Network Effects and Minor Political Parties
Considering the recent U.S. elections, I was interested in applying what we’ve been learning to voting behaviors. I could not find any published articles analyzing voters’ decisions in this election, but I was able to find an analysis of the 2010 elections in Britain:
http://www.envplan.com/epa/fulltext/a43/a43512.pdf
This article discusses voters’ decision in a political environment with more than 2 parties. Often times, people do not vote for their favorite political party; if they believe that their preferred party has little chance of victory, they might instead vote for their second preference if it has a reasonable chance of defeating their third choice. This practice is called tactical voting, and it is very common in the United States. Political parties like the green party and the libertarians receive disproportionately few votes because most of their supporters would rather vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.
This scenario is very similar to what we’ve learned about positive network affects. I will use the Green party as an example here, but the same analysis could be applied to any minor political party. From the United States, we will take the entire population that would in theory support the green party and approximate them as values between 0 and 1. Depending on how vehemently each person supports the green party, they will have a different payoff value for the green party being elected. We will organize the population so that the people with the highest payoff value are towards 0 while more apathetic people are towards 1. Thus, the value associated with the green party winning is a function for 0<x<1.
Now we will consider the positive network affect. Everybody also values the number of people that are also voting for their party because it affects the chance of their nominee actually getting elected. This value is directly proportional to the number of people, x, who decide to vote for the Green party. Thus, the total value for each person is x*f(x) for 0<x<1. For most people, this value is less than the value that they would assign to a major party, such as the Democratic Party. When this is factored in, only the few people who attach an extremely high value to the green party will vote for them. The majority of more moderate supporters will vote for a major party. This is why minor political parties are mostly irrelevant in our current political environment.
-rdg88