Arguably, the chief historical improvements in living conditions have not been from voters having the influence to pass legislation which (they think) will benefit them, but, rather, from power-wielders becoming scared of doing anything too horrible to voters.
I'd say the chief historical improvements in living conditions are caused by improvements in technology.
Which is to say that political powers do make an attempt to court the voters, but not to a noticeably greater degree than they court, say, the agricultural industry.
They only court the agricultural industry because they can influence the voters. That said, the power they exert over the voters can hardly be called the power of the voters.
Another thing voters can do is vote for a third party. They don't win, but it takes away votes from whoever they would have voted for, and will make them try harder to get their vote later. I'm given to understand the Democrat party leaned toward the Green Party after the 2000 election due to this.
This article links to another post that seems to have been missed in the sequence reruns. Was that deliberate?
Stop Voting For Nincompoops
Many people try to vote "strategically", by considering which candidate is more "electable". One of the most important factors in whether someone is "electable" is whether they have received attention from the media and the support of one of the two major parties. Naturally, those organizations put considerable thought into who is electable in making their decision. Ultimately, all arguments for "strategic voting" tend to fall apart. The voters themselves get so little say in why the next president is that the best we can do is just to not vote for nincompoops.
Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych
In Evolutionary Biology or Psychology, a nice-sounding but untested theory is referred to as a "just-so story", after the stories written by Rudyard Kipling. But, if there is a way to test the theory, people tend to consider it more likely to be correct. This is not a rational tendency.
A Failed Just-So Story
Part of the reason professional evolutionary biologists dislike just-so stories is that many of them are simply wrong.
But There's Still A Chance, Right?
Sometimes, you calculate the probability of a certain event and find that the number is so unbelievably small that your brain really can't keep track of how small it is, any more than you can spot an individual grain of sand on a beach from 100 meters off. But, because you're already thinking about that event enough to calculate the probability of it, it feels like it's still worth keeping track of. It's not.
These are the only four I've got at the moment. If someone wants to jump ahead and start summarizing more posts it would be very appreciated.
Today's post, The American System and Misleading Labels was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
The conclusions we draw from analyzing the American political system are often biased by our own previous understanding of it, which we got in elementary school. In fact, the power of voting for a particular candidate (which is not the same as the power to choose which candidates will run) is not the greatest power of the voters. Instead, voters' main abilities are the threat to change which party controls the government, or extremely rarely, to completely dethrone both political parties and replace them with a third.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Two-Party Swindle, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.