Duverger's Law and the Two-Party System Explained

Filmmaker, comedian, and CES supporter Andy Zhou created this awesome video to explain the concept of Duverger's Law and how it affects the number of political parties within an electoral system.

[theprutsert]

Man you put a lot of effort in this video! Very nicely done!

[samanthaderr]

Thank you for making this. This is going to make it so much easier when I'm trying to explain Duverger's Law to people (and it's important!)

[Friendly_Boo]

I genuinely enjoyed the music with the cloned versions of himself doing gestures.

[ethangasse]

This is the best political science video format god bless ur editing skills

[TaldrenDR]

Proportional Representation drawback: It allows extremist groups to have political representation without cutoff thresholds.

Approval Voting drawback: The "pity vote" and "virtue signal" psychologies kicks in, giving 'approval' to political agendas based on the charisma of the representative rather than based on their political beliefs.

I believe something closer to a caucus system would be a better idea. Get 2 votes (primary and alternate) and then multiple rounds of elimination where if a person is last they are eliminated and that persons votes are then given to the alternative if they had not already been eliminated in a previous round.

[TheJohoy]

Really nice vid, love the fact that there's Political Science audiovisual content being made and disseminated. Here in Brazil, voting for almost all legislative institutions use proportional representation and althought small parties are in fact represented, ideological pillars (like religion, liberalism or conversadorism) still aglomerate elected candidates and parties in Congress voting.

[elenamorgan]

Thank you for the really helpful visuals and explanation !

[purposeful]

I like how you simplified it to where I can honestly understand. 😊

[mangosday]

The visualization here helps soo much, seriously

[inversehyperbolictangent]

Oh yeah! I forgot to mention an idea I had for generating support for Approval Voting: While we may argue over which 'alternative voting system' is the best, we already *know* that Plurality is one of the worst, and absolutely worse than just about any of the most popular alternatives. Therefore, we could promote the idea that, regardless of what voting system we ultimately decide to use in the end, we should *never* just accept that plurality should be the 'default'. Instead, we should go with the research and reasoning that Approval Voting should be the new 'default' voting system for any election. Why? Because if you really want to, you can still just vote for one candidate, and if everyone did that it would be identical to plurality. Also, it requires no changes to ballots, only vote counting methods, and even then only trivial changes. No other system would be so easy to adopt, while having so many benefits. And once we finally ditch plurality, there will be plenty of time to use approval voting to debate and vote for hypothetically even-better systems (IRV, Range/Score Voting, etc.).

In the mean time, whenever you come across a situation where there's a vote for something (anything), we should be ready and eager to propose that AV should be the automatic default instead of plurality voting. Class president, what movie to go to, local dog catcher, whatever. The more we expose people to AV, the less Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) there will be about it, people will get comfortable with it, and eventually, hopefully, popular support for eliminating plurality voting with an extremely simple alternative will grow enough that it might actually happen in our lifetimes.

[alq_sophia]

Really clear and informative. It's helped me so much. Thanks a bunch!

[UncleJamie]

I'm getting a lot of videos about voting system upgrades in my subs feed, which can only be a good thing.
Personally, I'd like to see: i. Shortest Splitline boundaries; ii. STAR Voting ballots; and iii. Proportional Representation being installed, but I'd be happy with Approval Voting in the meantime!

[lipsaranidehury]

Yes. U people are really making Democracy SMART !!!

[Knightmessenger]

This is almost a perfect video but in addition to Approval Voting, you should have also mentioned Ranked Choice Voting.
RCV is used in several countries like Austrailia and Ireland and more recently, Maine and Alaska adopted it in ballot referendum. So it has far more real world instances used than Approval.

[xkidROBOTx]

Great video but the background music overpowers the vocals. Makes it hard to show in a classroom setting with speakers.

[ywgh]

4:40 - the problem with proportional representation - that it will move the problems you described in the beginning of the video - from level of people voting for representatives - to the level of representatives voting for laws - parties with small representation wouldn't have enough of power and would have to make coalition with major parties

better solution, i think, would be to make people vote directly for the LAWS, not for the representatives. that was unthinkable in the times of The Founders - but nowadays due to technology level it's more than doable

[kennethgewerth]

Great video, but the music is annoying AF

[IcePhoenixMusician]

The issue at this point is that we have entrenched interests that don’t want to allow the growth of 3rd parties since it doesn’t benefit them. The duopoly maintains its power by disallowing the possibility of the systemic change required to enact these other forms of voting.

[Flipside]

where does ranked choice voting fit into this? great video btw!

[inversehyperbolictangent]

Nicely done video! Great job with the production. Most of it was great, but I have one major critique, intended to be constructive: At the end of the video, I still don't have a clear conception of what Duverger's Law is.

I don't think there was a clear, concise definition of it in the video; or, if there was, it was buried within all the talk of voting systems. I know intuitively what it means because I've done plenty of reading and research into voting systems, but if someone were to ask me to give a clear definition of it right now, I don't think I could, even after watching this video. (cont'd in replies....)