Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
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.
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It further assumes that there has to be left, centre and rightist parties. Look south of the border and you'll see two rightist parties dominating - do each of them get a turn at being centrist when they win an election? No.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
Don't be silly, the Martin Liberals were in the centre because the parties to the right of them had less than a majority and the parties to the left of them had less than a majority. Ergo, the middle still belongs to them. For the Conservatives to have the middle, they do need a majority because there is nobody to the right of them.
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You're assuming there's a nice even bell curve of voters with the fat part being in the middle of the curve which is then called the "centre". To misquote: that's not right, that's not even wrong.
There's no reason that there can't be a huge population of voters on the extreme left and extreme right of the spectrum, or a flat distribution, or a huge leftist "slope", or whatever arbitrary grouping you can imagine.
All you're really saying is "The Liberals are left of the Cons, and right of everyone else, therefore they are the centre". That logically does not follow as it's perfectly possible that there are 4 leftist parties and one rightist, or five rightists, or five centrists, or - as I would see it right now - three leftist and two centre parties, with the right being empty since Reform compromised itself to gain power.