Well, if it’s chaotic, there no longer are any maps. You should therefore I think take that analogy seriously and find a mathematician to tease it out.
At a technical level, it seems at first sight correct to me. In the 50s, share of vote for, say, Labour mapped smoothly into seats won. Now it doesn’t.
But then, if the MRP models work, then there’s enough predictability to say it’s not chaotic. You just have to consider more variables in your model. So maybe not literally chaotic, just highly unstable.
But I’m not even sure that’s right. I have this sense that voters have imbibed the tactical voting idea so deeply that even the idea of party allegiance is dissolving. That is, it’s not just people having an allegiance that switches but rather they have some kind of end result in mind and will alter who they vote for to achieve that. Maybe a larger range of ends - eg “Keep the Conservatives out” - in the polling would reveal more underlying stability.
Finally, since the key question is Who Wins, it’s possible that another dynamic theory from your childhood might be more important, Catastrophe Theory, of which Warwick was the centre. This is a framework for understanding why systems flip rather than evolve into new states.
Given where we are now, and FPTP as our voting system, is it any wonder that faith in politics and politicians is falling? A more proportional system could lead to consensus driven policy making, but both of the big parties believe in ‘one more go at getting a majority’ and are prepared to wait many years in opposition to achieve it.
Well, if it’s chaotic, there no longer are any maps. You should therefore I think take that analogy seriously and find a mathematician to tease it out.
At a technical level, it seems at first sight correct to me. In the 50s, share of vote for, say, Labour mapped smoothly into seats won. Now it doesn’t.
But then, if the MRP models work, then there’s enough predictability to say it’s not chaotic. You just have to consider more variables in your model. So maybe not literally chaotic, just highly unstable.
But I’m not even sure that’s right. I have this sense that voters have imbibed the tactical voting idea so deeply that even the idea of party allegiance is dissolving. That is, it’s not just people having an allegiance that switches but rather they have some kind of end result in mind and will alter who they vote for to achieve that. Maybe a larger range of ends - eg “Keep the Conservatives out” - in the polling would reveal more underlying stability.
Finally, since the key question is Who Wins, it’s possible that another dynamic theory from your childhood might be more important, Catastrophe Theory, of which Warwick was the centre. This is a framework for understanding why systems flip rather than evolve into new states.
Given where we are now, and FPTP as our voting system, is it any wonder that faith in politics and politicians is falling? A more proportional system could lead to consensus driven policy making, but both of the big parties believe in ‘one more go at getting a majority’ and are prepared to wait many years in opposition to achieve it.
I find it all very depressing.