The 30% of the voters who vote for the party that keeps their taxes the lowest are going to stick with the Conservatives. If the Conservatives can keep adding a tiny proportion of the voters to join their core 30%, and there continues to be four significant parties to the left of the Conservatives, the Conservatives will become Canada's new "natural governing party" with the support of just 1 in 3 voters.I'm not prepared to concede that Conservative voters cannot be convinced to switch parties. In Western Canada, much of the swing vote is a swing NDP-Conservative vote, because the Conservatives and the NDP both claim to be fighting for their version of "the little guy." Here in Manitoba, there are many people who vote NDP provincially and Conservative federally, as evidenced by looking at the distribution of provincial and federal seats.
Western Canada is a good example of how FPTP politics works when it is in equilibrium. Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and BC, are all two-party dominant systems where one dominant right-wing party does not have a structural advantage over one dominant left wing party because there is no vote splitting. FPTP moves politics toward being 2-party dominant where both parties become relatively centrist big tent parties. That's why FPTP is known as being a two- party system. There's actually a principle in political science called "Duverger's law."
Here's the Wikipedia description of Durverger's law:
In political science, Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that plurality rule elections structured within single-member districts tends to favor a two-party system. This is one of two hypotheses proposed by Duverger, the second stating that "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to multipartism."[1]The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle. Duverger's law suggests a nexus or synthesis between a party system and an electoral system: a proportional representation (PR) system creates the electoral conditions necessary to foster party development while a plurality system marginalizes many smaller political parties, resulting in what is known as a two-party system.
A two-party system often develops in a plurality voting system. In this system, voters have a single vote, which they can cast for a single candidate in their district, in which only one legislative seat is available. In plurality voting (i.e. first past the post), in which the winner of the seat is determined purely by the candidate with the most votes, several characteristics can serve to discourage the development of third parties and reward the two major parties.
Duverger suggests two reasons this voting system favors a two party system. One is the result of the "fusion" (or an alliance very much like fusion) of the weak parties, and the other is the "elimination" of weak parties by the voters, by which he means that voters gradually desert the weak parties on the grounds that they have no chance of winning.[2][3]
A prominent restrictive feature unique to this system is purely statistical. Because the system gives only the winner in each district a seat, a party which consistently comes third in every district will not gain any seats in the legislature, even if it receives a significant proportion of the vote. This puts geographically thinly spread parties at a significant disadvantage. An example of this is the Liberal Democrats in the UK, whose proportion of seats in the legislature is significantly less than their proportion of the national vote. The Green Party of Canada is also a good example. The party received approximately 5% of the popular vote from 2004-2011 but had only won one seat (out of 308) in the House of Commons in the same span of time. Another example was seen in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, when Ross Perot's candidacy received zero electoral votes despite getting 19% of the popular vote. Gerrymandering is sometimes used to counteract such geographic difficulties in local politics but is controversial on a large scale. These numerical disadvantages can create an artificial limit on the level at which a third party can engage in the political process.
The second unique problem is both statistical and tactical. Duverger suggested an election in which 100,000 moderate voters and 80,000 radical voters are voting for a single official. If two moderate parties ran candidates and one radical candidate were to run, the radical candidate would win unless one of the moderate candidates gathered fewer than 20,000 votes. Observing this, moderate voters would be more likely to vote for the candidate most likely to gain more votes, with the goal of defeating the radical candidate. Either the two parties must merge, or one moderate party must fail, as the voters gravitate to the two strong parties, a trend Duverger called polarization.[4]
A third party can enter the arena only if it can exploit the mistakes of a pre-existing major party, ultimately at that party's expense. For example, the political chaos in the United States immediately preceding the Civil War allowed the Republican Party to replace the Whig Party as the progressive half of the American political landscape. Loosely united on a platform of country-wide economic reform and federally funded industrialization, the decentralized Whig leadership failed to take a decisive stance on the slavery issue, effectively splitting the party along the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern rural planters, initially lured by the prospect of federal infrastructure and schools, quickly aligned themselves with the pro-slavery Democrats, while urban laborers and professionals in the northern states, threatened by the sudden shift in political and economic power and losing faith in the failing Whig candidates, flocked to the increasingly vocal anti-slavery Republican Party.
In countries that use proportional representation (PR), and especially in countries such as Israel where the whole country forms a single constituency, the electoral rules discourage a two-party system. The number of votes received for a party determines the number of seats won, and new parties can thus develop an immediate electoral niche. Duverger identified that the use of PR would make a two-party system less likely.
This helps explains why the NDP in two-party areas like Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and BC are relativrly centrist. It also explains how someone like Gary Doer can comfortably work for the federal Conservative government while it's hard to imagine some like McDonough or Broadbent doing the same.
In Alberta where the PC Party has historically faced a divided left, they have monopolized power. Now that the right-wing vote is also being split the PC's are suddenly in real danger of losing power.
The federal NDP has a chance of forming government but the current unstable 5-party system that has been with us for just a decade has given the Conservatives a structural advantage. History would indicate that a consolidation of the centre-left will take place. The first party to go may be the Greens as it is easy to envision them merging with the Liberals.
