Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
I don't propose to define where the "middle" is, because there is no such thing, as least not as measured by voters. The thrust of my argument is that despite this being a popular over-simplification, it is a measure of nothing and is completely useless, other than as an convenience for the media to pretend to understand politics.
You can't define political positions on a scale by counting popularity of those positions, or you could just as easily put the Conservatives in the centre of an imaginary political spectrum and the Liberals way off to the right, and call the Conservative voter the median. The only reason you can't do this, is because the left/right scale is INDEPENDENT of the voters, and thus you cannot change that scale due to where the voters lie upon it.
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You can't call a Conservative voter the median, because the median is a well-defined term that applies to populations. The median Canadian voter is Liberal, whether you characterise them as centre, left or right. I feel that centrist is an appropriate characterization of a party that includes the median Canadian voter, in a Canadian frame of reference. Especially since that party doesn't include the extreme left or the extreme right, unlike the parties in the US.
Another way to define the scale is to use the party's stated positions. This is what the Vote Compass team did, and since they're using the same questions to place parties and voters, it doesn't really matter where they place the axises because the process is based on a scale that stays consistent.