Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
So when the Liberals under Martin were a minority gov't, they weren't in the centre anymore? Your logic seems more than a little suspect - where a party lies has nothing to do with how many votes they get, nor can you call a party "centrist" because they get a majority. You're confusing popularity with ideology.
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I think what he means is that if you assume that if you lined up all the voters in the country from the most left-wing to the most right-wing, the party that the guy in the absolute middle (the median) votes for in the centrist party. Generally, people on the left are going to vote NDP/Green, people on the right vote Conservative. When conservative popularity is greater than 50%, that center position is going to fall within the conservative realm, otherwise it's going to fall into the Liberal realm.
But that assumes, of course, that Liberals are actually between the Conservatives and NDP on that continuum - Martin's Liberals were arguably further right economically than Harper's conservatives have been. It also assumes that people vote according to their simple left-right ideology, and that these people vote in relatively solid blocks, a couple things that don't happen in the real world.