[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by malloyd

You should see in any competitive system where you have a majority wins outright really. This represents the minimum possible compromise you need to win the rest of your platform.

It's also why the successful political parties in one of these systems always evolve to be hard to tell apart. They are dragged toward the mid-point by the minimum compromise they need to make in order to win. In the limit, if they differ by more than whatever change in policy will cause the one voter in exactly the middle to just switch sides there's still room for one of them to move just a little closer to the center, convince him to switch, and change the winner.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Extremists cannot govern, effectively, for very long, and government by extremists usually has horrific results.

The best government is one in which center-left moderates compete and compromise about policy (but not ideology) with center-right moderates, and extremists remain so marginalized they're inconsequential.