Michael Allan wrote:
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
That is interesting. Perhaps one could have, for example, a "Condorcet
party" that pledges to run the Condorcet winner of an earlier internal
election for president. Then various small parties could nominally join up
with the Condorcet party, and that party would hold an election (a primary
of sorts).
The effects predicted by game theory would be a problem, though. A losing
party could think that "hey, if I run independently, I may get a share, no
matter how small, and that's better than the 0% chance I have if I stay
under the Condorcet party umbrella".
Or the parallel electoral system ("Condorcet party") might undertake a
"hostile takeover" of the other parties. It would appeal to their
members and cherry-pick their candidates. (But I'm uncertain how this
would play out in a PR context, unfamiliar to me.) It might attract
candidates by the chance to "be their own parties", or maybe just to
be independent of any party. It might attract members (voters) by the
ease of shifting votes across party lines, opening up a wider field of
candidates to them. (So it would be like a market fair, with
independent vendors.)
It seems this system would be more stable than I originally thought.
Third parties could run as parts of the Condorcet party without running
much of a risk, since they would otherwise get no votes at all. The
defection danger surfaces when the third parties have become
sufficiently large from using that parallel electoral system. Then a
party that would win a plurality vote but who isn't a Condorcet winner
has an incentive to defect.
Following that kind of reasoning, it would appear that conventional
parties have very little to lose by running Condorcet primaries instead
of Plurality primaries, more so if there's an open primary. (So why
don't they?)
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