Warren, You need to come down to earth. It is impossible to mathematically prove a sociological law such that "x election method leads to 2-party domination." I challenge you to find a single political scientist or sociologist who thinks you can. Societies are simply too complex to make such proofs possible. For beginners, you seem to have totally neglected the possibility that parties can evolve in unpredictable ways in response to all kinds of things, including election laws and the methods incorporated in them. The reason this hasn't happened very much until now is that party leaders have rarely understood election methods and their consequences very well and therefore haven't done a good job of taking them into account in developing their strategies. Nevertheless, any election method you can think of, including plurality, could be overridden by a currently minor party with large potential support using a strategy that does a good job of taking election laws and methods into account. The result could be that party displacing one of the currently major parties (and thus, still 2-party domination), but it could also be three or more parties each with substantial political power and many elected officeholders -- enough to prevent any one or two parties from being dominant for more than a few election cycles.
This is certainly not to say that election methods and systems of representation are not important. They obviously are and I have long been in favor of improving on plurality voting and single member district representation. But they are not nearly as mathematically determinative as you claim to have proved. -Ralph Suter In a message dated 8/31/05, Warren Smith wrote: << Earlier on EM I basically constructed a mathematical proof that all Condorcet methods lead to 2-party domination. (It may be seen at http://math.temple.edu/~wds/crv/CondStratPf .) >> ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
