That’s intuitively plausible, and in fact I think it’s likely to be true, but as it happens it’s also a testable proposition. Voter turnout varies quite a bit among modern democracies: for some voting is mandatory, for others it’s optional, and levels of enforcement vary among polities with mandatory voting. Do the dominant parties within high-turnout polities tend to be more moderate relative to the polity’s baseline?
Unfortunately you also need to control for architecture—first-past-the-post election systems, for example, are often thought to have polarizing effects. That makes testing a lot harder than it’d otherwise be, and scopes it out of my relatively modest familiarity with different political systems. But it should be feasible in principle.
This. With low voter turnout, rallying the base is a far more effective strategy than competing for marginal voters.
That’s intuitively plausible, and in fact I think it’s likely to be true, but as it happens it’s also a testable proposition. Voter turnout varies quite a bit among modern democracies: for some voting is mandatory, for others it’s optional, and levels of enforcement vary among polities with mandatory voting. Do the dominant parties within high-turnout polities tend to be more moderate relative to the polity’s baseline?
Unfortunately you also need to control for architecture—first-past-the-post election systems, for example, are often thought to have polarizing effects. That makes testing a lot harder than it’d otherwise be, and scopes it out of my relatively modest familiarity with different political systems. But it should be feasible in principle.
Agreed.