments. The SLFP / SLPP was historically supported by working class Sinhala people. The UNP was supported by Tamils, Muslims and richer / more urban Sinhalas. In 2022, the SLPP collapsed due to an economic crisis and widespread corruption. The SJB was an attempt by a section of the UNP to win over former SLPP voters by adopting centre-left economic policies and Sinhala nationalist rhetoric. The UNP base - largely Tamil and Muslim - are not going to vote for them! This is why the JVP was able to win - they consolidated the working class Sinhala vote, while not threatening Tamils and Muslims.
The reason being that, for many people, there is only one choice that is acceptable.
That's a viable path to getting your face in the public consciousness, so you can win next time. As you said, losing a prior election isn't a pre-requisite. But the posters you printed, the speeches you made, and the fact that one in thirty people took you seriously enough to vote for you, are a pretty strong boost when you run again.
With Sri Lanka's ranked ballots, they didn't need consolidation. Working-class voters could have had this, at any time, with no risk. And if voters keep wasting their second and third votes, then this new plurality-winning party is going to trounce the split alternatives, until one of them disappears, or both of them disappear.
I appreciate the background - but it doesn't change the math. When voters only get (or only use) one choice, and there's two parties on the same side of a divide, one of them has to utterly dominate the other, to stand any chance against a popular third party. If you think these two parties have irreconcilable differences then they're probably both fucked.
Either these voters start using their ranked ballots properly - or they're going to keep getting a two-party system. Changing which two parties matter doesn't change that system.
Ah, you're talking about SLFP voters second-preferencing the JVP. (I thought you meant UNP voters supporting the SJB.) That is more plausible, except the SLPP leaders and hardliners would attack it tooth and nail, fearmonger that it would split the vote and help the UNP win, and so on. No one wants to let go of power.
Hard to predict. Depending on how many seats his coalition gets in Parliament, Dissanayake might have to get support from one of the other blocs to get bills passed. But if he can get a majority, he has a great chance to destroy both the established parties simply by appointing an honest auditor and letting them loose on the previous government's files.
What the new party did was to challenge the old poor Sinhala vs Tamil+Muslim+rich divide, and turn it into more of a common people vs political / business class divide. Obviously, there aren't enough businessmen or politicians to form a party by themselves, so we'll have to see what they do. Maybe they'll negotiate with the new powers, or maybe they'll run smear campaigns, or maybe they'll wait for it to get corrupt and unpopular.
The other possibility is a de-facto one-party state, like Mexico or Japan. I really don't see hardline Sinhala nationalists and hardline Tamil separatists co-operating.
... it's a ranked ballot. This country already prevented that, as a concept.
It's gonna bug me for ages that these people seem unaware how functional their democracy is.