Homogenous America or Fun With the Political Compass
Jun 13th, 2009 by james
I meant to post this during the election but just never got around to it.
Some friends of mine were fuming about how if politician X was elected, America was going to hell in a hand basket. It’s the usual stuff people say as a result of politicians and the media getting them riled up just before an election. I pointed out that in terms of policy there was almost no difference between McCain and Obama. It’s completely unscientific but here’s how political compass plotted the two contenders:
| Barack Obama | John McCain |
There is no red America and blue America. Just one big purple America where people arbitrarily argue about whether they are red or blue. For all intents and purposes we have a two party system – but how is it that both parties are basically the same?
Lets imagine that the political landscape can be represented as a rectangle on a two dimensional plane. The platform of each party is realized as a point on a plane. In order to equally represent the political landscape with only two points we might place them like this:
The dashed line marks an equidistant boundary – it is in fact, a Voronoi diagram boundary. But I won’t go into that. The important bit is that this is not an evolutionarily stable system. These dots can move. If one dot moves closer to the center, they get a larger share of the political space.
In order for the other dot to compete, they must also move closer to the center.
This cat and mouse game can only go on so long – both dots attempt to converge to the same point – separated by a value x which is the minimum valued separation that allows both dots to still be distinct and not coincident.
And I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.. if you are happy with a single party system. But don’t tell me how wrong the other party is because of the value of x.
So how do we break up this poor representation of political ideas? Add more dots. We need more political parties that force these two points out of the stable solution. America needs more outliers. Think differently. Vote differently.
Here’s my compass. Where are you?
“America needs more outliers. Think differently. Vote differently.” Nice demonstration, right on the dot (pun intended).
Hi d.eris. I just visited your blog and am very impressed. I’ll definitely be reading Poli-Tea Party from now on!
Hi James. Cool. Thanks for stopping by. Do you write much on politics here?
Hah. Way to slip in a Voronoi reference!
Personally, I think it’s a good thing if politicians agree with each other enough to get work done, the work that we need but don’t necessarily want. It’s as if the main thing driving them to separate poles is they are competing for voters and need to look like alternatives – i.e. they want the job more than they want the responsibility.