If you look at US incumbent politicians’ voting records using a methodology like DW-NOMINATE, you get a number between 1 and 2. If you look at all people’s opinions on all possible issues, you’d surely get a much higher number. I personally think that healthy political debate would probably settle at about 𝓮 effective dimensions — that is, a bit less than 3.
https://​​www.civicscience.com has data about political preferences of large numbers of citizens. It might be good to talk with them to get an idea about what e actually happens to be.
I meant “𝓮” to be the number whose natural logarithm is 1 — “𝓮” is the closest to the math version of the character that I can type on my keyboard as-is. I don’t have any argument for why it should be precisely that value, it’s just the most famous number in between 2.5 and 3, which is roughly where I think the correct value will lie. I am aware of the larger literature on people’s political preferences, but that’s all from a world that’s already conditioned by more-or-less non-ideal voting methods, so I don’t think this is a question with an easy-to-find empirical answer like that. I may expand the section you reference to talk about these issues a bit more, and to discuss the available data/​literature, but when I first wrote it, I was hurrying through to get somewhere else.
https://​​www.civicscience.com has data about political preferences of large numbers of citizens. It might be good to talk with them to get an idea about what e actually happens to be.
I meant “𝓮” to be the number whose natural logarithm is 1 — “𝓮” is the closest to the math version of the character that I can type on my keyboard as-is. I don’t have any argument for why it should be precisely that value, it’s just the most famous number in between 2.5 and 3, which is roughly where I think the correct value will lie. I am aware of the larger literature on people’s political preferences, but that’s all from a world that’s already conditioned by more-or-less non-ideal voting methods, so I don’t think this is a question with an easy-to-find empirical answer like that. I may expand the section you reference to talk about these issues a bit more, and to discuss the available data/​literature, but when I first wrote it, I was hurrying through to get somewhere else.