on 2/2/01 12:00 AM, Joshua Bell at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> "Andrea Leistra" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> points out:
>>
>> You're assuming that stances on all issues are perfectly correlated.
>
> Yes, I thought of this too. It's interesting to note that in the current US
> political scheme, issues *are* generally correlated - that is, we can take
> an issue likely to come up in a political debate and easily bucket it into
> "left wing" or "right wing".
>
> (Although there is some absurdity in this as well, hence the old adage of
> keeping the democrats out of the boardroom and republicans out of the
> bedroom.)
>
> Is this due to current memes in the US population or some emergent property
> of multiple issues and the polarization? I'd wager a bit of both. Anyone
> have further thoughts on this?
It might be consequence of trying to shoehorn diverse and unrelated issues
into a simplified two-party system. As you pointed out issues that split the
voters around 70/30 or even 60/40 aren't good candidates for party policy in
a two-party system. On issues that split close to 50/50 the parties have to
oppose each other or risk some issue-based new third party splitting their
vote and winning 50/25/25. (Grossly simplified of course...)
Of course different voters might have a different mix of issues and
priorities - but each vote you lose on one side of the coin you gain on the
other.
But this question seems a good candidate for mathematical analysis or
simulation...
--
William T Goodall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
